Growing Up Ziglar by Julie Ziglar Norman

Author:Julie Ziglar Norman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Growing Up Ziglar: A Daughter’s Broken Journey from Heartache to Hope
ISBN: 9780824945312
Publisher: Guideposts
Published: 2012-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

* Jennifer Baker, Director of Post-Graduate Program in Marriage and Family Therapy at Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri.

CHAPTER TEN

LOSING SUZAN

PART OF LIFE

I can’t go a page farther without writing about what losing my sister Suzan meant to me in the scope of growing up Ziglar. Nothing that happened before or since has had a more profound impact on my life, or my parents’ lives.

As I mentioned in the last chapter, losing Suzan initially increased the distance my husband and I kept from one another, but in a roundabout way contributed to us establishing a happy, fulfilling, godly, faith-based marriage. God really can and does fix anything you give over entirely to Him. It’s true that our family didn’t have a choice about my sister dying, but recognizing that Suzan had always been God’s child and that she was only meant to be on this earth for a period of time made it possible for us to release our human desires and accept God’s plan for “fixing” Suzan—regardless of how He might choose to do that. The ability to trust God that much is a picture of the peace that passes understanding. Praise God our family had that peace.

In the twenty years I’ve been Dad’s editor, the hardest book we’ve ever worked on together was Confessions of a Grieving Christian. Dad was inspired to write that book because he wanted his readers to know how God, friends, and family were helping him walk his way through the grief of losing his eldest daughter, Suzan, to pulmonary fibrosis. He wanted his readers to know that there is joy in the midst of grief, and he knew people would wonder how “Mr. Positive” was dealing with his devastating loss. He wanted to be transparent. There is no easy way around grief, but he felt if he could put into words what he was going through and how God worked it out in his life, he might be able to help others in their grief journey.

It had also occurred to all of us that Confessions of a Grieving Christian would be an exclamation point for Confessions of a Happy Christian, an earlier book he had written specifically for my then-agnostic sister Suzan. He wrote that book praying that Suzan would read it, see his joy in Jesus Christ, and accept Him as her Lord and Savior, which, thankfully, she eventually did.

My sister Suzan turned forty-six years old on May 10, 1995, three days before she died. We are all grateful that she did not suffer the long, drawn-out, bedridden end that is typical of pulmonary fibrosis, but her sudden decline took all of us by surprise. One day she was at work, the next she was in the hospital.

We all knew her condition was terminal unless she got a lung transplant, but we thought she was at least two or three years away from needing one. The first week she was in the hospital she was put on life support, so drugs were used to keep her in a semi-comatose state.

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