Facing Forward Finding Hope to Begin Again

When struggles and disappointments arise, we risk remaining mired in grief and bitterness. God graciously grasps our shoulders and turns us around, urging us to stride forward with a stronger faith. In writing candidly about her own life experiences,Wendy Zoba shows how God has stretched her along the way and propelled her forward with fresh faith.

In this very personal story, Zoba retraces the path that led her from an alcoholic home to her current midlife crisis. The first section deals with her childhood, and in it she thickly describes everything from her visit as an adult to American Girl Place to the minute details of the neighborhoods where she grew up. Included in what seems an attempt to create mood and add literary weight, these observations sometimes serve as little more than a distraction. Her second part explores her feelings about motherhood, and unfortunately feels self-aggrandizing and self-pitying at the same time. In it, she depicts herself as a wonderful mother and her sons as delightful boys who have become godly young men. While sadness is an understandable response to an empty nest, her interpretation of their departure for college as abandonment borders on melodrama. Zoba's last section is perhaps the strongest, in that it pulls together the threads of the first two parts, disclosing the many battles she has had to fight all at once during her forties. Chapters about September 11 and her participation in a forum on gay-evangelical relations turn up inexplicably in this section; the former covers territory that is by now too well-worn. Still, a good deal of the book is a lovely meditation on faith and the vagaries of midlife, and as such should resonate with many readers.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Zoba, a Baptist preacher's wife who survived a dysfunctional childhood, felt that at 44 she had come to a spiritual crossroads. Her three sons, to whom she devoted her entire adult life, were grown, and her mother was old and unwell. If that weren't enough, dramatic and unwanted changes assailed her perimenopausal body. "Why these unexplainable spontaneous tears? Why this agitation? this aching? this sleeplessness?" she asked. "Confusing emotions assailed me. Hostility, dejection, despair. Was not God acquainted with my tears?" When everything you base your life upon has been cut from under you, she says, you are left with what you were before. Although Zoba had always wanted to forget her imperfect childhood, she realized that it was time to look back so that she could face forward. Thus she embarked upon a physical and spiritual reunion with the places and people of her youth. It is brave for a preacher's wife to admit spiritual crisis. We admire her strength and thank her for taking us along on her spiritual journey. Donna Chavez
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