Between the World and Me

"Between the World and Me" by TA-Nehisi Coates

I read this book because I'm trying to understand what is going on in our country with racial issues.  I want to learn, understand, and see other sides.  I'll admit this book was a bit difficult to read as I didn't understand all of it but I am glad I read it.  I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but it did give me some perspective that I didn't already have.  The author is a black man writing this book to his son about race in our country and what it is like to live as a black man.  Honestly it brought to my attention things I never thought of, things that I don't have to deal with or think about as a white person.  It opened my eyes and for that I am thankful because that is the reason I picked the book up in the first place.  "The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power."  These young black men acted this way because they felt so powerless in their world.  They put on such bravado outside because of how scared they were inside.  "I recall learning these laws clearer than I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these laws were essential to the security of my body."  He is talking about the laws of the streets.  These laws were of upmost importance to stay alive.  "'Good intention' is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream."  Good intention doesn't get us very far, a call to action is what is needed.  Good intentions can be our excuse to not do what needs to be done.  "The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.  I was made for the library, not the classroom.  The classroom was a jail of other people's interests.  The library was open, unending, free."  "Slavery is not an undefinable mass of flesh.  It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is intelligent and capable as anyone."  Putting faces to slavery makes it real and makes it that much more important to realize that these were people that were harmed and beaten and treated cruely.  They are not something we can look past.  "Then the mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you, and said, 'You exist.  You matter.  You have value.  You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want.  You have every right to be you.  And no one should deter you from being you.  You have to be you.  And you can never be afraid to be you.'"

War Child

"War Child" by Emmanuel Jal

This is not an easy book to read but informative.  The book is a memoir about Emmanuel Jal and his life as a child soldier in Sudan.  He talks about the war and how it came to his village, how his family continued to run from place to place to get away from the war.  His mother was killed and that is when he went to a refugee camp and there became a boy soldier.  He had such hate in his heart for the people that killed and displaced his family.  All other emotions were turned off as he was trained to feed that hate.  He did things that haunt him still.  He was saved by a British lady who paid for his schooling.  But he didn't do well in school as he had so much emotional baggage and because all he knew was fighting.  He found his relief in music, telling his story, and in remembering the God his mama taught him about.  He found forgiveness and turned that into helping other child soldiers find their way.  "Fear will always win against pain, and all I had to do was run."  "Love?  I must push down the feeling, crush it inside me just as I had when I was a young boy and war had taken everyone from me.  I knew how love once made me feel".  In war you can't afford to feel love, all emotions must be pushed down so as to survive.  Emmanuel Jal has found feeling these emotions again not an easy feat.  "It is time for me to tell my story using the music and lyrics that are my weapons now I have laid down guns and machetes forever."  His words, his story is now his weapon to bring about change.  "I'm still a soldier, fighting with my pen and paper, for peace till the day I cease."

A Dream Deferred A Joy Achieved

A Dream Deferred A Joy Achieved by Charisse Nesbit

This book is a collection of stories of children in the foster system who have made it through and gone on to succeed in life.  The author was a foster child herself and wrote the book because she was tired of hearing all the horrible stories of children in foster care.  There are success stories to be told of resilient children that despite what was stacked against them, succeeded.  "Savasia says she never became accustomed to being called a 'foster child': I hated those words.  They made me sound like I was somebody else's hand-me-down."  I am thankful for the perspective of this book, that I was able to learn straight from these children's stories.  "Remember, you are so much more than what you came from.  You cannot choose your parents or cannot explain their behavior.  You now have the opportunity to really understand who you are and what you can be.  An environment will have an impact on what's around it, but you can still rise above it."  I love those words of encouragement to children going through the system, they can rise above, we all can.  "I am in no way excusing the abuse.  I just now understand the circumstances."  "For kids in the foster system, she offers these words: 'First, I love you.  I know what you're going through.  Keep dreaming your dreams even though you feel powerless.  When the sadness overwhelms you, pray-make friends with God.  Speak up!  Your voice is important, and it MATTERS.'"  "I couldn't tell my secrets because if I did, I would have to defend myself even more becasue by saying I am a foster youth, I am saying to them that I am on drugs, a thief, will become pregnant as a teen, or will be a juvenile delinquent.  If I was a foster youth, according to statistics, I was not to be trusted.  I was not to be defended..."  The labels that we have given foster youth need to be thrown out.  We need to give these kids a chance, we need to defend them and show them that they are loved.  I recommend this book for a great perspective on our foster youth from our foster youth.

