Esau McCaulley’s memoir, How Far to the Promised Land? dives into his family history, specifically spurred on by his father.

What McCaulley shows in the book is it’s easy to put labels on people and events to simplify how we see people.

It’s easy to put on the labels: Democrat, Republican, Progressive, Capitalist, Socialist. It’s comfortable to do.

It would be easy to label McCaulley’s situation as “an absentee father” or “drug addicted dad.” McCaulley learned what many of us learn (hopefully) as life goes on. It’s more complicated than that.

We can make a hero out of someone. For McCaulley’s family, it was a matriarch who overcame abuse, tragedy, financial exploitation, and blatant racism. Yet, her story was complicated.

We want to hurriedly make heroes and villains out of people and leave them there. We fail to see that the same elements that made a hero can also form a failure.

It is far too easy for us to accept partial truths about someone and leave that label sticking on their forehead. They stay the “hero” or the “villain” and their lives become static to us. It cheats us out of a full life ourselves. Then, we find people treating us the same way… labels.

McCaulley’s book is a beautiful read. It has deep pain, a lot of sweet surprises, and far reaching life lesson. We have to be brave enough to look.