Letters for Lizzie is a book about the unfolding of a horrific set of events striking a family.  Walking with Arthur is Jim's story, 10 years earlier, of how a friendship changed his life. 

Letters for Lizzie tells about Jim and Lizzie O'Donnell, whose faith in God was big enough to risk all that is familiar to them.  They left behind money, friends, nearness to family, and moved from Boston to a little town in Indiana, where Jim could teach at a Christian college. 

Once in Indiana, however, Lizzie’s life is under attack, first from a terminal cancer diagnosis, then from end-stage heart failure. And Jim's faith came to be under attack as well. What happened?  What had they missed?  Why was God – the God they hoped to serve -- seemingly, so angry with them?

Jim O’Donnell is a person of faith, but he's is not unwilling to ask the hard questions that skeptics might pose in times of trouble and confusion.  O’Donnell’s own faith seemed to change over the course of his 13 letters.  At first, it is winsome and innocent: God will reward Lizzie and him with a simple but solid life working with college students.  But as the crises deepen, the simple trust that his God would never let him down gives way to dread and fear that perhaps -- just perhaps -- he'd misunderstood who God is.  

Indiana brought them wonderful gifts of new friends and a caring community.  But their faith is tested, nonetheless, in a furnace of suffering and disappointment.   Ultimately, they find God sustains them.  God is there with them in the shadows and darkness.  But, even knowing that, God seemed absent for long periods of time.  Grace is given, yes.  But not always at the time, or in the way, Jim or Lizzie might have thought.

Letters for Lizzie is composed of 13 letters, originally written to "friends back East," during 1995 and 1996, spanning the family’s move from Boston to Indiana until Lizzie’s heart transplant.   The letters are honest and raw.  They were sent, largely, in hopes of building prayer support from their friends, who, in some cases, thought Jim crazy to have given up what he had.  Jim’s earliest letters reveal the brave hope that, if the family behaved well, God might use their story to lead some to consider a faith in God.

In the finished book, each of the 13 original letters is preceded by a brief reflection, looking back from 2003, on thoughts and emotions not included in the original letter.

The resulting book is an intimate, honest and vulnerable true story  of the dangers life can pose.  It is a book of struggle and ultimate hope that is a gift to all who suffer.

Walking with Arthur was written after Letters for Lizzie but tells of a time before, of a time when Jim's self-absorbed life strove to climb the money mountains of corporate America.  On the surface, Jim seemed to have everything.  But just below the surface, he was falling apart until an unexpected friendship led him to ask questions about the way he lived, the goals he strove to achieve, and what he believed in.

Read newspaper coverage of the story of Jim and Lizzie