Beginnings

I'm beginning to realise that every point in one's life at which one loses everything is far more a beginning than an end.  For one has lost merely the past, and one has yet to gain the future and eternity itself. Douglas Gresham Lenten Lands.

Gresham is the stepson of CS Lewis, and has a fascinating story of his own. I caught an interview with him, and he has lost everything more than once in his life. His older brother David tried to kill him multiple times growing up and was eventually diagnosed as a paranoid psychopath, having to live out his days on locked unit.  Douglas nearly lost his mother Joy Davidman in 1956 but believed that a numinous experience in the graveyard at Holy Trinity in Headington Quarry, near Oxford (where Lewis was eventually buried) allowed him to intercede for her life, and she went into remission from her cancer two days later.  Four years later she was dying again, and he felt the same choice was offered him, in the same place. At fourteen he felt he could make it after all if this Presence would only be with him and said instead "Thy will be done." He lost his mother, his father, and his stepfather over the next two years.

He has had varied ministries since then, and lived in England, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the US at times.