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Help in Crisis, Help in Living
by 
Debbie W. Wilson
What
do you say when your best friend finds out that she has cancer? How can you help when a neighbor's spouse
dies?
Can a marriage remain strong when one spouse
travels a great deal? How can you build
a close relationship with your children when your time at home is limited?
PeggySue Wells and Mary Ann
Froehlich address these and other
questions in What to Do When You Don't Know What to Say (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2000, 108 pages) and Holding
Down the Fort (Minneapolis: Bethany
House, 1998, 191 pages).
In
Holding Down the Fort, Wells and Froehlich compiled accounts from families
involved in the challenges of holding a family together while one spouse is
frequently absent. The contributors
include Luis and Pat Palau, international evangelist, the wife of contemporary
Christian musician from DC Talk Toby McKeehan, salesmen and women, military
personnel, prisoners and their spouses, truck driver's wives and the
Froehlichs'' and Wells' personal experiences.
Each
chapter covers one challenge: a traveling
parent with young children, prison families, teens and a traveling parent, the
traveling wife, travelers who indulge addictions, military families,
ministering families, workaholics and others.
Each chapter offers several anecdotal accounts from families involved in
the traveling lifestyle.
Wells
and Froehlich end the chapters with practical suggestions for the families and
friends and churches to strengthen the family.
These vary from how to avoid temptation while traveling to how to deal
with long-distance child discipline to offering to baby-sit for a friend whose
spouse is in prison or in the military.
Froehlich
and Wells and their husbands take us inside their lives as they "open up a
vein" and show from experience the frustrations and difficulties they
faced.
This is
neither a book of blame nor a book of discouragement but is full of helpful
suggestions by those who have traveled and those who have held down the fort.
In What
to Do When You Don't Know What to Say, the writing duo continues their
approach of talking to those who have gone through it. This small book-- at 108 pages a good
afternoon's read-- is chock full of examples of help and comfort during times
of illness, grief, financial challenge, divorce.
The
suggestions range from chicken soup when someone is sick to including a
friend's child in family activities after a death in the family to helping
someone buy a plane ticket home during a serious illness to giving a Bible
marked with comforting passages. Some
of the suggestions are simple; others slap you in the head, leaving you to
wonder why you never thought of that.
By using
the excerpts from the individuals themselves, Froehlich and Wells give the
reader a touch of the pain and the comfort experienced.
They also include a section on what not to
do and what not to say. Grieving
parents don't want to hear that God needed a little angel in heaven. They don't want to hear well-meant phrases,
such as, "All things work together for good" or "God won't give
you more than you bear."
Many of us instinctively know that our words
can't dissolve the pain, but we don't know what to do, what to say. What to Do When You Don't Know What to
Say gives us some solutions.
