A Grace Discovered: Perseverance During Our Season of Loss by Curt Olson
>> Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Readers will understand the personal and spiritual challenges the Olsons faced on a journey through multiple job losses during the Great Recession, the death of a parent, two long-distance moves, a home in foreclosure with one of the Big Banks, a non-life-threatening health issue, and the end of a more than 20-year career in professional journalism.
The personal challenges focus on God orchestrating events that prepared the family for this season, although when life happens we don’t always recognize it for what it is at that moment. The Olsons also experienced the reversal of roles, God’s preparation for his wife, Lynette, to accept moving away from family, and the move of his mother from their home in the Cleveland, Ohio area as God gave glimpses that a big move was coming. The spiritual issues dive into the challenges of a man, husband, and father dealing with job loss for the first time in his career, the counsel he received from multiple godly men, waiting, worship, fearing God, and persevering under trial. Since this book is published at a time when Christians are martyred for their faith every day in the Muslim world, and elsewhere, it’s hard to call what the Olsons faced as “persecution.” But God has provided deep spiritual perseverance for the Olsons to hold them steady and strong during a deeply distressing period of their lives.
The timing of this inspirational non-fiction narrative is the Great Recession, which the author believes never ended for the vast majority of Americans. Readers may be familiar with the books in print by former secretaries of the U.S. Treasury, Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, which address the U.S. government’s response to the nation’s near economic collapse in fall 2008. Economists and others have written similar books. However, few books in the past six years have outlined how the Great Recession impacted average people, individuals and families trying to play by the rules and survive. “A Grace Discovered: Perseverance During Our Season of Loss” achieves that … and much more.
Wherever they lived, the Olsons were overwhelmed by the benevolence of churches of which they were members or attended regularly. Fellow Christians had their back, and that is how God designed the church to function. We celebrate together. We mourn together. We help others who are hurting. And we suffer together.
Curt Olson trusts readers will receive encouragement and hope for all challenges they face by telling his story, and the story of his family. However, Curt Olson also seeks to challenge the church in America in the area of benevolence. No one should anticipate America returning to the days of the 1980s and 1990s when the United States thrived as an economic juggernaut. While America remains the richest country in the world, that status is fading swiftly. There’s a country worth saving and everyone, including the church, has a role to play.
While Curt can brag about accomplishments during his professional career, his relationship with Jesus Christ far surpasses everything in his life. He is my Lord and my God.
Curt is an award-winning writer, having earned Associated Press writing awards in Ohio in 2001 and New York State in 1995. He has earned accomplishments at every level of his career. While he loved journalism, God compelled him to end that in summer 2013 when he was in his third round of unemployment in four years from that industry. He is transitioning his career away from journalism and he is waiting for God to reveal what’s next. He has been working part-time since mid-May 2014.
Curt Olson has been a professional journalist for more than 20 years, which included serving in his dream job as editorial page editor at a daily newspaper in the Cleveland, Ohio area. He also served as a beat writer covering government or public and higher education, in the Cleveland area and a newspaper in Jamestown, N.Y., and a nonprofit website journalist in Texas and South Carolina uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse in state governments as an investigative reporter.
At the newspaper in the Cleveland area Curt also served as religion editor for five years. He found that incredibly rewarding when traditional journalists primarily don’t care about faith and have no understanding of how to communicate it.
Curt is a proud graduate of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia and Maple Grove Junior-Senior High School in Bemus Point, New York. Other than college, he lived in Western New York State for 28 years before moving to the Cleveland, Ohio area in April 1996 when he was hired as a newspaper reporter there.
After marrying his wife, Lynette, in 2000, the Olsons lived in the Cleveland area about a dozen years before moving to Round Rock, Texas in July 2011 and then the Columbia, S.C, area about 18 months later. Curt regards his greatest accomplishment being married to his best friend, Lynette, and being the father of Samuel and Olivia. Curt and Lynette have strived to have a marriage and family life grounded in the truth of God’s word. It’s odd that people have to do this today, but yes, Curt believes marriage is between a man and a woman because that’s God’s model.
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