Songs Through the Night

By Colin Edmondson

We are all at some time or other faced with loss and trial. How do we deal with them? If these kinds of experiences are foreign to us now, they inevitably will come to us. What is it like for those who struggle with long-term illness and a doctor’s diagnosis?
This book handles these issues head-on from someone who has lived with Parkinson’s disease for over 20 years and who has been involved with facing many different kinds of loss. Where is God in all this? In this book the author reflects honestly on these issues – and more – and uses his battles with Parkinson’s as a place to start.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398436145

Colin Edmondson

Colin was born and raised in Kettering, where he attended the local Grammar School. After a compelling call to the ministry, he studied at London Bible College (now London School of Theology) where he gained a London University Bachelor of Divinity honours degree. Colin served five churches during his 42 years in ministry. In 2001 he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but was able to continue to work until his retirement in 2012. He has been married for over 50 years and has three sons and seven grandchildren.

Book preview

Foreword

This book is about a journey, a moving, fascinating journey in the face of great adversity. In 2001, Colin Edmondson began three years of progressive physical decline with Parkinson’s disease. Colin takes us into the many and complex issues when faced with a life-changing diagnosis, from who needs to know to the burden of informing others. Then the many different and conflicting responses to this devastating news, often leading to a profound sense of isolation and sometimes hurt.

After receiving prayer for his healing, Colin experienced a significant period of stability and indeed improvement in his condition, which enabled him to complete the race before him as a Christian minister.  With restored strength and freedom from the distressing symptoms of his illness he was also able, in the company of his wife Wendy, to return to his love of walking in the Highlands of Scotland, something which he thought he would never do again.

Colin writes about his experience, both the highs and lows, with his strikingly wonderful gift for words. He is an accomplished writer of Christian poems, and the reader will be stirred by Colin’s ability to express his deepest experiences in language both sublime and evocative. This book is written by one whose eyes are fixed on Jesus, the initiator and goal of our faith. His stated purpose in this book is to share his love of Jesus with the desire that others should come to experience his healing love. To this end, he draws on stories of suffering and illness in the Bible and explains why these are still relevant for us today.

For Colin, the years when life returned to normal were not to last forever. So, what can be learned from this? Was Colin not healed after all? If he was, why did the disease return? If it is God’s will that certain people bear these heavy crosses, there will be good reasons for this: for those who carry this cross as well as for those who watch from afar or who share the journey with words and deeds of comfort and support. Twenty years after his diagnosis, he is still in a better place than immediately before he experienced God’s healing in 2003.

A major contribution of this book is that it calls for the sufferer to be seen and known for who they really are, each with their unique identity as a person. Awareness of this basic human need is paramount in both the pastoral and medical professions.

Colin’s story will resonate with those fellow sufferers from this debilitating disease, and their loved ones and companions, on this long journey; I also suspect that it will make connections with many who live with other serious chronic illnesses. There are no easy days, just those which are perhaps less difficult. Every day demands courage and faith that all is not lost. Adjustments are necessary, but life is still worth living. 

Apart from writing inspirational poems, Colin has provided us with this volume, drawn from a rich seam of Christian experience. It is clear to me that his suffering has not diminished his joy in family life, or his desire to grow in his relationship with God. These reflections are shared knowing that there are others on the same or similar journeys. In Songs through the Night, we will witness great courage and honesty, in a story so movingly told. I am confident it will give courage and bring hope to other travellers along this dark and often lonely road.

Dr John Dyer, Birchington, 18 July 2021

Introduction

This book was written with the desire to bring blessing and encouragement to those who suffer. At the same time, I wish to bring understanding to those who care for the suffering. It is written not as a philosophical apologetic but as an attempt to chart a way through it. I write as a Christian pastor for well over forty years, as a preacher/teacher of over 50 years, as having a BD (Hons), twice a part-time hospital chaplain and finally one who has battled with Parkinson’s for over nineteen years.

These reflections began to be written when first diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The original title was Songs in the Night, and the reasons for the change to ‘through the Night’ will become obvious as the story unfolds. What is recorded is my response at the time. The parts in italics were recorded at or close to the events they relate. I hope this and the personal nature of the account is a help and not a hindrance to understanding. This comes not as an academic study divorced from life but as something forged by the fires of life’s realities. My desire is to encourage and promote in some small way the ministering of Christ’s love to needy people. If understanding and compassion are brought to others and the healing love of Christ extended in any way, it will have done what was intended.

I have reason to thank many people. Those who pray for me, without whom I doubt I would have survived the trial. My churches during this time, for their kindness, care and patience with an ailing pastor. Above all my wife Wendy who cared so constantly in my trials for me and never once made me think it was a burden to her. She is God’s greatest blessing to me on earth.

The story that will unfold is one of amazing love and mercy from God to a very ordinary man. My prayer is that you will know that love too.

When the earth quakes & the mountains fall –

Psalm 46:

God is our shelter and strength,

always ready to help in times of trouble.

So we will not be afraid, even if the earth is shaken

and mountains fall into the ocean depths;

even if the seas roar and rage,

and the hills are shaken by the violence.

The LORD Almighty is with us;

the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Chapter 1

Songs for the Night of Tears

Facing the Reality

‘Yesterday, the 12 February 2001, a slow fuse was lit on the rest of my life. It came in a brisk no-nonsense statement You have Parkinson’s disease. Of course, it was already there, but now sentence was pronounced and I knew my likely end. I knew it was true for me as for everyone else that one day I will face the last enemy, death. But it was anonymous, and the time indefinite. Now it has a face and I have a probable time period; I have a decade before major disability is likely to strike and then decline until one day I choke or fall. Suddenly the ending of my life is defined. It is similar to the time I stood before my father’s grave and saw the ending of my youth. Now I begin the last part of my life and I will carry this uninvited companion with me all the way. In the Bible story, Jacob wrestled with God for just one night, I will wrestle and fight this one enemy the rest of my days.

I was quite objective at first and in control, pleased with myself that I could make firm and sensible decisions about treatment. But we vowed not to hide feelings – the time left to us is too precious to use in any other way than with honesty and openness. I have sat alongside too many struggling in isolation with the pain of suffering to pretend. The rest of the journey must be clear and pure. We talked about how we needed to respond, how we felt, and we renewed commitments to each other. We talked for some time, because it is ‘we’, my sweet companion and I, who will tread this journey together. I didn’t want to burden her with this, always wanted to bring her joy, but now we face a greater challenge than Suilven1 together and at the last it will win the day.

This afternoon it finally hit me – the enormity, the final degrading awfulness. The sorrow claimed me as I was rehearsing in my mind what I would say to my three sons, how I would reassure them, and what their reactions might be and having to admit, to explain, that one day it would take hold of me. Whatever the delay, this thing will finally put its ropes around me, degrade me and cause my end. So I collapsed and howled and wept and knew my enemy. But I can still rob it of victory. It can claim my body but not my spirit.

I don’t want to tell the boys. I must and it must be me, but I don’t want to tell them. I don’t want to cause them pain.’

Sooner or later pain, suffering, is a challenge we all face and we all wish we didn’t. I wrote the above in a cloud of tears the day after the diagnosis was given. I was fifty-three and yet termed ‘young Parkinson sufferer’!

That first day, Monday February 12th, after we heard the news and I had my blood tests taken, we went home to hug each other and weep in each other’s arms. It was a day of occasional tears and constant returning to Parkinson’s, scratching round it a little like a new scab that had formed over a recent wound. When it