Eugene Peterson receiving hospice care

Pastor and best-selling author Eugene Peterson is entering hospice care at the age of 85, his son Eric said in a widely circulated message to friends and family on Friday. Peterson’s contemporary English paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, became a bookshelf staple in Christian households in the 1990s. He translated The Message from the Bible’s original languages and said he wanted it to re-energize believers’ interest in the Scripture. After retiring from church work, Peterson served as a professor at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He now lives with his wife, Jan, in Montana, where he grew up. Peterson was recently hospitalized for pneumonia and suffers from advanced heart failure and dementia, his son wrote, adding that the pastor’s friends and family surround him as he enters his last months of life. “He’s tucked into bed now and resting comfortably,” Eric Peterson said of his father. “I’m not exactly sure what he meant by it, but one of the last things he said to me this evening was, ‘It just seems so sacred that they trust me so much.’ Every moment in this man’s presence is sacred.”