I can’t remember what led me to “Here if You Need Me” by Kate Braestrup. It was a review somewhere. I’m always looking for things beyond The New York Times to find good books. I wasn’t a huge “Marley and Me” fan and that book stayed on the list forever.

But some publication told me this was a good book. Another annoying thing is when what the critic writes is off the mark. Stephen King’s Entertainment Weekly review of “The Ruins” by Scott Smith, for example. The story was a bunch of vines and there were no heroes. No big kick-butt scene at the end.

 But I stray. “Here if you Need Me” is one of the first chaplains ever appointed to the Maine Warden Service. Stop yawning! Her writing is like a warm blanket that you nestle in on a cold day with a hot cup of cocoa. It’s the person whose touch you want to feel when you’re in pain. It’s a book that holds your hand.

And that’s what she does. Her job is to be there for the parents whose child is lost in the woods, for the people searching for the child, for the people who find the child.

She’s there for the living and the dead. It’s not a religious book but it offers her insight about what she’s learned in her life and as a chaplain. She became a chaplain after her husband, Drew, a trooper for the Maine State Police, is killed in a traffic accident, leaving her with four children to raise.

 She opens the book on the way to sit with parents, whose 6-year-old girl wandered away from them. They tell her they are atheists.

“Unbeliever though he may be, Mr. Moore is not asking the lady in the clerical collar for an objective assessment of a practical situation,” Braestrup writes. “He wants the God’s honest truth. He wants me to tell him, with all the weight and authority my presence conveys, that his daughter is not dead.”

She’s a Unitarian chaplain. She believes God is in the way someone touches you. The way someone trusts you. How a volunteer with his dog can come out of the woods in the middle of the night “walking hand in hand with a child lost, then found.”

“It is possible that God is my neighbor with her pan of brownies standing on my doorstep. It is entirely possible, that is, that the God I serve and worship with all my body, all my mind, all my soul, and all my spirit is love (1 John 4:8). It’s enough. It’s all the God I need.”

When the game wardens pulled a dead man from the river and rescued his injured girlfriend, Braestrup knelt beside the body in the mud and put her hand on the dead man’s head. “Receive and bless the spirit of this man, Fred Shilenski, as the waters have received his blood, as the earth will receive his body. Bless the sorrowing hearts of those who love him. Lend skill and strength to the hands of those who would heal his friend Mona. Amen.”

 Braestrup also gives us a peek into her life raising her children alone, missing Drew and figuring out what’s ahead. I finished the book and thought about the people who hold my hand during bad times and remembered to be grateful.