The Unwanted Blessing

When you grieve, the world changes. However, much of the writing on grief is from outside the process, like viewing a distant planet through a telescope. The Unwanted Blessing is written by a father at the center of it all, who is dealing with the loss of a son to cancer. Like an astronaut sending back pictures from Mars, he offers instead an orientation to this new world through close up, first hand snapshots of the landscape. Here, rather than providing answers for or distractions from the grief itself, he offers a collage of feelings, events, questions, and prayers. The new terrain is reflected back stripped of any intellectual veneer or assent to understanding, and this new world is laid bare at your feet. In acknowledging the way it is, the book provides signposts of comfort in simply letting the reader know that they are not alone. Perhaps, it proposes, grieving is about going to where God is absent for a bit so that we can find him again. Perhaps, grieving is more central to God's story than the events that cause the grief. Perhaps, it is God's unwanted blessing.