A Grace Discovered: Perseverance During Our Season of Loss (ePub)

Join an average American family on a journey through their "season of loss," as this new author, Curt Olson, describes it. The Bible references many people who experienced times in the wilderness as a time of listening, learning, and teaching. Those times in the wilderness, or desert, lasted as little as 40 days for Jesus Christ and 40 years for Moses. God engineered the circumstances for a season of loss for the Olsons, too.
Readers will understand the personal and spiritual challenges the Olsons faced on a journey through multiple job losses during the Great Recession, the death of a parent, two long-distance moves, a home in foreclosure with one of the Big Banks, a non-life-threatening health issue, and the end of a more than 20-year career in professional journalism.
The personal challenges focus on God orchestrating events that prepared the family for this season, although when life happens we don't always recognize it for what it is at that moment. The Olsons also experienced the reversal of roles, God's preparation for his wife, Lynette, to accept moving away from family, and the move of his mother from their home in the Cleveland, Ohio area as God gave glimpses that a big move was coming. The spiritual issues dive into the challenges of a man, husband, and father dealing with job loss for the first time in his career, the counsel he received from multiple godly men, waiting, worship, fearing God, and persevering under trial. Since this book is published at a time when Christians are martyred for their faith every day in the Muslim world, and elsewhere, it's hard to call what the Olsons faced as "persecution." But God has provided deep spiritual perseverance for the Olsons to hold them steady and strong during a deeply distressing period of their lives.
The timing of this inspirational non-fiction narrative is the Great Recession, which the author believes never ended for the vast majority of Americans. Readers may be familiar with the books in print by former secretaries of the U.S. Treasury, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, which address the U.S. government's response to the nation's near economic collapse in fall 2008. Economists and others have written similar books. However, few books in the past six years have outlined how the Great Recession impacted average people, individuals and families trying to play by the rules and survive. "A Grace Discovered: Perseverance During Our Season of Loss" achieves that ... and much more.
Wherever they lived, the Olsons were overwhelmed by the benevolence of churches of which they were members or attended regularly. Fellow Christians had their back, and that is how God designed the church to function. We celebrate together. We mourn together. We help others who are hurting. And we suffer together.
Curt Olson trusts readers will receive encouragement and hope for all challenges they face by telling his story, and the story of his family. However, Curt Olson also seeks to challenge the church in America in the area of benevolence. No one should anticipate America returning to the days of the 1980s and 1990s when the United States thrived as an economic juggernaut. While America remains the richest country in the world, that status is fading swiftly. There's a country worth saving and everyone, including the church, has a role to play.