Lisa Gungor and her husband Michael were stars of the Christian music scene. They knew what they believed and their path through life seemed all figured out. But Lisa's certainty crashed into pieces the day her husband admitted he didn't believe in God anymore. They faced intense backlash from their church, their fans, and their families when they were honest about their doubts. When their second daughter was born with Down syndrome and needed several surgeries in her first few months of life, she wondered if she could ever find her way back to faith.

The Most Beautiful Thing I've Ever Seen will be familiar to many readers who found that their early faith couldn't hold up to the pain and brokenness of the world. But it is also a very personal confession. Lisa even bookends her memoir with letters to her mother, sharing her grief for the way they have been separated over the years and highlighting the choices she understands now as a mother herself. She lays out the entire story of her life: the churches her family attended, listening to her parents fight, the first time she went on a date with her husband Michael, and the need to find new people when her family and church told her she was no longer welcome.

This is not a story where everything is resolved by the end; instead it is one woman's experience of an expanding mind and heart. It can be frightening for us to realize our core beliefs have changed, but Lisa explains with kindness that it feels very much like thinking you were living on a dot only to discover it is actually a line and then a whole circle. The Most Beautiful Thing I've Ever Seen is about finding the place somewhere between a handful of friends in your basement and the stage of a megachurch where you can recognize the beauty in the midst of life's pain and admit out loud what you think about love, life, and faith.

The Most Beautiful Thing I've Ever Seen:
Opening Your Eyes to Wonder
By Lisa Gungor
Zondervan June 2018
214 pages
Read via Netgalley

Who we believe God to be is often the most personal thing about us. And Lisa Gungor gets personal. In her book, she walks us through her faith journey. From certainty to confusion to the mystery of Love. Not only does she write honestly, but as a creative song-writer and performer, she also writes poetically. I enjoyed her style as much as her content.

Here are a few favorite excerpts:

“Letting go of control isn’t instant and wonderful. Sometimes it gives us rope burns as we slide down trying to hold on like a madman.”

“You know someone is deep in the religious culture when sneaking off to another church is risky.”

“I look at Lucie and my idea of a good life is crumbling. And I’m beginning to see that I am the sick and she the healing.”

“I used to believe there was some line between what is sacred and common, miraculous and mundane. My perspective had to shift to see that actually all of the bushes are burning, the entire world is ablaze.”

My thanks to Net Galley for the review copy of this book.

I've been following the Gungors for many years as musicians, even going to one of their concerts (maybe 2010?). I also live in Tulsa where some of this story takes place (home of their alma mater, ORU). I was looking forward to reading this memoir and was grateful for a review copy. I inhaled this book and will be recommending it to my library system to purchase and to friends/customers to read. Gungor's raw and honest words about her faith experience and her entrance in to the Down Syndrome and disability community were refreshing and fascinating.

I first learned of Lisa and Michael Gungor through a hit song of theirs (it was Beautiful Things sung during a Lenten service). The song gripped me, so I bought it and became a passholder to their One Wild Life project; I don't want to brag, but while I downloaded the first installment, I only realized now that I never followed up on the other downloads, only because they were bogged down in the mess that can be my inbox of unread messages. Lucky for me that I subscribe to music services that will let me still listen to the entirety of the album since the links have since expired.

I was a peripheral fan of Gungor, following news of upcoming projects (albeit my success of that was hit or miss, as seen above). I remember coming across Lisa's blog post about her daughter Lucie's birth, as well as noticing the uproar created when some statements by Michael went viral and were viewed outside of their full context.

When I learned Lisa Gungor had written a book, I was excited to get my hands on it. It begins with the birth of their second daughter Lucie and her diagnosis with Down Syndrome. Then there are flashbacks to Lisa's childhood, her college years, tensions with her home church and family, her deepening relationship with Michael.

The words can feel poetic, which I trace back to Lisa's songwriting roots. I'm not ashamed to admit I highlighted an indecent amount of this book. It is poignant, honest, and vulnerable, and we witness Lisa transparently share what happened when what she relied on fell away (their church, home, healthy family, career, faith).

I, personally, found myself close to tears because Lisa so genuinely captures grief and uncertainty that I was immediately transported to how raw the feelings were after we welcomed our first daughter Katherine quite prematurely, then had to say goodbye six short days later. Then there are the emotions surrounding my complicated relationship with my mother. Lisa's words were a balm and a reminder of lessons I have learned.

Many will be able to resonate and connect with wrestling over acceptance, belief, and individual significance and meaning in the world.

I was provided a digital advanced readers copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I've just finished Lisa Gungor's memoir, The Most Beautiful Thing I've Ever Seen. It is beautiful, lyrical, and cinematic. I highly recommend it, especially to Gungor fans and to those who have difficult family tensions, and those with whom we don't always see eye to eye. It’s poetic and eloquent, evocative, insightful, and a true work of art. Super judgy, analytical readers may not find it appealing. It is a stunningly, achingly beautiful memoir. I especially loved the way all the threads were woven together: giving color and nuance and context and expression and experience.

