Dear Reader:

Quilty as charged…June is here… so the past several days I have stocked up on my summer reading list…between libraries, borrowing/swapping and ordering off Amazon…. the books are pouring in. I talk a lot about de-cluttering and simplifying…having done a decent job in several areas in the past two or three years….except when it comes to my books. “I always want more!” I am guilty of literary avarice...a desire for more books. (Isn’t avarice one of the seven deadly sins…..oh well just count me in!)

All the ‘beach reads’ are hitting the stands now just in time for summer and I will definitely share some with you (local authors and not-so-local)…but today I would like to introduce you to another book…definitely more serious…perhaps best read on a rainy day when you can’t go to the beach…but definitely worth the read.

It is called Ordinary Grace. Jackson told me about it while we were at Edisto and she chose it as her ‘pick‘ selection for this year’s book club meetings. I was thinking it must be something along the lines of the writings of Anne Lamott or Max Lucado or John Maxwell. I didn’t realize it was a fictional story about a murder in a close-knit family and a coming-of-age epiphany.

Here is the prologue from the book..You will discover that it goes much deeper than just a typical “who dunnit” mystery novel… This tragedy affects everyone in a small town to some degree…the emphasis is more on unraveling the consequences suffered by many from a  tragic incident that turns the world upside down for one family. It is also the story of how GRACE appears in the most unexpected way from the most unexpected person.

Prologue

All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota, sliced into pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota. His name was Bobby Cole. He was a sweet-looking kid and by that I mean he had eyes that seemed full of dreaming and he wore a half smile as if he was just about to understand something you’d spent an hour trying to explain. I should have known him better, been a better friend. He lived not far from my house and we were the same age. But he was two years behind me in school and might have been held back even more except for the kindness of certain teachers. He was a small kid, a simple child, no match at all for the diesel-fed drive of a Union Pacific locomotive.

It was a summer in which death, in visitation, assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder. You might think I remember that summer as tragic and I do but not completely so. My father used to quote the Greek playwright Aeschylus. He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

In the end maybe that’s what the summer was about. I was no older than Bobby and didn’t understand such things then. I’ve come four decades since but I’m not sure that even now I fully understand. I still spend a lot of time thinking about the events of that summer… 

(It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.)

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Grace-  the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.

As Jackson and I talked more about the novel yesterday (on the phone) I told her that, speaking from personal experiences, I have felt grace when I have been at my lowest points in life… when I was questioning my beliefs and faith and wondering if life is just some kind of badly written joke.

It is at rock-bottom that I have felt the grace of God flow through me.

I, also confessed to Jackson that I read books as much for their quotes as the story. Quotes, to me, are little gems waiting to be picked up off the beach, taken home, and polished. Here are three quotes from the author in this novel that I like to re-read and think about…

“The dead are never far from us. They’re in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.”

“The miracle is this: that you will rise in the morning and be able to see again the startling beauty of the day.”

“That was it… That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.”

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So until tomorrow…Find time to read and get into the “zone” …we all need to travel outside ourselves to get a better glimpse of what lies inside.

Life never ceases to amaze me..you know how much I love Gerber daisies- Tim came yesterday and we got a lot of yard work done! Late yesterday afternoon as I was coming up the steps to the deck something bright caught my eye! Two bright orange Gerber daisies had managed to survive under a table under the deck placed there two years ago. It had gotten little to no light and water- yet somehow it had bloomed!

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh