"Read your whole book before we ever touched the Dallas dirt. Laughed and cried and loved, loved, loved every page...loved."
J. Semmes, Oxford, Mississippi
"I've stopped reading with four stories to go; I don't want the book to end."
L.Harper, Sullivan's Island, SC
"I've re-read most of the year of weeks and loved the pieces even more--ranging from "damn good" to BRILLIANT. What a gift you have for writing. A true watering hole! Actually I found the photos as intriguing and beautiful as the written work--glad they're given prominence. To Eric and Ollie!
Rev. Dr. Bert Keller, Charleston, SC
Charitable community living is a tall order, and this is just a short book about small moments in one life. But its 52 stories confirm a compelling truth; that for human hearts in search of connection there are no small nor insignificant moments.
The Gift Of Belonging is the first of a "year of weeks" series of Wildbird Books, one experiment in a larger range of experimental steps being taken toward charitable community living, all by a growing flock of new and old friends in one small corner of the world.
This book is about the grace that lifts and surrounds all those who know they belong. As such, this book is about each of us wherever we live, starting where we are with who we are, on our own back roads home to fully belonging.
Brad Gustafson was born and raised in a rural, tightly knit Swedish religious farming community in south central Nebraska.
A church-related junior college opportunity 2,000 miles away after high school, just outside Vancouver, British Columbia, introduced him to a larger social and theological world, and his journey into that world has never ended. A few friends he made there have refused to leave him alone across many decades of their respective personal, marital, and vocational adventures, and with them he has now helped co-found Wildbird, a spiritual charitable venture in search of, once again and always, the North Star.
In mid-life (he hopes it was mid-life!), Brad married a woman named Sally and then completed graduate studies at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. He subsequently pastored two beloved congregations, one in Southern California and one in western Nebraska.
Then his mind and heart and soul got restless once again. He still believes there's always something soulfully new under the sun on the road ahead for all of us, which finds a way to rise up beneath our feet to meet us exactly where we are right now, and lead us home from there.