*I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for my review, but my opinion is 100% my own, and I highly recommend it, both as an artist, fellow musician, and longtime Gungor fan.

"Suffering is what happens when we want what is in front of us to be different from what it is."
This is the story and faith journey of Lisa and Michael Gungor, popular Christian recording artists. And their struggles with the birth of their daughter Lucie, born with Down Syndrome. They married at a young age and set out into life, expecting one story and find themselves in another,

In many ways we can all relate to this story. I know when I set out on my own journey I expected a different story, and not the twists and turns I have experienced. I have had moments of strong faith, and other moments where I wondered why I believed. And even why I work in a church.

In one part she writes "The things I thought would crush me became the very things that made see the world as more magical and vibrant than I ever have."

I enjoyed reading Lisa Gungor's stories and reflections. I have heard bits and pieces of it, reading an article here and a Facebook post there. I have long admired their music and their honesty. The only reason I am giving it 3 stars personally is because there were points I had a hard time relating to her story as a mother, being that I am a single woman I found it harder at points for me to unearth those truths. Otherwise a beautiful book, with beautiful reflections on faith and doubt.

I am changed for having read this book. I didn't learn much about it before cracking the cover; all I knew was that Gungor writes songs that resonate deeply with me and I am interested in hearing what Lisa has to say about anything. I suppose I came in expecting this book to be a series of optimistic, flowery platitudes. Maybe that is why the actual content of the book felt like a bomb exploding.
The genre of the book, much like Gungor's music, is very difficult to nail down. I pity bookstore workers who must find a shelf upon which to categorize it. It is many things: poetic, biopic, inspirational. Breathtaking. Riveting. Spellbinding.
Lisa Gungor lays out her life, unfiltered. From the dedication, it feels like something I stole off her desk, something she meant for her closest friends. I identify with so much of her journey, and there are other parts that I certainly hope never to experience. It would have been easy to sanitize the hard stuff, take out the things that could cause people to view she and her husband as imperfect, If she had done that, the greatest beauty of this book would have been lost.
There are so many lessons here. The greatest of them can probably be summed up with a quote from the book: "A collapse of beliefs leads us to the opening of something true." If you've gone through a crisis of belief and wanted to have honest conversations somewhere in the middle that you felt like nobody would participate in, this book is for you. It's equal parts gorgeous and gut-wrenching. I couldn't tear myself away.

Part poetry, part introspective auto-biography. An interesting read into the processing of the author's journey.

(3.5 stars) You’re most likely to pick this up if you know the band Gungor and enjoy their music, but I don’t think you have to be a fan to enjoy it. It is by no means a band tell-all full of road trips and touring shenanigans. In fact, the band hardly comes into it, and there are only a couple of moments in which Lisa pulls the curtain back on her songwriting process (I might have liked a few more). The big theme of this memoir is moving beyond the strictures of religion to find an all-encompassing spirituality and grasp how inclusive the love of God is.

Like many Gungor listeners, Lisa grew up in, and soon outgrew, a fundamentalist Christian setting. “I thought we went to church because that’s what Americans did. … Though I loved my tribe, I had small questions about its ideology. But you couldn’t really question authority figures.” She bases the book around a key set of metaphors: the dot, the line, and the circle. The dot was the confining theology she was raised on; the line was the pilgrimage she and Michael Gungor embarked on into a broader concept of Christianity after they married at the absurdly young age of 19. Lisa shakes her head at the memory of them as “two kids with grand egos out to change the world.” They “left something rigid and structured in search of something intimate.” You can sense that shift in some of their more questioning songs.

But eventually the line faltered. They struggled with infertility and world events, and the way both politics and religion fail to address the reality of human suffering. At one point Michael told her he wasn’t sure he believed in God anymore – while they were leading a church in Colorado! When their second daughter, Lucie, was born with Down syndrome and required emergency heart surgery, it sparked further soul searching and a return to God, but this time within a much more open spirituality that encircles and values everyone – her gay neighbors, her disabled daughter; the ones society overlooks. “My perspective had to shift to see that actually all of the bushes are burning, the entire world is ablaze.”

Her mantra from a silent retreat in California was “Divine Mother, give me eyes to see.” Being mothered, becoming a mother and accepting God as Mother: together these experiences bring the book full circle. It opens with a letter to her mother, regretting that they don’t see eye to eye on religion anymore and that her mother probably thinks she’s hell-bound for leaving her childhood church. The epilogue returns to that letter format, making what’s gone before a forthright confession. Barring the too-frequent nerdy-cool posturing (seven mentions of “dance parties,” and so on), this is a likable memoir for readers of spiritual writing by the likes of Sue Monk Kidd, Mary Oliver (whose poetry inspired their recent three-album sequence, One Wild Life) and Terry Tempest Williams.

Well written and very entertaining.
Thanks to author, publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.