It’s Friday and it does feel more like fall than summer. Time to curl in with a good book, and there are plenty out there to really make you think. Beth Macy’s new book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, is more than a memoir. It is an insightful examination of how her home town of Urbana, Illinois, a town of little more than 38,300 135 miles southwest of Chicago, has changed.
She begins the book visiting her dying mother in 2020 just as the election was being called for Biden and hearing her sister say the results must have been fraudulent. Jolted, to say the least, she tries to understand why such changes have occurred. Clearly, much like certain divided parts of the Mid-Atlantic, divisions run deep.
Also the author of Dopesick, about the opioid crisis devastating so many families in rural Appalachia, and Raising Lazarus, about rehab efforts, Macy writes with her reporter’s skill and with a novelist’s style. Looks like a good weekend to sit inside on what promises to be a few cool, wet, and windy days.
Prayer for the Day
Wondering what has happened to us, O God,
For sometimes we cannot talk with those we love;
Friends and family seem so distant, O Lord,
Just when we need to have them with us.
Heal us, O Holy One, so we do not feel so apart,
For distance can tear us apart.
In the name of the Great Healer,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
You can’t heal what you don’t acknowledge.
Jack Canfield, American writer
He that studieth revenge keepeth his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.
John Milton, poet, essayist (1608-1674)
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
God does not faint or grow weary; God’s understanding is unsearchable.
God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.
Isaiah 40: 28-29