Bruce Nygren - Touching the Shadows: A Love Tested and Renewed

Praise for Touching the Shadows

Most of us dont know it when we sign up for marriage, but it is holy love that God intends for us in its blessing. Bruce Nygrens bold, articulate, honest narration of his marriage as it is saved by suffering documents in detail just such a Christ-formed holy love.

EUGENE H. PETERSON
Author and translator of The Message

Touching the Shadows is a moving celebration of commitment in marriageno matter what the circumstances or cost. As you follow Bruce and Racinda through their life-changing journey, you will recognize that to be a real success in life, we must first be successful in our homes.

JOHN C. MAXWELL
Founder, The INJOY Group

For better or for worse, in sickness and in health... We repeat our vows at our wedding like theyre poetic clichs from the past, but when those vows are tested, we find out fast how resolved our love really is. Touching the Shadows is not just a powerful story of two peoples commitment to live out those vows; its also a clear road map any of us can follow when its our turn to walk through the valley of the shadow with someone we love.

DR. TIM KIMMEL
Author of Little House on the Freeway

For any couple who has felt more alone sleeping next to each other than they did sleeping single... For every husband and wife who have longed to reach across the growing chasm between them, but could not... Bruce Nygren expertly walks through secret places of the married heart, ultimately illuminating one of lifes greatest mysteries: that pain is often the best path, perhaps the only path, to the rediscovery of true love.

BECKY FREEMAN
Marriage columnist and author of
Chocolate Chili Pepper Love and Marriage 911

If you struggle with God, this book is for you. If you are facing dark days, this book is for you. If you have unanswered questions about suffering, this book is for you. Touching theShadows is a rare glimpse into the authentic faith of two of Gods choicest servants. These pages dont offer a Pollyanna approach to life, but instead deliver hope, encouragement, and, most importantly, a real faith in the God who can be trusted. Bruce and Racinda are good friends who have faced some of lifes most daunting circumstances. Read this book. You wont regret it.

DENNIS AND BARBARA RAINEY
Executive Director, FamilyLife
Coauthors of Moments Together for Couples
and Starting Your Marriage Right

Touching the Shadows is a courageous, painful, and redemptive walk through the dark woods of marital and personal agony. Bruce and Racinda honestly and winsomely allow us to see the by-products of selfishness, illness, past abuse, and the normal wear and tear of life, as well as the process of how God redeems us in spite of ourselves. Their story promises that no matter how lost we feel, or how much pain we have experienced, there is hope as we experience God as our wild lover. This is a glorious book.

DR. DAN ALLENDER
Author of The Wounded Heart and The Healing Path

Piercingly honest. Painfully confrontational. Impeccably written. Touching the Shadows will jolt you into evaluating your personal relationships. With descriptive wording that makes the reader touch, feel, and taste the agony, anger, struggle, and pain of a marriage that is disintegrating, Bruce Nygren offers hope to all of us who have, at times, failed in our relationships. This book is particularly helpful to married couples, but its applications go far beyond marriage. If you long for intimacy, oneness, connectedness, and spiritual unity with the people you are closest to, this book is for you!

CAROL KENT
President, Speak Up Speaker Services
Author of Becoming a Woman of Influence

Touching the
Shadows

Touching the
Shadows

A Love Tested and Renewed

Bruce Nygren

Copyright 2000 by Bruce Nygren

All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

Published by Thomas Nelson, Inc., in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, 7680 Goddard St., Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nygren, Bruce
Touching the shadows : a love tested and renewed / Bruce Nygren.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7852-6780-8 (hc)
1. Nygren, RacindaHealth. 2. Nygren, Bruce. 3. BreastCancer PatientsUnited StatesBiography. 4. BreastCancerPatients United StatesFamily relationships. I. Title
RC280.B8 N947 2000
362.1'9699449'0092dc21
[B]

00-045228
CIP

Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 BVG 05 04 03 02 01 00

Contents

For Racinda

1
The Moment

March 1997

I KNOW NOW IT WAS THE WEEKEND that changed everything.

Saturday morning began like hundreds of others. With the alarm clock gagged, how satisfying it is to tell your mind to forget weekday worries and drift again into the temporary death of sleep. But this time the little thinker was being a jerk, awake at the dawns early light, banging the door on the brain closet with the hope of dragging out forgotten ideas, wounds in need of a lick, things to do, unclassified feelings, wrongs to right, postponed pleasuresa heap of stuff so large that not even Saturdays mental fog could conceal it.

And this crazy basketball game! Why had I agreed so willinglyto present myself for public humiliation? I was going tocoach a basketball gameprobably my sons last game ever!

But looming above petty thoughts and anxieties was the state of my mate. Our marriage was sick again, and for the first time I was really scared about us. Always before there had been hopeful relational prescriptionsslick words, flowers, some new household toy, a baby, a vacation, a know-it-all marriage book, a wise counselor, church work, a marriage seminar, a new houseall distractions to dull reality. Not so now. Many months of her roller-coaster moods had left me tired. And more than a little angry.

She lay beside me, but just how far apart were we these days? Groaning feebly, she shifted and rolled on her back, her shoulder now touching mine. In dawns faint glow, I watched our covering sheet rise and fall in tiny waves, the ebb and flow of her breath. She slept now, but I wondered if the demons of the night had tormented her again.

The first signs had shown months earlier, leaves rattled by a breeze threatening to become a gale. Her body would warm and cool for no apparent reason. More troubling was a slow darkening of her mood, but her annual doctors checkup yielded no clues. Irritations wormed holes in her resilient outlook, and our normal relational bumping now bore sores. I had reemerged as the provocateur of her pain.

As the weeks passed she had slipped lower on a slope that fell away into a dark canyon. I would try to reach her, flinging ropes woven from hopeful words and deeds, but all snapped or slipped her grasp, none able to bear the weight and halt her slide. The night brought agony, the sweet renewal of sleep replaced by mental overtime, a ceaseless sifting of memories and feelings. Each day she edged nearer exhaustion.

Angry words darted between us. By last month a smog had swallowed all but familiar landmarks in our relationship. My wife of these many years was convinced that no one cared anymore, not even me. All she could see were the cold, stone, steep walls of her abyss.