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Picking Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life's Weeds

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Some people write because they are gifted at shaping sentences into beautiful, poetic expressions. Holding a book from a gifted writer is like drinking out of a stemmed glass of fine crystal. The look and feel is captivating, even when the wine inside was poured from a cardboard box. Other people write because they have a story worth telling. Depending on the significance of the narrative the quality of the serving cup can be somewhat overlooked. So when you find a writer who not only has the talent for words but also a tale to tell, you have a found a rare gift.

When I started reading Sarah Cunningham's second book, "Picking Dandelions," I knew I had found one of those memoirs that were worth championing both for its prose and its purpose. Often times Christian books seem nothing more than an outline from a speaker's favorite sermon that have been fluffed up to fit between the covers. Even when the message is worth sharing the art of story telling lacks any creativity that gives the book real body. But my early response to "Picking Dandelions" was that Sarah Cunningham could write. And as I continued, fully enjoying her story telling, I recognized its significance as well.

Cunningham describes her "Search for faith among life's weeds" from her days of growing up the daughter of a Baptist minister to her current roles as a teacher and new mother. Along the way she recognizes that her faith wasn't a "one and done" event like a sinner's prayer, but incorporates a lifetime of growing. Her journey to and through this understanding is full of imagery that will pull the reader into their own faith pilgrimage as well.

Though broken into nine sections, Cunningham's book has three main parts. The first two sections tell of the observations she had about faith as a child and adolescent. The next couple of sections concentrate on the segment of her life when she attempted to change the world around her. (There is a very poignant section where she describes her various outreach positions that sprung from her internships while at a Christian college and her staff roles at a church.) About half way through the book her energies are turned inwards as she realizes her attempts at creating a new Eden means she has to embody that garden within herself.

What does it mean to change? Does it matter if your faith is stale? How do you go about dealing with spiritual weeds? Cunningham asks these questions of herself, never getting preachy with the readers, which make this dandelion wine a rare, and worth imbibing, vintage.

A lot of readers eat up Anne Lamott (including this author, I have a feeling, who mentions Anne in her preface). They like Lamott's honesty and her irreverence. And let's be real: they like the dramatic ups and downs of her life story. Cunningham is cut from the same stylistic cloth although you almost wouldn't expect it since her life took a decidedly cleaner path than Lamott's. Her life is different (more solidly rooted in the faith and less rocky). But Cunningham's journey is still compelling and inviting. It takes up leading a relief team to Ground Zero and living in a homeless shelter among other things. And although she isn't a Lamott clone, you get the sense you're reading the opening book of someone whose name is going to cling to book club lists the same way. If you like Lamott for her style and honesty and humor, I think you'll see some of her younger prattling idealistic side in Cunningham.

So I interviewed Sarah Cunningham about her new book Picking Dandelions...

ME: Sarah, congrats on the new book. What's it about?

SARAH: "It's a loose collection of stories that play to a universal theme--that humans (especially people in the faith) can't afford the luxury of unchanged living. And it paints a metaphor of having to weed out one's life to make room for more Eden intentions; more of the life God intended."

ME: Who is it for? Cuz I see the dandelion, and I'm like...

SARAH: "I was thinking it would be 30 to 50 year old multi-tasking women, probably juggling a fast-paced career, laundry duty, and reading three or four books simultaneously. Maybe using a half-completed to-do list as a bookmark."

ME: But no?

SARAH: "I was surprised that six of the seven people who opted to endorse the book were... men. And after the book hit the shelves, men have consistently made up about half the reviewers."

ME: Well, there is a rumor going around that Donald Miller wrote the book under the pen name "Sarah Cunningham."

SARAH: "Its been funny to watch. A lot of the men who mention the book to me, in emails or online, abbreviate it as PD--as if the title and the bright fuzzy flower on the cover, becomes a little more masculine."

ME: Are you surprised that men are reading it then?

SARAH: "Sorta. I was a little surprised that men got over the cover image. It wasn't a bubble letter cursive font or hearts and lipstick smeared all over the cover, but it played to women. Now I imagine this underground group of muscle-y guys, flipping through the book with paper bags over their heads. Like the sports fans who are embarrassed by their teams."

ME: What do you think that means?

SARAH: "Maybe the metaphor is bigger than I realized then. Its not just women kneeling in their gardens pulling stray dandelions; it's men firing up the weed-eater and mowing down hundreds at a time."

ME: Yeah, that sounds like me.

The following is a review of Picking Dandelions by Sarah Cunningham from my personal blog...[...]

I hadn't felt like I'd traveled backwards in time, and spent moments with someone I didn't know, like this since I read Donald Miller's, Blue Like Jazz. I'm serious. No hyperbole here. Sarah Cunningham's, Picking Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life's Weeds did that for me.

