Books like Joni — picked by fans

Though this book was first published in 1971, its message of courage in the face of tyranny and forgiveness in response to evil remains stunning to this day.

I have read this book twice, twenty years apart, and both times I came away with a sense of awe that because of their strong faith, Corrie ten Boom and her family were willing to risk their own lives to protect those who were being hunted down by the Nazis.

Even when caught and sent to a concentration camp where they endured unspeakable cruelty, Corrie ten Boom and her sister, Betsie, did not lose their faith but instead ministered to the women around them.

I can only hope that I would have the same courage if I were in Corrie’s shoes.   

This is the best missionary autobiography I have ever read.

In These Strange Ashes Elisabeth Elliot is so brutally honest about being a missionary. She complains about humidity and wrinkled clothes. She endures loneliness and times of deep discouragement in the jungles of Ecuador. And the ending! I won’t spoil it.

While I’ve read other books by Elliot, including her famous memoir about losing her husband Jim, this one stayed with me. It asks, why do we serve God? What happens when the result is not stellar? Does it mean we failed? I wasn’t eager to sign up for a trip to the jungle after reading her story, but it helped me see my life from a new perspective.

As a young girl, I loved missionary stories about women like Gladys Aylward who left their comfortable homes and traveled to remote countries to tell people about Jesus.

In 1930, Gladys traveled across Siberia by train to a remote town in northwest China. There, as an independent missionary, she shared God’s love and stood up against time-honored traditions that were harming young girls. This book is full of adventure, and doesn’t shrink from stomach-wrenching details.

I’ll never forget the vivid descriptions of foot-binding, and how Gladys fearlessly confronted and corrected this painful procedure, no doubt impacting lives forever.

In the late 1800s, at age 28, Amy Carmichael went to India as a missionary, compelled to stay by the children she adopted as her own.

I love that Amy was stubbornly unconventional. Unlike other missionaries of her time, she adopted the cultural dress of saris and sandals, and lived among the people she served. She stood up against local practice to rescue children and though she had no children of her own became a mother to many.

Amy was so captivated by her love for India its people that she stayed there for 55 years, writing 35 books. There is something raw and honest about Amy’s story that gave me a passion for missions.

I found this an inspirational book, showing that besides causing much sadness and suffering, serious illness sometimes leads to positive transformation in people’s lives. While he was a medical student, Dinesh Palipana had a car crash that left him quadriplegic, apart from some limited hand function.

After years of rehabilitation, through tremendous hard work and determination, he became a doctor, lawyer, and disability advocate. This memoir is frank, practical, infused with humor, and the wisdom of Stoic philosophy. It put my own minor health concerns into perspective. Incidentally, he writes that an episode of major depression in his earlier life “paralyzed me more than the spinal cord injury ever has,” an interesting comparison between mental and physical illness. 

Between suffering from polio as a child, post-polio syndrome as an adult, betrayal, the loss of a son, and a husband who left soon after – Vaneetha Risner has endured unimaginable suffering. For that reason, her honest words about suffering have left an incredible impact on me as I’ve endured my own. She doesn’t “preach” to us as if we need to get our act together, but she writes with compassion, honesty, and comfort as one who’s been there. Despite having every reason to be angry and bitter at the people who have hurt her and God himself, she is full of wisdom, grace, and joy, and shares about the hope she has that has enabled her to endure. 

I felt so much validation and empathy in this book.

Loss and grief from chronic illness can be difficult and complicated to deal with. I learned in this book that not only is it okay to grieve and notice my losses, but that I can still find joy even in the trenches with chronic illness. I loved the thought-provoking questions that I feel helped me to draw closer in my walk with God because I was encouraged to be fully honest with God.

After reading this book, I was left with the perspective that grief may be a part of chronic illness, but there is joy to be found in God in the midst of it all. 

With Pete Greig’s How to Pray, the subtitle says it all: A Simple Guide for Normal People. Greig is a worldwide authority on prayer, but as a self-described “scruffy Brit,” he writes in a way that makes prayer both appealing and accessible. With disarming humor and candor, Greig addresses questions we’ve all asked, from why God heals some people but not others (Greig’s wife, for example, suffers severe epilepsy) to whether or not it’s okay to pray for a parking space. (Spoiler alert:  Greig says yes to parking place prayers, since doing so equips us to live life with greater gratitude. Love that.) I have more than two dozen well-loved books about prayer on my shelf, but How to Pray might be my favorite. It is, to borrow a word from the Brits, “brilliant.”

This book at times feels like poetry and written with such profundity.

Grappling with deep physical pain, Jen Soriano, a daughter of a neurosurgeon, comes upon a hard truth about the origins of her physical pain; a history of generational trauma and her family’s absorption of a painful history of colonization of the Phillipines.

This poignant memoir helped me understand, at a personal level, how the body starts to give up when we carry the emotional wounds of the past, how neurodivergence intersects with historical trauma, and reminds us that freedom from pain is indeed possible.

As a trauma psychologist, it was both humbling and enlightening to receive the author’s personal accounts of intergenerational trauma and intergenerational healing.

When I came across Georgie’s book I absolutely devoured its content. Knowing that she had spent time with Dr. John Sarno outlined how passionate she was about her work in this mind-body field. She provided me with inspiration for writing my own book and having personally connected with her, I know her book is as authentic as she is. I found the explanations helpful and easily understandable and it propelled me with so much more enthusiasm for further reading around this subject.