The Extended Hand

"The Extended Hand" is the first-person story of how a sixty-plus year old woman came to the point of having to tell the man she loved that she had lost all of their worldly goods, without giving him a warning. Only in retrospect did she understand why she, the daughter of a charismatic fundamentalist preacher with a need to control his family, was driven to excel and perform perfectly. As an adult, she found it hard to love herself--when her first marriage ended, after ten years, she was still a virgin--and went into a web-based business venture at a time when the internet was still a novelty, unable to acknowledge that she was in an emotional black hold.

Once, as a child, she fell through an open manhole into a sewer and was rescued by the extended hand of a caring man. Now, even though her business mistakes had wiped out the assets of a thirty-five year marriage, she discovers that her husband is another man capable of extending a hand to someone in need.

The story is also that of one preacher's daughter who learns to accept the extended hand of the living Jesus cleansed of the rules and exclusions imposed on it by a narrow, fundamentalist view of the bible's truths.

"The Extended Hand" is a "contemplative memoir" that covers basic facts of her two seemingly separate lives. The story combines these lives into an overview including political, historical, and religious climates of the time. It is an authentic story, told with the many circumstances put together, as a single life unfolds.