My mom has a wooden box—scarcely bigger than a jewelry box—which belonged to my grandmother. More than any other possession I can think of, I hope that one day that box will be passed along to me. In it are the neatly folded handwritten letters written over four brightly burning decades of my grandparents’ marriage.

My grandparents married in 1929, only weeks before the great crash that would change everything. Grandpa worked in heavy construction—building cross-state barge canals and roads with heavy machinery like the enormous drag-line that he was using the day it tipped and he was trapped below the waters of Florida’s Crystal River. That was just a few short months before they would have celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary and years before I was born. Several decades later, my grandmother would follow him into the arms of their Savior after a battle with Alzheimer’s which ravaged her mind from the time I can remember her.

In that box mom keeps are letters about the ordinary days of my grandparents’ lives, passed between life-long sweethearts, laced with tender words. But still they are a treasure to me: a snapshot into the hearts and minds of two people I only wish I had known.

If you wondered what Leigh McLeroy’s book Treasured is all about, it’s like this. It’s a  window to the heart of God through the things that He might have kept in His own treasured wooden box. They are glimpses of His character that He has passed on to us through the Scriptures. The fresh olive sprig which the dove carried to Noah, the dry waterskin which sustained the cast-out Hagar, the well-sharpened knife Abraham raised above his son Isaac—these are just a few of the treasures McLeroy examines.

Reading Treasured is both an opportunity to be nourished by these stories again, and an opportunity to be nourished with stories of God’s faithfulness through McLeroy’s own candid and often vulnerable reflections on her own life.

If you’ve walked with God for any length of time, you know that generally the most profound lessons God teaches us are in the places of our deepest heartbreaks and disappointments. When a friend opens up and shares those lessons with us, we feel deeply privileged to taste a bit more of the Father’s steadfast love—even if only vicariously. McLeroy’s intimate writing unfolds like such a rich friendship.

I found the book to be tender, poignant, deep, and rich in the way it connects stories of God’s past mercies to moments of our lives today. McLeroy is a gifted writer, weaving vibrant words with a deft and skilled hand. This is a book I want to give to people I care about to remind them of how dearly God loves them, and how real His faithfulness is even in the moments of life when we see it the least. It’s a book I believe will be treasured.