My Wife's Book now has its own Facebook Page

[RRoller123]

Just an FYI, you folks may want to check out my wife's Facebook Page that she has set up to help promote her new book. It is named "Fertilizer Happens: a Pastor's Faith, Calling, and Journey With Cancer" and is available on Amazon, etc. It is an easy read, not heavy, and filled with good stuff, fertilizer for thought, so to speak.

From the Acknowledgement...

I imagine that many people dream of someday writing a book. I know I did. But I lacked two important factors: a compelling topic and the time to write.

When I found myself both a divorcee and a widow at the age of 27, a few friends started to suggest I write about my experiences. But I was not ready. I needed more time to understand and make meaning of my losses.

When I quit my corporate career to enter seminary and then was widowed again, my friends repeated their suggestion. But the timing was not right. I had two young children and was holding down three jobs while attending seminary. The only writing I was doing was term papers.

The years sped by in a whirlwind. As an ordained pastor serving a congregation, my days were devoted to family and church. My writing was confined to sermons.

And then I was diagnosed with cancer, and suddenly I had both a compelling topic and the time, not to mention the need for an emotional outlet. Hence, I started writing a blog, which has become this book.

So I want to thank everyone who ever said to me, “You should write a book!” It took decades, but your prodding finally bore fruit.

[AriK]

Congratulations to your wife! This must be a satisfying feeling of accompishment. I am glad she has been feeling better lately. Please post another intriguing excerpt from her work. She's a devoted woman. Kindest regards,
Ari

[spidernut]

Excellent! I hope she has huge success with the book.

[RRoller123]

Thanks, fellows. She is quite something. Bravest person I have ever known, facing this terrible disease with dignity and grace.

[RRoller123]

Excerpt from the Prologue...
The question I have kept asking of myself, and I suspect others have wanted to ask me, is: How could I not know? How could I not know that cancerous tumors were growing in three different areas of my body?
Here’s the thing. Cancer is sneaky. It likes to hide and do its dastardly damage incognito. At least that’s what happened to me.
I estimate that cancerous cells were growing inside of me for two years before I developed a pain in my back that finally made me take notice. Even then, my response to the pain was to explain it away. After all, I was in my late 50s and figured that any new ache was just a natural aspect of life’s progression. A twinge here, a spasm there – hey, nothing to get concerned about; just part of the privilege of growing older.
Indeed, there were any number of perfectly good reasons that my back hurt: I was overweight and out of shape… I was stressed… I needed a new office chair… my mattress needed replacing…
And these explanations made sense – until the pain became too great to dismiss and turned into a diagnosis of Stage IV cancer.
How could this happen? Was this God’s doing? Was cancer payback for sinful behavior? A Job-like test of faith? Was it part of some divine plan that my life would be cut short?
I do not believe that the God I worship is punitive or cruel or capriciously mean. I do not believe that the God I have dedicated my life to would deliberately make me suffer and shorten my life.
Rather, I believe simply that stuff happens in life. You can probably guess that “stuff” is not exactly the right word. Manure is closer. But the title of this book is not Manure Happens but rather Fertilizer Happens. Fertilizer is different than manure. If you look up fertilizer in the dictionary, it means “to enrich” or “to make productive.” Fertilizer produces something, often something better. New growth springs from fertilizer.
Yes, stuff happens in life. It’s not God. It’s not “Satan.” It’s not punishment. It’s just the way life is. Stuff has happened in my life, as it has (or will) in everyone’s life. But that stuff can be fertilizer for new growth.

[AriK]

Very intense. i can keep on reading. Is this book available at Chapter's in Canada?

