Found Art Blog Tour

"As you may well know, foreign territory doesn't only exist ten thousand miles away; we can find ourselves in unknown countries without going anywhere."

~Leeana Tankersley in Found Art

Three and a half years ago, we suddenly found ourselves in a foreign country...and we hadn't left our living room.   It wasn't a popular tourist destination like Paris, London, or Venice.  It was the equivalent of a war-torn Somalia, Bosnia, or Afghanistan.   Fortunately, we knew the language...in a very academic sort of way...but the culture was completely alien. 

Although our "foreign place" was a situation, not a country, I nonetheless could identify somewhat with Leeana Tankersley's book Found Art.   For many of us there is a defining moment...which sometimes stretches over years...in which God turns our world upside down and in the process changes the very fiber of who we are.  For Leeana Tankersley, it was the year she lived in the middle east with her Navy SEAL husband.  During that time she learned that God "is making everything beautiful in its time.  While we wait, we must breathe and heal and grieve and become.  We don't see the beauty immediately, but as we look back. we find the art in and through it all."  

Leeana calls that art "Found Art": 

"....God is at work even now, creating and recreating an enduring piece of art from my little old, broken-down, Diet Coke saturated life.  This is what we call found art...created when odd, disparate, unlikely, even long-abandoned castoffs are put together with other similarly unexpected remnants to create something new and, if all goes as planned, lovely."

Found Art is a beautiful book.  Its textured hardback cover is a tactile treat for the bibliophile, but the true treasure is Leeana's conversational yet exquisite writing style.  Her words are woven together as beautifully as the Persian rugs she writes about as she shares intimately God's work in her life in the mundane as well as the exotic.  

While I was left wishing the book had been a bit deeper spiritually, and realizing that the author and I aren't necessarily like-minded in certain areas,  this was a beautiful, inspiring read, and a picturesque reminder of God's hand creating art in our lives, and our need to look for and see that art as we go about our everyday life.  I especially appreciated chapter 12, "Mending", which illustrates the reality that grieving is not limited to death, and in fact, death is not always the most difficult loss to grieve.  In this chapter, she discusses the bereavement traditions of Judaism, particularly the practice of rending garments.  It was interesting to ponder how different our society might be if we recognized and accepted the depth of the grieving process as cultures such as Judaism do.  

This was a fascinating and beautiful read, and I am thankful to Zondervan for providing me a copy in exchange for participating in Blog Tour Spot's social media tour.   For other reviews of the book, please visit the other blog tour participants listed here.  Be sure to visit Leeana's website as well.