Getting Ready for the New Life: Facing Illness or Death With the Word and Prayers - Bansemer, Richard F. Augsburg Fortress, 2004. 83p. $10.99, Paperback. ISBN 0-8066-4988-7. 242.4 Death—Meditations.

In Getting Ready for the New Life, retired Lutheran pastor Richard Bansemer has provided those facing illness or death and their caregivers a book small in size but great in comfort and reassurance.

Fifteen brief meditations with titles such as “Doing the Dying,” “When God Says ‘No,’” and “Thou My Inheritance” are followed not just by references to appropriate Scripture but by the passages themselves, taken from the NRSV. The author includes a prayer, at times almost as long as the meditation, but each is truly a personal conversation with God. Chapters conclude with thought-provoking questions.

Long years as a pastor have given Bansemer a deep knowledge of and sensitivity to the emotions and questions that patients and caregivers have at a time of serious illness and as death approaches.

The author introduces his longest chapter, “The Christian Funeral,” with a discussion of the times when Jesus grieved. Bansemer regrets that in some funerals the deceased is not even named. He includes the entire funeral meditation for a young man killed in an automobile accident as a model of one that celebrates the young life cut short and his continued relationship with those gathered to mourn his death.

Getting Ready for the New Life would be a valuable addition to a church library.

Bevery M. Bixler
First Presbyterian Church
Ashland, Ohio