Water from My Heart

by Charles Martin
Carver County Library hardcover 363 pages
genre: Christian fiction, adventure, romance
*Spoiler alert - some of the excerpts toward the end give away plot points.*

I didn't love the first half of this book. Charlie Finn is a drug runner who keeps people at arm's length. The chapters alternating between his past and his present just serve to make him less likable in his old work (playing poker while at Harvard and high finance with Marshall) as well as the evils of being a drug runner in the Miami area.

But halfway through the book, he gets violently ill (from fresh salsa) in Nicaragua. He meets Pauline and her daughter Isabella. And the story gets better and better from there until the end. So worth the read! I wish the author had focused (and/or the editor deleted liberally) the negative and repetitive first half.

page 144 - When he asks Pauline how she can stand to help people when they have so little going for them. "When I first traveled to the States to study, I was struck by how everyone I encountered spent their days working feverishly to make enough money to buy a better tomorrow. Here, people are content - they buy what they need today and leave tomorrow to God." So true! Our culture seems to be busy busy busy going somewhere and it's all about having money and control. But none of us can control our futures.

page 186 - This was just a giggle to me. Charles Martin doesn't come across as a strong Christian author. But this sentence caught my attention. "What I didn't realize at the time was that my half-fast proposal . . . " At first I thought it was a typo, then I realized he didn't want to use the vernacular. I had to read "half-fast" a few times before I realized it was a deliberate choice to avoid swearing!

page 216 - The first encounter with the title - "Aqua de mi corazon" - "Water from my heart" I loved the story of her father and digging the well.

page 242 - Charlie describing the emotional release that can come from crying. "The proof lies in the source. They did not fall from my head. They poured up and out of my heart."

page 270 - "I might not be in league with other evil men, but over my life, I'd looked away, gone on my merry way, done nothing to prevent or hinder - or rescue. While not an active instigator, I'd been passive. An accomplice even. That passivity had only served to multiply. Maybe that was the toughest thought to swallow. The effect of my life had been to multiply evil, not fight it. Not eradicate it." When we talk about our legacy at church, I think about what I want to achieve. What really matters. I couldn't live with myself if I felt that the effect of my life had been to multiply evil.

page 296 - This is when he talks to the bones of Alejandro Santiago Martinez and his wife, down in the well. He had already given her mother's locket to Pauline. Moving, touching. I like this scene. It's like a confessional.

page 306 - When the water is rising and he is stuck. "The sin of my life had been and remained indifference, and in that instant, I was indifferent to my own death."

page 311 - When Zaul asked Charlie to teach him how to do wood working. "For growing up with such privilege, there was a lot Zaul had not done. Evidence that money did not buy experience." I think this is so true of a lot of privileged kids! Some of my students have so little experience with chores, yard work, or other life experiences that middle class and poorer kids have to do!

page 314 - "I realized that Leena shined a light everywhere she went. She was a walking headlight. A coming train. A rising sun. Unafraid, she walked into the darkness, and when she did, the darkness rolled back as a scroll." I want to be a woman who shines light into the darkness! I love this imagery.

page 315 - I can so relate to this! Charlie is agonizing over his role in the closure of the Cinco Padres Coffee . . . and "Get it off my chest and dump it on hers under the guise of being truthful when in reality I just wanted to make myself feel better?" Sometimes, it's hard to know what your motives are in telling someone the truth. If it will hurt them, you have to weigh carefully what to say and how to say it. "Like gasoline in a Styrofoam cup, it was eating me from the inside out."

page 322-3 - Wow. Almost to the end of the book and we learn about a momentous, life-changing day in Charlie's life when he was seven or eight years old. That would have helped to make his character and personality traits a bit more logical for readers like me. I don't usually like a book if I don't like the protagonist. This one took me a while to warm up to!

page 344 - Makes me think of Sunday's sermon on hope. "I'd been letting the pain of my past dictate the hope and promise of my future. . . . If she was right and hope was the currency of love, then I'd been broke a long time."

page 359 - author's notes at the end were really interesting! I'm glad Marin included them. "Indifference is the curse of this age. We need to hear that. Indifference is evil, and it could not be further from the heart of God."

page 361 - LOVED this part about the real-life man named Moises and the faith he lives. I love the report of signs and wonders in his community in Nicaragua. "With a budget of zero, Moises has planted seven or eight churches and invests his time, encouragement, and leadership in some thirty more. He gives when he has nothing - which is all the time."

Yep. This was a really wonderful book!