Amazing Grace for Those Who Suffer: Ten Life-Changing Stories of Hope and Healing. by Jeff Cavins & Matthew Pinto (Eds.). 2002
This book presents ten real life stories of suffering and faith. These are people who have gone through it and have actually experienced the work of God’s grace in their individual circumstances.
Each experience is unique. Some are plagued by physical disabilities and pain. Some struggle with unexpected losses—a child or spouse, or an unborn child Some struggle with addictions, persecution or abandonment.
Janet Moylan speaks about how she faced up to the loss of her husband and a child in the sea and she had to choose between God and despair.
Carl Cleveland was a successful lawyer who was framed on false grounds and had to spend a year and a half in prison, which changed his life in a way he could not have imagined. But he believes that God was sending him a message. “If we accept suffering in faith and turn to God without recrimination, salvation is truly ours,” he concludes. Peggy Stokes, a victim of childhood sexual abuse and its devastating consequences, finally finds peace in the assurance that in Christ there is hope, there is healing. Grace Mc Kinnnon has to struggle with poverty and cerebral palsy and survive.
In each of these stories we find people asking the question that we all ask: “Why does God allow me to suffer” Where is He when we need him? The answer is presented in the final section of the book in the words of St John Paul, “Down through the centuries and generations, it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace” (Salvifici Doloris, n. 26).
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Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World
Henri J. M. Nouwen.
Henri Nouwen had a distinguished career as an academic, preacher and writer. He quit his post as a Harvard University professor and spent the last ten years of his life looking after the physically and mentally challenged. He wrote over forty books that enjoy wide readership.
This book was sparked by an encounter with a young journalist named Fred. Nouwen developed a deep friendship with him and the book is addressed to Fred. Fred’s life makes Nouwen realise that there are millions of undistinguished people who are possessed by a deep spiritual hunger. He, like Fred, is among them as a “fellow-traveller searching for life, light and truth.” The key idea is from the Gospel of Matthew 3:17: “And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.’” It applies to each one of us who must take possession of that belovedness and grow into it. “The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection,” the “enemy of the spiritual life, because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the ‘Beloved.’ Each one therefore has to make that great spiritual journey to claim belovedness, transforming ourselves into that state of belovedness, letting the truth of our Belovedness become enfleshed in everything we think, say or do.”
How different would our life be, were we truly able to trust that it multiplies in being given away! How different would our life be if we could but believe that every little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every little bit of joy and peace, will multiply and multiply as long as there are people to receive it…and that—even then—there will be leftovers!”
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