Tried With Fire

I was away last week helping my sister with elder care issues. She and my brother-in-law deserve medals for all they do for my parents because it isn't easy. The next step will be moving them from independent living to memory care for my mom and assisted living for my dad. Tackling practical stuff will be hard work, but I think it is harder seeing the decline even over the last few months. When I say goodbye, I can't help but wonder if I will see them again in this life because anything can happen. When I came back, I read this post at A Cry for Justice . This is a survivor's story, and it cut me to the heart because this line could have been my own: I didn’t tell you all these things because I was a good little Christian girl who doesn’t make waves and still thought I had to protect my abuser in some way. To compound this, I picked up a pamphlet among my dad's many books that we were trying to cull. Being a glutton for punishment, I read it when I should have b...

Walking Through Twilight: A Wife's Illness - A Philosopher's Lament by Douglas Groothuis is a book that is tragic, moving, but beautiful at the same time. The author's wife has a form of dementia that has robbed her of words, both written and verbal, due to the area of the brain that the disease has affected. This is especially painful because Rebecca Groothuis was a gifted writer, editor, and Mensa member. I have a few of her books on my shelf. Her husband, Douglas, is a philosophy professor by trade, so he writes of the sorrow, struggle, and trying to find meaning while holding on to the grace of God and the gospel. "I am hanging by a thread, but the thread is knit by God." (pg. 153) One thing worth noting, Rebecca Groothuis is one of the editors of the Council for Biblical Equality's Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy . Yes, they are egalitarians. There are assumptions made by non-egals about egalitarians, sometimes even qu...

They say a picture is worth 1000 words, so here you go: Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering , Kelly Kapic, IVP Academic, 2017, pg. 33.