Everyone has a life. Right? And each can tell a unique story. Millions of them. But have you ever put yourself in a picture where your normal life experiences stopped at age eleven years after meningitis and a prolonged coma, yet you lived to be fifty-nine years old living in a nursing home the rest of your life with multiple impairments? This book is centered around Barbara, a real-life person described above who struggled with such a life from childhood. Or think about Barbara's father who returning from a terrible war to the girl he left behind three and one-half years earlier, having a baby one year later, then have your wife contract a fatal disease four months after the birth and watch her slowly die over the next five and one-half years? Imagine you are a woman having ten brothers and one sister and one day you drop out of high school to be servant to your brothers and father coal miners after your mother dies suddenly. Would you marry without love in desperation to escape being a slave or possibly sexually threatened by your father? How would you feel when your true love returns from the same war after years to find you plunged into marriage thinking he was killed in action because of deceit by his sister? Would you feel depressed when he killed himself with alcohol? What kind of stepmother would you become to someone like Barbara after marrying her father? Experiences like these can test anyone's faith in a caring God but, if you believe enough and keep your faith, God will never forsake you. He cares about each of us.
