Loving Your Friend Through Cancer: Review

No one knows when the phone call will come, but statistics tell us that eventually someone we know or someone we love will be diagnosed with Cancer. That fact is hard to take in and the reality is even harder to face. Watching someone you love to suffer, hurt, and struggle is painful. It can be so hard that it is tempting to just slowly back out of the picture, because will she even notice? She will notice. While her or her loved one’s diagnosis seems out of this world to you, it is majorly overwhelming to her. Have you been there? Feeling hopeless and hopeful at the same time, wondering how you can love and serve your friend and her family well? Loving Your Friend Through Cancer, speaks right into the desire and need for love, service, and care during the hardest time of your friends life. Marissa writes from experience as she has both loved through the battle and experienced the battle first hand. Cancer sucks, but your presence in your friend’s life brings a light in the darkest night. Your presence is needed, and Marissa has provided you with a guide to being a meaningful and compassionate support to your friends and loved ones during this time. Filled with resources in the back to apply everything she discusses to the reality of Loving Your Friend Through Cancer. 

I watched my grandmother die of cancer and other health issues. I have friends who have watched their friends battle with cancer. Cancer is inevitable, it is a part of all of our lives in one way or another. I believe that is why we need resources like this on our shelves; we need to be prepared and ready to love in the hard places. I have never had Cancer, but I have struggled with other diagnoses and health issues that have rocked my life. While it speaks directly to Loving Your Friend Through Cancer, this book is a beautiful guide to loving through anything life altering your friend faces. From loss and diagnoses to any emotionally painful life change this book has a beautiful framework for being a friend that stays through the storm, the aftermath, and into her new version of life. Because whether your friend is walking through Cancer personally or with a loved one, there is no going back only forward into a completely new version of life. I highly recommend this book to you and to any of your friends who are walking with their loved ones through Cancer. This book brought comfort and purpose to my role as friend when it feels like there is no way I could possibly help. There is. Our friend needs us more than ever.

- Hannah

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher to read and share my honest opinion. I am not affiliated with Amazon the link is for your convenience. 

Come Matter Here: Review

We all want to matter. We all want to be known and desire to know others. We are hungry and we hurt at the same time. Hannah Brencher has a poetic and relatable way of piercing the marrow of a persons spirit. Come Matter Here is not just her story, but our story. Through her wit and wisdom Hannah shares her real journey through depression, fear, and trying to find acceptance and how all of the lies can be shattered, if we just stop running and stay. When we stay we start showing up in the life before us, instead of searching for a better version of what has already been given to us. Staying and showing up not only in our lives, but in our relationships leads to the discovery that Jesus is the best thing. He is the source of a love that will shatter all our fears. Come Matter Here is one of the most honest and relatable books I have read since Hannah’s first book. 

I have laughed, and I have cried in these pages. I have underlined and bracketed more than any other book I have reviewed or read this year. Hannah’s words cut through me and felt like they were my stories spoken back to me. I connected and am convicted by Come Matter Here. I have a fear struggle that is real. I can’t ignore fear or the fact that it has run my life more than God has. I accepted Christ’s salvation, but surrendered the keys to my heart and life into the hands of fear. Hannah relates, and I relate to her story. I am so thankful that she is alive and writing real and I think you will be too. As I live my own life and face impending changes, I pray that I don’t live believing that I do not matter where I am. I have always mattered and so do you. We do not have to wait to be included or for opportunity, because we already have it and we always have. Love is not in how many followers or coffee dates we have. Love is found in staying. Love grows when we invest. Love shows up and keeps showing up no matter the story or what your life looks like. I met Jesus in these pages, his outstretched hand asking me to come in, because I have always mattered within His story. You matter in His story. We matter to Jesus and this life.

- Hannah

I received a free copy of this book to read from the publisher, in exchange for my honest thoughts. I am not affiliated with Amazon, the link is for your convenience. 

Eye To Eye

Eye to eye

Hand in hand

Across

Around

Known

Loved

Together 

A past shattered

A present scattered

My tomorrow plastered

Today matters

Sweaty palms

Familiar spaces

New faces.

Community is hard

Friendship is messy

My heart is empty

My table is bare

My soul is craving

For someone to know

To be known by somebody.

Eye to eye

Hand in hand

Desire is there

My heart is ripe

My soul exposed

For someone to know me

To know somebody.

Will you be my friend? 

- Hannah