Acknowledgment
Acknowledgment
As some of you will know, for seven weeks following Thanksgiving Day, 1983, I was critically ill. I was taken first to the hospital in Aigle, Switzerland, and then, after a literally life and death dash across the Atlantic as a stretcher case, I spent the major part of the next six weeks in St. Mary's Hospital, connected with Mayo Clinic. While in St. Mary's, Edith and our children were told three times that I was expected to die. Happily that time has passed. And as I write this now I am convalescing in one of the houses of the Rochester, Minnesota branch of L'Abri.
Thus, that seven weeks was totally snatched from my life along with most of the work I had hoped to do. In that situation this book never would have made the deadline for the seminars bearing the same name, if it had not been for the long hours and devotion of Lane Dennis, vice-president and general manager of Crossway Books.
Lane is a friend, and one who knows my work "forward and backwards." He is the publisher of my Complete Works and A Christian Manifesto. He brought his whole family to spend three months at L'Abri in the summer of 1978. He has listened to many hours of my tapes, and he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation as a sociological study of L'Abri.
When I got out of the hospital I found that the seven weeks when I was in the hospital had not been lost. During this time Lane had been working long hours doing research and preparing my materials for the final manuscript. Thus, when a little time had passed and I felt a bit better, the manuscript was in a form ready for me to work. As I write this, we are still spending long hours on the phone and exchanging the last phases of the manuscript by Federal Express. There is every reason to believe now that the book will soon be on the Crossway presses and ready for the seminars as they begin early in March.
But the point is, if it had not been for Lane Dennis none of this would have been possible.
Nothing like this has ever occurred with my previous books and I, and everyone helped by the book, owe a debt of gratitude to Lane Dennis.
FRANCIS A. SCHAEFFER
February 7, 1984