Do you know the feeling of seeing something you know you shouldn't have? Remember catching mom wrapping Christmas presents and then stashing them away? You saw something you shouldn't have, but seeing it opened you up to things as they really were. That's the feeling I've derived after reading Picking Dandelion's. She led me into her world- a world I should not and would not have seen otherwise- to find the truth behind the story that's been hidden behind the veil for quite some time.

One can't help but look at the world around him and think: "Something's not right about all of this." And one would be right. Things simply aren't as they ought to be. And yet we pant and search and claw and pursue the thing to make it all right. Often, we are searching for the right thing in all the wrong places.

Part I begins with Sarah's childhood. I was drawn into her experiences, seeing them open up, unfold and eventually shut. It makes you wonder if the Christianity we teach our children is something that will endure for the long haul. Are there too many holes? Too many voids? Could we be setting them up for major disappointment?

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I really wish I couldn't empathize with her, but I do, and altogether too often at that. Where we are different is that she began picking up on much of it early on. As one who sat in on church business meetings at age 10, she took note of the things that were out of sorts. See saw the good, the bad, and the ugly. Gotta love this line: "It was clear, even to ten-year-old me, that a non-brown shingle would never be allowed to touch the church roof. If it came down to it, elderly men would lie down in front of bulldozers and choir women would chain themselves to the eaves." This is so typical, but the last sentence of the chapter says it all. After the votes were taken and brown shingles "won by a landslide...we breathed a sigh of relief. Once again we'd narrowly escaped change."

Part II takes us from adolescence to teenage Sarah. These days offered her new challenges. As most of us can somehow relate, it is the teenage years that cause us to begin to see ourselves in light of how others see us. It constitutes the beginning of a devilish trap that is immensely difficult to escape. And some never do. Identities are being formed and good direction always seems lacking.

Part III takes us into Sarah's college years, where nothing is easy. But Sarah seemed to see and experience things that created unrest and discontent, but it really didn't take her in the direction it took some of us. It seemed to do the opposite. Mission trips afforded her opportunities to see what she hadn't before. I love the last paragraph of Chapter 2. A trip to Chicago left this impression upon her,

The thing that nagged my soul was knowing that some days the warming shelter was too full and we had to turn people away. The people would nod unsurprisingly when we told them to come back later, and they would shuffle away, down the snow-covered road and past the colossal empty churches that ten people attended once a week on Sundays when they made their weekly drive into the city from the suburbs.

More experiences, and eventually marriage, would make for more personal transition. One thing, though, was certain... she was forced to adjust. And that isn't always easy.

Part IV introduces how the events of 9/11 changed so many things for so many people. Like many of us, one couldn't help but wonder where God was in the midst of it all.

Part V begins with how a scoliosis prognosis would affect her, but the physical issues she experienced were simply a means for her to begin speaking to spiritual ailments that were really in view. These ailments had only one solution...Confession. Her confession? It was simple..."I hate. I hate, I hate, I hate."

The remaining parts (VI-IX) are startling realizations about faith and how change happens in one's life. Her testimony is as compelling a testimony there is, outside of Scripture itself. She lays it out there with potent transparency. Her flaws were many and all needed to be addressed. And she addresses them.

This is God's great reconciliation project, and all who are willing may participate. It's not the funnest project in the world, by any means. But in Christ Jesus, God is reconciling the world back to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). He is in passionate pursuit of us, God help us that we are equally as passionate in our pursuit of Him.

This, I believe, is to a large extent the gist of Picking Dandelions. Things simply aren't always as they seem. People, well-intentioned people, did what they believed to be right in expressing to my generation how things are and how they ought to be. But being well-intentioned doesn't make it right. The voids that were left in many of us were in need of being filled, and they would be or will be, in due time. And so we search. We search for Eden among life's weeds.

The weeds are plenteous, but God sees us through them and we can find Him in their midst. He sees us in our pursuit of Him and he reveals the beauties of what was lost at the fall (Genesis 3) by giving us tastes of His grace. And grace is always sufficient (2 Corinthians 12:9). It keeps us sifting and searching for the real things that matter most.

"Pushing Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life's Weeds" is a memoir of Sarah Cunningham, who has previously published a book called "Dear Church: Letters from a Disillusioned Generation." Ever since reading "Dear Church", I've wanted to read more from Sarah because I connected so much with her first book. And I guess I was hoping to find out more of the story behind that book.

But that isn't what I found in reading "Picking Dandelions." Instead I found a story, still similar to mine, but divergent enough to keep me interested without throwing myself completely into a "yup, that's me, too"' type of self-help mindset that I've done with other people's memoirs. This is a very good thing, in case that isn't clear, because it requires me not to check out of my own story while taking in someone else's.

