The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Small Things with Great Love: Adventures in Loving Your Neighbor, Margot Starbuck

Small Things with Great Love: Adventures in Loving Your Neighbor

Margot Starbuck

Midwest Publishing Association Crystal Book Award honorable mention

Margot Starbuck is back with as much passion and energy as ever. In thirty brief chapters, she invites you to choose the adventure that fits who you are in authentically loving those around you.

Yes, she knows: just the thought of adding something more to your life sounds exhausting. But here's the fantastic truth she's discovered in her own journey: "We don't have to add lots more overwhelming activity to what we've already got going. The regular stuff of our lives--the commute to work and the potlucks and home improvement projects and errands and play dates--are the exact places in which we express and experience God's love for a world in need."

With a list of resources, a study guide and a six-week "Adventure Challenge," as well as plenty of stories and hilarity from Margot's own life, Small Things with Great Love will open your eyes to the people around you and the huge impact you can have on them through small acts of love.

"Small things happen when I learn the name of my daughter's school bus driver," Margot writes. "Small things happen when I listen to the dreams of a woman who lives in a group home on my block. Small things happen when I risk crossing a language barrier even though I look really stupid doing it."

And small things add up to big adventures and surprises, for you and others. The biggest surprise of all might be how powerfully God can use you, right in the midst of your walking-the-dog, paying-the-bills, doing-laundry life, when you're living out his love. Do the first small thing by opening these pages--and let the adventure begin!

Book Details

  • Publisher: IVP
  • Publish Date: Nov 23rd, 2011
  • Pages: 240
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.10in - 5.50in - 0.80in - 0.65lb
  • EAN: 9780830838172
  • Categories: Christian Living - Social Issues

About the Author

Starbuck, Margot: -

Margot Starbuck is a writer and speaker who cares deeply about what it means to follow Jesus in the sneakers, pumps or Doc Martens in which we find ourselves. She is passionate about communicating God's great love for the world--inextricably bound to God's love for individuals--in print and in speech.

Margot studied art at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. At the beach and in dorm rooms, she began to notice the bind in which women find themselves today, specifically as they're pinched by the culture's insistence on the value of appearances. She was further equipped to process these issues theologically at Princeton Seminary. Today, Margot continues to be energized by the kingdom reality of God's big plan for our bodies which have been called good.

Her first book, The Girl in the Orange Dress, describes the way she came to know that the God who "so loved the world" cared deeply for her. Her second book, Unsqueezed, is about that inextricable love setting people free to be agents of the new kingdom Jesus ushered in.

When she's not writing books, Margot pops up online in places like Relevant, Kyria and New Christian Voices. Though disheartened by much of Christian culture's silent insistence on keeping up appearances--namely, by simply doing it--Margot is regularly inspired by those countercultural heroes and communities who are exercising different practices. (For a sane perspective on body image, she recommends TrueCampaign, an organization partnering with Food for the Hungry to transfer resources from personal self-improvement to global survival.)

Right now, Margot is writing a lot about what it looks like for normal-ish folks to exercise love and justice in our cars, at the grocery store and in our neighborhoods. When audiences invite her to speak about how we can live with less stress, or spend more time with God, or grow in our faith, she still often seems to end up right there where the recycled rubber meets the road.

Praise for this book

"Writing in a way that is both practical and engaging, Starbuck helps us to follow the great teachers of compassion and justice not by leaving our present lives but by opening our eyes to our lives and to those with whom we share them."

--The Christian Century, October 17, 2012

"This book will open your eyes to the people around you and the huge impact you can have on them through small acts of love."

--Significant Living, May 2012

"Small Things with Great Love will equip and inspire all who read it with the grace and knowledge that they can follow Jesus for real."

--Sarah Scherschligt, The Presbyterian Outlook, April 2, 2012

"Delivered with wit and humour, this remarkable book compels readers to become world changers through small things with great love, instead of just wishing they were."

--Lailani Mendoza, Living Light News, March/April 2012

"This book is perfect for a Bible study or just a group that would like to make the neighborhood they live in a little nicer. . . . The common sense of this book reminds us how important it is to reach out to others in our community and enrich not only their lives, but our own as well."

--Connie Maier, CBA Retailers + Resources, January 2012

"Dorothy Day said, 'Don't call me a saint; I don't want to be dismissed so easily.' Small Things with Great Love is an invitation to look Jesus head-on and ask what it means for your life if he really meant all that stuff he said--not just for saints, but for you. It's an important question. And you can be grateful that someone as funny and gracious as Margot Starbuck is asking it."

--Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, author of The Wisdom of Stability and Common Prayer