Faith & Everyday Grace
The Beauty in Ordinary Days
Reflections on how everyday moments — a kitchen table, a church parking lot, a bike ride home — hold extraordinary meaning, if we're willing to slow down enough to notice.
Read More →Jungle of Faith
Jungle of Faith
Poetry · 2026
A Poetic Look at Life, Family, and Faith
Jungle of Faith is a collection of poems that moves through the struggles and joys of everyday life — from small-town memories to spiritual reflections, from grief to unexpected humor. Written across five decades by a poet, musician, and Lutheran pastor, the collection follows a motorcycle ride to a church meeting, a mother's house sold after her death, a son's first birthday, and the long, uneven road of holding onto faith without losing your sense of humor along the way. Tim Craven's honest and thoughtful voice invites readers to see the world through fresh eyes, where grace shows up in the most unexpected places.
Themes
Faith & Everyday Grace
Poems that find the sacred in hospital waiting rooms, church board meetings, and kitchen tables rather than only in the pulpit.
Family & Memory
A recurring return to a childhood home in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and to the people — parents, a son, a spouse — who shaped a life.
Loss & Grief
Unflinching poems about death, funerals, and the particular ache of a house that no longer answers when you call its name.
Humor & the Absurd
A willingness to be funny and irreverent — cheap cigars, peanut butter mishaps, and Ernie Banks baseball cards — right alongside the sacred.
Book Details
- format
- Paperback
- pages
- 108
- genre
- Poetry
- isbn
- See Amazon listing
- publisher
- Independently published
- language
- English
“Can you or I despite the maelstrom at our gait remain upon this road a champion of love if not of fate?”
— Tim Craven
Dedication: “To my family!”
Why Readers Love This Collection
Fifty-two poems, written across five decades. These four give a true sense of what waits inside.
Love Letter to My Mother's House
A son can't bring himself to sell the house that raised him — or to stop loving it, long after his mother is gone.
Angel (for Kimberley)
A chance meeting on Christmas Eve, and the quiet, almost embarrassed arithmetic of who rescues whom.
I've Been Wanting
Sitting on his childhood bed for the very last time, he becomes his mother for sixty seconds — and finally understands the weight she carried.
Some Season
The collection's closing poem: a promise that even absence can be its own kind of nearness.
Read an Excerpt
Step Inside the Collection
Read the opening of “Taking Jane To Chicago” in a distraction-free reading experience.
Read the ExcerptRelated Reading
Poetry & Craft
On Poetry and the Writing Life
Thoughts on creativity, inspiration, and why a poet who has spent decades in parish ministry keeps coming back to the page.
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Faith & Everyday Grace
Faith in the In-Between
On finding meaning in the quiet, uncertain moments of life that don't fit neatly into either grief or celebration.
Read More →Every poem in this book was written to be someone’s companion on an ordinary day.
Jungle of Faith is available now on Amazon. Your copy — and Tim’s next chapter as a published poet — is one click away.
Reading with a Book Club?
Discussion questions and reading-group resources for Jungle of Faith are available on our Book Club Resources page.
Book Club Resources