The Exact Place– A Story for Everyone

In this very good but very wounded world. some times there are windows into surprising grace. Come and see.

“There was a stark, even frightening beauty to the land just north of the Plains where I grew up; it was a constant reminder of the paradox of human strength and its inherent limits. These are stories about place and family, and are firmly rooted in the stark beauty of the northern Minnesota landscape. The people, the animals, and the physical nature of the land shaped my personal landscape. No matter how far I move from them, I cannot shed them. Nor do I want to. They are powerful reminders of both the strengths and the limits of human love, they have become part of the history of my spiritual geography.”

Yesterday I opened a box of books, 30 copies of The Exact Place, the wonderfully rich memoir of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Margie Haack. The paragraph above is from her Introduction, and there she introduces the vision of a “spiritual geography.” I am not much of a salesman, but I will say that this is one you should buy, and then buy for everyone you know and love. We will be better people, and the world will be a better place, for reading over Margie’s shoulder and through her heart. I hope it goes very far and very wide.

“There are sentences in this book so wonderfully crafted, breathtaking, and insightful that I had to read them over again and again to let the words soak into my soul. Margie is a storyteller of the highest order. You will see, feel, and think, laugh out loud and want to cry, sometimes all on the same page.”

–Andi Ashworth

“With a sense of God’s redemptive purposes played out over a lifetime of rural poverty and a harsh upbringing, these tales form a memoir of note, ruminating on an unusually vivid life in what for some will feel like another world.”

–Byron Borger

“As I read the story of young Margie’s life, I reflected on my own, and wondered at the goodness in the ordinary — land well-tended, food well-prepared, children sheltered and fed with sweat and tears — and at the unfolding of hope in the midst of hardship and heartbreak.”

–Gideon Strauss

“The Exact Place is for Everyman and Everywoman, for children and for grandparents, for the youngest students and the oldest students, for people everywhere who care about a good life, and what it takes to find it.”

–Steven Garber