Читать книгу Endearing Pain - Colleen Peters - Страница 5

What does it mean to suffer, except to perhaps come to the end of ourselves, or toward the end of ourselves. And maybe when we come to this spare and sometimes unspeakably lonely place, a new conversation, and a new journey begins. A death before a new life.

When feeling competent and strong with self-sufficiency, confidence and enthusiasm, we are full of great ideas for ourselves and others. We see things so clearly, we’re quite sure about our notions and methods, and that we know the way. Things we’d love to share and maybe to teach others. This mastery has its own thrill and excitement.

But when nearly everything is pulled out from beneath us, this certainty and the buoyancy and lightness that goes with it may dissolve in seconds, or more slowly over months or years.

Within a city block or two right now, there are many, young and old, grieving loss, living with sickness and in pain, anxious with fear, and with an aloneness and angst that is beyond words.

What can we begin to say to this? What can we do? Perhaps this is you right now.

In my work I meet with a handful of people each week who are wandering about in this frightening cul-de-sac. Suffering and the hopelessness that can accompany loss arrive in so many different ways in our lives, and each experience can come with a nearly unbearable and sometimes crushing weight of fear and loneliness. We know that hope is essential to life, but it can feel so quickly and so completely pulled out of our grasp. And then what?

In this book, my long-time and dear friend Colleen invites you to consider what she began to discover when her health and power began to leave her. My zaniest and liveliest of friends began to stumble, and then to fall, both figuratively and literally.

Colleen’s life has taken a very different path than expected. A road not romanticized here, but rather, a tough and honest recollecting, with practical and thoughtful observations. With her illness and a thousand limitations and losses, Colleen set off on a voyage, writing to us from time to time in these letters along her way; a travelogue.

In Endearing Pain Colleen hasn’t thought to indulge too much in the story of her particular life, perhaps having it clearly in mind that others have their own stories and lives to refer to. Instead, she has allowed her particular river of pain and loss to move her downstream at a pace not her own, but nevertheless showing her good and hopeful and even marvellous things along the canyon walls of her sometimes quiet and difficult days, always aware that God is directing the journey.

Through anxiety, uncertainly, loss and pain Colleen has experienced a kind of joy, and a life larger and more compelling and wonderful than we might imagine.

As you read, I hope you will be heartened and warmed, and challenged and encouraged. Colleen is a very good traveling companion.

Dr. Todd Sellick