Finding Sanctuary

Book excerpt: Winner of a first-place award in memoirs, a second-place for best front cover artwork, and a third-place in the category first time author of a book from the Catholic Media Association. Where is God when the innocent suffer? Jennifer Hubbard began to grapple with the question in 2012 when her six-year-old daughter Catherine was killed in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In the depths of her grief, Hubbard founded an animal sanctuary in Catherine’s memory, creating a place of healing for her family and their community and fulfilling her daughter’s dream. Hubbard’s courageous witness will uplift your faith and demonstrate how Christ’s redemptive suffering provides a path of hope, even in the darkest moments of our lives. Hubbard’s daughter Catherine was a happy little girl who wanted to spend her life rescuing animals. All that changed on the morning of December 14, 2012. Though her daughter’s tragic death marked the end of Hubbard’s world as she’d known it, she instinctively held on to her faith in God, realizing it was the only way she could bear the initial impact of her daughter’s death and the subsequent waves of grief and loss as her marriage ended and she was forced to forge a new life. A typographic mistake on Catherine’s obituary led Hubbard to an unexpected invitation to fulfill her daughter’s dreams of opening an animal shelter. She began to channel her grief into a work of peace by starting a foundation in her daughter’s memory, by writing, and by helping her son recover after surviving the tragedy that took his sister’s life. Ultimately, it was Hubbard’s faith that gave her the courage to entrust her daughter to God and to seek his plan for her own life. “God helped me to look back on my life up to that time and to see all the ways he had been preparing me for what was to come,” she writes. In Finding Sanctuary, Hubbard shares her journey of healing and transformation in order to help those who may be grappling with an inability to trust in the goodness of God. You will learn: to recognize the diamonds of divine insight and encouragement when you are deep in the mine of pain and despair; to be patient with yourself as you take the time you need to process what is happening; and to look both to the past and the present for signs of God’s presence, preparing you to move toward acceptance, forgiveness, and peace. Each chapter in the book is dedicated to one step in Hubbard’s journey toward wholeness and includes reflection questions to guide you to consider what God is teaching you as you make your own way toward God’s kingdom of peace.