This was just the way

THIS WAS JUST THE WAY

Author TED STAMP

Publisher TATE PUBLISHING

ISBN 1-68333-338-8

Ted has been a friend for fifteen or so years.  Yet, how little we know, how little we enter in to the secrets of another’s life.  Ted has shared himself in this memoir.  It really is fine writing, it reminds me of Wendell Berry’s style, bearing the reader along with its story, meaningful, challenging, sobering and refreshing.  A ‘chance’ accident when two friends were having a fun and impromptu fight led, through a welter of hospitalisation, surgery and rehabilitation to a life in a motorised wheel chair.  A ‘quad’ as he tells us, is the shortened name given to describe his condition.  Was this ‘tragic,’ ‘bad,’ and what has it brought about in the life of a young man, at the time, just finished high school and en route to college.  Now more than twenty years on through all this ‘suffering’ what do we read?  Ted is thought provoking in his reflections as he considers this strange and unexpected road.  The love of family, friends, the transformation that has taken place as he, without expectation of any great change witnessed an Easter cantata and met the Lord Jesus in a life changing way.  Things with which he filled his life simply dropped away, new things came and have become established filling him with fresh purpose.  It seems clear that Ted has a gift for writing, this is not theoretical idealism but faith, hope and love working in real ways in a man taken through extremities which few of us will ever face.  So many questions arise, why did things work out this way?  All the ‘what if’s’ come to mind.  In these pages you will find no trite answers and no attempt at doctrinal and Biblical explanations.  Rather, the reality of faith emerging, being purified and becoming triumphant in the fires of a life filled with adversity of a kind few shall face.

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