Book Review: Eight Twenty Eight by Ian and Larissa Murphy

I'm on an email list for Inspired Reads, which provides suggestions for inexpensive religious Kindle books, mostly Christian.

I LOVE Kindle books. Love them, love them, love them.  It is SO nice walking around with my Kindle full of fun books I can read when I'm outside the home, or nursing the baby. The latter is actually a big deal.  Kindles are perfect for one hand operation.

Ok, back to our regularly scheduled blog post.  I recently purchased  Eight Twenty Eight, by Ian and Larissa Murphy.  It's the true story of the Murphys.  A very brief synopsis is as follows:

Boy meets girl in college.  Boy is Christian, girl becomes Christian.
Boy and girl fall madly in love with each other.
Boy starts working extra jobs to earn money for engagement ring so that he can propose.
Boy is on his way to an extra job one day, when he has a massive, horrific car accident and sustains a catastrophic brain injury.

That obviously has all the makings of a tragedy, and in many ways it IS a tragedy. But God sustained Ian's life and Larissa's love for him, in spite of the fact that Ian really wasn't the same person after the accident. He was in a coma for 7 months and even now is severely disabled.  But he has gotten back speech, and his brain works fairly well, and 3 or so years after the accident he proposed, and they did indeed get married.

It's a thought provoking book, an interesting book, a challenging book. I'm sure most people would think "What would I do?" in a situation like that.  Larissa's devotion to Ian is, in many ways, startling.  He isn't able to work and indeed he can't even walk without support. She has to support them both financially and do the vast majority of the household work too.  Ian is a kind and loving and devoted husband, and he and she share a vibrant faith in God's goodness, but it still is challenging.  Larissa is open about that in the book, about the sorrow and the frustration.  Ian has short term memory loss and while he can read and indeed can impart significant spiritual truths, he mostly lives in the present and doesn't seem to struggle emotionally as much as his wife.  Or maybe he does, but since she is the primary author her struggle comes out more clearly.

This morning, I looked them up online.  They have a blog and I also found a fairly recent video which showed footage of their wedding (which went viral a couple of years ago) plus more recent information.

I admit that after watching the video, Larissa's choice seems even more amazing because Ian really struggles with a lot of things.  In the book, his speech is of course written down.  In person, he talks, but it is very garbled and hard to follow.  I'm sure his wife and other family members and caretakers have learned to understand him well (just as I can understand our toddler because I am around him so much) but it must make it hard for him to interact with strangers.  He also just looks odd. I LOVE that he and she are open about what he is like because we live in a culture which is WAY too focused on looks and intelligence.  Ian is very limited in some ways, but he is a human being, made in the image of Christ, and he is as valuable as any other person.  Maybe more so...Jesus said a lot about the first being last, and the last being first.  Ian may be first in heaven, who knows.

One thing that occurred to me rather strongly was whether marital intimacy would work out and the answer seems to be YES, that part works out just fine, thank you very much. :-)