Mother Finds Kindred Spirit in Suffering Job
By ADELLE M. BANKS
c. 2002 Religion News Service
 
 (Ed. note: Photos to accompany this article are available from RNS
Today. To download photos from the RNS photo Web site, call
800-767-6781.)
 
 (UNDATED) Before she knew of the parental nightmare ahead, before
she knew the child she carried would live less than nine months and be
followed by another with the same fate, Nancy Guthrie admired Job.
 "God had such confidence in choosing Job," said Guthrie, an
evangelical Christian publicist based in Nashville, Tenn., of the
biblical account of God permitting Satan to test Job's faith by killing
his children, servants and animals.
 "He was so confident that Job would be faithful to him no matter
what," marveled Guthrie in a recent interview. "I thought that's
something to attain to, to be so consistently faithful to God that he
would point at me and say, `You know what? She'd be faithful to me no
matter what.'"
 Guthrie, who has lost two children in the last three years to the
rare disorder called Zellweger Syndrome, has written her first book
about how the biblical character's experience with suffering can
influence others in the midst of trials.
 She details in "Holding On to Hope: A Pathway Through Suffering to
the Heart of God" (Tyndale House Publishers, $11.99) that she learned
from Job that in the midst of suffering, he drew closer to God.
 "I wanted to offer these hurting people a gentle invitation to
change how they think about their suffering and to see it as an
opportunity to develop a more intimate relationship with God that they
couldn't have without the suffering," she said.
 Expanded from a talk at her Presbyterian Church in America
congregation when she was pregnant with her daughter Hope, the thin
volume describes how Guthrie's faith endured in the midst of suffering.
She also looks at how others can help people who suffer and admonishes
those who think faith and tears are mutually exclusive.
 Guthrie, 39, who has promoted such Christian authors as Max Lucado
and Anne Graham Lotz, initially shied away from writing about her
situation, fearing that some might suspect she was exploiting her
experience.
 Then a reading of Jesus' parable of the talents, in which he urged
making the most of one's gifts, helped her view the opportunity to be a
first-time author in a different light.
 "I just felt such an impulse at that point to write, a desire to in
a sense give God a good return on all he had invested in me," she said.
 Using the skills she'd long honed as a media representative for
CBA, the trade organization of the Christian retailing industry,
Guthrie can explain in a sentence or two the disease that twice struck
her family. She compares peroxisomes, subcellular particles, to "little
trash men" that remove certain toxins from our bodies.
 "A child with Zellweger Syndrome is born without peroxisomes and so
there's nobody to take out the trash," she said.
 She watched her daughter Hope and, later, her son Gabriel succumb
to the disease that began to shut down their bodies' systems even
before their births. (Gabriel's birth occurred after Guthrie and her
husband attempted to prevent future pregnancies -- and potential
familial sorrow -- with a vasectomy.)
 "The challenge of her life was primarily the reality that her first
day was her best," Guthrie said of Hope. "Whereas most children are
developing and increasing, ... from the day she was born, she was
deteriorating."
 Nancy, her husband David, an executive of Word Entertainment, a
Christian company in Nashville, and their son Matt, now 12, decided to
celebrate the months, rather than years, of their young family member.
 One month they gathered with 50 people around the piano in their
home and sang songs. At her six-month celebration -- the last one --
they had a cookout at the park with three times as many people.
 Guthrie said one of the big lessons she learned was the need to
appreciate life no matter what the circumstances.
 "Life itself is a gift and that's worth celebrating, even when it's
very limited," she said. "My focus was `I don't want to spend her life
being sad the whole time that she's leaving me and miss her life.'"
 They had sent out invitations for a six-month party for Gabriel as
well, "a big chili dinner in a barn," with a band and bingo, but he
died the day before that milestone.
 "We didn't get to have that party," she said.
 She marked the first anniversary of Gabriel's birth -- July 16 --
with the release of the book, which includes an epilogue about his
brief life.
 The celebrations they were able to have -- and copious photos of
them -- were not just for Guthrie's family; they were an opportunity
for others to share in their joys, and later, their grief.
 "If you have held and touched and known that child, you care more
deeply," she said. "When they were gone, I didn't want to be the only
one who missed them."
 In fact, Guthrie said one of the greatest comforts is having others
cry with her when she contemplates her loss.
 "Grief is a very lonely experience," she said. "When someone sheds
their tears with you, it's not quite so lonely."
 Guthrie scolds those who think that the comforting belief that
children are in heaven should be enough for those left on Earth.
 "We believe firmly in heaven but it doesn't make me not hurt," she
said. "It doesn't make me not sad. It doesn't not make me miss my
children desperately because heaven feels very far away."
 Guthrie urges more people in the church to recognize that tears can
come with faith.
 "In some Christian circles, they focus so much on victory in Jesus
that there's no room for being sad," she said. "There's no room for
recognizing and verbalizing and expressing our humanness in terms of
what we feel in terms of loss."
 Though she admires Job's ability to grieve and still worship God,
Guthrie admits that's often not easy to do.
 She recalls being stunned after Hope's death by a stanza in "All
Hail the Power of Jesus' Name," a hymn she had sung her whole life,
that includes the verse, "Oh, that with yonder sacred throng, we at his
feet may fall."
 Guthrie interprets it as a call to worship God along with those in
heaven.
 "All of a sudden I'm realizing this piece of me, this part of me,
is in that yonder sacred throng and yet it's calling me to do the same
thing when I'm sitting here feeling so hurt that she's gone," she said.
 Guthrie makes no claim to have figured out all the reasons for
Job's trials -- or her own.
 "I think God is a redeemer and that he uses the most bitter things
in our life for his glory and to accomplish his purposes and so I
believe that's how he's using it in my life," she said. "Would I say he
caused it all to happen for that? I can't answer that for him. I don't
know his reason. All I know is it's up to me to be a good steward of
what he's allowed into my life."
 
