These
three books are written by authors who not only understand but have experienced
raw pain and the soothing balm that only God can provide. The suffering for
each is different, but the answering still, small voice of God that whispers
His love and compassion into the hardest places is found by each and expressed
in their own wondrously powerful way.
Perez,
Venus Angelica. © 2012 Mentality Listens:
Where Art Screams 2nd ed.
LCCN
2012903846
ISBN-13
978-1470089979
ISBN-10 1470089971
This book is a collection of poems
Perez wrote as she was “introduced to pain, was married to pain, divorced pain,
and remarried a few years later.” Perez reminds us, “It is not easy to live
with pain, but it is possible.”
Perez shares her inmost heart. Her pain-filled cries go out to a God she
knows is there even when He seems not to be. Even when she finds herself drawn back in to
relationships and feelings that move her away from a place of safety, she
remembers the God who has sealed her to himself. Perez has selected poems that take
the reader through betrayal, sorrow and a marvelous comfort as she is pulled
from and through what most troubles the soul. In her words are not only
brutality and evil, but love and forgiveness.
Perez is a former marine and a
disabled veteran. She lives in, through and beyond her chronic pain, in ways
that will take you to your knees.
Body and Soul
Publishing
ASIN: B008RSQFJC
Following her
father’s brutal beating resulting in traumatic brain injury and a coma, Hitz
began a journal to deal with her feelings. As God worked through her father’s
slow but steady improvement, Hitz encouraged her family and their friends by sharing
her diary through a blog. Through her battle with rage and despair and release,
God worked an act of grace in her heart.
Finding Hope, coming from
her blog, becomes an opportunity for anyone struggling with the unfairness, the
pain, the inability to cope and understand. She shares not only her experiences
but opportunities for the reader to create their own journal, their own freedom
to talk honestly with God.
Elizabeth L. Chalker
Hanging on By the Scratch Marks My Nails Left
Behind (Raw Faith)
Xulon Press ©2012
ASIN: B007XHW4OS
Elizabeth Chalker suffers from late stage lyme disease, probably
fatal, offering nothing but a slow,
agonizing death. Lyme disease is complicated and compounded by other serious
health issues that have left her bedridden and mostly alone. In this roaring
furnace where she experiences daily frustration, unbearable pain, and, like
Job, unjustifiable suffering, she has found the way to walk with unbound faith
and trust in God.
In her book, I was at first witness, but soon became her
companion, experiencing through my own chronic pain such wonder at her passionate
love and unquenchable thirst for God. I have lived eighteen years with chronic
pain. At times, her cries to God for deliverance were so intense I had to stop
reading.
The book had somehow become not only Chalker’s story, but mine, as
well. I had to stand in awe like King Nebuchadnezzar, “It is my privilege to
report to you the gracious miracles that the High God has done for me. His
miracles are staggering, his wonders are surprising, His kingdom lasts and
lasts, his sovereign rule goes on forever.” *
If you are hurting, crying out in anger or fear, or if you know
someone who seems to be weighed down with their hurts and their needs, Hanging on by the Scratch Marks My
Nails Left Behind has a place
on your shelf beside C. S. Lewis’s The
Problem of Pain and Philip
Yancey’s Where Is God When It
Hurts? It is a terrible, dark
place that can only be lit by God's grace in all the ways it comes.
*Daniel 4:2-3
MSG - A Dream of a Chopped-Down Tree - King - Bible ... (n.d.). retrieved from
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel+4&version=MSG (8/9/2012)
Check out this interview with Kimberly Payne author of Women of Strength; sign up to win a copy of her book.http://www.psalm451.net/
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