We Hope for Better Things

by Erin Bartels

One of the most important lessons I learned in my first couple years as a professional journalist was not to get emotionally involved with a story. There was simply too much heartbreaking stuff you had to write about. To let yourself empathize with the boy who was being bullied or the man who had lost his business or the woman whose daughter had been abducted, when there was nothing you could do to help the situation beyond making a voice heard—it was just too heavy a burden to bring home with you every night. So I built up a wall around my heart and stayed within it at all times when it came to work.

history is written by the victors.”

Change happens when the cost of keeping things the way they are is too high.

There’s no one right path that if you make the wrong choice you’re sunk. Whatever you choose to do, God can use that. Life is always a winding path. It’s only in retrospect that it appears to be a straight and inevitable one.”

You get to my age and you wish you had a chance to step back to see the whole, to see what you’ve made of your life and what you’ve made of theirs, to see if you’ve honored their memories or redeemed their faults. But you never can. Time never stops and allows you to know anything.”

There are always hard parts. But so many of those things—later you realize that were it not for them, something else wonderful could never have happened.”

All it took to lose one’s history was a single generation that didn’t take the time to learn it and pass it on.