Two Steps Forward

Summary: Picking up right where Sensible Shoes left off, the four friends continue to find their way in the world and to find God more clearly.

Sensible Shoes is one of those series that is really one long story broken up into different books because no one would buy a 1500 or so odd page book. The second book starts right after the first book. There is a clear conclusion, but it also was clear that the story would keep moving at the end of the first book.

As I said in my post on Sensible Shoes, one of the problems of writing about spiritual formation is that it is incredibly slow and the problem of writing about it is that it either seems magically fast or boringly slow. Part of what Brown is doing here is to make sure that the reader understands that this is not a one way path toward growth.

But I do think that one of the other problems here is that spiritual growth is inherently dependent upon discernment because discernment is part of how we understand the work of the spirit in our lives. And in my estimation, discernment can bring us to different conclusion because we are different people. And I think at least some of the discernment that happens in these books is discernment I would question. It may be that one particular case of discernment that I question was a red herring where the characters didn't act as well as she should have in the situation but over time did come to a place of forgiveness toward another character.

Forgiveness is a major theme of the series. The characters need to forgive others, especially parents. But also over time, the tends to be a level of acceptance that parents, while they may not have been great parents, they were doing the best that they could at the time, or at least they were not trying to actively harm, even if there was harm. A recent Gravity Commons podcast interviewed author Adam Young about his recent book and he talked about the fact that parenting inevitably leads to trauma. Even good parents will harm their kids in some ways because that is part of the fallenness of the world. And that is how this series treats parents.

The characters are also not perfect. There are times when they are selfish or unthinking, or self protective in unhelpful ways that leads to lies or a lack of full truth. I am still in process of the series but I do not think the characters are going to become perfect along the way.

I don't love the cover art and some of the writing tropes or methods that feel a little too stereotypical. There are some theological quibbles that I have, and big problems, like the problem of evil, are never going to be solvable, but it still makes sense to grapple with those big problems. But I am engaged. As I am writing this, I stayed up WAY too late last night finishing up the third book in the series.

I originally posted this on my blog at https://bookwi.se/two-steps-forward/