Author Melissa Zaldivar talks honestly about losing everything that once defined her and how God used unexpected opportunities, like working at Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, to spark a journey of working through her grief and encountering the all-sufficient love of Christ.
Weaving inspiring passages of Scripture and insights from Little Women into her personal story, Melissa encourages readers with her discovery that it’s when we have nothing left to offer that we can receive God’s love the most. And that’s something that can never be lost.
As a man who’s had his world fall apart in a single day, I can attest to the all-sufficient God, who heals and refills a broken heart and provides his all-sufficient love in the most creative of ways. God was certainly creative in how he brought Melissa Zaldivar into my life. In my darkest season, she helped me see God’s all-sufficient love and helped me look for God in the midst of my mess. Allow her to do the same for you.
“The story Melissa Zaldivar tells in these pages finds meaning through the frame of the beautiful stories she has immersed herself in: the stories of Louisa May Alcott, the stories of people she knows and loves, and the truest and best stories of all—those of the Bible. “What Cannot Be Lost” is a beautiful testimony to the power good stories have to make our lives better, even (or especially) when we face great loss.”
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An unexpected combination of biblical truth and literary commentary, “What Cannot Be Lost” exposes the rawness of loss and longing while, at the same time, applying the only effective salve. Simply put, it’s one of the most honest books on grief I’ve ever read.
It is a beautiful thing to form a friendship with an author from another time and find comfort in their story. Hand in hand with the century-distant Louisa May Alcott, Melissa Zaldivar walks through rooms of grief and promise to find what cannot be lost in the sad days and strange nights of grief. Beautifully told and heartfelt, this book bears witness to a friendship and what it means to give voice to our grief.
When grief wraps itself around the goodness in our life, we often feel suffocated by senselessness. Melissa Zaldivar has an uncommon way of giving words to the unspeakable parts of our lives, and by doing so, she frees us to breathe again. This is a book we need.
I read What Cannot Be Lost with tears running down my cheeks. It helped me release the stored-up grief in my soul as I found comfort and a companion in Melissa’s honest reflections on loss. When sorrows threaten to overwhelm us, when death of any kind casts a shadow on our lives, What Cannot Be Lost is the reminder we all need to know that we have a God who stays with us in our weeping and who loves us to—and even beyond—the end.
Just as Melissa guides tourists through Louisa May Alcott’s historic home in Massachusetts, she gently leads us through the shadowy corners of our own grief, ever reminding us that we are never alone. There is a tremendous depth of comfort in Melissa’s words that can only come from a soul who has experienced profound loss; each chapter is a quilt to wrap around a weary heart. “What Cannot Be Lost” is a profound gift for any soul feeling the terrible sting of grief.