[SoFlaFiat]

Pete,
I will admit that I am not a religious person and find it very hard to listen to people who force their beliefs on others, but, I love the way your wife writes and from that little excerpt I get the feeling she shares but doesn't force her belief. I have always wondered how people can believe that there is a higher being responsible for ALL in this world, while so much "fertilizer happens" and she shows a balance of faith and understanding that is truly amazing! I don't have to "believe" to understand that strength is drawn from believing and that it works for many! I congratulate your wife, and your family, for working through these hard times and making something positive of it! I wish the best for the book and sincerely hope that it finds itself in the hands of every person who is in need of a helping hand to get through their own battles!!

I apologize if that got too personal for the forum, but no matter what ones beliefs are, it brings warmth to my heart to see such strength in the face of adversity!!

[Jimb]

Yes, congrats on her success. Now if she could find a way to redefine the definition of God to appeal to a new modern day mentality much like J.K. Rowling has done with Harry Potter
Jim

[RRoller123]

Thanks again, guys. I sometimes feel like Job around here, so I will post an excerpt from the book regarding that poor, tested, faithful and unwavering fellow. My own belief is that Job's conversation with God is the greatest single piece of literature in human history. But what do I know?

[RRoller123]

Along with new writings, the book contains material from her blog on caringbridge.org, and sermons preached over the years. Here is a sermon from 2006 regarding Job.

“Job’s Questions – And Ours”

A Sermon Preached by Rev. Jean Niven Lenk
Sunday, October 8, 2006
Text: Job: 1:1, 2:1-10; Matthew 5:1-11

The following are true stories.

An elderly woman lives out her last days in a nursing home, struggling against a body which is slowly shutting down. And her daughter turns to me and says, “I don’t understand why God is putting my mother through this.”

A young woman, having already suffered a miscarriage, carries a baby to full term, only to have her beautiful daughter die within an hour of being born. And the mother cries to me, “I do not understand why God did this to me.”

A teenager writes, wondering why our “loving God” isn’t around when marriages break up, or when a friend considers suicide, or when children must live – and die – in poverty.

Because of true stories like these, Job is our contemporary in a way few other biblical characters can be. He is one of the most compelling figures in the Old Testament, and it is his unexplainable, unjustified, innocent suffering that does it.

This morning’s lesson tells us that Job “was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”[ii] He was a good and faithful man with a loving wife, ten children, and much property. But then, Job’s world collapses.

It happens because one day, God and Satan start chatting about Job. This Satan is not the devil we usually think of. The idea of a devil that operates as a separate and opposing force to God did not develop until hundreds of years after the Book of Job was written. In Job’s time, Satan served as a respected member of God’s “council,” a heavenly being who operated as a kind of divine prosecutor. His name is translated as “The Accuser” or “The Adversary,” and he had no power to do anything except the power God gave him. His job was to bring people to trial when God said so – and only if God said so.

So one day, up in heaven, God says to Satan, “What have you been up to?”[iii] And The Accuser tells God that he has been, “Going here and there, checking things out on earth.”[iv] God asks, “Have you noticed my friend Job? There’s no one quite like him – totally devoted to God and hating evil.”[v] We can imagine The Accuser putting his arm around God’s shoulder, shaking his head, and saying, “So do you think Job does all that out of the sheer goodness of his heart? Why, no one ever had it so good! You pamper him like a pet, make sure nothing bad ever happens to him or his family or his possessions, bless everything he does – he can’t lose! But what do you think would happen if you reached down and took away everything that is his? He’d curse you right to your face, that’s what.”[vi]

And wanting to get to the real motivation behind Job’s piety, God says, "We’ll see. Go ahead – do what you want with all that is his. Just don’t hurt him."[vii] And God permits The Accuser to begin testing Job.

