Saturday, December 8, 2012

Remember Tuesday Morning

"Remember Tuesday Morning" by Karen Kingsbury

This is the final book in the 9/11 series.  It was my least favorite but it was still good.  It was a little slow moving at first and took some time to get into it.  But I'm of the type where I just want the main point to happen, forget all the fluff around it, who cares.  Once I got about half way through I blew threw it.  The book is about a young man whose father was killed on 9/11 and on that day his heart was killed too.  Alex leaves those he loves and becomes a policeman fighting crime so that no other family has to suffer the loss that he has.  His life doesn't matter, all that matters is putting the bad guys away.  But when he his own life is on the line and he realizes there is always another bad guy, Alex begins to ask if this is all there is.  Who can help Alex tear down the walls of his heart and find life again?  "She didn't understand that releasing her was maybe his greatest and final act of love, because it nearly killed him to do it."  Sometimes letting someone you go is the bravest thing you can do, and the hardest.  It is also often misunderstood.  "Healing was definitely happening when people could find their way out of the dark clouds of grief to love again."  Choosing life, choosing love after loss, that is what brings healing.  "You don't have to feel God to know He's with you.  The Bible tells us God is with us, and that's all the proof we need to know.  It's a fact.  Feelings or no feelings."  Sometimes our feelings get in the way of truth.

Beyond Tuesday Morning

"Beyond Tuesday Morning" by Karen Kingsbury

This is the second book in the September 11th series.  This is about God's redemption and healing.  It is about finding life again after tragedy.  It's been three years since Jamie lost her husband in the attacks but the pain is still so great.  She volunteers to help others who are also trying to get past the pain of that day.  In the midst of helping others she finds love again, but the guilt is great and what she finds out about this man shocks her.  The God she has just started believing in couldn't have this plan for her.  Only the strong love from this man, words from her dead husband, and her precious little girl can help her live again.  "It was the same story again and again and again.  Different faces, different names, different floors of the Twin Towers, but so often when the walking wounded found their way here it was with one question.  How could God let it happen?"  I think it is a question we have all asked, at different tragic things in our lives.  God is good, all the time.  But we live in a fallen world where evil is allowed to happen.  For me it just reinforces the fact that I don't belong here, this is not my home.  "Loss was part of the package of living, but the fighter remains.  He fights the good fight, he gets back in the ring, he never gives up.  He chooses life."  And this is what we must all do in our lives.  We must choose life and God gives it to us abundantly, that is what He wants for us.  So no matter the pain, no matter the loss, choose life.  We can choose that life with God's help.  "Now-with a pain that knew no bounds, she was letting God break her heart again so that it might heal correctly."  Sometimes it takes brokenness to finally truly heal and boy does it hurt but life on the other side of it is oh so much sweeter.  "God believes in you, even if you don't believe in Him.  He'll keep calling to you the way He's been calling to all of us since the beginning of time."  I love that.  That is something to sit and soak in.  God believes in you and He's calling you and He won't give up on you.  This gives me hope for those of my loved ones that don't believe.  God's calling them, just keep praying.  "Because if you cry a lot when you say good-bye, it means you loved a lot."  Good-byes are hard but when they are then you know you have loved a lot.  This book is a testimony that God can heal all hearts, no matter the pain, no matter the loss.  And He is calling you.

One Tuesday Morning

 
"One Tuesday Morning" by Karen Kingsbury      
                              
I have been wanting to read this trilogy for quite some time and it didn't disappoint.  I don't know how Karen can keep turning out such good books.  This is the first book of three and my favorite one.  It is about September 11th, that awful day when the world changed.  It is about the firemen who chose to go up the stairs when everyone else was trying to get out.  It is about loss and love and healing.  It is about a fireman who was thought dead and then turned up at a hospital with amnesia.  It is about love winning and God healing the broken.  "God's message for you here this morning isn't that everything will be okay here on earth, because it won't.  The rotten, sorrowful smell of death is still too strong among us for me to tell you anything but the truth.  But death will not have the last say.  For those who believe in Jesus-in a God who would cry alongside you-death will never have the last word."  This book reminded me of that fateful day.  It is easy to put that day in the back of our minds, especially for me who wasn't personally touched by that tragedy and who live on the other side of the states.  But hundreds lost their lives and for them that day will forever be etched on their hearts.  They live their lives in two separate categories, before and after September 11th.  I loved the perspective of this book, from those that lost loved ones.  It showed how hard it is to get past the anger of that day but how all the people whose lives were lost would want one thing, love to prevail, life to be lived again.  It's a book you wont want to put down.