Author name
Midweek Message
Over the weekend I finished another book that’s been making the rounds lately, Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden. Mr. Levi lives in a small town in Georgia, and he was here on Signal Mountain a couple of years ago as the guest author at the local library not long before the book really hit it big. I saw it was Katie Couric’s book club pick this month. It seems like just about every person I talk to these days has read it or wants to!
In the book, a mysterious and strangely foreign older man called Theo moves to a small southern city called Golden, where he gets to know some of the townspeople at the local coffee shop, bookstore, and park. It’s an endearing story about kindness, generosity, and close attentiveness to the people we find ourselves with at any given moment. Several of my clergy colleagues who’ve read it have commented on how it’s full of sermon illustrations, so you might have to hear about this book again.
One of the characters we meet is a minor character named Grandmother Whitaker. She is the mother of one of the more prominent characters, Kendrick, who is the night custodian at the local college, and the grandmother of Kendrick’s young daughter Lamisha, who was badly injured in a car accident. Before the sentencing of the man who was driving the car that injured Lamisha and killed her mother, Kendrick is pondering what kind of victim’s statement to offer. He asks his mother what he should do. Here’s what Grandmother Whitaker tells him:
“Baby, they’s justice and they’s mercy. If you not sure what to do and you gotta choose one or the other, I say always go the mercy way. If you make a mistake, make it for mercy. Bad mercy don’t hurt nearly like bad justice, and always remember, the eye of God can see.”
I don’t about you, but that sounds like gospel to me. And since this is reported to have been shared in a town called Golden, maybe we could consider it another “Golden Rule.”
