STRENGTH IN ADVERSITY

About the Book

No one is spared suffering – no one! To be human is to suffer. Grief, pain, injustice, disappointment – life serves these up in portions great and small. We can try to deny this reality or escape from it through endless diversions. We can even fall into despair, the seemingly rational response of a caring person when faced with a cold, uncaring world. Denial, diversion and despair. Is that all there is? Is there another way? A way that is honest about suffering and yet offers hope rather than despair, victory rather than victimhood? About twenty-five hundred years ago, a literary masterpiece came on the scene. Known as The Book of Job, a wisdom book in the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament, it has stirred serious thinkers and honest seekers for generations. To be sure, the grim story of a righteous man who loses everything – wealth, health and even his children – raises almost as many questions as it answers. But that is to its credit! The Book of Job never stoops to simplistic answers to hard questions. Instead, this narrative openly wrestles with some of life’s most difficult moral and spiritual puzzles, including how to reconcile a loving, just God with a suffering and unjust world. Powerful and poetic, it points a way through life’s most difficult challenges – the setbacks and sufferings that inevitably come our way. This is the way of Strength in Adversity, a way of honest hope and courageous faith.

About the Author

Gary Nicolosi is an Episcopal priest and attorney who has pastored urban, suburban and rural churches, large and small, throughout the United States and Canada. Throughout his ministry, Gary has had to deal with the pain and suffering of being human. He has heard parents pour out their hearts and over wayward sons and daughters struggling with drugs, crime and even committing suicide. He has sat in his church study with men and women who have been successful professionally but were now helplessly experiencing their career in free fall. He has listened to women who have been cheated by their husbands and vice versa. He has had to deal with the tragic deaths of teens and young adults, as well as the deaths of people in the prime of life. He has spent time with family members awaiting the results of emergency surgery, time at the bedside of patients who faced a long road of recovery, those whose only future was a nursing home, and with those facing life’s last chapter. Hurting people expect to receive from their pastor the right words at the right moment. What words of encouragement and hope do we give at such times of grief, loss, pain and bewilderment? Strength for Adversity, which is a pastoral commentary on the Book of Job in the Bible, is Gary’s answer to such questions. The book provides readers with a roadmap by which to journey through the problems and pains of life in the power of God’s love. It is an honest, thoughtful but helpful resource for any person experiencing suffering of any kind.