The Beginnings in our Endings

About this book

October 8, 2004: a phone call from the Abilene Police Department changed everything. Jenn Hogan's twenty-one-year-old life split into "before" and "after" the moment she learned her eighteen-year-old brother, Garrett, had been murdered--his throat cut, no signs of forced entry, no answers.The Beginnings in Our Endings follows the twenty years that came after: the unsolved case that resurfaced and collapsed again, a marriage to a man who hid a terminal diagnosis until it was too late, and a faith that eroded so completely Hogan once called herself furious at God--before slowly, painfully, finding her way back.This is not a tidy story about grief resolving into peace. It's an honest one--about sitting on the concrete floor where her brother died, about a struggling houseplant that somehow survived weeks with no water, about learning that forgiveness doesn't require reconciliation, and about discovering that justice, in this life, doesn't always come. When the case against her brother's killer finally collapsed after twenty years, Hogan had to decide what faith looked like without the ending she'd spent two decades waiting for.Woven through with Scripture, unflinching honesty, and moments of unexpected grace, this memoir is for anyone who has lost faith along with everything else--and wonders if it's possible to find it again. Hogan doesn't offer easy answers. She offers something more useful: proof that the endings that break us open can become the beginnings that lead us back.