Night Road

"Night Road" by Kristin Hannah

Another good one by Kristin.  I haven't read one of hers yet that I don't like.  This story takes place in a small town, families who know each other, kids growing up together, small community helping one another.  A young girl comes to town to live with her aunt after numerous foster homes.  She isn't like the other kids but none the less gets excepted.  She makes a best friend at school and soon becomes like family.  She falls in love with her best friends twin brother.  She loves this family and would do anything to hurt them until one fateful night of drinking at a party changes everything.  Lexi will lose everything she loved.  Will she ever forget that night?  Will there ever be forgiveness for her?  "The last thing in the world she wanted was to stand here, pretending she wasn't shattered inside, but she couldn't make herself move, either."  Sometimes we are so broken we can't pretend.  "Mostly, she'd learned that some pain simply could neither be cured nor ignored nor healed."  Facing the pain allows the healing.  I believe all pain can heal, doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt, just becomes less hurt I guess.  "What you did isn't the sum total of who you are."  Truth for all of us.  "When you love someone...and you lose them, you can kind of lose yourself, too."  A deep loss that grieves us can make us lose a piece of who we are.  "It was easier to suppress heartache than to overcome it."  "Maybe you need to be broken a little before you can put yourself back together."  The breaking is what puts us back together.  It's in the breaking we find ourselves and that we alone can't fix it.  It's in this place that God can do His work to put us back together again.  "People think love is an act of faith.  Sometimes it's an act of will."  The feelings won't always be there so sometimes it takes just being willing to show love despite the feelings.  "She didn't know how she would correct all the wrong paths she'd taken, but it was time to start undoing her mistakes.  One at a time."  That's where you start, one step at a time, it's never too late.  "She'd known it all along; she'd looked away from it purposely, afraid that the pain would kill her.  But not feeling had taken away her joy, too, left her in that gray haze of numbness."  We often try and suppress the pain because it hurts too much but in doing that we also suppress all our other emotions.  "In the sea of grief, there were islands of grace, moments in time when one could remember what was left rather than all that had been lost."  Grief takes time, we all do it differently but there will come a time where rather than the pain of the loss the  joy of having lived becomes greater.

Writing my Wrongs

"Writing My Wrongs" by Shaka Senghor

I will admit this book is a little tough to get through.  It has a lot of cussing and explicit examples of what happens in prison.  Yet, it is a good book to understand about growing up on the streets, prison, and re-entry after prison.  It is an amazing story of how some choose to make something of themselves and help others, while others can't break the cycle.  "I was tired of being hurt and confused by two people I loved more than anything in the world."  Childhood is when most of our prison inmates have experienced the abuse that leads them to the streets and the crimes that they commit.  "I had never thought about the fact that by getting locked up, I was also imprisoning everyone who loved or cared about me."  Our actions and choices affect so many around us and yet in the moment we only think of ourselves.  "We weren't bad people, but we had made some very bad decisions that were shaped by the bad things we had experienced.  We were fathers, brothers, uncles, drug dealers, robbers, and killers.  And we weren't any one of those things by itself-what we were was a mixture of failure, neglect, promise, and purpose."  I think that we forget that our inmates are people, people who have made bad choices yes, but also people who have been badly hurt themselves.  "I had helped to bring a new life into the world-but now I was taking my life out of it."  He had made a choice that landed him in prison, a choice that took him out of his child's life.  "My crime was no badge of honor in my son's eyes-it was a scarlet letter that signified how badly I had failed him and the other young Black males in my neighborhood, many of whom would die or spend their lives in prison for trying to emulate me."  And this brought about the change in him, realizing that he needed to do better by his son and help others that were like him choose a better life.  "It had taken me years to realize that no one goes to prison alone; my imprisonment had impacted my family as though they were sitting in the cell with me." "That's why I'm asking you to envision a world where men and women aren't held hostage to their pasts, where misdeeds and mistakes don't define you for the rest of your life.  In an era of record incarcerations and a culture of violence, we can learn to love those who no longer love themselves.  Together, we can begin to make things right."