It was okay. Kind of confusing.

After seeing Sue on Super Soul Sunday, I picked up this book. Maybe back at the end of 2015, early 2016. Her words & writing really urged me forward in owning my truth and being okay with changing my life path after age 40.

Published in 1990, in When the Heart Waits, Sue Monk Kid says, "I was standing on the shifting ground of midlife . . . ". I'm well beyond midlife's "shifting ground" and yet, I think we need to be reminded over and over again throughout our lives of what's truly important and how to live well. Kidd brings us those reminders. At the end of the book, she says, "Spiritual growth has no boundaries." Amen.

Reading "When the Heart Waits," while reading another memoir. I think the feeling Sue Monk Kidd expresses is an emotion we all grapple with at times in our lives. There can be a wave of emotion that can be so deep and yet so undexpected, there is no reason for the shift. Internal observation of ones thoughts and feelings are the only way to move past moments like these. Society by design has trained our souls to stay distracted from what hurts. However, my early years in acting and theatre class explored characters, plots and human nature. "Why do we act like that when this happens?" What is causing this feeling?" "Are you understanding the scene?"
What I love about this book is Sue Monk Kidd braves the deep waters of darkness and I am sure the ending will be worth her bravery of facing that pain.

I really needed this book and recommend it to anyone who is a thinker, such as myself, and who tends to want life-results immediately.

The book is an account of Kidd's spiritual crisis at midlife, and the conclusion that she comes to is that sometimes, there is nothing TO DO but to wait. The book is peppered with biblican references, but they did not throw me as they sometimes do. I was able to glean comfort from what she had experienced and to realize that waiting itself is sometimes the only action we can take when we are trying to heal.

This was a perfect read for this season of life. I'm thankful for an authentic look at what work is happening in a season of waiting.

"God is not just a healer, but a midwife."

Amazing book. Preferred it over The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. It depicts more of her internal spiritual awakening and overall journey, especially in the early stages when she was learning to let go of her old self.

My progress through this memoir was as slow as SMK'S awakening of which she writes. Throughout the book, she chews, regurgitates and circles around her acknowledgement that Christianity may not be the core of her soul. Yet, even in the end of this memoir, she only glimpses at the awakening. That revelation comes later in her "Dance of the Dissident Daughter."

Loved it. Made me do some thinking.

I liked the book and her ideas about the chrysalis and the need to wait. I found she wrote a lot about God and is obviously religious and saw her evolution in relation to her relationship with God. That kind of turned me off because I am an agnostic. I don't see my evolution in relation to a God at all, I see it in relation to myself. I found that she relied very heavily on God and that I had to force myself to finish the book because I liked some of her ideas.

I like her fiction books a lot and I respect her as a writer and her own beliefs, I just couldn't relate to the religious aspect of her book.

Best I can tell, Kidd wrote this book before Dance of the Dissident Daughter, although she had to have been working through several of the same themes.

Maybe it's because I'm 48 and on the cusp of several changes: becoming an empty nester, career changes, my husband's career changes, garden variety aging, and a ton of revelations about life over the past few years...but this book really spoke to me. I'm going to show some of my highlights, and just understand it isn't all of them.

I would've loved to have read this book back in 2018 or so as preparation for the past 5 years--has it only been 5 since then? It feels like a decade--but I typically have to learn everything the hard way so it probably wouldn't have done any good. At least Kidd's book has helped me make sense of the waiting I was doing and that I am, in some ways, still doing. Am I any more patient? Doubtful. Do I have a little more faith that things are falling in the way God wants them to fall? Absolutely.

Most people know this author from her book "The Secret Life of Bees" (Fiction) but I would describe this as her spiritual memoir. The idea of "waiting" focuses on how God teaches us when we pause/wait etc. Insight comes in increments. While the book slowed at points, she offers some great thoughts.

"I often need permission to do daring things. And when I can't get it from myself, God often sends someone else to give it to me. As I struggled with whether to embrace this experience or banish it, a friend said to me, 'If you think God leads you only beside still waters, think again. God will also lead you beside turbulent waters. If you have the courage to enter, you'll think you're drowning. But actually you're being churned into something new." -Kidd