"I have learned that hope, which I had thought small and delicate like a moth in the night, can be hard as steel, a blade in your hand."
When Inara Cahira was eleven days old, she suffered catastrophic seizures. Her parents were told she would be unlikely to survive her first year. That she would never stand. That she would never walk. During the dark nights waiting by his daughter Inara's hospital bed and the uncertain years that followed, Stant Litore wrote the original edition of this book, both a deeply personal account of a vigil during the longest night and an insightful study of the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount in ancient Greek - a study and an experience that challenged everything Litore thought he knew about being "blessed" and "poor in spirit," and what it might mean to live a life of unstoppable hope.
After nine years in the dark, Inara's family has a diagnosis at last, one she shares with just ten other children in the medical literature - but now that geneticists know what to test for, the medical community may find many other infants who suffer as Inara has suffered. Their parents may not have to endure the years of mystery, and can know more about what is happening to their child and what to expect. That, together with her laughter and her dragon-like ferocity, is Inara's gift to the world.
Now Litore invites you to this second edition of
Lives of Unstoppable Hope,
revised throughout and adding fifty pages of new material to bring his daughter's story up to date, provide fresh meditation on the nature of hope, and consider in a new light one of the earliest Christian hymns in ancient Greek (
Phos Hilaron
).