Normal, really?

I just finished Carol Kent’s A New Kind of Normal  — Hope filled choices when life turns upside down.  In 1999, Carol and Gene Kent watched their good life unravel when their only child was arrested and eventually sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

This book is Kent’s story of how you still have to make choices even when life takes the worst detour possible.  Kent writes with a kind of tender compassion.  I’d recommend it.  Reflecting at one point on the fact that she has no idea what the future holds, Kent writes:

"We want to control the outcomes of these stories [the stories of the lives of those around us] but they are not our stories to write.  We are waiting ‘in the mean-time’ of life with no clear sense of direction and, at times, with dashed hopes."

Watching and waiting for the coming of Christ during Advent, one of the great truths of life, albeit sometimes mysterious, is there is but one story in which you are in charge, and only one story you can write — your own.