Gone Are The Days
A True Story of Forgiveness and Healing.
by
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My mother sensed something in me throwing anger her way, but she had no clue as to why, nor did I. Ours was a sad coexistence, a relationship that desired closeness, as one is drawn to a hot stove for its warmth, but fears getting too close lest one be injured.
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About the Book
From childhood into manhood I staggered, lost within the mystery of a deeply flawed relationship. For so long, as though blind, with hands and feet touching my way through life, I made little emotional progress. The morning I found my mother’s lifeless body, my eyes were opened and my life changed forever.
Gone Are the Days is a moving account of an unusual woman and the troubled son who came to love her.
About the Author
The tracks of Ken McArthur’s life cannot be found along unadventurous roads. At age seventeen, he chose to embark on an American version of “Waltzing Matilda.” Inspired by the music of Woody Guthrie, the young man hitchhiked thousands of miles, slept under bridges, in fields, and along roadsides. He met the landscapes and the peoples of the great nation in which he was fortunate to be born. Seeking to satisfy an insatiable hunger for understanding life, he joined a traveling carnival, lived in a commune, and in silence sat alone in the Rocky Mountains.
One rainy day in Colorado, the pickup in which he was riding slid over a cliff onto a steep incline and rolled many times, leaving him severely injured. After eight surgeries, a life-and-death battle with flesh-eating bacteria, and two months in the hospital, Ken went home to Texas. The accident ended his hitchhiking days, but not the lure of adventure. Through deserts, swamps, and forests, he journeyed in airplanes, abandoned mines, caves, cults, and canoes. For over two years he worked with a professional treasure-hunting company on many of America’s famous lost treasures.
In his thirties, Ken became a carpenter as well as an inventor. However, at age fifty, his life took a downward slide and he found himself in yet another dire life-circumstance. Due to a physical and an emotional decline, he lost everything and became homeless for eight months. During what he calls “his time outside,” Ken witnessed a living parable involving a wasp and a spider, and once again his direction in life changed. He heard the call to write. You can read the story of the wasp and the spider in the prologue of Gone are the Days.
Ken McArthur now lives in Carmel, Indiana and has written a children’s book, Spinny the Spider, and is presently working on The Foolishness of God, an account of his relationship with his father. If someone were to ask Ken, “What is the greatest experience of your life?” without hesitation, Ken would avow “The day I received Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior!”