Ordinary Altars (How to Love the World (Even When It Breaks Your Heart))

You don't always get to change the world, but you do get to love it.

From “one of our most important progressive Christian voices” (Jen Hatmaker), an urgent invitation to actually love the world even when it breaks your heart.

Many of us were taught to look for God in the extraordinary: in big callings, dramatic transformations, affirmations of constant achievement, or lives that inspire millions. But what if that way of seeing has left us unable to recognize where God is actually present—especially now, when headlines are overwhelming, our systems feel broken, and hope seems naïve? What does it mean to actually live a faithful, meaningful life when the world is on fire and nothing turned out as advertised? 

Drawing from her own story of faith, disillusionment, motherhood, and decades of work as a spiritual guide, Bessey believes there comes a time when you decide that being earnest and sincere is better than being defeated. She names what she calls “ordinary altars”: places and people where the holy and the commonplace meet, not as an escape from our daily lives, but as the full-bodied engagement with the questions of our time and an encounter with the God who is with us in it all. Blending rich storytelling and compassionate spiritual insight, this is a story of choosing stubbornly, again and again, to keep loving your small patch of the world when it would be easier to shut down or walk away or become what you despise.

For readers who are spiritually tired but still hopeful, deconstructed but longing to rebuild, grappling with despair but determined to make room in their spirituality for the ache in their chest, Ordinary Altars is a guide to a sturdy faith that can bear the weight of the world—rooted in reality, loving defiantly, and stubbornly faithful enough to make the world feel like home again.