"A Broken Kind of Beautiful" by Katie Ganshert

"After Sara's accident, so many well-intentioned people had offered her words of hope---that God would heal her, that she would see again---as if that was a given. It was the same hope people gave Marilyn all those years ago. Story upon story of women who had struggled through infertility and ended up with a child on the other side.

"'God is good. It'll happen,' they had told her.

"As if God's goodness depended on whether or not he answered prayers the way people wanted him to answer. The hard truth was that sometimes he didn't. He hasn't rescued Marilyn from her infertility, and he hadn't rescued Sara from her blindness. But that didn't negate his goodness. It just meant he had different plans."

I just finished "A Broken Kind of Beautiful" by Katie Ganshert. It was a great tale by a local author, and I was surprised by how smoothly it was written. I have found books by local authors often sound like someone trying to write, and it takes you out of the story. This was not like that.

It's the story of Ivy Clark, a New York model who lost her virginity at 14 and has tried to stay in control of life by using her good looks to control men. When she gets older, it doesn't work as well anymore and life gets complicated.

There's a couple of under stories though, one about a woman suffering from infertility and another about a woman suffering from recent blindness. It was the section above that really struck me. These women didn't get the answers they wanted from God, but they both dealt with their pain and looked for the good in life.

So often we assume God will answer our prayers how we want, and if not he has failed us. That's not true though. God knows what is best, whether it's what we want or not.

That doesn't mean we can't pray for what we want, but it does mean we should accept it if we don't get it.

Life doesn't always end up how we expect or want, but if our hearts are tied into God's, we can have faith that it's all for our good.