Publisher's Desk

I just finished reading the book, “Have a Little Faith,” by Mitch Albom. He is the author of “Tuesdays with Morrie” that was a best seller of several years ago.

The new book is a true story and begins when Albom is asked to deliver the eulogy for an 82-year-old rabbi from his old hometown. He feels the need to better understand the rabbi, and is led back to the faith he left many years ago. It also leads him to become involved with Henry, a Detroit pastor and reformed drug dealer and convict, who now preaches to the poor and homeless in a decaying church, with a hole in its roof.

Albom moves between their two worlds as they explore issues that trouble all of us. The part that intrigued me was four pages near the end of the book.

Albom went to the Detroit church one snowy, blustery Sunday, and stepped inside the vestibule. The place was freezing     . . . and empty. The roof hole was above him and the wind was whipping the blue tarp, but there was no one around. “Psst,” a man motioned him to a door on the side. He walked into a makeshift sanctuary with plastic sheeting nailed to two by fours. The congregation had been forced to build a plastic tent inside its own sanctuary. This was where Pastor Henry now conducted his services.

He was in the middle of his prayer, “We are grateful to you, God of Hope, we give you thanks in Jesus’ name, Amen.”

His sermon dealt with judging people by their past. He said: “I know how it is, I know what it’s like when you swear, I’ll never do this again. I messed up, but I’m gonna get back . . . You get some money and then you promise your loved ones, ‘I messed up, I am so sick and tired of being sick and tired’ . . . I’m telling you we have gotta fight this thing. It’s not good enough for just you to get clean.

“If someone else is trying, you gotta believe in them too. In the book of Acts, we read that Paul . . . after his conversion, people distrusted him because he used to persecute the church, but now he praised it. It’s amazing how folks can’t see you because they want to keep you in the past . . . They just looked at his past, and couldn’t see what God has done or what He can do.

“When people from your past don’t believe that we can change,” I say, ‘You knew that person, but you don’t know the person that I am trying to become’.”

We are not our past! People can change. Have a little faith.