This book was excellent - insightful and thought-provoking. Powerful words for just that time when I needed them. “When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up.”

Before she was a best-selling fiction writer, Monk-Kidd wrote for various Christian publications. Although books that have a religious bent usually don't interest me, this is more about a personal spiritual quest and found me at a time when I needed it most.

I always enjoy a good play with words and analogies, however sometimes Kidd leaned a little too heavily on these techniques; I yearned for a few more specifics. Still, there were a lot of uplifting and relieving gems to be found throughout this book, regarding being patient and forgiving with one's self, and allowing that self to take its time to grow and flourish. If nothing else, this book served as a great sense of opening of my soul.

3.5 stars

Having just finished "Dance of the Dissident Daughter," this book is almost painful to read. It was written before she had her awakening and you can watch Kidd trying to force her spirituality into the tight, constrictive box of Christianity. I am so glad she was able to break free and find her true, unique, authentic path to faith. I realize that she needed to go through this stage to get to where she is now, and for that reason this book is interesting. Her writing style is still beautiful, I just had some trouble going back in time. Perhaps I should have read this first!

Continuing down my Sue Monk Kidd road...

Lessons about spiritual growth by waiting seem all too important during a pandemic. This is part of her prayer when she is starting to figure things out that just really spoke to me at this current time of waiting.

“I’ll say to myself that you are loved. Your pain is God’s pain. Go ahead and embrace the struggle of it all, the splendor, the messiness, the wonder, the agony, the joy, the conflict. Love it all.

I’ll say to myself, remember that little flame on the Easter candle. Cup your heart around it. Your darkness will become the light.”

This book was written by Sue Monk Kidd when she was going through her mid-life crisis, but I found that I could really relate it to my life at the moment. It left me with a strong sense of peace and hope. Its an easy read and uplifting.

I highlighted many passages in this book that I related to 100%. I felt like she lived my story word for word in some parts. I did think the analogies went too far sometimes and would have liked it to have been scaled back. I tend to do that too though; when I am looking for something I find it everywhere, but sometimes I just wanted the most powerful analogies and not the ones that felt a bit forced. Still have to go with 4 stars because of the number of times she nailed what I have felt. It is both comforting and crushing to realize that even your most personal moments are not unique but universally shared.

I love Kidd's novels, but this just is not my cup of tea. I realized that from the start, but thought it would be interesting to see what makes one of my favorite authors tick. However, at the halfway mark I'm calling it quits.

There are a couple of thoughts worth considering, like the value of waiting, or being still and processing and feeling the spirit, and the concepts of "I" and "They" and taking action to help yourself (like: why didn't Rapunzel chop her own hair off to make a ladder to get down?), but overall this comes across to me as the musings of a person when they are indulged in too much introspection. We thinkers can easily get too caught up in our inner process, and I recognize that here. Kidd doesn't whine at all, but she thinks too much. ;D ("Takes one to know one" working full strength here, and I have too many other books that I want to read to finish the second half of this one.)

Love me some SMK!
I really enjoyed her expansive questions and practices for discernment. Embracing waiting, gestation, and being over doing are all wise lessons of which I benefited from being reminded. Simultaneously, the cocoon to butterfly metaphor may have been less cliche when this was published. However, the theme did feel a bit dragged on.
Nevertheless, here were some of my favorite quotes:

“When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can become what God created you to be.”

“Somehow we’re going to have to learn the deep things of God don’t come suddenly.”

“When Jesus told us to love our enemies, I suspect that he was talking about our inner enemies, too. He knew that Love was the only means by which to transform them.”

“To Hildegard, sin was failing to care for the soul, failing to water it and give it what she called ‘greening power.’”

“The natural gradient in us is toward growth. Whatever we use repeatedly and compulsively to stop that growth is our particular addiction.” (Marion Woodman)

“Now and then, in the search for your True Self, you have to find the courage to enter a great absurdity.”

“Many of us learned to be afraid of the feelings inside ourselves. Perhaps when we risked expressing them, we met with astonishment and admonishment, which led to embarrassment and vulnerability. So gradually we built an ego structure in which we separated ourselves from our feelings and avoided deep self-disclosure, even to ourselves.”

“Letting go isn’t one step but many. It’s a winding, spiraling process that happens on deep levels. And we must begin at the beginning: by confronting ambivalence.”

“…I refuse to believe that God, who is like a Mother to us all, doesn’t also delight in such watchfulness and devotion—the kind that keeps us waiting even when we don’t have to.”

“Whenever new life grows and emerges, darkness is crucial to the process.”

“If I have inside me the stuff to make cocoons, maybe the stuff of butterflies is there, too.” (Trina Paulus)

I have enjoyed every book I've read from Sue Monk Kidd - The Secret Life of Bees, The Invention of Wings. And When the Heart Waits did not disappoint either. She is clearly very well read and she has interwoven her love of books, from medieval Christian mystics to fairy tales to Jungian theorists to existential writers, into her very personal life journey. She is transparent, vulnerable, and patient to wait, all qualities that I admire. This book is a keeper that I will not pass on to others, except perhaps to gift them their own copy. It's a modern classic that speaks to deep truths that defy modern pop sugar solutions. Sue also has that tendency to see significance in the little things like I do. The small ironies and coincidences that seem unlikely, but form part of a greater whole that connect us to ourselves, to God, and to others at the same time. My body and spirit resonate with the message of this book. Let us have patience in our becoming and hope in things yet unseen.

This book, while quite dramatic at times, challenged the way that I view processes, waiting, patience, and my own patterns of feeling and behaviour. I think I’m a little different at the end of it, so I would consider it good.