All Manner of Things: Meditations on Suffering, Death, and Eternal Life

The meditations in this collection originated from a series of questions about suffering, death, and eternal life put to the author by a friend who was dying from cancer. These questions included: How do we wait upon God and cancer at the same time? What do we know of the God to whom we go when we experience only the silence of God in our suffering? How do we long for heaven when what we want most is to continue on with our families and loved ones in this life? Is heaven removed from this world? Does the joy associated with it depend on ignorance of the suffering of those we leave behind? And so on.

The meditations themselves are not intended primarily as answers to these questions so much as an attempt to enter into them more fully, the goal being to think about how we might best inhabit those places where doubt and faith, grief and hope, forsakenness and grace are so often made to coexist. For though the tension between suffering and hope cannot ultimately be resolved in this world, we can look for ways to stand within it a little more boldly, and to fall within it a little more boldly as well. We can seek out words or images that allow us to speak about it a little more clearly, a language that helps us to find rest in our longing and perhaps also longing in our rest.