Wherever You Are

I was in Victoria for the weekend celebrating my grand-nephew’s baptism in the Anglican church—at 11 weeks old, he’s still too young for books, but as he grows I hope he’ll enjoy our gift of Wherever You Are my love will find you by Nancy Tillman.

The book is about a parent’s love that will find you wherever you are, and the full-page illustrations are wonderfully whimsical. On the cover, a child dances with a bear, and inside the child plays in the water with elephants, sits on a bench with two panda friends, and paints a beautiful two-page spread of blue peacocks. All creation seems to say, “You are loved. You are loved. You are loved.”

The author dedicates her book, “To Daddy, whose love always finds me, wherever I am.” But I can’t help but think it also points to the love of God, our Father, whose love finds us wherever we are. Like the shepherd looking for the one lost sheep, like the woman searching her entire house for the one lost coin, God’s love also seeks us out and finds us.

Tillman writes,

My love is so high, and so wide and
so deep, it’s always right here, even
when you’re asleep.

Her words remind me of Romans 8:38-39:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” God’s love is so high, and so wide and so deep, and with us always.

For the next few weeks while I’m on study leave from my church, I’ll be blogging reviews of some of the other books I’m reading. Next up, the last of my “summer” reading: The Cost of Community: Jesus, St. Francis & Life in the Kingdom by Jamie Arpin-Ricci.

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2 thoughts on “Wherever You Are”

I haven’t heard of that book, I’ll have a trip to the library and see if they have it.
Emma from LLM Calling through the Revgalblogpals group

Hi Emma – nice to meet you! I hope you can find the book – I think it would make a great children’s feature in church too. I haven’t used it that way yet, but the full-page illustrations would be easy to show to a group of kids, there aren’t a lot of words on each page, and it’s focused on the one big idea of love which even the younger children would understand.

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"Writing is an act of faith, not of grammar," says author E.B. White, and that's how writing feels to me too. It's an act of faith to write out your heart, an act of faith to put words together and hope they speak to someone else.

I currently serve as resident author with a liturgical worship community; edit a quarterly devotional magazine; write online and in print publications; and often speak in churches and other settings. For me those are all acts of faith too.

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Emma says:

October 8, 2012 at 3:27 am

I haven’t heard of that book, I’ll have a trip to the library and see if they have it.
Emma from LLM Calling through the Revgalblogpals group

April Yamasaki says:

October 9, 2012 at 10:05 am

Hi Emma – nice to meet you! I hope you can find the book – I think it would make a great children’s feature in church too. I haven’t used it that way yet, but the full-page illustrations would be easy to show to a group of kids, there aren’t a lot of words on each page, and it’s focused on the one big idea of love which even the younger children would understand.