Book excerpt: WE LIVE IN A CULTURE THAT IS DESPERATE TO AVOID LOSS. We choose to fight it because we assume that it has come only to unfairly steal and inflict terrible pain. Loss is seen as the rogue enemy and heartless foe, rather than an opportunity for immense and improbable growth. It's in loss that some of the richest and rarest of life's lessons lay buried, eagerly waiting to be deeply mined and unearthed. In the deepest pain God does the deepest work. An Autumn's Journey - Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons does not loosely gloss over loss or provide shallow prescriptions and weak formulas for our grieving. Rather, it aggressively embraces both grief and loss, bringing fresh eyes to these times in our lives in order to draw out of them the marvelous riches that we all too often miss.