Beth’s life has been pretty steady. Her husband, Rick, works as the Men’s Pastor at a large and growing church. Her two teenage boys are being – well, teenagers, but overall they seem fine. The church is giving them a month long sabbatical, and one of her friends has lent them keys to a Florida vacation home. A perfect life right?
When old friends reappear on Beth and Rick’s doorstep to offer them a high profile job at another, even larger church, the invisible fault lines in the family begin to crack. Rick retreats to his shed turned man-cave to pray and seek the Lord’s guidance. His family is left to carry on, explaining to their neighbors and friends why their husband and father has suddenly become a hermit, and Beth begins to seek a deeper meaning in her own life.
Where does the book without a genre go? Where few books can apparently. While much of the story centers on Beth trying to understand and cope with her husband’s very unexpected actions, this isn’t really a story about romance. While part of the plot is driven by Beth suddenly waking up to the fact her life has lost direction, it isn’t really a story about identity crisis. While drugs, protestors, and halfway houses figure largely, it isn’t really a story about losing one’s faith.
What this is a story of is one family that stumbles, falls, and, through God’s grace, arrives at a point of clarity. Beth is the story’s narrator, but by the end, the reader has deeply connect with her, Rick, their sons, their friends, their elderly neighbors, protestors on the street corner, girls fighting with drug addiction, and a maybe nun. There isn’t a nice one line lesson the book sums at the end. Rather, The Sky Beneath My Feet is as brilliant a portrait of humanity as the mural described in its pages. I loved the fact that while Beth clearly felt her husband was having some kind of break down and wasn’t above snarking about it (very loudly where he could hear in his shed), she never stopped caring about him. Even though she found his actions both unfathomable and hurtful, there was never a moment she stopped worrying about him. As for Rick, as misguided as his quest was, he walked away from it freely acknowledging both the good that had come from it, and the harm it had done to both him and his family.
Similarly, there was definitely a few jabs at the phenomenon of mega-churches, Jesus fish, and the Church with a capital C, but none of them came across are either preachy or judgmental. Rather, they seemed part of an overall tone that sometimes we have to step back from our lives and laugh. And sometimes we have to step back and seek out things that need to be changed.
My thanks to BookSneeze for providing me with a copy of The Sky Beneath My Feet in return for my honest opinion of the book.