Messages from an Illness: Deepening Faith Through Cancer

When Ruth Skaggs was diagnosed with cancer, she recognized that there was a larger purpose at work. There were meanings to be gleaned from the illness, and she committed herself to learning what truths were waiting to be revealed. Using her daily routine of reading Scripture followed by contemplative prayer, she was bombarded by messages from God. Skaggs explains how the profound insights from the messages helped her to move through the journey from illness to recovery. Skaggs shares how she used her knowledge and experience as a licensed professional counselor, with specializations in music psychotherapy and expressive arts therapy, to complement her medical treatments. She provides suggestions that will help others to incorporate music and expressive arts in their own healing journeys. In Messages from an Illness, Ruth Skaggs' first words got my attention, and I immediately remembered when I heard my own diagnosis sixteen years ago. She and the Spirit moving her led me gently but insistently into the whirlwind of awareness of the all-encompassing reality of cancer. She leads us into the treatment, with its misery and hope, and to the special people our doctors and caregivers become for us. She reminds us of the blessing of family and friends and the importance of faith-even in confusion and protest. She tells her story of her journey with this disease, and in telling, she becomes good company for us when such a journey is ours to make or when it beckons someone we love. She tells and walks with us as one whose hands hold the rod and staff, even in the valley of the shadow. -The Reverend S. Albert Kennington, XV Rector, retired, Trinity Episcopal Church, Mobile, AL; contributor to Forward Movement, The Living Church, and the Anglican Digest.