Lakendra Netterville

“Sé que mi familia es así pero este silencio me pesa. Tengo la impresión de tener millones de cosas que decir que, en el fondo, no interesan a nadie. Me viene a la memoria lo que decían los supervivientes de los campos de la última guerra al volver a su hogar: las pesadillas no se cuentan. Los demás no imaginan este género de pesadillas. Se instala, entre ellos y nosotras, una especie de statu quo que parece decir: ‘Estás aquí, se acabó, no hablemos más de ello.”
― Betty Mahmoody, For the Love of a Child

“He had already authenticated his experience by telling me things he could not otherwise have known. But now I had to square his answer, “three minutes,” with all the rest. I stared down at my Bible, lying open on the kitchen table, and turned over the possibilities in my mind. Three minutes. It wasn’t possible that Colton could have seen and done everything he’d described so far in just three minutes. Of course, he wasn’t old enough to tell time yet, so maybe his sense of three actual minutes wasn’t the same as an adult’s. Like most parents, I was pretty sure Sonja and I weren’t helping that issue, promising to be off the phone, for example, or finished talking in the yard with a neighbor, or done in the garage in “five more minutes,” then wrapping it up twenty minutes later. It was also possible that time in heaven doesn’t track with time on earth. The Bible says that with the Lord, “a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”1 Some interpret that as a literal exchange, as in, two days equals two thousand years. I’ve always taken it to mean that God operates outside of our understanding of time. Time on earth is keyed to a celestial clock, governed by the solar system. But the Bible says there is no sun in heaven because God is the light there. Maybe there is no time in heaven. At least not as we understand it.”
― Todd Burpo, Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back

“forgotten by the world and by those you love”
― John Grisham, The Racketeer

“And yet had not a pagan the right to be a pagan?”
― Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family