Into a Reluctant Sunrise
When Andrea L. Lingle, a Christian mother of three, learned that the baby she carried in her womb had died, her once firm faith in God turned to ashes. Into a Reluctant Sunrise is her story of how, despite her devastating grief, she came to embrace the gift of each new day.
The memoir is moving in revealing how Lingle, a Sunday school teacher and the wife of a minister, learned that faith isn’t a guarantee against tragedy. Wounded and brought down by the death of the daughter she’d named Gwyneth, her questions lost their politeness and turned fierce: How could anyone love and serve a God who lets such things happen? Does God care about people’s suffering? Does God even exist? With her spiritual practice reduced to “the equivalent of a newborn’s blank, uncomprehending, undemanding stare,” Lingle writes that it was Jesus, and his love for children, who brought her back.
“Jesus gives us a way to blindly grope our way towards a God we were never intended to grasp,” she writes. Trying hard to let God go, she discovered that, no matter what had happened, a life with God in it was still the better choice. “I will never understand the bones beneath the water or the ashes on the wind,” she writes, “but I will follow the one who loved the children as I do because it is my only way.”
Into a Reluctant Sunrise touches the heart of a human dilemma: love and loss will always be entwined. Lingle admits that it was not easy to learn to be the parent of a dead child, but feeling Gwyneth still near her, and hearing a small voice ask, “Can you love me like this?” her reply had to be, “Yes. I can.”
Reviewed by
Kristine Morris
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
