My Heart for His: Stacey Sumereau’s Adventure Awaits

My Heart for His: Stacey Sumereau’s Adventure Awaits

By Franci Revel Eckensberger, Lead Editor

If you’ve ever had a passion, career, hobby, or relationship that slowly overshadowed God in your life, Stacey Sumereau’s story will speak to you. If it happened to be performance-related, you’ll really relate. 

Opening her book Adventure Awaits: How to Interpret Your Desires and Hear God’s Voice, Sumereau tells the story of receiving a callback at her audition for The Wizard of Oz as a recent college graduate. “It was as if the theater gods had seen my sacrifices and answered my prayers. Not that I really believe in ‘theater gods,’ of course . . . theater sat squarely on the throne in my heart. The roles I booked and the skills I gained were the very definition of my self-worth” (2).

In a previous life, I was a serious ballet student. I remember well the way that working with one’s body, performing on a stage and telling a story with that body, had a particularly tricky way of becoming one’s entire identity. “Giving it your all” carries a different meaning when every part of you, mind, body, and soul, is vulnerably on display in your training and your performance. Unfortunately, the self so wholeheartedly given to the audience can feel strangely lost to the one who possesses it, and the ensuing confusion and pain can wreak havoc. “The product I was selling at every audition,” Sumereau writes, “was me” (5), summing up a complex relationship with the “theater gods,” audiences, and her own body that left little room for God. 

Even growing up in a devout Catholic family, Sumereau felt what she calls a “crucial” gap—“Somehow, I missed the lesson that God is really interested in me” (3). In rediscovering this unconditional desire of God’s for her whole person, good, bad, clean, and messy, Sumereau learned, slowly, to release her illusion of control in her relationship to God and to her own life. The result was a deeper understanding of how to not only follow His will, but to trust that He truly wanted to fulfill her deepest desires. Sumereau shows that knowing Christ’s love refines desire. It attunes us more fully to what we truly want.

Adventure Awaits is a big-hearted book that shares Sumereau’s knowledge with readers in a generous, highly readable manner. With practical examples from her own life, she encourages readers to “make God’s beliefs their own” and train their minds to differentiate between God’s voice and that of the devil or other forces of hatred and negativity. The spiritual heart of this book embodies God’s loving voice, and is encompassed by the first vision she ever experienced. The lessons from this vision permeate her entire approach to surrender as necessary to effective discernment. In a particularly beautiful section, she describes this vision of Jesus holding out his heart to her:

“Thank you. What shall I do with it?” Jesus said gently, “Take out your heart, and put mine where yours used to be.” I found I could open a small door in my chest I’d never noticed before by turning a latch. . . . I wept with the realization that the most perfect, loving, beautiful, all-powerful heart in the universe was mine. Jesus’s heart belonged to me. (50)

Movingly, Sumereau then quotes Ezekiel 36:26:

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put in you. I will remove the heart of stone from your chest and give you a heart of flesh.

This new heart is flesh that can be wounded and swell, capable of authentic love and heartache. (Sumereau is not naive, and Adventure Awaits speaks eloquently on the failure and pain that is par for the course in this life while maintaining an optimism that is effective and earned). This exchange is complete when Jesus asks Sumereau for her heart, clinically described as “gray, shriveled, and small. All my stingy self-preservation and small-mindedness were reflected in its appearance.” Nevertheless, Jesus wants it. Without hesitation, He puts her heart into His chest, filling the space where His own heart had been before.

Jesus does not polish her “stone” heart. He does not repair it before her eyes, paint over it, or simply hold it in His hands. He makes no demands of it, makes no comment on it, and gives His own freely before asking a thing from her. Her transformation begins with surrender—receiving and handing over, not achieving. The very capacity to offer our broken hearts to God is itself a gift, made possible only because Christ has already given Himself to us. He welcomes her heart as-is and does the transforming work Himself by placing it in His own chest. This intimacy—God dwelling within us and us within Him—is mutual, communicative, and vulnerable. It is the dwelling we are born for. Sumereau’s vision and her commentary echo the mystic St. Teresa of Avila and the lessons of John 15: Remain in me, as I also remain in you.

Surrendering to this intimacy, Sumereau shows, does not speak to our weakness or diminishment, but instead enlivens our hearts and is vital to our ability to hear and respond to God’s loving will for our lives. Without this relationship, our dreams have no pulse. No animating breath to lift them beyond the realm of self-protection and into the terrain of genuine love and risk. What will sustain our dreams when our willpower runs dry? When the crowds go quiet? To read this book is to witness an approach to discernment that beautifully honors the relationship God longs for with each of us.

“Dreaming,” Sumereau admits, is “wild territory” (79), and she makes it clear that our personal dreams cannot take priority over our call to love God and our families with sacrifice and devotion. She argues that when seriously discerned, our dreams are God’s dreams for us. The point of dreaming is to “align your vision with his” (78) and is, for Sumereau, enmeshed in our personal journeys to holiness. God’s dream for our holiness is co-creative, intoxicating, and specific to each person. A true theosis does not flatten the self but fulfills it through God’s love. It is not “bland” but “intimately connected to what you love to do . . . Your purpose should fascinate you, delight you, terrify you with its hugeness, and capture your imagination” (79). She promises that “when God calls you to face a difficult fear and you act on the call, he puts ground under your feet as you go.” Sumereau, who has ventured through multiple careers and callings, makes this promise from a place of experience. Her confidence in God’s love beams off the page as she lets us in on all the ways He has used her diverse skills and perceived defeats for good. 

Part memoir, part guide, Adventure Awaits has the rhythm of a conversation with a wise friend. The book transmutes Sumereau’s sometimes glamorous, often complicated experiences into sound spiritual advice and guidance. It’s welcoming, humorous, and earnest all at once, in close conversation with scripture, the saints, and Ignatian spirituality. Her journal prompts are never surface-level and encourage readers to be genuinely honest about truths and “untruths” about themselves, their lives, and their relationships. Refreshingly, she also inspires readers to crack their Bibles open and spend dedicated time reading, memorizing, and responding to scripture as a key part of their relationship to Jesus and His will. 

Adventure Awaits would be particularly valuable for young adults navigating major life decisions, though it speaks to any age and any background. Decisions, we are taught, are made by considering successful outcomes. The world promises fulfillment through prefabricated paths and concrete achievements but God, however, cares about relationship, not worldly success. Love lacks benchmarks and standing ovations, leading to uncertainty about whether we are doing it “right” and choosing well. Walking through uncertainty is no small feat, and Sumereau is the kind of companion you want on that walk. She insists, with candor, humor, and wisdom, that there is a better adventure waiting than anything we could imagine in our five-year plans. This adventure begins with handing over the hearts we guard so fiercely—someone is reaching out, welcoming them home.

Learn more about author, speaker, and podcast host Stacey Sumereau at her website here. Listen to her podcast, Called and Caffeinated, here. Purchase Adventure Awaits from Ave Maria Press here.

Don’t miss Stacey Sumereau’s appearance on A Resounding Yes! Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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Lead Editor Franci Revel Eckensberger holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Cornell University. With years of experience as a copyeditor for academics, fellow writers, and various small businesses, she takes pride in maintaining clarity, consistency, and beauty in each client’s voice. 

Franci finds grace and insight in the Catholic Church’s rich relationship to language and invites that relationship to influence both her literary and editorial work. Saint Cecilia and Catherine of Siena continue to play a vital role in her journey to the faith as an artist. She lives in coastal Delaware with her husband and daughter.