Life After Why
Finding Your Footing and Purpose in a Life Disrupter
Welcome to Life After Why
I’m writing this blog for you.
You whose plans are slammed, smashed, and derailed and you realize you’re not in control. You who are wounded, battered, beaten down, but won’t stop fighting. You who can’t find a way out but want a way forward. This is for you if you don’t want to waste your pain. This is a place of encouragement if you don’t want circumstances to define or stop you from living fully.
Dear Reader,
Why do we need to know why?
This is what is so intensely fascinating to me. It’s tempting to offer formulaic solutions as if to say that suffering is in our control, that we just have to eat a Himalayan root, adopt a dietary secret of a remote South American tribe, visualize our healing, or say the right words to release God’s healing....
The Book
This book is about overcoming obstacles. When a life disrupter strikes, it’s common to search for reasons and formulas to obtain control of the uncontrollable. The author is convinced that a satisfying life lies on the other side of asking why, a life at the intersection of sorrow and joy beyond the need to control outcomes. A recent cancer recurrence propelled Sheri Blackmon into surgical failures, setbacks, and a search for a way forward. Her disrupter evoked dormant childhood trauma that obscured and complicated the process of moving toward acceptance. This memoir is not only a cancer story but also a story of a girl torn between two continents as a missionary child whose mother is a Holocaust survivor. It explores universal themes of loss, abuse, control, dislocation, being an outsider, and finding one’s voice. It offers an honest Christian reflection on discovering one’s footing and purpose within a framework of five discernible steps toward acceptance. While presented in five steps, acceptance of what is lost is not a linear process with a beginning and an end, but a lifelong engagement of the heart.
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