the drug game was raw capitalism on overdrive with bullets, a pyramid scheme whose base was dead bodies and ruined lives.

“Mama, I am sorry to disturb you, but I am very confused. After all of this pain and heartache, how are you now able to forgive? You seem so at peace with yourself and your life. How are you so able to move on?” She gave me an easy half smile and took another sip from her mug. “Because Mr. Mandela asked us to.”

I don’t want readers to ever forget the high stakes of these stories—and of all of our stories: that life and death, freedom and bondage, hang in the balance of every action we take.

“I guess it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.”

But the real discovery was that our two stories together helped me to untangle some of the larger story of our generation of young men, boys who came of age during a historically chaotic and violent time and emerged to succeed and fail in unprecedented ways.

Where was God when people didn’t make enough money to feed their families? Where was God when kids were selling rocks at twelve years old, and their parents encouraged it because the kids were the main breadwinners in the home? Where was God when a young boy came home from a school that was as uninterested in him as he was in it? Where was God when

We laughed at the panhandler on the block, but he wasn’t just an object of ridicule, he was an unsettling omen.

The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.

Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.