Angels of a Lower Flight

"Angels of a Lower Flight by Susie Scott Krabacher

This is a memoir about a women who saw an ad for an orphaned child on tv and found that she wanted to do more than just give money, she wanted to hold these children and let them know they weren't alone.  This started her life's work.  Susie had been abused and taken advantage of her whole life, she knew how these children felt.   She went to Haiti and began taking care of abandoned children in the hospitals.   One trip led to the next trip which led to her opening an orphanage.  This book is inspirational and heart breaking.  It is also a tad bit on the graphic side.  The author was once a Playboy Bunny and she doesn't hesitate to tell all.  But, aside from that, I like the book and the courage the author had to go into a foreign country and make a change for the better.  "Good intentions never amount to anything unless you actually do something about them."  Talking about an issue doesn't resolve the issue, we have to get in there and actually put our words to action.  "When he committed suicide he took a part of my life without permission."  "A poverty-stricken county is fertile ground for corruption and greed, even for the best of us."  Poverty and hunger can lead so many to do things they wouldn't normally do.  It is easy to judge when we have never been in their shoes.  "I don't believe we are wrestling simply with humanity's evil.  If God exists, then why wouldn't a devil also exist?  If Satan is real, it'd be a great benefit to him for us to believe he isn't.  I have to believe there's a personality behind the horror I routinely witness.  It's simply too much awfulness to pin onto chance.  But I'm not afraid of the devil.  I brace myself with a stronger power."

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."   

See Me

"See Me" by Nicholas Sparks

If youv'e been following this blog for any amount of time, you know that my favorite author is Nicholas Sparks, he never dissapointes.  See Me is his latest novel, although he is currently writing a new one.  I don't know how he writes so many and they are all so good.  This one might be one of his best, yet I might say that every time.  Colin is a young man with a long history of violence.  He has decided to start a new path and leave the old Colin behind.  The question is, can he really do it?  Maria is a girl that has also left her past behind and seems to have the world at her fingertips.  A chance meeting between the two of them might cause Maria's past to catch up to her and Colin to show her hasn't really changed at all.  "But if you're going to make a judgement about me, then you need to know who I really am, not just the part I decide to tell you.  I'd rather be honest about all of it and let you make the call as to whether you want to keep talking to me or not."  Wouldn't this be great if everyone we met did this at first, to let us know who they really were?  I think it would be a little frightening at first but so much easier to just get it all out on the table in the beginning.  "I think you can do whatever you want.  In the end, we all live the life we choose for ourselves."  We are the ones at the end of the day that have to live with the choices we made, best make the choices you can live with.  "Love makes everything complicated, and emotions always go wild in the beginning.  But when it's real, you should hold on tight, because we're both old enough to know that true love doesn't come along all that often."  Pick up this book, you won't be sorry, I promise.

Little Princes

"Little Princes" by Conor Grennan

An unexpectedly good book.  I love stumbling upon a gem.  Conor is a 20 something man who wants to travel the world.  He leaves his job and spends the first three months of his trip at an orphanage in Nepal.  This three months will change the course of his life.  He finds out that the children aren't really orphans at all but children with families, children who were trafficked, childre whose parents had no idea they were alive.  This became Conor's goal, reunite these families and stop the trafficking of children in Nepal.  This goal became a nonprofit and with it many sacrifices for Conor and many children saved.  "Despite myself, I had become a parent to these kids-not because I was qualified, but because I had showed up."  Often times we just need to be willing, to show up, and God will use that willingness.  "It is my estimate that he has trafficked close to four hundred children."  The families are so poor in Nepal, the drought so severe, the war so long, that parents were giving up their children in hopes that they would have a better life.  They were tricked by men who took all these families had, lied and then sold the children.  "We marveled at the images on TV, at the faces of these peaceful, wonderful, loving people, suddenly crazed with passion, with determination, with revolution, with the spirit that drives men and women to stand on front lines and absorb bullets and batterings to win freedom for those who stand behind them."  "But God used that time of great sadness to reclaim me, to redeem me.  Things that are broken can be made whole."  God is in the business of reclaiming, redeeming and making our broken lives whole again.  "It was always difficult to accept these gifts, knowing how little the parents had and what it must cost them.  But I also knew that this was for them.  They needed me to know how much their children meant to them."  When Conor went to the remote villages to find the children's families he would be given gifts in gratitude.  He knew these gifts were more than the family could afford but he also knew it showed how much they cared for their children.  "The kids spoke little English, but as I had learned long ago, language isn't always necessary when interacting with kids."  Loving and playing with children is speaking their language, no words needed.  This is a great story of being willing and being used.  We can all do great things when we are willing to show up and let God use us.