If You Think You’re Too Old

EXCLUSIVE: Cover & Title Reveal! The Nuns of Shaw Island

If You Think You’re Too Old

Friends,

Like some of you, she’s been married for more than sixty years. Has welcomed the arrivals of grands and a great. A lifetime of callings have positioned her alongside others not only as a wife and mother and grandmother, but as a counselor, chaplain, teacher, mentor, Coffee-Break ministry coordinator, author of multiple books, and friend.

And that’s just for starters.

Through a stream of relationships, she’s made lives better. In return, those whom she’s touched love her dearly . . . myself included.

But Donna VanderGriend has suffered, too. Her friends and beloveds’ illnesses and injuries, broken choices, financial losses, and deaths—so many deaths—come to mind.

As does her own pain, most recently from clinical depression. Doing better now, Donna would be the first to say that making sense of her ongoing struggle continues to inform her wisdom and worldview. In the sort of fabulous remaking for which God’s known, depression has since bolstered her hope.

Calling her healing process a relief is an understatement. After all she’s gone through, eighty-two-year-old Donna has every right to rest. To put her feet up.

But why would she? As suffering has shaped her life’s clay, her story’s even more interesting and useful than it may have been in her earlier years.

So she wrote about it in her new book: Lines: Stories and Sketches.

In last Wednesday’s Lynden Tribune Encore (pg C 10-11), Donna told former Tribune editor Cal Bratt, “These meditations . . . arose out of the long COVID tunnel and its aftermath of isolation, surgeries, caretaking, and losses.” She felt called to “remember, by writing it down, what I still believed and what I still want to believe.”

I’m not surprised that what emerged from her musings is rich with humor, hope and inspiration.

Because darkness doesn’t have to win.

I trust the book will bless you (and those to whom you gift it . . . for Christmas, maybe?) as it did me.

Here’s some of the gist from her cover copy:

LINES speak as we shape them into stories and sketches. This book is hold-in-your-hands encouragement to write your thoughts and draw your insights [if you want to] . . . Between you and me and God and the rest of us, the lines of creativity wait to come alive.

To each reader of LINES: Stories and Sketches, thank you for joining me in old memories and new reflections. Enjoy the journey though the misery and mercy and merriment of Story Lines, Bottom Lines, Lyrical Lines, Memorized Lines, Standing in Line, Side-Lined, Wrinkle Lines, Hairlines, Lifelines (and thirty-one more).

*****

A subscriber to these Saturday Letters of mine will win a copy of the book this week! To drop your name in the hat, reply with the word LINES by next Friday, October 18. If you don’t already subscribe, please do.:)

*****

Meanwhile, a few pics for you.