About the book
Nothing Is Wasted is Marilyn J. Benson’s deeply personal spiritual memoir—an account of leaving, losing, searching—and discovering that the sacred can be found everywhere. Born on a mid-twentieth-century Minnesota farm and raised within a culture of Christian fundamentalism, Benson grows up believing there is no place for women in spiritual leadership. Yet her longing for meaning silently follows her, as she begins to walk away from the faith of her childhood.
Marilyn in the small wagon by the big wagon filled with the corn harvest
Baptism in Indian Lake
Her journey spans an evangelical college in the Midwest, the charged creativity of 1970s San Francisco, a remote Alaskan village, a Quaker community in Pennsylvania, and ultimately her return to Minnesota. Along the way, she marries a seminarian whose decision to drop out leaves her unaccountably devastated—until, years later on the campus of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, she realizes the truth beneath her anger: she was grieving the theological education and spiritual exploration she had been taught were off-limits to her.
House in Lower Kalskag, Alaska
On the steps of her San Francisco house
The memoir traces the unraveling of her first marriage, the birth of her daughter in rural Alaska, and the unexpected sources of strength she finds as a mother and high-school English teacher. Through therapy, friendships, and the presence of the natural world—the mountains and beaches of Northern California—Benson recognizes a spirituality broader and deeper than anything she could have imagined as a girl. She comes to see how powerfully the theology of her youth shaped her, even long after she thought she had left it behind.
In her thirties, guided by a wise Quaker mentor, Benson steps onto a path she had yearned for all along—a path that leads her to seminary, to a spiritual community that embraces her gifts, and ultimately to a vocation within progressive Christianity as psychotherapist and spiritual director.
Peer group of spiritual directors
Nothing Is Wasted reveals how every experience, every loss, and every turning can become part of a larger story of transformation—one in which nothing is wasted.
“To listen another’s soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another.”
Douglas V. Steere, Gleanings: A Random Harvest, Nashville: The Upper Room, 1986, p.83
This book is for . . .
Spiritual seekers
Recovering evangelical Christians
Those seeking to understand the power of fundamentalist Christianity
People reinterpreting their childhood faith
Progressive Christian women
Divorced single mothers
And everyone . . .
On their own spiritual journeys
Looking for light in the dark
Healing from spiritual abuse and heartbreak
Discovering their own narratives
Wanting to integrate faith language into their own lives
© 2025 Marilyn J. Benson