Every Day Deserves a Chance: Wake Up to the Gift of 24 Hours (Hardback)

Selected Excerpt - Choosing Forgiveness

Let Antwone Fisher inspire you. He had ample reason to live with a cluttered heart. For the first thirty three years of his life he knew neither of his parents. His father died before Antwone was born. And his mother, for reasons that Fisher longed to know, abandoned him as a boy. He grew up as a foster child in Cleveland, abused, neglected, and desperate to find a single member of his family.

Equipped with the name of his father and a Cleveland phone book, he began calling people of the same last name. His life changed the day an aunt answered the phone. He told her his date of birth and father’s identity. He described the harsh turns his life had taken; kicked out by his foster mom, served a stint in the Navy, now holding his own as a security guard in Los Angeles.

Her voice was warm. “You have a big family.” She invited him to Cleveland for a Thanksgiving reunion and filled the week with a lifetime of belated love. And then, after days of calls and attempts, his family found the brother of his mother. He offered to take Antwone to the housing project where she lived. On the drive, Antwone rehearsed the questions he’d longed to ask for the last three decades: Why didn’t you come for me? Didn’t you ever wonder about me? Didn’t you miss me at all?

But the questions never came. The door opened and Antwone walked into a dimly lit apartment with shabby furniture. Turning, he saw a frail woman who looked too old to be his mother. Her hair was uncombed. She wore her nightclothes. Antwone’s uncle said to her, “This is Antwone Quenton Fisher.” Antwone’s mother made the connection and started to moan, losing her footing, holding on to a chair. “Oh, God, please…Oh God.” She turned her face away in shame, and hurried out of the room, crying.

Antwone learned that his mother had tried to get a man to marry her, so that she could raise her son, but couldn’t. She had gone on to bear four other children, also raised as wards of the state. Over the years she’d been hospitalized, incarcerated, and put on probation. And when he saw how painful her years had been, he chose to forgive.

He writes, “Though my road had been long and hard, I finally understood that my mother’s had been longer and harder….Where the hurt of abandonment had lived inside me, now there was only compassion.”

In the end, we all choose what lives inside us. May you choose forgiveness.