When God Goes Missing

Growing up in the Jim Crow South was a withering way to start childhood. No one explained how to navigate the back-and-forth of the love versus hatred teachings of the fundamentalist church this child attended with her family. There was no getting used to the confusion brought on by a community with its rigid rules to live by. For years, the contradictory teachings of the church saddled this young mind, trying to make sense of anything to do with God. It was the outspoken woman who took care of her and cleaned her mama's house that began an education on what was real. This truth-telling soul guided the child in her care by sharing what was going on in places south of Huntsville, Alabama.

By the time the child was in her teens, she had already begun a journey that would take her past the suffocating beliefs of her church and family and onward toward the life-giving message of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. It was clothed in an act of prayer that teachers would show up. The people she met were gifts she didn't see coming. But there they were at every turn, a parade of beautiful beings holding out their hands to help her cross over to sanity. Healing took place over years of prayerful reworking of a bad theology. What she came to understand along the way is how embedded faulty thinking works its way into everyday decisions and perspectives on life. Being part of a community of thoughtful people helped make sense of the incompatible.

What got her through decades of generational trauma was writing. It began with spoken Word, stories, and then along came the book. When God Goes Missing: Looking for Meaning Through the Eyes of a Southern Child is the culmination of a long journey from there to here. The stories were worth telling and meant to reach others in need of healing from the shrapnel of their childhoods.