This is the Main Event

You had me at the title – ‘This is the main event’ is the kind of phrase I’d like to tattoo on my arm – and my spirit. But the excellent title is just the beginning: this is a thoughtful, artful, soulful meditation on life and faith and time and what really matters.

Shauna Niequist, New York Times bestselling author

Few people love words as much as Joshua Luke Smith . . . This new book, as in everything he does, is a gift from the depths of a wise, earnest and articulate heart, straight to the heart of every reader.

Andrew Peterson, singer/songwriter and author

Joshua Luke Smith’s affecting craft connects heaven to earth and uplifts earth to heaven. Joshua moves words in his kinetic poetry: words distilled to authentic truth with vulnerable candour and prophetic alacrity. This is a book for generations of dreamers, sunflower seeds of words scattered in the poisoned soil of culture, ready to chase the sun.

Makoto Fujimura, artist and author of Art Is

What a book . . . full to the brim of honest poetic stories, teachings and lessons that feel they come from a kind big brother gently shuffling us all forward while also keeping us beautifully in the present.

Elle Limebear, artist and storyteller

I try to read (and watch and listen to) everything Joshua Luke Smith puts out. He's fast becoming the poet laureate of a new generation. There are thoughts, phrases, lines in here which will soon become your friends. They will be cherished in solitude, quoted in cards, shared at weddings and funerals, for many years to come.

Pete Greig, bestselling author of How to Pray and How to Hear God

There are very few writers who can combine raw, even painful honesty about how brutal life can feel with a grounded hope. Joshua Luke Smith is one of them. This book is beautiful, humanizing and profoundly nourishing—soul medicine for our times.

Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive and podcast host of The Sacred

A cluster of imaginative, kind and soul-opening propositions nestle here. Joshua lives in a world we all understand, yet again and again he gestures to the luminous within the ordinary. There's a hard won decency that's refreshing.

Martin Shaw, author of Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us

What a gift... Beautiful, real, raw and relentlessly hopeful. This is a work of holy art.

Jo Hargreaves, The Faith Filled Therapist, pastor, speaker, author and podcaster