Professing Christians always tremble a little at Christ’s commission, that we take up our cross daily in order to follow him. Yes, we want to do so – but to accept the suffering this will entail is, humanly speaking, hard; indeed, without grace it is impossible.

My thoughts are occasioned by reading Defying Gravity: How Choosing Joy Lifted my Family from Death to Life by Joe Sikorra (Ignatius Press). The author and his wife, Lori, an American couple originally from Florida, learned in 1998 that their much-loved older son, John, then aged 7, had juvenile Batten’s disease, a progressive and fatal illness. Six months after this traumatic diagnosis they discovered that their younger son, Ben, aged four, also had the same disease.