Publisher Description
"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.
Download and start listening now!
About Rachel Marie Stone
Rachel Marie Stone teaches English at the Stony Brook School in Stony Brook, New York. Her writing about food, faith, justice, public health, and maternal health has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Christianity Today, The Christian Century, Books and Culture, Sojourners, In Touch magazine, Religion News Service, Patheos, and more. Her books include the revised More-with-Less cookbook, Telling God’s Story, and Eat With Joy, which won a Christianity TodayBook Award and was named by a Religion News Service columnist as one of the year’s ten most intriguing titles in religion. She and her husband, Tim, have two sons.
About Carla Mercer-Meyer
Carla Mercer-Meyer, a Southern California native, has a strong musical theater background, as she has been performing her entire life. Her credits include a guest appearance on The Morris Taylor Show, and her performances include Into the Woods and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, as well as many other theatrical productions. An AudioFile Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator, Mercer-Meyer resides in Southern California with her husband and four children. She is an avid audiobook listener and a book fanatic.