Living Pain

Life doesn't always work out the way we planned. Things happen that we have no control over, and circumstances seem overwhelming. I never thought I'd marry an abusive man - a man whose mental demons turned him into two different people. I never imagined being a widow at the age of 38. I never dreamed that one decision could so profoundly change my life and my viewpoint of mental illness. I didn't know how much I still had to learn about myself.

The apostle Peter described faith as "much more precious than gold that perishes". As gold passes through purifying fire, so Peter says a man's faith must be tried in order that it "might be found unto praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 1:7). While we address the crises in our lives that try our faith, we rarely praise God the way Job did, and we rarely submit ourselves to the purifying fire as Peter suggests.

“Why me?” is the cry I hear most often in my work as a hospice chaplain. I’m not a theologian, but through my encounters with people who are elderly, disabled, dying, and bereaved - and through my own quest for peace - Jesus’ teachings known as the Beatitudes have become essential. They describe the attributes of God’s people: God is with those who suffer, those beaten down by life and rejected by the world.

Find fullness of joy during the holidays - especially for the brokenhearted. Divorce. Financial stress. Chronic illness. Losing a loved one. Experiencing any of these situations during the year is already difficult. But the holiday season, once joyful and happy, can heighten this pain even more.

Do hurts and mistakes from your past weigh you down? Have you given up hope that things will ever be different, that you will ever feel whole again? In this deeply personal and transparent book, AJ Wilt walks you through fresh revelations she has received from the Lord in the hopes that you will find time to sit at the feet of Jesus and ask some of the same questions.

As Liuan Huska went through years of chronic pain, she wondered why God seemed absent and questioned some of the common assumptions about healing. Countering a Gnosticism that pits body against spirit, Huska takes us on a journey of exploring how healing is not an escape from the limits of the body, but becoming whole as souls in bodies and bodies with souls. As chronic pain forces us to pay attention to our bodies' vulnerability, we come to embrace the fullness of our broken yet beautiful bodies. She helps us redefine what it means to find healing and wholeness.

Patty is a licensed mental health professional and a counselor. She was invited to present on Christian Pastoral Counseling for hundreds of indigenous pastors and church leaders. After the unexpected death of their 33-year-old son, both she and her husband, Dennis, invested the next year in mental health counseling from a licensed grief counselor. This time she was the client - not the counselor. As an avid writer, part of her therapy included journal entries as she expressed the emotions of her walk through her grief. Her book is an accumulation of those journal entries.

When we are in painful circumstances, we tend to want to escape at any cost. Yet in doing so, we can miss the greatest opportunities of our lives. Writing about her own valleys - including loving a struggling son and reeling from the untimely death of her husband - Yolanda Cohen Stith shares hard-won insights. In the midst of her most painful experiences, Stith discovered that God shows up in the valleys in ways he doesn’t on the mountaintops. She came to believe that we need valleys to recognize our desperate need for God.