It’s rare – VERY rare – that a book will make me cry. Rarer still that I’ll be in tears by page two.
Yet Parting the Waters by Jeanne Damoff has done just that.
The story (true, by the way) is told from Jeanne’s perspective as a mother whose teenage son, Jacob, was in an accident at the lake and left in a coma. She’d brought him clothes so he could spend the night at a friends, and he went on a school canoe trip the next day. She says if she’d known that would be the last time she could talk to him for a very long time, she wouldn’t have hurried off.
She’d gone to pick her younger children up after school and was met by school staff and hustled into a van with very little information beyond, “There’s been an accident”. Her son was in the hospital. Another boy was dead.
As a mother, my heart stopped right there as I imagined what she must have felt in that moment. She says, “I prayed out loud. For help, for mercy, for wisdom, for Jeremy’s family. For Jacob. I prayed in circles until I didn’t know what else to pray. Then we rode in silence…”
This is a moving story of one family’s struggle to have faith in spite of what they could see and hear and feel and touch. Faith beyond what the doctors suggested would happen. Faith to endure.
It’s a story of courage, of hope, and of knowing that God is God no matter what happens.
I’m sitting here trying to write the review and I ponder words, I start to cry yet again. Not for the sadness of the story, because although the story has its sad points, there is also joy and triumph. I’m sitting here crying because of the beauty of God and that His beauty, when allowed, shines through people so brightly as this.
Be sure to check out the other blog tour reviews – and follow Jeanne Madoff on Twitter, too!
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