God

In Austin’s memoir, God is not confined to abstract doctrine or private consolation. God is encountered in a Black church that takes material hardship seriously, in the anger provoked by Dalin’s death, and in a faith that keeps acting without promising that racial justice will come soon. Across these changes, Austin’s understanding of God expands: the divine is present not only with the poor and hurting, but also with the accused and incarcerated, and faith becomes a reason to face injustice rather than turn away from it.

A God Encountered in the Black Church

At ten years old, Austin finds a religious home in a Baptist church where worship joins spiritual conviction to the shared realities of Black life. She falls in love with the music, the church mothers and deacons, and preaching that moves people to their feet. The Jesus she encounters there cares about her soul, but does not treat the body, economic hardship, or heartbreak as lesser concerns. This is a Jesus who sees people without transportation and those unable to pay utility bills, as well as people facing addiction, family wounds, and broken relationships.

That church gives Austin a way to understand God as attentive to circumstances that more abstract religious teaching had left unaddressed. Sin and temptation are still taken seriously, but the sermons make them embodied and contextual rather than detached from lived experience. The congregation’s insistence that trouble will not last always offers a promise of endurance without pretending that struggle is unreal or final. Austin learns that heartbreak is not the whole story and that God’s expectations of people coexist with care for their suffering.

This understanding takes form in worship and community, not only in ideas. The church’s singing changes from week to week, and its congregation responds with its own cries of praise. Members become family, addressing one another as siblings and, as closeness grows, as aunties, uncles, and mothers. Austin later encounters the name James Cone and reads about Black liberation theology, but recognizes that she had already met the liberating power of Black Jesus in childhood. God’s presence, as she remembers it, belongs within a Black community where people worship together and attend to one another’s needs.

Anger, Protest, and the Work of Truth

Austin’s account also rejects the idea that faith requires silence or placidity. She connects her own growing capacity to trust her anger with a biblical image of Jesus Christ protesting inside the Temple. In her reading, Jesus confronts corrupt officials, overturns furniture, frees animals, blocks doorways, and carries a whip. The action makes space for people at the margins, including the poor, the wounded, and children. What might be condemned as destructive anger by those in power can, from the perspective of the excluded, become a force for belonging, healing, and participation.

This image gives theological meaning to Austin’s own writing and speaking. She describes learning to use anger in ways that defend Black dignity and speak truth to power. Rather than leaving her isolated, that anger leads to creative work and connection with others who are angry, too. God’s own capacity for anger makes her less inclined to treat anger as inherently incompatible with faith. The biblical protest does not serve as permission for aimless rage; in Austin’s account, its significance lies in the space it opens for those kept outside.

The same insistence on truth shapes Austin’s criticism of church language about racial injustice. Euphemisms about national divisions, cultural change, or the need to improve diversity can circle around the history that produced present inequalities. Austin argues that dismantling racial injustice requires greater curiosity about its origins than concern for comfort. Recalling the past is difficult and risky, but she presents the Holy Spirit’s work as illuminating truth and inspiring transformation. God is therefore associated not with evasion of painful history but with the possibility that truthful recognition can change people and institutions.

Dalin’s Death and the God of the Accused

Dalin’s death makes Austin’s belief in God’s power emotionally difficult. A week after Dalin dies, a young man recently released from prison comes forward at church to renew his commitment to God. His ten-year-old daughter runs to embrace him as the congregation celebrates. The reunion is beautiful, but it intensifies Austin’s grief: days earlier, she had watched her aunt tell Dalin’s daughter that her father had died and would not come home. While the congregation stands in praise, Austin leans against a wooden pew and cries, overwhelmed by fury and the question of why God did not save her cousin.

The circumstances sharpen that anger. Dalin was not killed in a fight; he was struck by lightning. Austin believed in a God who governed nature and could have saved him, and she turns her grief directly toward God rather than concealing it. Her anger does not frighten her. She understands the Bible as containing accounts of God receiving anger from people, and she allows herself to bring her own fury into that relationship. The scene presents religious lament as part of faith, not evidence that faith has disappeared.

When the first wave of anger passes, Austin’s questions widen beyond the explanation of one death. She asks what responsibility the state bears toward incarcerated people, how many unjust encounters with police Dalin may have endured, and what she should think about mandatory minimum sentencing. Studying the criminal justice system in relation to the Black community forces her to consider what her theology says about Black lives unlike her own. Her private white Christian education and ministry experience, she recognizes, cannot stand in for the full range of Black life.

That recognition requires rejecting the notion that Dalin’s worth depended on innocence or perfection. Austin anticipates that people may reduce him to labels such as drug dealer or criminal and blame him for his death, while leaving his Blackness unspoken. She contrasts the treatment of Black people with the tendency to recognize white offenders as people who did something wrong. In the racial order she describes, Black people are made to earn the right to live; mercy and justice are withheld until an impossible standard of perfection is met.

Austin’s theology changes in response. She had learned that Jesus understood the poor; because of Dalin, she comes to understand Jesus Christ as also knowing the experience of the accused and incarcerated. Jesus was accused and imprisoned, and his crime was displayed above his crown of thorns. This identification does not undo Dalin’s death. It does, however, give Austin a way to understand that God knows what Dalin’s body endured. Racial justice and reconciliation consequently become more than matters within church relations between Black and white members: they become a living framework for understanding God’s work in the world.

God and Fragile Hope

Austin’s final account of hope does not make God a guarantee that disappointment will end. She describes hope dying repeatedly: in relationships, workplaces, organizations, policies, and expectations that history will stop repeating itself. Each loss hurts, but mourning can yield a clearer understanding of the world, the Church, herself, and God. Fury gives way to a search for her center; from that process come realignment, rediscovery, and, on especially good days, renewal.

She refuses to place her hope in whiteness, white people, white institutions, politicians, lawmakers, pastors, ministries, or even herself. She is not anyone’s savior. Against the temptation to wait for a bright, certain future, she describes remaining in the shadow of hope: knowing that racial equality may not arrive within her lifetime or her children’s, and still showing up. The work takes concrete forms—speaking, writing, loving, returning to work, and pushing back even when no one action can change everything.

For Austin, the basis of that persistence is not confidence in her own power. She writes and acts while acknowledging that her words may never be large enough to transform the world, and that the book itself might be read only by her mother. Her grounding is the distinction that God is God and she is not. Faith does not promise her the warmth of success or require certainty that her dreams will be realized. It allows her to demand meaningful love and continue working in uncertainty, carrying the inheritance of her ancestors, her parents’ teaching, and the Blackness that rescued her. The resulting duty is to live anyway: to let hope have both its day and its death, without mistaking the loss of certainty for a reason to surrender.