You are finally here. After weeks and months of planning, you are here. It’s hot, but you don’t mind. You can almost feel the wind whipping through your hair already. A bead of sweat strolls lazily down your back, but your smile doesn’t waver.
As you walk through the gates you grab a map. It’s not like you need one. You memorized the lay of the park even last night before you fell asleep, knowing which rides you would hit first. Your arms swing quickly to keep time with your step.
Finally, you catch sight of it in the distance. Your eyes strain to read the sign at the entrance.
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I’d waited weeks for this moment: toes in the sand, waves crashing in the distance, sun warming my soul. I watched as my two-year-old made happy piles of sand in front of me, experiencing the beach for the first time.
Then from beside me I heard a sigh and a mutter. “It’s not fair. I wasted my money.”
My ten-year-old son pouted and kicked his body board further from him. From the outside it looked fine, blue cloth stretched over the foam core displaying South Carolina’s traditional palmetto tree and crescent. But beneath the covering, the board was broken in two.
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I pulled up to the stop sign not far from my neighborhood. Music floated through the car like fog – not loud enough to be truly heard, but not quite soft enough to equate silence. The sun was shining. I turned right at the stop to meet a friend for walking at the mall in what turned out to be a Friday ritual. In the back seat was my new baby, my first-born son. No other children yet to grace the spots behind me. One year earlier, I was standing at a white board teaching phonics and double-digit subtraction with twenty-four sets of eyes on my every move.
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Dear Mother,
God sees you. I needed to tell you that. Yes, I’m talking to you. Yes, you. God knows your hurts. He hears your quiet sobs in the night.
It stormed here last night. The rain fell, and my baby cried. I paced the floor between her bed and mine. The well-worn path needed nothing to illuminate the way. My heart led. That’s the way of things when your child is sick.
I wanted you to know there’ll be nights like this. There will be strings of nights like this. Each time you lay your body down, you’ll wonder, “Will I wake when she calls?”
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I walked in with an attitude every day. Every. Single. Day. I hated the class. None of my friends were in it. Not one person from my circle of comrades. The class next door had Kim and Cassie. Why wasn’t I placed in there? 
I dreaded my 11th grade first period class so much I drug my feet each morning, often being tardy to school. My grandmother would always write me an excuse saying I wasn’t feeling well. She’d follow it up with, “Well, you weren’t feeling well when you realized you were going to be late for school, were you?”
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Pages flipped behind me as I tried to listen to the preacher.
Flip. Flip. Flip.
It was rhythmic. My concentration paused as I waited for it to stop. A second of silence and then –
flip, flip, flip.
I glanced at the middle schoolers behind me willing them to give it a rest.
Bibles have the loudest pages, I thought and began to wonder about how the people at Tyndale and Zondervan dipped the edges of the pages in gold and silver. Who even published my Bible? I turned to the front pages to find out. Tyndale and Zondervan. I never knew two publishers worked together to publish something.
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It wasn’t like I turned my back on God. 
I just couldn’t fit Him in my schedule. The birth of our third child pushed me over the edge – the pages of my carefully crafted day planner fluttering in the breeze. Normally, I spent time in Bible study and prayer in the morning after the kids left for school. But nothing was normal.
I tried getting up earlier for a while, but my sleep deprived body revolted. I tried doing it during naptime, but realized I needed a big dose of Jesus just to get me through the morning.
For two years (Did you read that?
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I don’t know what I was expecting. World peace? The end of poverty?
But when I asked the six felons at the table around me what they wanted for Christmas, they responded in unison. “Papers!”
“Papers?” I naively asked.
“Yeah. Parole papers,” the one closest to me explained. “We want to be home for Christmas.”
Half of the men at my table were in the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary prison ministry degree program. (Yeah, I know. It’s a mouth-full.) I questioned those three again. “But what about your degree? If you got out on parole-” They stopped me before I could continue.
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