“Christian fiction” those two words will make the bravest man tremble and flee in terror. I know. Bear with me.<\/p>\n
About ten years ago, we were having dinner with a couple of students at our house. We did that around 400 times, so I don’t remember them all with vivid detail. But for some reason I remember part of one conversation. Our discussion led me to ask the female student what her dad did. Her answer was that he wrote Christian books and stuff. I thought \u2013 I’ve never heard of this guy, must be a wannabe. I felt sorry for him, sitting at his desk, writing books that were lame and no one read except the people related to him.<\/p>\n
The last couple of weeks I read a book that this guy wrote. Technically I listened<\/em> to it on my drives to school and back. It is a work of Christian fiction.<\/p>\n Now, I know what you ‘re thinking. You ‘re thinking that my expectations were set real low<\/em> and that any ecstatic proclamations of mine should be discounted. Any “run out and buy this book” can safely be ignored.<\/p>\n Or maybe you ‘re thinking that if it’s good, it can’t really be Christian<\/em>. Because Christian+fiction=cheesy. Or corny. And certainly not true to life.<\/p>\n You would be wrong. This book is really<\/em> Christian. It doesn’t insert Christian phrases to make it Christian. It doesn’t have the guy and girl waiting to kiss until the wedding. It’s not the frilly, surface stuff that makes you hate Christian fiction. It is Christian because the writer is a man of deep faith, intense love for the church, absolute devotion to the Savior, and a practical knowledge of Scripture.<\/p>\n But it is also fiction. The author wrote a story. It is engaging. I looked forward to my drives every day, and traffic didn’t bother me until the story finished midway home this afternoon. The story could be true, and no doubt it is based on numerous other real people.<\/p>\n I could assign this book for a number of classes. Students would love reading it (they ‘ve probably never had a textbook that caused them to lose track of time). And they would learn a lot.<\/p>\n I’m not going to tell you what all this book teaches, primarily because that would take away some of the surprise of the story. I ‘ll just tell you that it’s worth learning and based on years of careful study of the Scriptures. The setting of the book is the persecuted church in China, but there is much more to learn that that.<\/p>\n One of the things this book did for me was to give me a more exalted view of God and a greater desire to live my life for him. Not many books do that.<\/p>\n I’m not the only one impressed by this novel. In fact, I come very lately to the party. When it was released, it was winner of the Gold Medallion Award for best book of the year. Reviews on book sites are five-star (114 at Amazon). <\/p>\n This is one book that you might consider buying new (or directly from the author<\/a>), as all royalties go to the persecuted church.<\/p>\n The book: Safely Home<\/a><\/em>, by Randy Alcorn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Christian fiction” those two words will make the bravest man tremble and flee in terror. I know. Bear with me. About ten years ago, we were having dinner with a couple of students at our house. We did that around 400 times, so I don’t remember them all with vivid detail. But for some reason\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13,38,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-faith","category-teaching","category-things-i-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toddbolen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}