Resurrection Year – A Memoir of Broken Dreams and New Beginnings.
by Sheridan Voysey

Thomas Nelson, Nashville, Tennessee, 2013.

The ache and the agony of infertility is in one sense the theme of this book, but it is a whole lot more. It is a love story, the story of a marriage and a quest, or two quests, for an Aussie couple you feel you would love to know.

They wanted a child, yes – and, denied one, they needed a fresh start. Each needed a new job or career – one each – renewed faith in God and insight into the meaning of suffering. This is the story of their resurrection year.

Sheridan Voysey already had a career. From early in their marriage, in Brisbane, Perth and finally Sydney, he was making a name as a presenter and interviewer in Christian radio. He was the author of Unseen Footprints: Encountering the Divine along the Journey of Life, which won the Australian Christian Book of the Year award in 2006, and three volumes of a series, Open House, featuring interviews from his radio program of that name. He had met and interviewed some amazing people, well-known authors and artists, rich in life’s wisdom and humour – Joni Eareckson, Philip Yancey, Adrian Plass … But after introducing his successor Leigh Hatcher, with mixed feelings he left the show he loved in order to enable Merryn to follow her dream to live abroad.

Ten years of unanswered prayers and cruel let-downs seeking a child through fruitless rounds of IVF cycles, or adoption, had left her broken-hearted. She longed at least for a consolation prize. Doors close but an exciting one opens, a joy for both – a dream job for Merryn, a medical statistician, to work at Oxford University.

The episodic style, back and forth, reflects the months and years of hopes raised and dashed, interspersed with joys from other aspects of their lives. In 2011, fifteen years married, they pack up their Sydney home.

Voysey finds ironic humour in that painful process, and writes with verve and freshness of their delight as, like a honeymoon couple, they taste places like Rome and Paris and spend time at L’Abri, Switzerland, a centre for exploring life and faith founded by Francis and Edith Schaeffer in the fifties.

There they resolve some issues as they wrestle theologically with the problem of pain – whether “God is a meanie”, mocking their prayers and longings. He is there and He is love. They note the paradox that at times the most readable books are the least biblical in their arguments and while those with more promise are often densely written and impossible to understand. This book is both readable and honest, with depth.

Merryn has a great job. Oxford is now home. In Australia, Sheridan Voysey had a both a job and profile. Radio producers and publishers make it clear that abroad, he lacks that essential profile. So he is jobless, a hard thing for a childless husband.

When a major U.S. publisher accepts his book proposal, writing this and other books becomes his job.

Merryn and Sheridan Voysey ask the One who fills the universe to fill their new home in Oxford with friends, shared stories and healing.

Lesley Hicks is a freelance writer.