A “Bonus” Brief Book Summary from Books At a Glance
by Clay Werner
In life east of Eden, our hearts are called to embrace SUFFERING AS A SACRED JOURNEY. The healing path is the long walk in which painful realities must be faced- either we’ll be numbed and destroyed by pain or refined and blessed by it. The healing path isn’t the resolution of our past but the use of our past to bring us closer to God, which is why, when it comes to pain which we often think ought to be relieved, should actually be embraced. We must move from escape to embrace when it comes to pain.
However, we often take one of four routes to escape pain, which causes us to lose a deeper joy: the paranoid views all of life from the darkest reality; the fatalist sees the pain, shrugs their shoulders, and keeps going; the hero views suffering as a challenge to overcome; and the optimist locks out the undesirable and unsafe. Yet, we’re called to wrestle with sorrow and see what painful events do to our hearts and the dysfunctional patterns set in motion afterward. Wrestling in this way, which leads us to God, will begin to reset and heal the broken places of our hearts.
Choosing to walk on the healing path will take us through deserts and valleys of darkness, heartache, and doubt. Any path around these deserts will lead away from God because God reveals his love in the middle of the darkest places and arouses our desires and thirst for Him, along with a new trust, hope, and love. The desert will lead us through betrayal, powerlessness, and ambivalence.
A major destination in the desert is betrayal and the loss of faith where we are plunged into our doubts of God’s and other’s trustworthiness, but where a new faith can be born. Another destination is powerlessness and the loss of hope as we’re confronted with our inability to improve our situation which often leaves us in apathy and despair, seeking to find life wherever we can. Eventually, though, we’re led from despair into a new hope as we realize how weak and needy we really are. A final destination in the desert is ambivalence and the loss of love where we feel torn in two, desiring to engage God and others in love, but not wanting to feel the pain of heartbreak again. The healing path takes us into the disintegration of our hearts where a new love can be born. . . .
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