In a matter of just a few verses, Job’s idyllic life falls apart. First, God allows Satan to take Job’s property and family. All of Job’s servants are slaughtered by enemies; all his camels are stolen, and lightning kills his sheep. Then, a desert wind comes along, knocking down his house and killing all his children as they are eating dinner together around the table. Yet, even with all of these devastating calamities, Job falls upon the ground and worships God, crying, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”[viii]

But in this morning’s Scripture lesson, Satan the Accuser is not impressed by Job’s continued devotion, and he asks God, “What do you think would happen if you reached down and took away his health? He’d curse you to your face, that’s what.”[ix] And God responds, “All right. Go ahead – you can do what you like with him. But mind you, don’t kill him.”[x] So, with God’s permission, Satan makes itching sores erupt all over Job’s body, from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. And finally, left to scratching himself with broken pieces of pottery, Job erupts, cursing the day he was born. Why didn’t I die at birth! he laments. Why am I suffering? I am innocent!

In Job’s world, it is believed the good get rewarded and the bad get punished. And he has been a good person. He has done nothing wrong. He has been faithful. And yet, God is punishing him. “God has no right to treat me like this – it isn’t fair!”[xi] he cries, and with his words, Job raises perhaps the biggest, deepest questions any of us ask. If God is good, and loving, and all-powerful, why is there innocent suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people?

Job asks these questions, and so do we. When things go well with us and in the world around us, it is not hard to believe in a loving, just and powerful God. But when we experience tragic suffering in our own lives and see it in the world, we begin to have doubts and question our beliefs. We want a world that is orderly and balanced and fair, a world that has a kind of moral arithmetic in which the guilty are punished and the good are spared. But life does not work that way. And when, like Job, the bottom falls out of our world – torn apart by pain or illness or death, we – like Job – cry out to God, “Why?”

Later on in the book, three friends try to comfort Job, but they cannot accept that Job’s suffering can coexist with Job’s innocence and God’s justice. And so they defend God, arguing that Job must have done something to deserve his suffering. After listening for 35 chapters to uncomforting words that only add to his pain, Job finally tells his friends to be quiet. The only one he wants to hear from is God; he wants an explanation for his suffering straight from the Source. And at last God speaks.

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”[xii] God asks Job. “Have you commanded the morning since your days began?”[xiii] “Do you give the horse its might?”[xiv] “Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars?”[xv] God goes on for four chapters with a voice rising in a magnificent symphony of questions. But God’s response does not answer Job’s questions, nor ours.

Why do some people suffer more than others? Why do some have more tragedy in their lives than anyone should have to bear? Why the debilitating disease, the tragic accident, the death of a young person whose life is just beginning? Why is there suffering? Why you, your child, your spouse? Why mine? The questions are endless.

And the answer? I could stand here and talk about the frailty of our mortal lives, or the fragility of the order of creation, or the consequences of human irresponsibility – and perhaps we would be able to come up with some partial explanations. But in the final analysis, the answer is: we just do not know.

I think, in the end, if there is any response to the problem of unjustified suffering, then it is this: for most of us, the worst thing that can happen is not to suffer without reason, but to suffer without God, to suffer without the hope or consolation or promise of new life that God offers.[xvi]

In his Sermon on the Mount, in the poetic verses called the Beatitudes, Jesus says, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."[xvii] The literal meaning of the Greek word translated into English as “comforted” [parakalao] is “to be called to the side of.” When we are in mourning and in pain, we are called to the side of God. It is not just in our times of unwavering faith or spiritual devotion, but perhaps even more in our times of doubt and questioning, our times of confusion and suffering, that God is at our side. Blessed are those who mourn, for in our sorrow, sadness, and grief, God is right there next to us.

In Job’s story, after hearing God’s poetic response to his cries and questions, Job’s vision is transformed. He begins to see the universe not through human eyes, but through God’s eyes. And through God’s eyes, Job sees a mixture of birth and death, of creation and destruction, of suffering and joy. Job begins to comprehend God’s divine magnificence and his own earthly insignificance, and he says, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you.”[xviii]

What Job wants us to know is that God does not abandon us. Even though we may want answers to our questions, what we really need is God. And God will respond. When we have nothing left but a piece of broken pottery with which to scratch our sores, we still have the God of all creation, the God who laid the foundation of the earth, who commands the morning, who gives might to the horse and flight to the hawk and has made everything that breathes.[xix] That God will never abandon us, for God will always be where God has always been – loving, sustaining, and caring for God’s own. Amen.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Barbara Brown Taylor, “Out of the Whirlwind,” Home By Another Way (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers), pp. 164-165.