 == 30 ==
 
NEWS SIDEBAR: Excerpts from `Holding On to Hope'
c. 2002 Religion News Service
 
 (Editors: Following are excerpts from "Holding On to Hope: A
Pathway Through Suffering to the Heart of God," by Nancy Guthrie
(Tyndale House Publishers, $11.99). See main story, RNS-GUTHRIE-HOPE,
transmitted July 17. Note italics in text.)
 
 
 "Our culture wants to put the Band-Aid of heaven on the hurt of
losing someone we love. Sometimes it seems like the people around us
think that because we know the one we love is in heaven, we shouldn't
be sad. But they don't understand how far away heaven feels, and how
long the future seems as we see before us the years we have to spend on
this Earth before we see the one we love again."
 
 
 "You see, we worship because God is worthy, not necessarily because
we `feel' like it. In the midst of a crisis, if we only do what we feel
like doing, we could remain stuck in a cycle of self-pity. But when we
worship, we get our eyes off of ourselves and our sorrow or problems.
We focus them on God, and this puts our difficulties into proper
perspective."
 
 
 "You see, Hope was a gift. And the appropriate response to a gift
is gratitude.
 "That's what we see in Job. As he falls to the ground to worship
God, even though he has just lost everything, Job is thanking God for
everything God has given him. When Job says, `The Lord gave me
everything I had, and the Lord has taken it away,' we see that Job
recognized that everything he had was a gift from God and that Job had
learned how to hold on to those gifts loosely. Evidently Job, long
before, had figured out that his extreme wealth and blessing not only
(ITALIC) came (END ITALIC) from God but also were (ITALIC) still (END
ITALIC) God's, while Job himself was just a steward.
 "How about you? I know you can barely stand to think about being
grateful in the midst of your loss. You probably think I'm crazy to
suggest that you could be grateful as you face the empty chair, the
empty bank account, the emptiness.
 "God gives, and God takes away. But let's be honest: We just want
him to give, don't we? And we certainly don't want him to take away the
things or the people we love.
 "We tend to think the money in our bank accounts and the
possessions we have are ours -- that we've earned them. That we deserve
them. But the truth is, everything we have is a gift."
 
  
 "We might not say it, but in the back of our minds we somehow think
that because Job was so godly, he should have been spared from pain.
But the truth is, often people who follow God suffer -- not less but
more. ...
 "If God has allowed suffering into your life, it is for a purpose.
A good purpose. A holy purpose.
 "The world tells us to run from suffering, to avoid it at all
costs, to cry out to heaven to take it away. Few of us would (ITALIC)
choose (END ITALIC) to suffer. Yet when we know that God has allowed
suffering into our lives for a purpose, we can embrace it instead of
running from it, and we can seek God in the midst of suffering.
Accepting suffering drives us deeper in our devotion."
 
 
 "Before losing Hope, I never really understood why people found
such comfort in knowing their loved one is in heaven, but I do now.
When you lose someone you love, heaven becomes much more of a reality,
much more than a theological concept or theatrical cliche.
 "In the midst of his suffering, Job's deepest desire is not just
for the suffering to end but for eternity in the presence of God to
begin.
 "I have come to the place where I believe a yearning for heaven is
one of the purposes and one of the privileges of suffering and of
losing someone you love. I never had that yearning before, but I do
now. You see, a piece of me is there. And all too soon, I will have
(ITALIC) two (END ITALIC) children waiting for me there. I now see in a
much fuller way that this life is just a shadow of our real life -- of
eternal life in the presence of God."