It’s been more than 25 years since author Mitch Albom shot to fame with his beloved book “Tuesdays with Morrie.” But the lessons gleaned from those brief moments in time, 14 Tuesdays to be exact, still guide Mr. Albom’s life. He recently sat down with the Washington Times’ Higher Ground to talk about the inspirations behind his latest book, running a Haitian orphanage, and how those fateful Tuesdays taught him of the immense blessings that come from caring for others.
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“I watched so many people going in to try to cheer [Morrie] up and he would end up turning the conversation, even though he was suffering from ALS and he was dying, but he turned the conversation and end up giving them a therapy session. And I would always say to him, ‘Why are you doing that?’” Mr. Albom recalled. “And he says… ‘Taking makes me feel like I’m dying, giving makes me feel like I’m living.’”
From that moment, the writer took Morrie’s words to heart and set out to discover if giving to people really was the “key to happiness.” Mr. Albom started his first charity in Detroit in 1995 and never looked back. Then, in 2010, he heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti.
“I didn’t even know how to find Haiti on a map, but I went because I had heard an orphanage had been destroyed and I couldn’t imagine children buried under rubble, and I went to just try to help, and it turned out it hadn’t been destroyed, but it had been overrun,” Mr. Albom explained. “I started helping it out. Next thing I know, the guy, the pastor would have been running it, said, ‘I can’t run it anymore. I’m 84. I don’t have any money,’ and I said, ‘I guess I could run it,’ and he said, ‘Thank you,’ and that was it.”
And while it was a lot of work and a lot of failing forward for Mr. Albom and his wife, who didn’t have any kids of their own, the couple was blessed with a front row seat watching hundreds of kids go from “the absolute worst circumstances” to thriving, joyful individuals who know what it is to feel love — especially from their Heavenly Father.
They even ended up adopting one little girl, Chika, who was diagnosed with a terminal brain cancer. Instead of taking her back to Haiti to die like doctors suggested, the Alboms brought her home and spent the next two years loving on her and giving her the best chance at life before she passed away.
“There’s a picture that I have of me with Chika and, just we’re messing around, but she’s smiling, but I have her in my arms, and I always look at that and I say, ‘That’s what life is. That is how you’re defined — by what you carry,’” Mr. Albom said. “And, for many years, I just carried my work, my accolades, my money, my paychecks. And then all of a sudden, you’ve got to drop all that and you’ve got to take care of a 5- and 6- and 7-year-old and that’s what’s in your arms. But it’s the best honor you can have to carry a child… And so she taught us all that. And I always say, we didn’t lose a child, we were given one. And that’s how we try to look at it.
It seems Mr. Albom had that lesson on the brain when he wrote his latest work, “The Little Liar.” This gripping tale, inspired by true events from World War II, tells the story of an 11-year-old Jewish boy in Greece who goes from never telling a lie to being manipulated by Nazi soldiers to convince his fellow Jews that it was safe to board the trains to Auschwitz. When the boy, Nico, finally discovers that he had been lying to those he loved most, he vows never to tell the truth again and spends most of his life carrying that guilt with him to the point that it comes to define him.
“Every book that I’ve written since, and there have been, I think, 10 now, since ‘Tuesdays with Morrie,’ seems to have come from one of the inspirations of those Tuesdays that I spent with him,” Mr. Albom said. And in this one, it was about truth and lying. And, we all tell lies in our lives. Some of them are more harmful than others. And some of them we spend the rest of our lives trying to make up for.”
“There’s a line in the book that’s if it was a movie, it would be the tagline, ‘A man to be forgiven will do anything,’” he continued. “And I hope that people look at that whole question of forgiveness and forgiving ourselves for the lies that we tell and find that in this book.”
“The Little Liar” is now available everywhere books are sold.
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Marissa Mayer is a writer and editor with more than 10 years of professional experience. Her work has been featured in Christian Post, The Daily Signal, and Intellectual Takeout. Mayer has a B.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Arizona State University.
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