I began reading this story
about the same time last week when the details of tragic national events
spilled into every news outlet one after another with no time for breath in
between.
Their journey of healing helped
me in ways I’m not even sure I can explain. Perhaps Jay touched on it when he
wrote, “. . . in the breaking of precious things, something even more precious
than we can imagine might be unleashed. Perhaps in the breaking, we can find
the healing we long for.”
Honestly, I didn’t want to read
this chronicle, because I believed it would be sad. And I was already sad. Sad
from the realities of this old broken world, from the first anniversary of my
dad’s death, and from a seeming brigade of hard life events his death has recalled.
But I opened my e book reader
because I know several of their family members, and though much of the story I’d
heard reported real time as it unfolded, I didn’t want to face the relatives
without having read this account of the jagged journey they’d lived through in
these past years.
What I found? Yes, it was sad. I
can’t distance myself from the incredible pain these folks suffered and are in
many ways still suffering.
But much greater than the
sadness, what I was left with when I finished their story was its essence embodied
in the book title itself, Hope Heals.
Katherine Wolfe and her husband
Jay share her miraculous survival of a brain stem stroke only a few years ago
when she was in her mid-twenties. She writes in the prologue, “My experience has
caused me to redefine healing and to discover a hope that heals the most broken
places: our souls.”
I believe we do.
I felt empowered in new ways
after reading the book to face my own less profound yet persistent version of
suffering.
My writer friend, Marion, says
that when we suffer a loss, it opens up the other losses we haven’t fully
grieved. I suppose that’s what I’ve been dealing with for the past year. In my
early life I shoveled a lot under the rugs including childhood trauma, and I’ve
been dealing with it as I could having had much prayer through the years, but
losing Dad threw me into a new awareness of many other losses.
Grief itself involves wrestling
with the permanent altering of expectations. We struggle. We fight. And if we’re
open to the hope Katherine shares, we face it and somehow transcend the brokenness
into a new kind of life. Not the life we had before. It’s gone. But a different
life with possibilities never imagined.
That is what Katherine and Jay
offer us through their sacrificial sharing from the grief-shattered land they’ve
traversed. From this cracked and arid place, they offer us a
drink of living water. Yes, the “breaking
of precious things,” but from it healing.
Joni Eareckson Tada says of this
book, “. . . you now have a guide. . . Hope Heals may well be your most
treasured companion through great trial and pain. . .”
David Platt, author of the New York
Times bestseller Radical (and University of Georgia graduate, just had to get
that in), says, “Jay and Katherine are a raw yet refreshing testimony to the
unshakable trustworthiness of God amidst the unimaginable trials of life. This
book reminds all of us where hope can be found in a world where none of us know
what the next day holds.”
Just so you know, I have no
sponsored links on this blog, so what I’m about to tell you, I will receive from
it no financial remuneration. If you are
dealing with loss and suffering, go HERE and buy the Wolf’s book. Don’t
hesitate, just do it.
So, now, since I’ve read the
book, I can face the Wolf’s relatives, but so much more than that, reading it
has better enabled me to face my own grief.
Thank you, Katherine and Jay.
“Passing through the Valley of
Weeping (Baca), they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it
with blessings. They go from strength to strength (increasing in victorious power);
each of them appears before God in Zion” (Psalm 84:6-7 Amplified).