Emerging from the Mess: Finding Hope in Life’s Storms

A guide for readers from suffering to joy, urging humility and gratitude while navigating life’s challenges and renewal.

At the darkest hour the dawn arrives again anew, just like always, but we forget so easily. This post-pandemic world of uncertainty, drought, war and death is not the end. It’s not all of reality as it proposes to be but just a temporary place of growth and purification. We need to be open to learn about humility, compassion and grace. A person, the Christ, has lifted us up. Our true destiny is revealed, to be with the Light, breaking open the clouds of weary, often isolated existence.

Emerging from the Mess is essentially the experience of how suffering and pain alternates with great joy and fulfilment. Especially when we reach the limits of our strength and endurance (Richard Rohr calls this ’liminal space’), we need to remember to hang on, to be patient and faithful in prayer. This book’s challenge is to live every day like a resurrection day. It is all about gratitude: to see the absolute giftedness of every moment, the wonder of every encounter, the silver lining on every cloud. We have structured this book in sections to mirror this exact same process of desolation to hope, darkness to light, and 11th hour rescue from death into resurrection.