If you asked me what to read…

People ask me sometimes — usually not directly, more sideways, in the middle of another conversation — what they should read. Someone's husband just lost his job. Someone's mother is dying slowly instead of quickly, which is its own kind of grief. Someone hasn't said the word "doubt" out loud in twenty years and finally does, quietly, like it might get them in trouble.

I never know the right answer immediately. Mostly because there isn't one.

But I've noticed something about the books that actually helped me, back when I was the one asking sideways questions instead of answering them. They weren't the books that tried to fix me. The things that fixed me were prayer, time, a rector who asked one honest question, and people who stayed. The books did something quieter. They kept me company while the fixing was happening somewhere else, slower than I wanted.

Bonhoeffer did that for me. Not because The Cost of Discipleship solved anything — it's not that kind of book — but because reading a man write toward his own martyrdom made my ordinary collapse feel less like an emergency and more like a doorway. Buechner did it too, with one sentence about deep gladness meeting the world's deep hunger, which I still think about more than most sermons I've heard.

I don't think what people in a hard season need is a syllabus. If you're in a faith crisis, you don't need someone to hand you six books and a deadline. If you just lost a job, or a marriage, or the version of yourself you'd built your whole identity around, you need something that doesn't perform wisdom at you. You need companionship — the quiet kind, where the writer isn't pretending to have arrived either.

That's the only real qualification I look for now, in what I read and what I write. Not "is this comforting," not "does this answer the question," but: does this sound like someone who has actually been in the room. Anxiety books that quote a lot of Bible verses without ever describing an actual 3 a.m. panic don't sound like that to me. Grief books that skip straight to hope without letting you sit in the strangeness of early grief — the way ordinary things suddenly seem insane — don't either.

If you're a spiritual director, or a therapist, or just a friend trying to figure out what to put in someone's hands, I'd gently suggest looking for that same thing: not the book that answers the question fastest, but the one willing to stay in the question long enough to be trusted.

He Reached Down came out of exactly this instinct. I didn't write it to give anyone an answer. I wrote it because of thirteen years of being a dry drunk, two DUIs, a fire alarm I ignored with a bourbon bottle on one side of me and a pistol on the other, and an unmistakable, unasked-for call toward ordained ministry taught me far more about companionship than about certainty. If you're in the middle of something, and you're tired of books that already know how your story ends, it might be worth a look.

Available August 15 at fieldstonebooks.com.