The Rescuer: One Firefighter’s Story of Courage, Darkness, and the Relentless Love That Saved Him

In this moving debut, high school dropout and Oakland firefighter Sautel shares his experience of job stress that led to depression and how he came to be saved by faith. One of the writer’s earliest memories is of his first day of school, when his teacher placed him in a dark closet because he misbehaved; it was there he learned to carry around his own “closet of fear.” After his parents divorced, his mother moved across the country to North Carolina, while Sautel remained in California with his abusive, emotionally distant father. Sautel became a firefighter at age 18, and initially he found the work and camaraderie rewarding. But the buildup of traumatic experiences nearly led him to give up after a particularly harrowing moment when he failed to convince a bridge jumper not to jump. Then, a near-death experience in a fire causes Sautel to take a relationship he’d started a few months prior more seriously, making him realize how much he wanted to live and that “the times of peace, the genuine love, was God.” Mostly concerned with the unique difficulties of his life in the line of fire, Sautel’s riveting account will appeal to Christians concerned with the effects of trauma on mental health. (Sept.)