The Hour I First Believed

I just read this new book by Wally Lamb. He only writes a book about once every 10 years, but each one I've read has been fantastic. Lamb is from Connecticut and I once heard him speak at a writer's conference in Hartford.

I often feel conflicted when it comes to reading fiction. I have such a hard time finding something that is both well-written and uplifting. My experience has been that the well-written (usually secular) stuff is so utterly depressing that I can't make it through the book. I used to be able to, but as I've changed and progressed through life I've realized I can't spend an excessive amount of time reading a story in which there is no hero, no one grows or learns anything, and the main character ends up with a more bleak outlook at the book's conclusion than when it began. This isn't always the case, but in my experience, has happened often.

On the other hand, I am desperate to find well-written Christian fiction. I'll read Christian novels and love that I feel uplifted and as if my mind is in a good place at the conclusion -- if I can see beyond my frustration with the formulaic plot, plastic characters and sometimes just plain weak writing. I never thought of myself as a fiction snob (yes, I was an English major in college, but never even read half the classics I should have and hated those analytical, academic approaches people take to literature), but maybe I am in some ways. And so I bounce between the Christian stuff and everything else, trying to glean the best parts from whatever I read.

Okay, enough rambling and back to Wally Lamb. The book is called "The Hour I First Believed" and is rather complicated to explain. Let's just say the plot centers around a husband and wife who worked at Columbine High School during the 1999 massacre of (was it 13?) students and one teacher, and the after effects on this couple...there's much discussion of anxiety, post-traumatic stress, our faith in a higher power or lack thereof, and about the forces that drive people to the type of evil that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out that April day. It's a disturbing and exhausting book in some ways, but the conclusion resonated with me. Lamb takes the title of course, from the one hymn everyone knows, "Amazing Grace:"

T'was grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace my fears relieved
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Grace, and fear, they go hand in hand, although one might not think so. That is amazing. The fears grace relieves are the fears associated with control, with having to know everything. The fear grace teaches is the fear of God.

"The question you gotta ask isn't Why? or If?," says a wise old man to the questioning protagnist, somewhere in the middle of the book. "The question is How?"

That line runs again and again through my mind. How much energy do we waste asking "Why?" or wondering "If only..."? When I stop asking, I'm acknowledging there is much in this world beyond my understanding. I don't need to know why nearly as much as I need to know how I'm going to face, work with, even take joy in the challenges facing me.

The hour I first believed. In something beyond my feeble ability. In trusting in what I cannot see. In opening my arms and letting the grace fall like rain.