On Forgiveness: What Cedar Hollow Promises Is Really About

Redemption is not the same as forgiveness. Redemption is something you earn. Forgiveness is something you give — or can't, or won't, and have to live with either way. Cedar Hollow Promises is about both, and the distance between them.

I grew up in a faith tradition that talked about forgiveness constantly. Forgive seventy times seven. Turn the other cheek. Release the debt. What that tradition didn't talk about as much was the labor of it — the fact that forgiveness is not a feeling that arrives and settles. It's a decision you make, often daily, sometimes hourly. It's a discipline. And sometimes it isn't available yet, and that's true, too.

Malik has done things that require forgiveness. He has also been the object of a wrong so severe that it shaped the entire architecture of his adult life. He is both the person seeking absolution and the person who deserves an apology he may never receive. I was interested in what happens inside a person who has to hold both of those things at once.

Lena's forgiveness — if you want to call it that, and she might not — doesn't arrive as a revelation. It arrives as something quieter. An accumulation of small choices to keep showing up. To stay in the room. To let the grief exist without letting it have the final word.

That is what the epigraph means to me: "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." It's not a romance verse. It's a description of extraordinary will. Of choosing, again and again, not to let the worst things be the only things that count.

Cedar Hollow Promises is a love story. But it's also a book about what it costs to stay human when the systems around you are designed to make that impossible. About whether faith — in God, in each other, in the possibility of repair — is ever justified.

I believe it is. I wrote a whole book to try to show why.