Birthing Hope, Rachel Marie Stone
Birthing Hope, Rachel Marie Stone
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Birthing Hope
Giving Fear to the Light

Author: Rachel Marie Stone

Narrator: Rachel Marie Stone

Unabridged: 5 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/01/2018


Synopsis

"Love is always a risk, beginning with that first blood sacrifice: when a woman consents to nurture a child with her body and allow it to be torn open for the sake of new life: that's the miracle that saves the world. That's where fragile hope is found." While living and working in one of the world's most impoverished countries, teacher, doula, and young mother Rachel Marie Stone unexpectedly caught a baby without wearing gloves, drenching her bare hands with HIV-positive blood. Already worried about her health and family and whether her service was of any use, Stone grappled anew with realities of human suffering, global justice, and maternal health. In these profound reflections on the mysteries of life and death, Stone unpacks how childbirth reveals our anxieties, our physicality, our mortality. All who are born or give birth will someday die. Yet even in the midst of our fears and doubts, birth is a profoundly hopeful act of faith, as new life is brought into a hurting world that groans for redemption. God becomes present to us as a mother who consents to the risk of love and ultimately lets us make our own way in the world, as every good mother must do.

Reviews

Goodreads review by James on May 01, 2018

Pain marks our journeys. Pain is borne alone.  Rachel Marie Stone is an English teacher and the celebrated author of Eat with Joy (IVP, 2013), the 40th Anniversary edition of the More With Less Cookbook (Herald Press, 2016), and numerous articles on justice, faith, food, public and maternal health. I......more

Goodreads review by Amy on April 25, 2018

I tend to avoid thoughts of death, covering my eyes to the reality of how little control I have over my life. Here, Rachel Marie Stone pries those hands off my eyes, forces me to consider the reality of life and death, and still leaves me with hope. This book is a beautifully written meditation on m......more

Goodreads review by Michele on June 19, 2018

Birth is the metaphor that runs throughout Birthing Hope: Giving Fear to the Light as it binds memoir to meditation and bears witness to the journey that has left its mark on the author. When Stone and her husband packed up baggage and boys and relocated to Malawi, they had not an inkling of what it......more

Goodreads review by Michelle on May 09, 2018

We all carry fear with us in our bodies. Some of us try to escape it, some excel at denying it, and others attempt to bully it into submission. Rachel Marie Stone's shimmering writing instead invites readers to recognize the ways in which fear shapes us (and sometimes breaks us) as human beings. Bir......more

Goodreads review by Cara on July 20, 2018

Oh, gush gush gush. Rachel Marie Stone’s writing is exquisite. I’m not sure how I’m just finding her way with words now.......more