Book Review: The Scent of Water, By Naomi Zacharias

I just recently finished Naomi Zacharias' book The Scent of Water. Wow! It was unlike anything I normally read, it was beautiful and truly refreshing. Naomi works for Wellspring Internartional, part of her father Ravi Zacharias' ministry. Wellspring is an organization that helps women and children at risk. In her work Naomi has helped victims of red light districts and tsunamis, from South Africa to India to Amsterdam.

This woman has such a gift for words, her style is eloquent yet down to earth. Hearing the stories of women and children she has worked with opened my eyes to needs around the world that it is easy to remain blind to. Her own story has been marked with pain and suffering, as she walks through it with the reader she shows the hope that sufferers have in Christ, that there is purpose in pain, and as the subtitle states, "grace for every kind of broken."

My own prejudices against certain types of people were challenged. It is too easy to don the robes of self-righteousness and set myself up as a judge of others. Hearing her story and the stories of the people she has worked with humbled me, causing me to own up to my own sin in this area and reexamine how I view others.

Read The Scent of Water, come to see that there is always hope, and that God uses pain in our lives to accomplish beautiful purposes.

She's Home!

Fast forward three months, and our life has changed dramatically again.

Our sweet daughter S has been home for just about a month and a half. After exactly two months in the NICU, with no out of the ordinary complications, we feel so blessed just to have her here with us. S came home on oxygen and an apnea monitor, but we are hoping she will be truly "wireless" within a few months :).

Adjusting to full-time parenthood is going well. We are exhausted, but what parent of a newborn isn't? In some ways I feel like I have finally "arrived," all I have ever wanted to do was to be a stay-at-home mom. I don't think it's hit me yet that I am really done working. I still feel like things are going to change again, this doesn't feel permanent yet.

We have so much to thank the Lord for. As I've been reading tons of books and blogs on preemies, I am finding out just all the possible things that could have gone wrong in little S's body...and yet in His Divine Providence didn't. Thank you Lord! She is absolutely beautiful, we are truly fearfully and wonderfully made.