For some reason the intro and first chapter were very slow for me, but after that, the pace picked up very quickly. Where I really homed in are the chapters on Sarah's assisting efforts at Ground Zero after 9-11. Part of this is because I had just watched the movie "Reign Over Me" and part because it is such a seminal moment in our generation's history, but I was gripped by this section of Sarah's story. What I appreciated most is the comparison of the recovery and support effort to be an incarnation of real community and church: loving neighbor over ourselves. I tire so easily with church being our own patting ourselves on the back at church or being inward focused that I long for a more permanent outward focus like that, though not necessarily needing to be that extreme.

And other examples exist in other stories Sarah tells, about teaching experiences, her chance to lead in ministry at a church, or making up a blues diddy at a homeless shelter. Sarah maintains an easiness about her story that pulls you in, yet disarms your own storied conceptions to listen intently to her's.

I definitely recommend Picking Dandelions, and hope Sarah has another book project coming soon.

It's often been said that the best way to show God's love is to love others. Give of yourself, your time, your talents, to help those around you. It could be something as simple as a card to someone who is feeling down or a meal to a grieving family. Maybe God asks you to share your financial blessings by buying dinner for a stranger or making a mortgage payment for an unemployed friend. The important thing is to love others.

Sometimes, though, we need to show God's love by loving ourselves and making changes that make us more Christ-like. In her book Picking Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life's Weeds, Sarah Cunningham explores this idea.

I was drawn to this book for a few simple reasons. One, not only was Cunningham raised in my home state of Michigan, she actually lives in my hometown. Jackson seems to be getting a bad reputation recently. I was more than eager to read a book that shows something good can come from the city I love. Another is that she teaches at Jackson High School. Not only did I graduate from JHS, I have friends who still attend the school (Children of high school friends. To my knowledge, none of my high school friends are still enrolled in the school.). My sons will someday attend JHS, unless God has something planned that I am unaware of. The idea of a Christian teacher in those halls, one who is so unashamed of her beliefs that she willingly published her faith journey in such a public fashion, gives me hope for their futures.

What kept me reading the book was the simple, straight-forward style. Often it felt more like I was having a conversation with the author, rather than just reading the words. I laughed out loud more times than I can count while reading. My husband and sons must have thought I was losing my mind. After reading it, I feel as if I have known Sarah Cunningham for most of my life, though we have not met face-to-face.

Quite often when I read a non-fiction book, I donate it to my church library or to a friend who asked to read it. Picking Dandelions, though, will remain in my personal library. This is definitely a book I will read again.

If you are looking for an entertaining, enlightening tale of how to grow closing to Christ, check out this book. If you think you are already Christ-like and have no need to change, then you need to read this one. I promise you won't regret it.

Sarah's lively and humorous prose has been compared to two of my favorite memoirists, Anne Lamott (author of several novels and memoirs, including Traveling Mercies and Operating Instructions) and Haven Kimmel (a.k.a. "Zippy"), so I eagerly signed up to read and review this book for her summer blog tour.

Picking Dandelions is Sarah's story of growing in faith, although not in life-changing spurts precipitated by dramatic crises, as in many spiritual memoirs. Sarah, the daughter of a Baptist minister, travels a relatively smooth road from childhood to young adulthood to marriage and impending motherhood. Along the way, she keenly observes the change-resistant adults who inhabit most churches, hatches world-changing plans in her urban outreach work, and eventually turns her attention inward, recognizing that it is not only stale church dynamics and struggling neighborhoods that could benefit from a few changes. The latter part of the book focuses on what Sarah calls her second conversion (her first conversion being her childhood acceptance of faith in Christ, an event that she can't really remember). In her second conversion, Sarah catalogs her flaws--a sense of superiority and arrogance chief among them--and makes daily efforts to recognize, confess, and correct them.

Sarah is witty, concise, observant, self-deprecating, and gently sarcastic about the dynamics of church life. At nine years old, Sarah started attending the business meetings at her father's church. Her story of how a proposal for re-shingling the church devolved into warring factions' arguing about progressive mauve shingles vs. traditional brown will elicit knowing laughter from anyone who has had the privilege of serving on church committees.

I identified with a lot of Sarah's story, in part because we share some specific traits and experiences; we are both pastor's kids who embraced faith-based urban outreach work after college and went on to become writers. But I also identified with her story because it is so straightforward, and therefore familiar to someone like me, whose faith journey has been similarly lacking in high drama. Sarah's story shines a light on the funny and poignant moments of everyday life--all those church meetings, the first time a boy asked her out, working (as a volunteer at Ground Zero after 9/11 and as a high school teacher several years later), or going to a chiropractor for chronic back pain.

