The title is not a figure of speech, and understanding where it comes from changes the whole book.
Lou Gehrig stood at Yankee Stadium in 1939, dying of the disease that would take his name, and told a packed house he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. John R. Paine, diagnosed with the same illness, borrowed that line for his own account. He means it the way Gehrig meant it.
The Luckiest Man: How a Seventeen-Year Battle with ALS Led Me to Intimacy with God is by John R. Paine with Seth Haines. Haines is credited as co-author and the old review left him off entirely.
What the book is
Paine was a successful businessman and a respected Christian leader when he was diagnosed with ALS. His account is that he thought he already knew God, and that the diagnosis stripped away what he had mistaken for intimacy and left him with the real thing.
Seventeen years is the span, and it matters. This is not a book written in the shock of a diagnosis or in the glow of a recovery that never came. It is written from inside a long, slow, physically brutal decline, by a man who kept losing function and kept going.
Why it is worth a man’s time
Most Christian writing on suffering is written by people who got better or by people watching from outside. This one is not, and you can feel the difference.
Paine does not resolve the problem of suffering and does not try. What he does is testify that God was actually present in it, which is a smaller claim and a much harder one to fake over seventeen years.
For a man whose faith has never been tested, this is a useful thing to read before it is. For a man currently in something he cannot fix, it is company from someone who is not going to tell him it will be fine.
Honest notes
The old review credited the book with reflective questions to guide readers. I could not verify any study apparatus. It is a memoir. Check the preview before buying it for a group.
It also cited a review team, including a member who discussed God’s love amid suffering and another who noted Paine’s imagery. There was no team. Removed, along with a stray asterisk that was rendering as literal punctuation in the link.
The old post gave a page count of 224, which I could not confirm, so I have left it out rather than repeat it.
One fair caution. A memoir of terminal illness is not light reading, and the framing that suffering produced something good in the author is his to make about his own life. It is not a lesson to hand to someone else in the middle of their own loss. Be careful who you give this to and when.
Who should read it
A man whose faith has been comfortable and untested. Someone facing a diagnosis, his own or in his family. Anyone who has decided God is absent in hard seasons and could use a firsthand account arguing otherwise.
Skip it if you want practical teaching or a study. This is one man’s testimony, and that is its whole strength.