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Book
Review: “A Life Lost… and Found” I don’t
usually do book reviews but I am making an exception.
Almost everyone has faced the loss of a loved one, the breakup of a
marriage, or some other tragedy. We
know it hurts and can weaken or destroy our faith.
There have been various situations when I wondered how a person could
deal with their particular loss. I
know we have to continue to live and serve God, but it can be difficult.
The book “A
Life Lost... and Found” is written
by Wilson Adams and David Lanphear. Most
if not everyone, of this congregation, knows that David was married to Alice
Gentry Ward’s daughter Debbie. David
faced the pain of losing a son, Adam, in 1999 due to a traffic accident.
He writes about the pain of missing a child and realizing that one will
never have the joy of seeing their child growing into an adult and having their
own family. Then in 2004 David’s
wife, Debbie, suffered a heart attack June 29, 2004. Debbie was comatose, never
regaining consciousness, and passed away July 6, 2004. Wilson Adams’s life
changing experience came from an unfaithful spouse.
Despite his willingness to forgive his wife and work out their problems,
she eventually left him. I did not
think of suffering from a divorce as similar to suffering from the loss of a
loved one, but in both cases you go through a grieving process. This is not a
book which tells you to just count your lucky stars and shake it off.
It deals with each author’s individual experiences and painful
situations. David writes of the fog
that often occurs after such a dramatic event and the feeling that nothing will
ever be the same. Don’t expect to
read this book without shedding a few tears.
In particular I found the section describing the grief and agony of
losing a child in an accident to be very moving.
After all, losing a child in such a manner is the nightmare of most
parents. Death is dramatic and the
fact is nothing will ever be the same. That
does not mean you will never be happy again but you will always miss your love
one. One section of the book lets us
know that there are countless untold stories of tragedies; a woman who survived
breast cancer, a grandfather having to deal with running over his grandson, a
young man who survived a boating
accident on the Rio Grand River in which a number of his friends drowned, and so
on. The book
contains numerous Biblical references to teach us some lessons.
Job experienced the pain of losing his children.
“What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.
I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest but only turmoil” (Job
2.25-26). There are also passages
that tell us to rely on God during such difficult times.
“Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (Deut. 31.6;
Hebrews 13.5). There is a section
called “Four Truths About Trials” taken from 1 Peter 1.6-7 that points out
that trials are necessary, trials are distressing, trials come in various ways,
and trails have a purpose. In
another section the writers tells us that yes it hurts to lose a love one,
suffer from a divorce, and it does not reflect on one’s faith to say it hurts.
We need to pray to God about our pain and ask Him to help us through our
trials. Yet another section speaks
of the value of grief and its benefits. One chapter is
titled “The Process—Getting Stuck in an Emotional Time Warp” in which we
are warned about getting caught in our grief to the point we do not move onward
and start living again. This brings
me to a point that the book does not talk about, and I am glad.
A term we hear a lot is “closure.”
This idea that one magical day we will no longer have a sense of sadness
or miss a loved one is a fallacy. We
will always miss our loved ones, but we will learn to cope and live our lives in
a way that would please our loved ones. As I said
before, this is a book that needs to be read, but it is an emotional experience.
Yet we need to learn these lessons for at least two reasons.
First, we never know when we will experience the sudden death of a loved
one. Second, we never know when we
will be in a position to help someone else deal with a tragic divorce or death.
The final
section of the book shows us where both men are in their lives today. The book is
only 171 pages long and well worth the time to read it.
It took a lot of courage on the part of both men to share their most
personal thoughts and feelings with us. Dennis
Tucker |