Friends,
Most weeks I send you something about law and gospel, or a teaching aid, or a bit of catechesis you can put to use. This week is different. I want to tell you about a book, and to do that honestly I have to tell you something about myself.
I’m a recovering alcoholic. By the grace of God I’ve been sober for some years now — and I mean that phrase the way we mean phrases like it: not as a polite garnish, but as the plain account of what happened. I did not keep myself sober. I was kept.
That’s the book. It’s called KEPT: Sobriety, Grace, and the Hand That Won’t Let Go, and it’s the most personal thing I have ever written.
Here’s why it exists. There’s a Celebrate Recovery group that meets in my church on Thursday nights — good people doing hard and necessary work, keeping one another alive. And I kept thinking about the person sitting in that chair who has done everything the program asks: worked the steps, found a higher power of his own understanding, tried harder than anyone knows — and still wakes at three in the morning convinced that whatever grace is, it isn’t for him. Not after this.
I wanted to put something in that person’s hands. Not a better program. Not one more push to try harder. The opposite. A book that says the thing almost no one in the chair will say out loud: you cannot keep yourself sober, you cannot keep yourself saved, and you were never the one who was supposed to be doing the keeping.
You’ll recognize the bones of it, because they are the bones of this newsletter. Ordinary Means is named for the ordinary means of grace — the preached Word and the Sacraments through which Christ actually hands himself to sinners. KEPT is what that doctrine looks like when you carry it into the worst room in a person’s life: a God who comes all the way down, a verdict already spoken, grace delivered not as a feeling you work up but as something done to you — in water, in words said out loud by someone who can answer, at a table set for people who keep failing.
It honors the rooms that keep people alive. It does not pick a fight with them. It just tells the truth they often can’t.
If you know someone in recovery — or you are closer to that chair yourself than the people around you might guess — this book was written for them, and for you. And it was written for the pastors and sponsors and ordinary church members who love them and never quite know what to say.
You can find it here: [Amazon link]
If it’s useful to you, the most helpful thing you can do is simple: hand it to one person who needs it, and if you’re able, leave an honest review so the next person can find it.
Thank you for reading, as always. More ordinary means next week.
Larry