Thomas Shepard

7 Pages 1836 Words

Many people spend their lives searching for answers to their problems or past misfortunes, answers that most people will never find. Seeking out truth is no easy task, especially when you don’t know where to start looking. People die every day, and their loved ones are left behind to ponder why. Death has no scheme, no rhyme or reason or prejudices. So why is it that someone can smoke cigarettes for sixty year and pass away peacefully in their sleep from natural causes, and someone who has never taken a drag get cancer in the prime of their life. Some people would say bad luck, Thomas Shepard would say that it was gods will. He was a man whose life was filled with hardships and tragedy, yet he was able to find peace at times through some of his own, and others experiences, and most importantly, he was able to find peace through God.
Throughout much of The Spiritual Accounts of Thomas Shepard, tragedy surrounds his life. He was born into religious persecution, coming from a puritan family during a time in England when anyone who was not an Anglo-Saxon was frowned upon. This did not so much effect his childhood but other misfortunes did. When the plague struck his town of Towchester he was sent away to live with his grandparents in Fossecut. While he was tending to farm animals at the ripe age of four the plague was ravishing his fathers family. It was during this time that his mother passed away, not of the plague, but from some other disease that followed. Shepard then returned home not to the receptive arms of his loving mother, but to his father and his new wife who, “did let me see the difference between my own mother and a stepmother”(3). This is a relevant situation even today that many people may find themselves in. It is not easy to get over the death of your mother, especially when your father replaces her with a cold-hearted woman who shows no compassion. “She did not seem to love me but incensed my father often agai...