Categories: uncategorized
Date: 27 June 2006 06:07:23
I'm feeling a bit like The Dr today, time travelling around from the present to the past to move to the future.
Now: As she sits after work in her comfortable flat by the sea the wanna-be academic picks up the latest book to go through for her literature review and carefully notes it's details before diving in; Worth,J and Tufnell, C, All Alone? Help and Hope for Single Parents, (2003), Spring Harvest Publishing Division and Authentic Lifestyle, Carlisle. Her purpose to use it as a text to try and help her find an "ideal type" to measure her research against.
Firstly she notes the pretty cover with it's subtle picture and range of soft colours, and then the GLE branding it has recieved: Spring Harvest logo in the corner and emblazoned with the words "Foreword by Rob Parsons" centre bottom. She ploughs through the foreword, aware of the link between the book and the single parent work undertaken by Care for the Family , which means the Rob Parsons introduction is almost mandatory. It's a good foreword, useful in some ways for her research into lone parents and the church, but as her mind drifts back she's not sure if it would of put her off, way back when, the last time she had come across this book, in a different form, many moons ago before it had been lent out once too often & never returned.
Then: It was heading towards the end of the millenium; she was sitting in the middle of a field in Cambridge, enjoying a weekend away from her life dominated by depression and juggling her pre-schooler with a part-time temping job and no money. She was reading the book she'd picked up when she headed into town earlier that day; it had a blue cover, simple and non-descript. As she opened the book she was immeadiately struck by the fact it was written for people like her by people who had been down a similar path.
She must have heard the music, but the book, well that had grabbed her attention for the whole afternoon. As she read she began to realise that her experience was unique, yet normal. She began to grasp that the nightmare that had been the last year was following a pattern and that it was ok to feel that way & even more it was ok to be a Christian and going through this. She read carefully the wisdom and advice contained within, some of it cheered her and some of it scared her as she realised, only in part then, the significance of the words relating to lonliness, debt and forgiveness.
This book was as much the key to keeping sane she realised as the happy pills, perhaps more so. It meant she now had a resource at hand to turn to when she felt it was just her, or to seek help and advice from initially when she didn't want to disturb others, or to remind her that she was not an island, to show her there was a future in all this and perhaps, just perhaps to be able to explain to others when words failed.