From the CWL Book Shelf Michelle Gott Kim

CWL Book Shelf: REVIEW OF “Dear _____, There’s Hope on the Other Side”

November 10, 2020 Michelle Gott

REVIEW OF “Dear _____, There’s Hope on the Other Side”
by Michelle E Gott

Years ago, in a Campus Life magazine there was an article I read that has forever stuck with me. I do not recall the author or the name of the article, but it was regarding how God decides what child receives a teddy bear and what child gets cancer. The article was profound, and to my teenage self, it inspired questions I didn’t know we had the right to ask. Add on decades and many more life lessons, and somehow surviving a year like 2020 and a pandemic, and the question still clamors for attention in my head. I have earned my own understandings that are derived of life’s experiences and poor or unknowledgeable choices, and I know now that, while all things in life are in God’s control, not all things are controlled by God because He gave to humanity the ability to think with its own mind and make its own choices. I have reconciled that there isn’t a starting place where parents are running up to get in line to sign their child up for a puppy so that they don’t end up instead in the line where leukemia and other hardships are being tossed to kids that didn’t get there in time to collect their kitten.

So it is for me as I read my new friend’s book, “Dear _____, There’s Hope on the Other Side.” I find myself pondering my age-old question. How was Lisa the girl who was born into a complicated family instead of one of wealth and privilege with whom she rubbed shoulders in her Christian school, church and upbringing? How was it that at many corners Lisa turned in her life, there was another obstacle impacted, another dead-end street, another figurative fist to knock her back down? How was it that the grace of God which is for all people should be withheld by the very ones who were supposed to be handing it out to her liberally to heal the heartache and speak the love of Christ over her trauma? And would I, at the end of the day, if I wore the same shoes and bore the same scars, choose faith in Jesus to override all the anger, bitterness, grief, resentment?

Lisa Godwin writes her difficult story in an interesting format as if writing letters to her heartbroken self. She addresses very challenging and appropriate issues for any one of us today who wrestle with understanding: Why Me? From contending with idols and feelings of worthlessness, to the trenches of discouragement, insecurities and hopelessness, into battle with suffering, control and misery, to finally stand victorious as a warrior, Lisa poses each letter as an affirmation that you and I, just like her, can be overcomers of anything life throws at us, but only through the strength and power of belief in Jesus Christ.

So why did Lisa’s youth, and then her adulthood self, face one tribulation followed by another, you ask? You need to read her story to fully understand; don’t just take my word for it. But simply yet incredibly, to be now in a place where the Lord can use her heartache and devastation to help others like her, little girls without any ability to protect themselves who are being forced to carry a load never intended by God for them to carry; teenage girls who might have had better options if it hadn’t already been chosen for them by someone else’s poor choices; grown women still living with the sin, fear and shame of abuse and addiction having nowhere else to turn.

“Dear ______, There’s Hope on the Other Side” is a story of bravery and courage with the vast potential to help other women find and cling to Jesus when all other hope is gone.