Amazing Grace

His Healing Touch by Autumn Macarthur is a delightfully warm Christian romance. It is the second book in the Sweetapple Falls series but can be read as a stand-alone.

The novel’s main themes are love, loss and grief. Loss and grief can consume and strangle the love out of us if we let them. Living in the past, focusing on our losses is not living the life God intended for us. The past is dead. We need to learn to live again. We need a purpose and we need to trust again.

In our hurt and pain, we may lose sight of God. “Hard to keep believing ‘Jesus Loves Me This I Know’ when real life smacked you in the face.” Life hurts but Jesus is bigger than our hurts. He asks us to love and trust Him. Whatever life throws at us, Jesus promises to walk beside us every step of the way.

Great love permeates the novel. There is a wonderful warm community atmosphere as hearts and homes are thrown open. The church is not just a building the church is carried inside believers wherever we go. “Wherever people worshipped God became a church.”

God’s love is a blanket that covers all the action in the tale. Sometimes we need help to see the love and the hand of God in our situations. God knows just what we need and when we need it. He sends the right people to walk alongside us at just the right time.

We all have hard times. It is how we respond to these times that matters.

The novel shows the devastating effect of losing a loved one to cancer. “All her prayers and all her tears hadn’t changed anything.”

We also see the difficult time faced by a veteran as he battles survivor’s guilt. “I’m the king of ‘I’m fine.’” We have to hang on to God and trust that He will work all things together for the good of those who love Him, even though our circumstances tell us it is a lie. God will make a way through the darkness, we just have to trust Him.

His Healing Touch was a really wonderful offering from Autumn Macarthur. All her stories fill the reader with hope and love as we not only enjoy getting to know the characters but we also get to glimpse the heart of God.

I received this book for free. A favourable review was not required and all views expressed are my own.

JULIA WILSON