DETROIT LAKES — Former Detroit Lakes Tribune publisher Devlyn Brooks really wasn't a big believer in God's love, or even the existence of God, through much of his younger years. "I was out of the church for a very long time," he says. "My parents divorced when I was very young, and we belonged to a small church in a small town.
"And as small churches and small towns do, they can pick a side, right? I had always felt that our small church had picked a side, and my mom, who had kept all nine of us kids, was not that side. At least I didn't feel that support from my faith community, so I left the church when I was 12 years old. I made a very conscious decision like, if this is what God is, if this is what he has to offer, then I'm out.
" The Crookston, Minnesota, native noted that if someone had told him then that he would end up as the ELCA-ordained pastor of a small Lutheran church in the equally small northwest Minnesota town of Wolverton, he would likely have labeled them as slightly, shall we say, less than sane. "I had decided that I'd had enough of this organized religion business," Brooks wrote in the forward to his first published book, "Finding Faith in Life's Beautiful Cracks," which is available for purchase locally at Detroit Lakes' own Bluebird Books, as well as online at the WDAY News e-commerce site, wday-smart-shopper.myshopify.
com, and at the front desk of the Forum Communications news offices in Fargo. ADVERTISEMENT Brooks continued in the book's foreword: "W.