by Patricia Bradley
Then the LORD told me: “I will give you my message in the form of a vision. Write it clearly enough to be read at a glance” (Habakkuk 2:2 CEV).
The Christian fiction genre accounts for nearly 51% of all faith-based book sales, and I believe it is an awesome tool for evangelizing. Not everyone agrees with me, but think about it.
Jesus taught by story—parables—short fictional stories with heavenly meanings, but they were stories nonetheless.
Stories that listeners were caught up in because Jesus used characters, items, and events from their everyday lives. His listeners could relate.
Not only that, but we can give our readers a different perspective than they might have had. Sometimes, a story can even change a person’s mind.
Take the story of the Good Samaritan.
Maybe Jesus put it in story form because he knew his listeners would not accept what he wanted to teach them if he preached it as fact. To the Jewish people of that time, Samaritans were loathsome. Jews often traveled up to 70 miles out of their way when going from Jerusalem to Galilee to avoid Samaria. That’s a long way for someone who is walking.
When I wrote my first book, I intended to give Christians an alternative to the romantic suspense available in the general market—stories that were on-the-edge-of-your-seat riveting but often wove profanity, sex, and violence into the books.
My readers let me know I’d given them an alternative. But that wasn’t my only reason for writing fiction. I wanted to show the world that Christians have problems just like everyone else. What makes us different is how we solve them and Who we depend on.
An example is in my first romantic suspense novel, Shadows of the Past, which was released in February 2014. In March, a reader emailed me that she’d found an error: I had called a respiratory therapist a respiratory nurse. I couldn’t believe I had done that—I knew there was no such thing.
When I checked, she was right. I thanked her and then, because she had been a nurse for thirty years and the book I was working on featured a doctor, I asked her to read it for errors. She agreed and did a fabulous job of ensuring I had my terminology right.
Once I turned the book in, I wanted to reward her in some way. She refused, saying, “No. I was supposed to meet you and read this second book because the problem your heroine had is one I’ve had all my life.”
My heroine overheard her parents talking, and the mother told the father, “I told you we never should have had another child.”
My heroine was that second child. She felt unloved.
My reader continued, “Seeing how your heroine resolved that problem gave me hope that I could do the same thing. Your book changed my life. It changed my children’s lives because they no longer had a bitter and angry mother.”
I read her email with tears running down my cheeks. At that moment, all the hard work of writing that book was worth it—more than worth it. It was the whole reason I was a writer—to bring hope and healing to a hurting world in a way that would magnify Christ.
Hope. That’s why I and other Christian fiction authors write the stories we do. The characters in our novels live their testimony to God’s goodness through the pages of our books, realizing that when bad things happen, it’s not because God has abandoned them, but that He is with us through the bad times.
New Release – available on Amazon – https://a.co/d/jkphrUL
Patricia Bradley
For more information, visit https://ptbradley.com/.
