I waded into Eric Tonjes’s manuscript with honest dread—another account of the sad journey of a loving couple into cancer’s darkness. I have read it before, lived it before, wept through it before, and did not welcome the weight of it again. And then I began to read. Contrary to my expectations, I found joyful love, honest—really honest—grief, sweet family bonds, humor so out of place that it helps, profound faith, hope to share, and remarkably compelling writing. The long day’s journey into night never materialized. Instead, I found myself cheering these champions of the race that will be lost—and then won.
Maggie Wallem Rowe
This is a book Eric Tonjes never wanted to be qualified to write, but one the rest of us urgently need to read. Grief comes calling on us all, and we have no choice but to open the doors of our hearts to the agony of eventually losing someone we love. In Either Way, We’ll Be All Right, Tonjes takes us with him as he experiences the searing pain of seeing his wife eaten alive by cancer. In brutally beautiful prose yet without self-pity, he eloquently wraps language around deep sorrow while pointing the way to a loving God who meets us in our grief.
Kristen Wetherell
In his refreshingly honest book, Eric Tonjes shows us what it means to preach the gospel to ourselves in suffering and grief. I appreciate his candor because it will encourage the body of Christ to run straight to Jesus in their pain, not away from him. I’m happy to recommend this beautiful book to those who are hurting since a vision of our glorious, always-present God and our eternal future with him is what we most need.
J. Todd Billings
Numerous forces at work in modern Western culture shape us to be people who avoid the waves of grief for fear of being overwhelmed. Many Christians in this context attempt to keep God at a distance as well, as if even God might be overtaken by the helplessness of loss. Eric Tonjes shows us a different path. In his poignant and direct way, Tonjes welcomes us on an experiential and theological pilgrimage: Amid our gasping in the waves of loss, the Lord of creation enables us to breathe, to both wrestle with and rest in him. In a book about loss and hope, mortality and divine glory, Tonjes bears witness to human and divine mysteries we so often suppress or ignore.
Jake Meador
Because I was in their wedding, I was a witness to the first things of Eric and Elizabeth’s life together. Over these past years, I have witnessed the terrible beauty of a couple that is now, too soon, facing the last things together. They have borne this calamity with courage, fidelity, and honor. How have they done that? It is not through comforting themselves with trite answers or finding techniques for making the horrors of our cursed world somehow less awful. What they have done is humbly rely on God’s grace to sustain them, always reflecting on the truths taught by Christians for millennia, the truths that Eric writes about so beautifully in this book. Reading this will help you learn to love the God that Eric and Elizabeth love, the God who is their (and our) comfort, even in the deepest darkness.
Kate Merrick
This book is a gift. It’s gorgeously honest, offering the reader both solidarity and rapport. It’s hopeful, in the most down-to-earth, truthful sense. And it’s an inspiring call to meet God in the midst of the sorrow we all eventually become acquainted with. Having my own grief experience, I found Eric to be a true brother, a fellow traveler, and one who offers a rich variety of truth to feed on. You won’t find empty platitudes here. Please read. Enter the search for God in suffering, the beauty of pain, and the offer of strength.
Bryan Chapell
I waded into Eric Tonjes’s manuscript with honest dread—another account of the sad journey of a loving couple into cancer’s darkness. I have read it before, lived it before, wept through it before, and did not welcome the weight of it again. And then I began to read. Contrary to my expectations, I found joyful love, honest—really honest—grief, sweet family bonds, humor so out of place that it helps, profound faith, hope to share, and remarkably compelling writing. The long day’s journey into night never materialized. Instead, I found myself cheering these champions of the race that will be lost—and then won.
Chris Brauns
Here, written by one who is suffering, is a book that will serve the suffering. And in a fallen world, all of us will tomorrow find ourselves in that category, even if we are not shedding tears today. Reflecting on his own journey, Eric Tonjes explains with the heart of a pastor how the tears of grief are a lens through which we can most clearly see the beauty and glory of Christ such that we recognize, in Eric’s words, that “our vision of God on the throne provides a resource like no other for moving forward under the weight of grief.” Eric’s thoughts are not just the raw journal entries of a man whose wife has cancer. Rather, his reflections are built on a foundation of rock-solid theology. This is a book that will serve both our minds and our emotions. I highly recommend it.
Andrew Arndt
It is tempting to say that what qualifies someone to speak meaningfully about suffering is their experience of suffering. But I don’t think that’s right. For the believer, what qualifies us to speak meaningfully about suffering is our knowledge of God in the midst of it. Eric Tonjes does this brilliantly. No whitewashing, no side-stepping, no false hope. Just the gospel of God-with-us, God-for-us, forever.
Rev. Dr. Eric E. Peterson
I don’t believe I’ve ever come across something quite like this: the sophistication of a pastor-theologian who obviously knows a great deal about the nature of God combined with an individual who is personally gutted with grief. In these tender, wisdom-soaked pages, follow Eric Tonjes, who has gone to the depths of human anguish and lived to tell the honest story of how he and his wife were met by the God who suffers with us and who ushers us into a deeper intimacy with life itself. Eric is the kind of pastor everybody wants at their side when facing inexplicable pain.
Sarah Van Diest
By the time this book is published, our music pastor will have died. His family has watched him diminish in front of their eyes as cancer overtakes him. He watches it himself and mourns. It is one of the most impossible of situations imaginable. Fears and questions abound. This book sits in their home as a companion for their unplanned journey in uncharted territory. Who understands this path better but one who is on it as well? Eric Tonjes offers himself as a fellow pilgrim, traveling on a road none wish to take. He wrestles openly and unapologetically both with the fears and questions entwined with death and with the God who is sovereign over all. His message to you: Take heart; you do not walk this path alone.
