People Change

Earlier this year, at the recommendation of a good friend, I read The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin. It’s one of those memoirs that doesn’t follow a straight line. It’s jagged. Raw. Funny when it shouldn’t be. Honest when it would have been easier not to be.

Hardin was a suburban soccer mom with a heroin addiction and a criminal record. She was also a ghostwriter, a spiritual seeker, and eventually a bestselling author. The book traces her journey through addiction, incarceration, recovery, and reinvention, and at every turn, it forces the reader to wrestle with two simple questions: What do we do with people who have messed up? And how do we allow them to change?

Here’s the line that I’m holding onto:

“People are not the worst things they’ve done. They are who they’re becoming.”

It’s easy to say we believe in redemption. It’s harder to practice it. This book doesn’t offer a clean or inspirational version of growth. It provides something more complex and more believable… a person owning what she’s done, facing the wreckage, and trying to build something better anyway.

I’ve known many students over the years who have made significant mistakes. Not little slip-ups, but the kind of choices that get them suspended, expelled, or labeled in a way that sticks. And yet, so many of them are still in process. Still figuring things out. Still becoming. If we only treat them as the worst version of themselves, we help make that version permanent.

Hardin’s story is full of contradictions. Jailhouse Bible studies and smuggled drugs. Shame and grace. Relapse and reconciliation. We’re not asked to forget that she has done some awful things. Instead, we are called to believe that transformation is real, and that it is possible even in the lives we are tempted to write off.

That idea matters in schools. In families. In communities. Everyone is becoming. Everyone deserves the chance to rewrite their story… not just once, but maybe again and again.

This book reminded me to stay open to that. It reminded me that accountability and compassion are not opposites. They have to live side by side.