Dear Friends,
I’ve just finished writing a book about one of the most humbling years of my life.
In 2023 I remarried, eleven years after my first wife Lana died of cancer. Unfortunately, the second marriage ended in divorce within a year. I spent the following year grieving, looking at my own failures, and finding my way back to ministry.
This book is less about divorce than about facing life after a significant loss. It covers what I believed about myself because of it, and the fuller picture I got with the help of a counselor who walked me through that first year.
It’s called One Slice at a Time. If you’ve been through a blow of your own, whatever it was, I wrote this book for you.
Here’s how I’d like to share it. The book has 28 chapters. I’m sending the introduction today and the first five chapters over the next five weeks. I think they’re helpful to anyone and they’ll give you a good feel for the whole book. You’ll get one a week, and you can read at your own pace.
If you’d rather not wait, or want to keep reading past chapter 5, the full book is on my website where you can read it or listen to the audio version for free. As always, I want to reach as many people as I can with the hope I’ve found in Jesus Christ. The page also links to the paperback, Kindle, Audible and Google Play editions:
theranch.org/one-slice-at-a-time
For today, here’s the introduction…
Introduction: I Thought That Was the End of Me
When my marriage ended, the loss I could name was the marriage.
The fear underneath it was something else.
I thought I had lost my standing.
I’ve been in ministry for thirty years. I’ve written books about marriage. I have thousands of people who read what I write, and I had told a great many of them that God had brought me a wife. Five hundred people had been invited to a celebration.
And when it came apart, what I believed — not as a passing thought but as a settled fact, for months — was that I was finished. That nobody would listen to me again. That I had forfeited the right to say anything to anyone about anything. That I might not even be able to hear from God anymore, because why would He keep talking to a man who had gotten something that large that wrong.
I sat in a parking lot one night after walking out of a meeting and thought: I can never come back here. I can never do ministry again.
If any part of that is familiar to you, then this book was written for you and you can stop wondering whether it’s for someone in worse shape.
What This Book Is Not
I’m not going to take you back through my marriage.
She isn’t named in these pages, and I’ve kept the particulars out. That isn’t the same as anonymity, and I won’t pretend otherwise. Our marriage was public knowledge. What I can leave out is the account itself. Who did what, in what order, and why.
There’s a fair amount in this book about my own failures. I’ve left that in, because it’s mine to give.
The rest of it isn’t mine to give, and I don’t think it would help you anyway. Two people can’t be understood by a stranger reading one of their versions. And I’ve watched what happens to a man who spends his recovery trying to get the record straight — there’s a chapter about that later.
This is also not a book about a seven-month marriage. It’s a book about the year after — which turned out to be a much longer year than I expected, and is not entirely over as I write this two years later.
Who Sharon Is
About twenty conversations run underneath this book.
Sharon Giacinto is a friend and a counselor. She knew my first wife, Lana, before Lana died. She’s in her eighties. She and her late husband, Chuck, spent decades in ministry, in real estate, teaching, counseling, praying with people, burying people. She has been through more than I have and says so rarely.
Early on she told me she would tell me what I needed to hear rather than what I wanted to hear, and then she did that every single time, including the weeks I may have preferred anything else.
We talked roughly every other week for about a year. I took notes the entire time, because that’s what I do and because I could tell within the first few minutes that I was going to want them later.
Those notes are this book.
Most of what’s good in here is hers. What’s mine is the reporting — what Sharon said, what I did with it, and where I got it wrong at first.
What I’m Actually Offering You
Not a program, and not a timeline.
Twenty-eight things that got me back on my feet, in roughly the order I learned them. Each one begins with something that happened to me, moves to something she said, and ends by handing it to you to use or leave.
Some of them will land and some won’t, and I’ve tried to write them so you can take one and set the rest down. That’s the method as much as the content. A person in the first year of this cannot absorb everything at once, and one of the earliest things she taught me was to stop trying. There’s a better way.
I’d add one thing about how to read it.
I have cried through the writing of most of these chapters, two years out. If you find yourself further into this than you expected to be, still not fine, still ambushed on ordinary Tuesdays — you are not behind. There’s no schedule. I checked.
When I sat in the parking lot that night, I thought that was the end of me.
It wasn’t.
And it doesn’t have to be the end of you, either.
Chapter 1, “Divorce Is Like a Death,” arrives next week. If you’d rather keep reading now, the full book is free to read or listen to online, and the paperback, Kindle, Audible and Google Play editions are linked on the same page: theranch.org/one-slice-at-a-time
Many of you have been journeying with me for years, and you’ve steadied me more often than you know. Thank you for walking with me through this one, too.
Love,
Eric Elder writes for page, stage & screen to glorify God’s name so Christ may be seen! Hit reply to send Eric a note! Use this link to subscribe or unsubscribe.