Mark Oakley is one of the church’s most outstanding communicators. His writing and preaching alike are shaped by a sense that language is sacramental, and he has a poet’s gift of opening up new worlds and new possibilities simply through words. In a series of fifty beautifully crafted reflections, with characteristic wit, Mark traverses the landscape of the Christian year, with its oases of celebration, its desert stretches of emptiness, its days of abundance and seasons of lament, and its affirmation of the ordinary and the everyday.Rooted in the scriptures that the Church reads through the year, this volume is pure gift for preachers and all who are charged with interpreting these sacred stories in today’s world. For all who wish to understand their own story in the light of God’s bigger story, this will be a book to turn to again and again.