But the lack of drama, while it allows readers like me to recognize ourselves in Sarah's story, is also the book's greatest weakness. Picking Dandelions is a collection of beautifully written vignettes, but I was pining for more of a story. I was waiting for a central conflict that never materialized. For example, her second conversion starts with a confession as she sits on her front porch and realizes that she is capable of true hate.

Like, you know that adrenaline rush you get when you build a strong case against someone who has wronged you? How with a few sleights of hand and twists of the tongue, you can turn people into monsters? Or failures? And then you can hate them for it? Yeah, I can get a little too into that sometimes, God.


Yeah, me too, and I wanted to know more. Who does she hate? When? Why? Give me details, not because I want to voyeuristically drool over her failings, but because details bring a story to life.

The remaining chapters focus on Sarah's attempts to confront her flaws. She cleans out her closets to deal with her overabundance of possessions. She apologizes to her high school students for losing patience when, after her twenty-minute spiel, they still don't have a clue what the assignment is. Again, these attempts at self-improvement are familiar (cleaning out clutter is one of my standard responses when the chaos of life in a household with three young children threatens my sanity, and I've offered oh, several hundred lost-patience apologies to those same young ones). But, after the apparent turning point of Sarah's second conversion, I was expecting something a little more radical, some dandelion digging that went a bit deeper.

But perhaps that's exactly why Picking Dandelions deserves a place of honor in the spiritual memoir genre. If you want radical drama, read Anne Lamott's tales of asking Jesus for help after figuring out that her plan to limit herself to two beers per night just wasn't going to work. Sarah's story, in contrast, reminds us that you don't have to be an alcoholic, a partner in an abusive marriage, or clinically depressed to realize that you make a lot of mistakes and could do better. Even chronically optimistic, unfailingly energetic, funny preacher's kids are screwed up and in need of God's help and grace.

I'm not sure who first penned the statement, "You can't judge a book by its cover!" but it's true. I'll be honest; the moment I saw the cover of "Picking Dandelions" I thought it would be a great book to pass on to my wife. However, I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised. At first glance, a book on dandelions may seem like a ladies novel; but I discovered something very manly about "Picking Dandelions."

As Cunningham notes, a dandelion is not a flower---it is a weed. And if there was such a thing as a manly-weed the dandelion would be it for sure. The dande-lion actually took its name because its serrated leaves resembled the teeth of a lion. So whatever you do, don't call a dandelion dainty--call it ferocious.

As I began to read and process Cunningham's story, I couldn't help but think about the chronicles of my own life. As a man, I have a tendency to view life from a zip-cord--flying through life hoping to go faster and further. I'm all about the need for speed, in fact, most books I "speed read." Yet, for this book, I decided to stop and smell the dandelions. I loosened up and asked God to do something in my heart. Oh, did I just use the "H" word? Heart... Yes, something resonated in my heart as I contemplated the mile markers in my own faith journey. After going through a challenging season in life, "Picking Dandelions" provided a fresh wave of hope and a renewed perspective in my relationship with God.

I would highly encourage every man who is wild at heart to pick the ferocious dandelion. Cunningham's imagery and storyline will be sure to take you on an unguided journey---one that will leave memorable yellow stains on your hands. Give "Picking Dandelions" a whirl!

Sarah Cunningham carries a great blend of humor and heart throughout her book that makes an already good story, great. Her story, I think, speaks to any Christian life. Whether you grew up in a Christian home or didn't start until adulthood, Christian life is about life, growth, change, and maintenance. I had several laugh out loud moments (She seemed to have a direct line to my funny bone), and had no problem flying through this book (Because it was good, not because it was short.) If you don't like humor or a good story, then this might not be for you.

Picking Dandelions: A Search For Eden Among Life's Weeds....this book...was a gift to my soul. My undernourished, stagnant, Christian soul. I pray, I go to church every Sunday...I even take notes during the service with genuine interest but I've become dead in the water when it comes to what it truly means to be a Christian. This book grabbed me by the front of the shirt and shook me so hard that it hurt at times.

The book starts off with an account of Sarah's early memories of her childhood and how they related to her Christian walk. She is a pastor's daughter and was raised in the church so it was natural for her to have faith in God and in the world around her. As she grew older she realized both the world she lived in and her faith were somewhat tarnished.

A self-confessed "over thinker" she related humans to dandelions throughout the book and how we are constantly growing, changing, drifting aimlessly, and how we need to accept God's grace throughout all of this. She challenged herself to change in ways that helped her grow as a person through faith.

Picking Dandelions is a book that will speak directly to your heart. The book is faith based and is written in tones of warm humor and hilarious wit that will make it non-threatening to those with or without faith. Sarah's honesty throughout make you feel as if you just sat down to coffee with an old friend.

Picking Dandelions reminds us that walking with Jesus is about constant change and reevaluation, ups and downs, and that God loves us enough to not want us to remain the same.