[ii] Job 1:1, NRSV.

[iii] Job 1:7, The Message.

[iv] Job 1:7, The Message.

[v] Job 1:8, The Message.

[vi] Job 1:9-11, The Message.

[vii] Job 1:12, The Message.

[viii] Job 1:21, NRSV.

[ix] Job 2:4-5, The Message.

[x] Job 2:6, The Message.

[xi] Job 23:6-7, The Message.

[xii] Job 38:4, NRSV.

[xiii] Job 38:12, NRSV.

[xiv] Job 39:19, NRSV.

[xv] Job 39:26, NRSV.

[xvi] Ibid, p. 168.

[xvii] Matthew 5:4, NRSV.

[xviii] Job 42:5, NRSV.

[xix] Ibid, p. 167.

[Jimb]

Yup....sounds just like Harry Potter.

What I don't understand is (and I'm not being facetious..I confess to being densely ignorant when it comes to understanding the various Gods out there), why do so many folks think they have to kill in the name of their particular belief?

All us atheists have no excuse to kill anybody over religion.

Jim

[AriK]

For some: to kill or to become a martyr: the promise of 72 virgins in paradise. I just don't get it.

[RRoller123]

Many times as I sit around with friends and discuss politics or philosophy (politics being a subset, imho), the topic comes around as to what the world will be like for future generations. I always state that I truly wish that I could come back, reincarnated, in 200 or 300 years and see what has became of the United States, Canada, the EU, Britain, Western culture. The technology and social changes should be astounding, as I imagine they also would be for Jefferson and Washington, et al, were they to reappear today. And it becomes nearly impossible to imagine the earth 3000 years into the future.

I am somewhat sure, but without evidence, that the writers of scripture did not put pen to scroll with the idea that this stuff would be debated 3000 years into the future, and it is likely that they cared not what we current denizens think. But I am fairly sure that the Old and New Testaments will still be around and read and used and studied and debated 200, 300, maybe another 3000 years from today. I am also fairly sure that they are unlikely to be replaced by J. K. Rowling and Harry Potter. And the reason of course should be obvious; The Harry Potter series was written as entertainment, with a profit motive, and that is the entire purpose of its creation. And very successfully it has fulfilled those goals, too! Scripture was written ~3000 ago (Old Testament) for many reasons, to provide a record of historical events, etc. But most importantly, to serve as a basis for Existential Philosophy. Scripture is not a science book, and most modern societies do not take it as a literal record.

Of course there are people who do take this literally, and in Western culture, that is both their right and their privilege. But I do remain fairly sure that Harry Potter and JK will both adorn the dustbin of obscurity in future centuries.

[AriK]

It is so difficult to imagine our Mother Earth in 3000 years. Our earth is treated like a garbage can. During the Gulf war for example, oil wells were bombed and fires burned uncontrollably with no way to put them out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DoxBG5z ... ata_player
That's just one example. There are countless more.
We dont treat our earth with respect, the humans will spell its demise.
We have put more wear and tear on this earth in the past 50 years than we have in all of time.
How can we expect to foresee the existence of this place in 3000 years. We as a species have f**d up.

[RRoller123]

And yet in New England 200 years ago, nearly every inch of forest was stripped of trees, and the air and water were horribly fouled by continuous burning of wood, coal and the dumping of all sewage, raw, in waterways. Only a very small section of the White Mountains remains having been uncut. And yet the region is now cleaner as well as far more populous than it was then. There is now boating and swimming in the Charles River in Boston, something not dreamed of even 30 years ago.

New chemical creations pose an obvious risk, but even these are getting sorted, kinda like how our cars eventually get sorted and their mysteries solved, gremlins expelled.