Healed People Heal People

I am as honored as can be to have contributed a foreword to Preston Shipp’s new book: Confessions Of A Former Prosecutor. By clicking the link in the previous sentence, you can order it now and be energized, inspired, sobered, challenged, and made more alive all at once.

If you’re like me, you go looking for the real ones. Here’s what I mean by that.

The real ones are people who listen when you’re talking to them, I mean actually listening, not pretending to listen as they’re really mentally forming the words they’re going to say once you stop talking. The real ones don’t presume they know what you’re going to say before you say it. They know—or they’ve come to know—that even beginning to know another person takes time and patience, slow talking and slow listening. They know that to love a person is to love a process. They know this about themselves.

Preston Shipp is a real one. In this volume, he gives us the profound gift of describing, with candor, courage, and conscience, his own process, chronicling the drama of the difficult and sometimes humiliating moral realizations that brought him where he is today.

We need more of this in the world. If you’re reading this, I bet you know that already. What you might not know, until just now, is that a former criminal prosecutor in the beautiful state of Tennessee had his life turned around by people he once played a decisive role in caging. If I could get everyone I know in Tennessee to read this book, it would, I think, move the needle. Y’all, help me move the needle. Tell your people about this book.

And if you aren’t in Tennessee, you probably know something about the culture of fear and retaliation that often runs things here and there. Maybe you’re contending with that culture yourself. If so, this book might be for you and yours.

Hurt people hurt people, as the saying has it. But Preston has a new one: “Healed people heal people.” There’s a lot to grieve and be sad about out there. But there’s also a lot of hope and a whole bunch of folks entering into the healing game anew. Preston tells us about his friendship with Cyntoia Brown, his love of Miami Vice and Star Wars, and his determination to stop serving as a functionary in the strategies of abusive people. He has been enjoined by and within a culture of healing. I want to be there with him in the years remaining to me. You’re invited too. Give his his witness a look.