Having just made the decision with God to make seeing my parents more often a priority in my life, as they are now needing a bit more support, I heard an interview with Emily Ackerman (on Premier radio online), was impressed and bought her book. It is excellent, warm, encouraging, godly, honest, helpful, practical and positive. I feel I will be referring back to it often as the journey with my parents progresses, and have already lent my copy, recommended it to friends, and bought a second copy to lend to others. If you are of the generation whose parents are aging and needing extra help, read this book - it may transform your outlook - that here is an opportunity to honour your parents, honour God, and to take a journey that is unlikely to be easy but can be precious.

Regardless of who we are, we all have parents and they will at some stage face their lives shrinking as they get older and possibly suffering from ill health. At what point do we become more involved in their lives, taking on the caring role for them that they will be needing in the last few years of their life? Emily Ackerman is a doctor who has seen the caring from both perspectives – looking after her own aging parents and then becoming a parent in need of care herself due to physical ill-health. This is no dry list of what we should and shouldn’t do as Christians for our parents when they become frail. It is inherently a practical book dealing with most aspects of an aging parent’s life and current health problems. She strives to encourage us not to feel guilty that we can’t be in several places at the same time, with our own work and family commitments and then on top with a parent or two that we have chosen to care for. She deals practically with some of the issues facing carers, and also looks spiritually at how we can best honour our parents when they have become less independent and the parent/child relationship appears to have become reversed. What makes this a very authentic book is that the author is coming from a place of ‘really knowing’ what it’s like to be in the carer’s position and to then have had the roles reversed, and she has been able to consider and learn from her own situation, writing with compassion and depth.