Rooted: A Spiritual Memoir of Homecoming 

Christy Berghoef 

Reformed Journal Books

July 29, 2025

172 pages

I often avoid driving the road that passes by the land that once was my grandpa’s orchard. The apple trees are gone now, the old orchard bulldozed, and so whenever I take in the bare, rolling hills, my chest clenches. To glimpse the land stripped of the landscape that shaped my childhood causes an ache both physical and heart-deep

Thankfully, just a few miles from the old orchard, my parents have planted and tended their own. It fills me with joy to watch my kids working beside their grandparents, walking the rows of trees, forging memories that echo mine.

And yet, it isn’t all nostalgia. Over the years, my early beliefs—and the person I once was—have evolved. Like the twisting and gnarling of a tree’s roots, my faith has grown more tangled and complex. And though I love the land of home, love the family that raised me, there are differences and changes that make home both beautiful and brutal—brutiful, as I’ve heard it called.

This was the connection I carried into the pages of Christy Berhoef’s new book, Rooted: A Spiritual Memoir of Homecoming.

The first chapter of Berghoef’s memoir opens with her emotional drive from Washington, D.C., where she and her family had been living, to Holland, Michigan, a return to the 40 acres where she had grown up. As the miles pass and her minivan approaches the old home that would become her family’s new home, she asks: “Would the place and people of my hometown ever allow me to really feel at home? I was no longer part of the tribe. I knew that. While my values hadn’t changed, the political expression of those values had shifted.”

I was familiar with Berghoef because her husband, a pastor, ran for Congress in my district in 2020. A Christian Democrat in a deep Red county, I remembered the onslaught of cruelty —slander, threats, and meanness—she and her family endured. I expected the book to be a story of this experience. And it was. But it was also so much more. 

Berghoef invites readers into her home, her garden, her heart. This is not just a story of heartache—but a love story of the land and its creator.  A story of one woman’s resolve to nurture and sustain herself across the world’s uneven terrain. A story of healing and the complexity of seasons. A story of clinging to the good, and a story of letting go—whether by choice or necessity.

Berghoef covers a lot of ground, both metaphorically and literally: the resurrection of her childhood experiences, “simple living without simplistic thinking,” selling flowers at the local farmer’s market, a technology detox for her children, learning to appreciate spiders, and navigating the shifting seasons of our bodies, including menopause. Readers witness the bloom of her Secret Garden—and, if you’re like me, you may find yourself hunting her social media for images of its lushness—and feel the enormous grief and pain of her father’s death.

I found more than comfort in Berghoef’s story; I found, as a good farmer often offers, sustenance. Her journey is not one of ease, but of commitment, sweat, connectedness, surrender, and a fierce, relentless hope. Perhaps one of my greatest compliments for the book is that it propelled me to slow down, even to set the book down, and get outside to get my hands dirty.  “The more time I spend in the garden,” Berghoef writes, “the more I sense the Spirit of God hovering around and within, and the peace that passes understanding begins to take root and grow.” Rooted lives up to its title—it is a book that doesn’t lecture or promise certainty, but challenges us to consider our role as co-creators in the world God entrusts to us, our role in the mystery of resurrection, that cultivating a life of awe and wonder requires some dirt in our fingernails. Berghoef shows that homecomings and their sacred transformation are indeed brutiful.