"When my doctor told me I was dying, I came alive." What happens when you come face-to-face with your mortality? When your body fails you, what happens to your faith? Russ Ramsey was struck by a bacterial infection that destroyed his mitral valve, sending him into heart failure and requiring urgent open-heart surgery. As he faced the possibility of death, he found himself awakened to new realities. In the critical days and months that followed, Ramsey came to see the world through the eyes of affliction. He grappled with fear, anger, depression, and loss, and yet he experienced grace through the suffering that filled him with a hope and hunger for the life to come. This profoundly eloquent memoir gives voice to the deepest questions of the human condition. In the midst of pain, we can see glimpses of eternity.
"Russ is the kind of writer I wish we had more of in Christian literature. His prose is flawless, his voice familiar, and his theology true. Struck is his story, told with the kind of humility only a man who knows his frailty can display. I pray it reminds us of our frailty too."
Lore Ferguson Wilbert, writer, Sayable.net
"While I don't believe in 'must-read' books, you'd be cheating yourself if you didn't read this one. It's all at once well written and startlingly helpful. Beautiful and heartbreaking. And like all the best books, I think about what I read on those honest pages all the time. Struck reminds me of all the good books and it's like nothing else I've ever read."
Matthew B. Redmond, author of The God of the Mundane
