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GRACE BY WHICH I STAND by Lin  Lockamy

GRACE BY WHICH I STAND

by Lin Lockamy

Pub Date: Nov. 4th, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490855752
Publisher: Westbow Press

From being confined to a wheelchair to walking on her own, Lockamy recalls her journey of recovery after a near-fatal accident tested her strength and faith.

After dropping off her son at school, Lockamy was hit head-on by a driver in the opposite lane. Her car flipped over another car to land upside down on another vehicle and careen into a brick wall. Trapped in the twisted wreckage, Lockamy floated in and out of consciousness during the rescue process, overhearing that they were running out of time to save her pinned right ankle. Though medics were able to save her lower half, the damage was extensive enough that doctors said she would never walk again. During recovery, Lockamy’s sunny disposition helped her through circumstances that otherwise seemed dismal: legs mangled from the extraction, ankles and lower legs pieced together with rods and screws. Over the course of her recovery, she took literal baby steps until, at the close of the book, she walked on her own, with family and friends as witnesses. Lockamy’s tone strikes a balance between conversational and testimonial, mixing faith-based anecdotes with her mellow sense of humor. Because of her shifted perspective, Lockamy comes to certain realizations about humanity and connectedness: we are all at different points in our own processes of (re)construction, and we can never know whose lives we touch. Throughout the memoir, Lockamy weaves in excerpts from biblical stories she found inspiring: Daniel in the lions’ den and Noah building the Ark. For the most part, these passages testify to deep faith and renewal by focusing on God, but more analysis would better integrate them into the memoir as a whole.

A straightforward, faith-based story of reconstruction in the wake of trauma.