Linda Ellis Livres

People would converge on a spring night, a Saturday night in 1982 at the Jersey shore. One of them wouldn’t be going home. It was a cold-blooded murder spurred by the heat of lust and greed. Mistakes were made. Nevertheless, it could quite easily have been a perfect crime. It is only because one of the players was rendered stone stupid by an insatiable appetite for sex – a special kind of nothing-to-do-with-love sex - that this case ever reached a courtroom. Eighteen years later, the family of the victim is able to shed the black of mourning and don the blood red of retaliation. Enraged by what they saw as inadequate punishment meted out by a court, the grieving family has a new opportunity for dark justice. More than one family seeks closure. Another victim has been mourned all these years. It’s a race for revenge. Who will win?

When your life is over, everything you did will be represented by a single dash between two dates—what will that dash mean for the people you have known and loved? As Joseph Epstein once said, “We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents, or the country of our birth. We do not, most of us, choose to die. . . . But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.” And that is what The Dash is all about. Beginning with an inspiring poem by Linda Ellis titled “The Dash,” renowned author Mac Anderson then applies his own signature commentary on how the poem motivates us to make certain choices in our lives—choices to ignore the calls of selfishness and instead reach out to others, using our God-given abilities to brighten their days and lighten their loads. After all, at the end of life, how we will be remembered—whether our dash represents a full, joyous life of seeking God’s glory, or merely the space between birth and death—will be entirely up to the people we’ve left behind, the lives we’ve changed.