The Exact Place
A Search for Father
Margie Haack
9781941106181
240 pages
Square Halo Books
Overview
A three-room house in northern Minnesota with no running water can seem crowded with a mother, stepfather, five siblings, and a dog. It was swampland barely claimed from wilderness, where temperatures of 40 below could freeze a chicken house full of hens. It was the place Margie accidentally killed her favorite dog, was chased by a timber wolf, learned to love work and humor and hate sheep. Her roots were tangled with the death of a father who was killed before her birth, leaving her mother a widow at seventeen. This was also where her spiritual awakening began. She yearned for home, for a father who loved her. Margie determined to win her step-father's love and approval, but failed. Her stories of her childhood show how suffering ripened the landscape of her life. From her earliest memories at the age of four through dark nightmares, she became aware that God received her as a beloved daughter. She had been, all along, in The Exact Place she needed to be.
Author Bio
Margie Haack was born in Warroad, Minnesota and grew up in rural Lake of the Woods County. When she graduated from high school, she entered the University of Minnesota as a pre-med student. That was where she met and married her husband, Denis Haack. They moved to New Mexico where they lived in a commune for several years, served on the staff of a church, ran a small janitorial service and did other clever things that allowed them to eat pinto beans and green chile every day. In 1981 they moved to Rochester, MN, where they were mentored by Francis and Edith Schaeffer at L'Abri. Margie and Denis co-direct Ransom Fellowship, a ministry devoted to helping Christians thoughtfully love and engage the world. Margie has three adult children and nine grandchildren.
Margie thinks that leaving her home of 35 years and moving to a place with bedroom and bath on the main floor means the next move will be to the Home she’d always dreamed of with an Italian espresso machine and a daybed on the porch.
She writes a quarterly newsletter “Letters from the House Between” containing personal essays about being ordinary in a world that loves the sensational and the historic. You can also find her blogging about “what’s funny, what’s holy, what’s suffering” at Toads Drink Coffee.
