Purple Room
Where Hope Confronts Loss
by
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“I think the devil didn’t know the kind of little girl he was messing with!” God wants other people to learn from what happens to our family.”
-Kelsey Wood December 1999-
“Mom, can I paint my new room purple? It’s my favorite color and it just makes me feel good.”
-Kelsey Wood November 2002-
The day was warm in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The sun was bright and the wind trailing in a light breeze. I pulled myself from a comfortable position on the chair and stood. Walking to the window I could see the lake below gleaming in the sun as I considered my next words carefully… or not so carefully
"Suzanne."
"Yes."
"Robert just asked me to take over a store in Baton Rouge."
"What!"
"The store there is hemorrhaging cash and Robert wants me to turn it around.”
"John, we've had just over a year back in Dallas! The kids are just now beginning to readjust."
"I know, but it's a great opportunity and you know how bored and restless I get when things begin to become routine."
In the fall of 1993, my family and I were in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where I was attempting to facilitate a turnaround in a store that was sinking in a sea of red ink, and a laissez-faire culture. I was in a word, miserable. My fortieth birthday loomed large on the horizon, and I was completely depleted physically, spiritually, and emotionally. My two oldest children John and Katie had attended three different schools in the past twelve months, and I was under tremendous pressure at work to turn around a severely struggling retail operation. I was working twelve to sixteen hours a day and collapsing when I arrived at home, with no additional time or energy to invest in my family.
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About the Book
In every life, there comes a time when nothing, including God, seems to make sense. There are times when we figuratively find ourselves hanging from a fifteen thousand-foot cliff by one slender rope, completely out of options. We call out to God for rescue, and His answer is to cut the rope. Or worse yet, God Himself may appear to cut the rope for us. What do we do and where do we turn when the life we had imagined disintegrates before our eyes? Who do we blame? Is the comfortable, happy life that we have come to expect a lie? Confronting his youngest daughter’s diagnosis of pediatric bone cancer, as well as his own struggle with cancer left John Wood questioning a seemingly invisible God. Encounter the journey and discover where Wood eventually landed following his sojourn in the “valley of the shadow of death.”
About the Author
John Wood graduated from Harding University with an undergraduate degree in business management and later earned a master’s degree in educational administration. He spent eighteen years in the high-stress world of retail buying and store management. In February of 1994, returning home from a business trip, the small commuter plane that he boarded along with twenty-one other passengers went down in a sugar cane field in New Roads Parrish, Louisiana. The experience jolted him into understanding that the life he had worked to create was slowly unraveling. Following a dramatic change in careers and a new sense of fulfillment, his life was once again humming along at full speed, when on one heart-wrenching day in December of 1999, he felt it explode.