Testify - A Memoir Of My Journey, Memories, Faith

Funderburk's real gift is sitting inside a small, specific memory until it opens into something larger — and trusting the reader to make that leap alongside him rather than over-explaining it. The chapter on his mother's mental health crisis, "I Lost Her at Twelve," is the book's strongest sustained passage: the detail of the darkened house, the candles, being called "the devil," and then — devastatingly — his mother riding a bicycle down the street unclothed while he watches from a neighbor's deck, is rendered without melodrama and without flinching. He doesn't resolve it neatly; he lands on "I lost her at twelve, and I have spent many years learning how to love the mother who remained," which earns its weight because of everything preceding it.

The baseball chapter, "A Cheering Section," does something harder than grief writing: it makes an embarrassing childhood memory (his mother sprinting down the first-base line, hollering) pay off as an adult reckoning with unconditional love — "Sometimes the people who support us do not look or sound the way we think they should." That's the book's throughline, restated in different keys across the collection: grace disguised as ordinariness, showing up in a mower, a whistle through the woods, a shopkeeper's mercy after a theft.

The prose is plain but controlled, and the memoir knows exactly who it's for: readers of faith-based reflective nonfiction who want small-town, family-rooted testimony rather than literary pyrotechnics. Within that lane, it delivers real emotional payoff more than once.