"'This is the main event' is the kind of phrase I'd like to tattoo on my arm--and my spirit . . . a thoughtful, artful, soulful meditation on life and faith and time and what really matters." -Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author
A simple mantra to change everything: discover how to encounter God in your everyday, and practice extraordinary presence in an ordinary life.
What if the life we long for isn't elsewhere but rather right here, waiting to be discovered?
Joshua Luke Smith believes the greatest lie facing our generation is that the life we long for lies beyond the life that we have. We so easily learn to disdain the inconveniences and interruptions that infuse our everyday. But the real transformation happens when we look at our life as it is and dare to announce: This is the main event.
With devotional depth and prophetic wisdom, and interspersed with the author's original poetry and blessings, This Is the Main Event is your invitation to awaken to the sacred in your ordinary life. The pathway is through three spiritual practices, as Joshua commends, each proclaiming a transformative truth:
- LAMENTATION: you are allowed to name your pain
- CONSECRATION: you are called to let grace change you
- ADORATION: you are invited to live in the wonder of God's daily presence
It's easy to see the bills, packed lunches, traffic jams, dentist appointments as mundanity, but then again, God comes to you in the shape of your actual life. Joshua Luke Smith writes from the raw materials of his own ordinary life--toddler tuck-ins, recovery meetings, flat tires a mile from home--to speak to yours. As you'll soon discover, every moment becomes meaningful when you recognize the God who meets you in it--a holy encounter accessed in the everyday.
About the Author :
Joshua Luke Smith is a poet for the people. A songwriter, storyteller, and renowned international speaker, he is the founder of Orphan No More, a record label and creative community, as well as The Psalmists, a non-profit that teaches creative expression and self-reflection in the incarcerated community. He is the writer-in-residence for The Rabbit Room in Nashville, and lives with his family in London.
Review :
"I try to read (and watch and listen to) everything Joshua Luke Smith puts out. He's fast becoming the poet laureate of a new generation. There are thoughts, phrases, lines in here which will soon become your friends. They will be cherished in solitude, quoted in cards, shared at weddings and funerals, for many years to come." - Pete Greig, bestselling author
"You had me at the title--'This is the main event' is the kind of phrase I'd like to tattoo on my arm--and my spirit. But the excellent title is just the beginning: this is a thoughtful, artful, soulful meditation on life and faith and time and what really matters. The books I'm interested in right now--and the books that I'm pressing into the hands of everyone I love--are books that invite us to swim upstream, aggressively away from our culture's screaming demands for shallow, shiny and immediate. This is one of those books." - Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author
"Joshua Luke Smith's words come as an extravagant grace and an elemental, essential one. Like no one I know, he tells the whole of this brutal and beautiful life, showing us that this is the precise place where the life we most hope for is already being made in blessing and in love." - Jan Richardson, author of How the Stars Get in Your Bones
"There are very few writers who can combine raw, even painful honesty about how brutal life can feel with a grounded hope. Joshua Luke Smith is one of them. This book is beautiful, humanizing and profoundly nourishing--soul medicine for our times." - Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive and podcast host of The Sacred
"Some books tell you what to do. This one helps you see what's already true. Honest, disarming, and full of hope, Joshua has given us something beautiful here." - Bob Goff, New York Times bestselling author, coach, and chaser of whimsy
"Few people love words as much as Joshua Luke Smith, and I'm delighted any time he puts pen to paper. I can also say that few people I know love people as much as Joshua, and this new book, as in everything he does, is a gift from the depths of a wise, earnest, and articulate heart, straight to the heart of every reader." - Andrew Peterson, singer/songwriter, and author
"[Smith's] musings on what it has meant to "slowly fall back in love with my life and the world around me" are resonant and affecting. The result is an earnest invitation to savor the moment." - Publishers Weekly
"Joshua Luke Smith, a fine spoken word poet, also reveals himself as a writer of powerful prose. His affecting craft connects heaven to earth, and uplifts earth to heaven. Joshua moves words in his kinetic poetry: words distilled to authentic truth with vulnerable candor and prophetic alacrity. This is a book for generations of dreamers, sunflower seeds of words scattered in the poisoned soil of culture, ready to chase the sun." - Makoto Fujimura, artist and author of Art Is
"What a book. I've always been so encouraged by Josh's words, so I'm glad we now have a whole book with pages full to the brim of honest poetic stories, teachings and lessons that feel they come from a kind big brother gently shuffling us all forward while also keeping us beautifully in the present." - Elle Limebear, artist and storyteller
