The Church That Wasn't Mine

I was in an unfamiliar part of Detroit on a Sunday morning, killing time before a meeting, when I walked past a small church with the doors open. Something stopped me and pulled me in. I am not a person who does things like this. I sat in the back. The pastor preached on forgiveness. Specifically, precisely, on the kind of forgiveness I had been refusing to give my mother for fifteen years. He used an analogy — a locked door and who holds the key — that my therapist had used with me in a session two days earlier. Word for word. Same analogy. I went home and called my mother.