Sonny's blues

Sonny's blues is a narrative story between two brothers living in a rough part of town. The narrator and Sonny never really had a tight relationship in fact several times in the story the narrator said how he wishes he could relate to his brother. Sonny went to jail because he was addicted to heroin and when he recovered he came home to live with this older brother, the narrator. Throughout the story the narrator is bringing up past events that dealt with him and Sonny. One part that really touched me was when the narrator said "I wanted to say more, but I couldn't. I wanted to talk about will power and how life could be-well, beautiful. I wanted to say that it was all within." This is extremely sad to me since I am coming from a Christian perspective. I often wonder how do people live the daily grind without hope? How do you deal with stress whether it's dealing with the family, fiancial, school, friends, relationships. We live in America and we are known to have an abundance in materialism but does that get us through our day? Can our car or college degree save us from ourselves? Many times we rely too heavily on what we have to be our savior just like life got rough for Sonny and he resorted to heroin. "It makes you feel-in control. Sometimes you've got to have that feeling." This quote Sonny was referring to how heroin made him feel. He was in desperate need of being in control of his life, to have this peace that God can only give. He didn't have it so he was looking to the world for solutions. In the Bible it states that God made a little hole in our heart that we will wont to have filled in our life but it has to be him to fill it otherwise when it's not him it doesnt feel quite right. Only God can give us this peace that we all are desperatly looking for just like Sonny.