Forest Park, IL, March 07, 2024 –Tom Holmes, a seventy-five-year-old retired pastor, has completed his new book, “Progressive Disorder: A Memoir of Loss, Response-Ability and Redemption”: a poignant true account of the author’s life and how he chose to reframe the challenges he faced as opportunities to grow and deepen his faith in God, including his diagnosis of primary lateral sclerosis.
For the past fifteen years, author Tom Holmes has had a part-time job as a religion reporter and columnist for two local newspapers in the Chicago suburbs. He earned a Doctor of Ministry degree and has published three books: “Forty Days Alone in Thailand,” “The Soul of a Liberal Village,” and “Pongsak, Advocate for Asian Christians.” The author is married, has two adult children in their forties, and is blessed with two grandchildren.
“I was diagnosed in 1997 as having what they call a progressive disorder, primary lateral sclerosis,” writes Holmes. “I chose that medical term as the title of this memoir because I wanted to share with as many people as I can a testimony about how what seems like an oxymoron—progressive disorder—was reframed with the aid of a cloud of witnesses into a paradox which plumbs deep realities which reason cannot grasp. The experience of the losses in my life gradually came to feel less tragic, even though some were, and became opportunities to grow up in the ways I relate to the world as it is, to the people around me, and to God.
“In the pages that follow, readers won’t find a ‘and they lived happily ever after’ story unless they look beyond the veil of death and believe in eternal life. No, this is a narrative of redemption only in the sense that through grace and hard work, I gradually learned the art of response-ability, a way of leaning into life which Richard Rohr called falling upward.
“Neither will you find any groundbreaking new concepts that will transform your thinking about loss. What you will find, I believe, are good stories which will encourage you to keep at the work of using your losses as a doorway to maturity.”