Greg Garrett is among other things a lay preacher within the Episcopal church in USA. In writing this book he is specifically writing as an American to other Americans, but for the British reader it is none the worse for that. I found his way of expressing his themes clear, easy to read and to understand. His intention is to help anyone suffering, either with illness or injury themselves or possibly involved with a sufferer in a multitude of ways. Using his experience as a seminarian working as a hospital chaplain as part of his training, he uses some of his experiences there, and in his own life previously, to discuss how we so often see God working or not working for us here on earth. Somehow pushing God into a box of our own shaping wrought by the civilisation we have been conditioned by during our lives. As he works through the book he tries to widen our perceptions to, and a greater understanding ‘that there are stories in which suffering persists – but so does faith’