When my friend Laurel mentioned Finding Spiritual Whitespace: Awakening Your Soul To Rest, by Bonnie Gray, was next up on her reading pile, I picked up a copy for myself.

Based on the title, I was already on the journey. Plus, I’ve been curious to get a purely Christian perspective on this concept since reading After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, which included Christian ideology alongside other faith traditions.

I’ve introduced a lot of whitespace to my life this year, and I tend to still feel defensive about it. No one really gives me grief about my dance class, but meditation? The first response I often get if I mention that is, “But what do you do while you’re meditating?“

You don’t. But many of us – and I’m raising my hand as a recovering Doer – while we claim to be saved by grace (Review: Grace can’t be earned), we have a very hard time categorizing any activity that feels passive as one that draws us closer to God.

Which brings me back to Finding Spiritual Whitespace. Gray starts out with a series of easy-to-read, reflective chapters that take you through her own journey toward making whitespace a part of her life, while introducing different, but all very abstract, ideas about what “whitespace” means and how it’s expressed in music, art, and design. It is a memoir of a midlife unraveling, and recovery from trauma, wrapped in devotional form.

Each chapter ends with several questions, and an action prompt. Chapters are broken into short sections, which made it my favorite kind of book – one where it’s easy to find your place after you’ve been interrupted.

With about ten other books waiting on my nightstand, I wish Gray hadn’t waited till the second-to-last chapter to offer ideas that allow you to put the whitespace idea into practice. As I was reading, I kept getting to the end of a chapter thinking, “This sounds great! How do I do it?” It took too long to get to the answer. I appreciated what she’d done with the questions and prompts throughout the chapters, but I don’t understand why she didn’t sprinkle the practical material through the book the way she broke up the rest of her content.

I found myself up to my eyeballs in the indulgent writing style. It was repetitive, with rambling metaphors and stylistically incomplete sentences. While reading, at times I was in a muddy thicket, unable to see which way was up, only to realize I’d been walking in circles (see what I did there?). She reminded me of my own writing, when I don’t dial back the dreamy Anne of Green Gables prose,  fail to edit firmly, then mix that with the modern tendency. To break things up. To force the reader. To pause. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself).

Towards the end of the book as Gray was really getting the practical part, we were tangled so deeply in a coffee metaphor that I had trouble seeing through the brews and cream dollops to what she was trying to say. She was playing off the theme of her blog, The Faith Barista, which it looks like is now folded into a newer site with different branding. My impatience about having had to wait till the end of the book to find practical application certainly played a role in my frustration with the belabored coffee theme.

Then, the last chapter: “Whitespace Killers and Triggers.” With the #MeToo movement and lots of overly sensitive college students, a trigger is something that sends you with lightening speed to a moment of trauma, betrayal, or pain. Or, in the case of the college students, any time anyone says anything that makes them vaguely uncomfortable (People have DIED to protect free speech. Grow a pair. But I digress.)

A trigger is, if unintentionally, antagonistic. But in Whitespace, a trigger is a positive nudge that gets you to find your whitespace. This is why word choice is so important. When I saw the word trigger, I almost stopped reading. I have had too much personal experience with being triggered to want to try to reframe it as a positive. If it’s a positive thing, then what do I call what happened to me in the other, more common and current sense of the word? Am I no better than the oversensitive college students if the word “trigger” is a trigger for me?

The thing is, Gray’s list of things that might keep you from whitespace, and the things that can spark you to move towards it (the “killers” and “triggers”), were totally on point. Yet I’m a language girl – though I don’t always get it right myself – so the word choice piece came close to being a deal breaker.

One of the things the author mentions several times near the beginning of the book is how she has always been one for scripture exegesis, and that gift really came through in the book. Her use of scripture, as well as quotes from various sources, created a strong defense of the practice of rest in the Christian faith.

I have already been working on this myself, a defense of my meditation practice as an act of faith, and I appreciated the thoughtful way that Gray argued for her audience, Christian women, to do the radical – self care – as Christian culture still seems to be stuck in the Puritanical past when it comes to women taking care of ourselves. Especially for those of us who are perfectionists and task-oriented doers, it’s easy to slide into feeling guilty, lazy, or selfish for taking time for ourselves. And see? I’m part of the problem, calling Gray indulgent. She can write the book however she wants. It’s her book. I just found the style annoying.

TLDR? I loved what Bonnie Gray had to say, but I didn’t love how she said it. If you start to read it and find yourself wondering what whitespace is, beyond an abstract concept, skip to the last two chapters, push through the coffee metaphor, then go back and finish the rest.

Truth: I don’t have a white surface in my house for a backdrop for a photo of a book about whitespace, except maybe my fridge, if I wanted to remove the magnets (I don’t). Or, I could iron a sheet, which is even less appealing than removing magnets. So instead, I used the Wordswag App again, and quoted a verse that Gray uses in the book.