Catching Stars While Walking Into Walls

Catching Stars While Walking into Walls is a book of short reflections on what in our everyday routine and the ordinariness of our lives leads us ever more deeply into the heart of our God, the God who loved us first, loves us now and has promised to love us always. Though we can feel our lives are just too ho-hum ordinary to matter to anyone, what we learn is how extraordinary each of us is to the One who created us in God's own image.

Catching Stars While Walking into Walls is filled with reflections that open us to new ways of seeing and of thinking about the "holy" in our lives that all too often feels "hole-ly" to us--that fills us with doubts about who we are and why our lives are such gift not only to ourselves and those around us but to the Holy One who breathed God's own Spirit into us. This is a book that raises our eyes to the heavens and the stars there even as we trip over ourselves and walk into walls on our own journeys. Though we sometimes, even often, feel alone on these journeys what we discover through self-reflection is that we are never alone but accompanied always by our God who delights in us and is as close as our own hearts.

Rev. Dr. Kathy Rooke is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and the founding pastor of Faith Family United Church of Christ in Brandon, Florida. She holds a PhD in English from Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. After thirty-three years of teaching at the high school and college levels, she attended seminary and was ordained in 2007. She was not quite ordained two years when she and twelve others felt the call to found Faith Family as a place of sanctuary and welcome for all. She is grateful to that small band of radically inclusive Christians, who, though continuing to grow in number, remains faithful to their founding vision and continues to reach out to their greater community as the hands and heart of Jesus Christ in this world. Kathy lives in Bradenton, Florida with her beloved spouse, Mary, and their four fur-balls of love— Noah, Choo Choo, Angel and Callie Anne.