Amazon.com (ISBN 0849907020, Paperback)

"What is the difference between the paraplegic woman with the smile that lights a room and the millionaire with a suicide wish?" asks Billy Graham. "Or what makes one person accept and keep his balance during a painful time, and another become a self-pitying whiner?" Hope for the Troubled Heart: Finding God in the Midst of Pain is Graham's attempt to answer these questions and the larger question that underlies them: why, in a world full of pain, should people hope and not despair? Perhaps the most powerful thing about this book is the sheer number of its heartbreaking stories about people suffering from abuse, loneliness, sickness, emptiness, financial ruin, and other calamities. Nearly every reader will find something to relate to.

Graham's stories do not stop at desolation, however. They press further, to show how suffering people find solace in the Bible, in the love of other believers, and in the hope of heaven. What Graham offers in this book is a reason to be patient, a reason to believe that the forces of destruction need not have the last word in human life. "A few more days may dawn and darken and we will know the unending day," he writes. "A few brief years, or brief moments, and we shall enter that eternal city, sit in the shadow of the Tree of Life, and drink the crystal clear water. We have only had a foretaste on earth of what it means to love and be loved." That, in the end, is the greatest reason for hope that Graham offers. --Kevin Attwood