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Kiwiria

Kiwiria

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Creative Prayer: Speaking the Language of God's Heart
Chris Tiegreen
Jesus Calling: A 365 Day Journaling Devotional
Sarah Young
Shadow of Night
Deborah Harkness
The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry
Rachel Joyce
Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives - Becky Aikman ...one of them is a beautiful series of Chinese watercolours of lotus blossoms. She chose them because they bloom even in the mud.The above is a quote from, and an excellent representation of Saturday Night Widows. When I first heard of it, I knew I had to read it, and I'm so glad I did, because it is without a doubt the sweetest and most poignant book I've read in a long time.Becky Aikman lost her husband to cancer and afterwards had to reinvent herself as "the dreaded W-word"... a widow. Only in her forties she was nowhere near ready for the stigma of being a widow. She had lost her husband far too early, but even in her grief, she knew that she wasn't ready to repeat Queen Victoria and dress all in black and never live again. When this attitude got her kicked out of a traditional grief group (something that still shocks me!), she decided to start her own. Only this wasn't to be a grief group, but a support group.Thus starts the group that will come to be known as the Lotus Blossoms. Six women who couldn't be more different, and whose only connection is that they all lost their husbands at far too young an age, but who possibly because of those differences come to be a safe space for each other. Once a month they get together - not to revel in their pain, but to try out new experiences, to draw on each others' wisdom and to just have fun!Saturday Night Widows is a book of true friendship and hope. It tells of how to move on without fear, "because the worst thing has already happened". Most importantly, it made me feel like I really knew these women, and I felt with them in their ups and downs. I had feared that reading about a group of widows might be depressing, or that I wouldn't be able to relate to them, fortunately not being in their shoes, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Becky (I feel I know her well enough to be on first name basis with her) brings the reader into their world and understands that sharing sadness only becomes depressing if you let it. Besides, this isn't a book about loss - it's a book about picking yourself up again afterwards and daring to live again. It did made me cry, but they were tears of poignancy rather than of grief.It's an amazing book that I would recommend to any women... not just widows.