Thanksgiving Eve and December 1, 2024
Dear Friends,
From time to time, people who are working through painful periods of their lives will ask me to recommend books that may be of help. One that I often suggest is called Mending the Heart, by the late Rev. John Claypool. Claypool was first a Baptist pastor and then an Episcopal priest who at one point suffered the loss of his ten-year old daughter to cancer. His grief over Laura Lue was devastating, and threatened to be the undoing of his life. But as he explains in his book, Claypool found a way out of the darkness and into the light. The way was gratitude.
One sleepless night he was reading a Biblical commentary about the dark and mysterious story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son, Isaac. God was testing Abraham, but how and why? Claypool writes: I remember putting down the book that night as it dawned on me that Laura Lue had come into my life exactly as Isaac had come into Abraham’s. I had never deserved her for a single day. She was not a possession to which I was entitled, but a gift by which I had been utterly blessed. And as that sense of her glowed in the darkness, I realized at that moment a choice stood before me. I could spend the rest of my life in anger and resentment because she had lived so short a time and so much of her promise had been cut short, or I could spend the rest of my life in gratitude that she had ever lived at all and that I had the wonder of those ten grace-filled years.