Member Review

As is often true these days, I became acquainted with Shannon Dingle long before I laid eyes on her book "Living Brave: Lessons from Hurt, Lighting the Way to Hope."

It was Dingle's social media presence that caught my attention, a refreshingly honest presence that seemed to withhold unnecessary niceties in favor of transparency, vulnerability, and a no-holds barred approach to spirituality that felt safer than that which I experience from many of today's Christian voices.

I didn't really know about Dingle's background in the beginning.

I didn't know her story.

I didn't even know about her most recent tragedy.

I just knew that Dingle's voice was different and so I kept following her.

Truthfully, as someone who shares a surprising number of similar life experiences, there have been times I've had to reduce Dingle's social media presence in my life yet it's a presence I always return to time and again.

As Dingle says time and again in "Living Brave," this is not the book that she intended to write. I'm guessing it's not the book that HarperOne originally envisioned when they signed Dingle to pen a book based upon her life experiences.

Yet, "Living Brave" is Dingle's book. It's Dingle's voice and life and light and journey.

I started simply. I had just finished up another book and wanted to read a few more minutes before drifting off to sleep, so I read the first chapter of "Living Brave."

It was, as expected, an emotional experience.

The following night, last night, I hunkered down here in Indianapolis on an extremely chilly night wrapped up in my weighted blanket and began reading again.

I wouldn't stop until I'd reached the last page of "Living Brave," a book that reads like an extemporaneous discussion with Dingle and a book that feels honest and truthful and raw, incredibly raw, because it does come within the very year that her husband, Lee, was killed by a wave during what had been an otherwise joyous family vacation with their six children.

Shannon Dingle spent nearly half of her life married to Lee, whose presence certainly isn't responsible for Shannon's immense healing (that's Shannon's!) but is most certainly irrevocably intertwined with Shannon's ability to survive childhood sexual abuse and trafficking, a dysfunctional and abuse family situation, and a myriad of physical and emotional injuries that resulted from it all that continue to impact her daily life.

Dingle shares these experiences, all of them, with a rawness fitting of their impact on her daily life. She dwells less on graphic truths and more on how those truths shaped her emotional, physical, relational, and spiritual journeys. "Living Brave," it would seem, was originally designed to be a lighter text celebrating of that healing but, of course, that healing itself is now a quilt with grief woven into its tapestry following the death of Lee at 37-years-old.

At the same age, Dingle was forced to add a new branch onto her healing tree of life that allowed for parenting of six children including three that had been adopted who already shared immense traumas in their backgrounds. Similarly, Dingle has been forced to adapt to parenting as a single, widowed parent and has had to deal with all the practical things that companion this like developing an income as Lee, who'd recently received a substantial promotion, had an income that was essential to the family's health and welfare.

There was more, of course, as grief reveals all those things big and little to which we must adapt our lives over and over and over again.

I wasn't sure, to be honest, that I was up for "Living Brave," a title Dingle explains so simply yet beautifully. I honestly worried I'd have to take it in smaller pieces. I worried that Dingle's trademark uncompromising transparency might be a tad too much in a book-length dose. I worried, quite frankly, that it would trigger ever trigger I have myself...my own sexual abuse, my own family dysfunctions, my own grief, and my own physical challenges.

But, something rather miraculous began to happen the more that I surrendered myself to "Living Brave." I began to realize why I too had survived all those experiences. I began to see the wholeness of Dingle, her joys and sorrows and traumas and triumphs. I began to hear her voice as I read and to embrace the weighted truths of trauma and the occasional chuckles of dark humor. I began to see Jesus in the occasional appropriately placed f-bomb or other expletive that may turn off some Christian readers who prefer Hallmark Jesus.

I began to feel safe, in essence, with this woman I don't know other than through social media because I sensed a sort of namaste spirit that was willing to live into both the "this sucks" and "I still believe" moments of life.

If you're expecting a well organized, hoity-toity Christian book with "healing lessons," then you may find yourself a little bit taken aback by the book that Shannon Dingle has produced. Truthfully, even if Lee were living today I'm not sure that Shannon's unique yet vital voice could produce such a book. She's simply too real, too honest, and too raw. Instead, "Living Brave" is a different sort of theological beast filled with the kinds of lessons borne out of a difficult survived, at times monumentally and at times incrementally, and about the light and the love and the hope that almost unfathomably still guides it all. It's a book about finding a way to step forward when you can't even see six inches in front of you, your footsteps guided more by faith than anything else.

As "Living Brave" winds down, the grandness of the testimony is, at least in some ways, replaced by simpler truths present in the unknowing now of a life gloriously and beautifully lived with children and with friends and with family of choice and in safe community. Today, Shannon Dingle is "living brave" without Lee yet she's figuring it out and still believing and still loving and still lighting and she's choosing to share it with all of us.

That makes "Living Brave" a remarkable book, indeed.