My friend Brenda Salter-McNeil is a blessing to me and D’Aun. So it is a joy to announce her new book, Roadmap to Reconciliation: Moving Communities into Unity, Wholeness and Justice
In our hearts, all of us want reconciliation. With our spouses, kids, parents, coworkers, neighbors. Especially in light of recent events where we have seen tragedy upon tragedy. But few of us know how to be proactive about reconciliation. We simply do not have a roadmap to reconciliation we can get our brains around.
That’s why this book is so important. Brenda has been nurturing reconciliation for decades, and her book shares the insights learned along the way. It is an encouraging, uplifting, challenging book … ultimately a book of hope.
As with past reviews in this series, here are a few quotes that really struck me:
It’s vital in the task of restoration, however, that we experience enough safety to open ourselves to one another and allow hope to penetrate the dark places between us.
Reconciliation is possible only if we approach it primarily as a spiritual process that requires a posture of hope in the reconciling work of Christ and a commitment from the church to both be and proclaim this type of reconciled community.
The challenge comes in accepting that if there is any hope of birthing new life, chaos must be part of the environment for a time.
My hope isn’t that we change the social order but instead that, like Jesus and his disciples, we build small cadres of the Beloved Community that can infiltrate society and change it from the inside out over time.
In small and big ways we give people glimpses of what the future vision looks like. This is our mission, and we must never lose hope, knowing that God has the power to bring the kingdom — on earth as it is in heaven. God has the power to bring shalom.
Amen, Sister Brenda, Amen!
For more books on hope, check these out:
Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bands
