About the Book

Moments Rushing By is a personal account of Sherry Strayer’s life, told in her own voice. She does not try to make anyone the villain. She is trying to understand how her life became what it became, starting with her mother’s marriages and the effect that constant change had on her and her sister.

Sherry was born in Clayton, Kansas, in 1956. Her sister Shan was born the next year, and the two of them were very close growing up. Their family later moved to Norton, Kansas. Her dad was a bricklayer who worked with Jerome Rudolph and Cleo Rolland. They laid brick for many of the buildings in Norton, including the church Sherry would later think of as her home church.

Sherry explains that a lot of what she knows from that time is what she was told later, because she was still very young. One memory she does describe in detail is from when she was three years old. She woke up cold in a room where an old water-backed air conditioner was running. She tried to turn it off and could not, then tried to unplug it and was not strong enough. She bit the cord to pull it loose, was electrocuted, and was thrown across the room. The cord stayed stuck in her mouth until her mother braced her foot on Sherry’s chest and pulled it out. The right side of Sherry’s upper and lower lip stayed scarred. It affected how she saw herself for the rest of her life.