Silent Resolve and the God Who Let Me Down

Many of us lived through the shock and horror of September 11, 2001, but we lived it one step removed. We watched TV recordings of the twin towers falling and the smoke rising from crashed planes. Perhaps we prayed for the fallen, only names on a list to us, and for their families. We shared a heightened national awareness of evil among us and of our human vulnerability. Susan’s brave words, however, strip away the protective veneer of distance and drop us into the raw horror of living vividly and personally that day and the days that followed. Through her poetic prose, with clarifying references to scripture and the wisdom of J.R.R. Tolkien, she makes real for us the sudden and senseless murder of a beloved father and the rent in faith that followed, when she asked God, Where were You and why did You allow this to happen? Aside from the beautiful flow of her writing style and her thorough treatment of the subject, what I liked best about Susan’s book was her honesty and willingness to lay bare her struggle against the injustice and her sense of betrayal by the God who did not protect her family. She does not offer neat solutions but instead allows us to struggle along with her as she grapples with faith issues and learns that only by clinging to God can she rise above a wound that can be neither undone nor forgotten."
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— Judith Ingram