I really enjoyed Voysey’s book earlier memoir, Resurrection Year, so I anticipated reading his latest work, The Making of Us.

This book chronicles Voysey’s pilgrimage in northeast England and also his internal journey to understand his vocation. As Voysey says, “With movement comes discovery” and “Maybe the wrong turns will just be part of moving forward, and the abrasions part of us becoming ourselves. And maybe, like all our journeys, great discoveries will be made simply through moving.”

I was captivated by the story of his pilgrimage. Voysey shares with us the beautiful scenery, the story of Cuthbert, the deep conversations with his fellow pilgrim, and the blisters! I appreciated hearing how his experiences sparked so much deeper reflection about his life and work.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in pilgrimage, for anyone questioning their vocation, for anyone facing adversity, and really for anyone else that wants to engage more deeply in thinking about God’s hand in their story.

I was encouraged to see how God has brought beauty from the ashes of my own life, to slow down and attend to my life, to rest in my identity as a child of God, to contemplate the work of my heart and to embrace my gifts.

“Beautiful things can emerge from life not going as planned. It can even be the making of us.”

“Perhaps when life as we know it ends, new adventures really can begin. Maybe when identify is lost we can discover who we really are. And maybe the adversity we despise can release our greatest gifts into the world.”

Disclaimer: I received this book in exchange for my honest review.

This is a beautifully evocative, poetic book – but it is more than that. The author and his friend took a life-changing pilgrimage, and invite us readers to go on it too.

Sheridan has already written about the pain of infertility in the book Resurrection Year, which is an incredibly poignant and honest account of his and his wife Merryn’s journey that has helped hundreds of couples facing similar heartache. In the end, they relocated to England for Merryn’s work, which necessitated Sheridan giving up a successful career in radio broadcasting. In Australia he was known – here in England, he has had to start from scratch all over again.

It hasn’t been an easy journey for Sheridan, and he has wrestled with the big questions of identity – such as ‘who am I when everything has been taken away from me’? It was this sense of not being sure of what his place was that fuelled Sheridan’s plans for the pilgrimage, in which he and his friend DJ walked from Lindisfarne to Durham in order to soak in the history, walk where other pilgrims have walked and finally see the Lindisfarne Gospels.

As they travelled, Sheridan wrote journal entries and he has beautifully recaptured the essence of the landscapes they travelled through, as well as the hardships along the way, through his writing. The journey may have been painstaking at times – so has the process of writing the book afterwards. It has taken four years for Sheridan to complete it, as he has allowed himself to dig deeper into God and himself in order to find the answers he was seeking.

If you have ever faced the pain of not knowing who you are, and struggled to believe the identity that God has spoken over you through the Bible, then this book could really be life-changing for you too. Having been on a similar heart wrestle myself, I know how painful, but deeply rewarding, it can be when you truly discover that being a child of God’s really is everything. I heartily recommend this beautiful book.