Review: Craving Grace by Lisa Velthouse

Title: Craving Grace: A Story of Faith, Failure, and My Search for Sweetness
Author: Lisa Velthouse
Released: April 25, 2011
Publisher: SaltRiver (Tyndale)
Pages/format: 272 (Hardcover)
Genre: Nonfiction, Christian Memoir
Source: Tyndale Blog Network

Quick Synopsis: After two decades of trying to win God’s favor and failing to find fulfillment in this endless striving, Lisa Velthouse fasted from sweets for six months, broke a vow she’d made years before, and discovered that Grace is not something you earn.

From the back cover:

Obeying her parents. Not drinking. Not cursing. Not having premarital sex. Vowing to save her first kiss until she got engaged, even writing a book called . . . well, Saving My First Kiss. (This, it turns out, does not actually help a girl get a date.)

But after two decades of trying to earn God’s okay, she found her faith was lonely, empty, and unsatisfying. So where does the “good Christian girl” turn when she needs answers? More Discipline, of course: fasting! By giving up her favorite foods––sweets––Lisa hoped to somehow discover true sweetness and meaning in her relationship with God.

For months Lisa managed to fast, but the only result seemed to be that suddenly she was falling short in everything else. Then, one night at a wedding, she denied herself the cake but broke an even bigger promise she’d made years before––failing in such an Unexpected and world-rocking way that it challenged everything she thought she knew about God and herself.

Quick Review: Craving Grace is an inspirational memoir about discovering God’s grace with a chick-lit-ish flair, a little hard to follow because of the alternating timeline, but a good nonfiction book to bring to the beach.

In-Depth Review:

Lisa Velthouse’s distorted view of God at the beginning of Craving Grace reflects how many Christians relate to their Creator. Lisa felt that she had to please God by always doing the right thing lest God cease blessing her or worse yet, smite her for doing the wrong thing. Furthermore, she frequently made bargains with God, promising to do something good in exchange for things going her way. Craving Grace is the story of Lisa’s journey from a works and fear-based relationship with God to grace-based accord free from perceived performance requirements.

My only fallback plan was to keep fasting, to keep trying to be extra good. I hoped my obedience and good behavior would compel God to send me some of the favor I had been asking for. The problem with this fallback plan, however, was that it was held together by two assumptions: I’m deserving and God isn’t loving. These are faulty assumptions, but I couldn’t see that at the time. I also couldn’t have known that both of them were about to be exploded into oblivion. {Craving Grace, Page 101}

The story is told by alternating between the “present winter” (or spring, towards the end of the book) and “three winters ago” when Lisa fasted from sweets for six months in an attempt to fill the hollow her empty religion had left in her. I found this approach of switching back and forth between the present and past a bit confusing. I kept having to refer to the chapter title to remember whether I was reading about the past or the present, and the two didn’t seem to mesh well. I think that the alternating timeline was necessary to effectively convey the message of the book, but the text could have been arranged in such a way that the narrative flowed more cohesively.

I wasn’t really sure what to expect when I began reading Craving Grace, except for, well, a memoir about discovering God’s grace. That discovery could take place within any number of circumstances. All I knew from the synopsis was that the circumstances in this particular story had something to do with fasting from sweets and making a colossal mistake at a wedding. Both of those things play a big role in the book, but there’s also a substantial number of pages devoted to chronicling Lisa’s dating life (or, in some cases, lack thereof), including a date with a drunk, the disinterest of a certain young man with a tattoo, and an online relationship snafu. Certainly some of these incidents are relevant to Velthouse’s discovery of grace, but the emphasis on her love life gave the book a tone one might expect to find in chick-lit, which did not really contribute anything to the main theme of the book.

The one day Sam James called to say he was having a meeting with clients in my neighborhood on Friday evening, and how about if he stopped over at my place afterward with a bottle of wine? I said, “Sure, I’d love to,” and when we hung up I had to peel myself off the ceiling. All I could think was, Date, date, date, date, date. This would be a date! Wine equaled a date. Friday night equaled a date. Just the two of us, prearranged by him, equaled a date. Definitely. Finally! {Craving Grace, Page 63}

The writing itself is quite good, and I like Velthouse’s conversational style. I was disappointed, however, to read the author’s note after finishing the book and discover that Cora, a significant character in Velthouse’s gradual realization of grace, is a composite. Admittedly that was kind of a letdown. She happened to be one of my favorite people in the story.

The main point of Craving Grace––that God’s grace is totally undeserved, that we can’t earn his favor, and that he is always good whether we like what he’s doing or not––is an important lesson that all of us need to be reminded of every now and again. That being said, I did not find the whole of the book to be very spiritually enriching.

About Lisa Velthouse:

Lisa Velthouse is a freelance writer and speaker who has serves on the staff at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan. She has been working in publishing and communications for more than a decade, but she has had a sweet tooth for as long as she can remember.