Gifts from Friends We Never Wanted

Discover how unlikely friends can provide us with gifts beyond measure.

Unwelcome guests are not generally greeted with gratitude but occasionally they become unexpected friends bearing gifts we never would have asked for. In Gifts from Friends We Never Wanted, Virginia Herbers introduces a sampling of these types of surprising guests in our lives—failure, disappointment, worry—and the gifts they offer us when they come visiting.

Following the same pattern as her first book, Gifts from Friends We’ve Yet to Meet, Herbers chooses a gospel character to accompany us as we engage these uninvited “friends.” Weaving together the stories of Jesus’s contemporaries, his response to their foibles, and stories from her own experiences, Herbers invites us to join her on a journey of discovery, vulnerability, honesty—and hospitality. She asks if we dare to befriend the least appealing truths of ourselves to surrender them to a God who can enlighten even the greatest darkness? If we dare, then we will have truly understood the value of these gifts from friends we never wanted.

Virginia Herbers is a retreat director, lecturer, and spiritual director who uses story and theology to shed contemporary light on traditional scriptural texts. Virginia has been an educator in the United States and Taiwan, a blogger for the USCCB, a regular columnist for Global Sisters Report, and a frequent presenter at retreat centers and parishes across the country. Her undergraduate degrees are in theology and mathematics, and she has an MA in pastoral studies from Aquinas Institute. She is the author of Gifts from Friends We’ve Yet to Meet, published by Liturgical Press. She currently serves as the director of mission formation at Saint Louis University.