“Again, I can take it out, but I don’t know what you want me to say.” “We’re at the squishy end of an already squishy diagnosis.” He throws it back at me, nonchalant. “Look,” he said, as if having to start all over again. I’ve been to all your specialists, but I have been in a crazy amount of pain for three months now, and I can’t keep doing this.” “I don’t know how to get you, or anyone, to pay attention. Plus the pain and inconvenience of a surgery.” I can take out your gallbladder and you might be in the same pain you’re in today. “Look, there is nothing to suggest that we are going after the right thing. “It’s not entirely clear,” he said in a hard voice. “I thought the last test suggested that it was probably my gallbladder.” Then he said, “Well, I looked at your latest tests and they don’t tell us anything conclusive.” He sat down heavily on his stool, sighing as if already annoyed. I eyed the surgeon warily as he came into the small examining room where my husband, Toban, and I waited. It was a little creepy to watch, I’m sure, but it was the best I could do at pretending for so long. When the pain subsided, I would reach into my purse, take a swig from a giant bottle of antacid, stand up straight, and resume whatever I was doing without comment. This had happened so often over the last three months that I had developed a little ritual for it: reach for the nearest wall with the right hand, clutch my stomach with the left hand, close my eyes, keep perfectly silent. Every few hours I doubled over from a stabbing pain in my stomach. I had lost almost thirty pounds by the time I was referred to a gastrointestinal surgeon at Duke University Hospital. And what else is art for?” -Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and president of Together Rising I left Kate’s story feeling more present, more grateful, and a hell of a lot less alone. Her writing is naked, elegant, and gripping-she’s like a Christian Joan Didion. Praise for Everything Happens for a Reason Everything Happens for a Reason tells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? Kate is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before.įrank and funny, dark and wise, Kate Bowler pulls the reader deeply into her life in an account she populates affectionately with a colorful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumors. The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realize that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with “a surge of determination.” Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you “can’t do” and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward “blessing.” She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God’s disapproval. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE “Belongs on the shelf alongside other terrific books about this difficult subject, like Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.”-Bill Gates “A meditation on sense-making when there’s no sense to be made, on letting go when we can’t hold on, and on being unafraid even when we’re terrified.”-Lucy Kalanithi.
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