Title: Along Came Hell, or So I Thought
Author: Lois Young
Publisher: XlibrisUS
ISBN: 978-1-6698-3515-8
Pages: 220
Genre: Memoir
Reviewed by: Susan Brown

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“As I pondered and prayed about this project, one thing became clear. This book wasn’t to be mainly about me or the family, the pain or the healing. It was to be primarily about our loving and faithful God.” So states author Young, as she leads the reader down her turbulent path toward understanding the why behind God’s plan for us is not nearly as important as the acceptance of His loving and faithful guidance in our lives.

What caused the life crisis in this steadfastly Christian woman? After 44 years of marriage, she learns that her husband has been sexually molesting her granddaughters. Her shock and disbelief brought her to her knees in a prayerful search for understanding. With the help of her family, her church community, Bible exploration, as well as copious conversations seeking to unpack this trauma that rippled through her life, she came to this revelation, “It’s about His perseverance and gentleness, His prodding and patience. He wants His story told. If I was his instrument to do so, I needed to obey.”

As the narrative of her husband’s offense unfolded, she is faced with a reckoning of her faith in an omniscient God. Her worries and fears are real — will she be financially ok; can she feel comfortable in her church; what does a woman married for 44 years do now as a single person?

She relies on her family’s support for the practical, but as she reclaims herself and her faith, she is imbued with an appreciation that, “God is good. He is amazing. He is faithful. In one big aah-ha moment I knew hell hadn’t arrived at all. I now felt it never would.” The result of that aah-ha moment is this book, an homage to “God’s faithfulness” in the midst of her grief.

There is an enormous amount of heartache and anguish in this accounting of the author’s journey to work through the upheaval her husband’s behavior caused in her life. Ms. Young writes with powerful clarity about her struggle to come to terms with her grief. We are carried along, through her thought process, with prose that captures her anger, despair, confusion and the betrayal. Mercifully, for her and the reader, she also shares how hope and trust in a loving God led her from seeing herself as the wife of a felon to that of a devout “Woman of Faith.”

While the molestation of her granddaughters unquestionably upended her life, shook her faith to its core and caused her to scrutinize her life, the end result of her journey was a deeper and stronger understanding of God’s presence in her life.

For anyone dealing with the sorrow that comes with trauma, this book is infused hope; hope that if you lean on God and trust in his ultimate plan, “He will use His story in our lives for His good.”