Ask Andrea

I recently had the opportunity to read Rain Dance by Joy DeKok, a re-release of her 2006 novel , this time from Sheaf House. I have to say, I like the revised edition’s cover much better:

First off all, if you don’t like books that you need a box of Kleenex near by to read, you might want to stop reading now, because I sobbed like a baby. Of course, I’m in much the same shoes as Jonica, who the author admits in an afterward is based upon her own struggles with infertility and shockingly rude people who make me feel either grateful for my church or paranoid I’m being gossiped about too and just haven’t overheard it, depending on my mood at the moment.

She adds a novel’s worth of conflict to the drama with Stacie, the daughter of a Senator in the mold of Hilary Clinton who discovers the hard way who the real closed minded people are when she falls for the lie that abortion is a quick and easy way to get rid of a little “problem” and make sure her career goals stay on track. The author shows her struggle with post abortion syndome and fears over her increased risk of breast cancer (it also runs in her family) in a way that allows readers to understand the issue from a human perspective.

I like the way she portayed post abortion syndrome especially. It reminds us abortion effectively induces a miscarriage and we all know the devestating effects a miscarriage has on a woman, how she misses the child, she may even fret over whether she  unwittingly did something to hurt the baby. Why are we so surprised, shocked, even scandalized that intentionally inflicting a misscarriage on yourself can wreak similar emotional devastation? We forget the woman’s reproductive system isn’t on the same page as her career goals, is actively working against conscious mind, and did want that child. This is a tragic realization that comes to late for many, and they need loving souls like Jonica, and the author, to bring that pain to the surface, to grieve, and  ultimately find healing in Christ.

I am a little puzzeled at her preaching for the need to make post-abortive women feel welcome in the prolife movement (if I understood what she was getting at) as in Boise, ID, we have several pro-life activists who had abortions, they’re the most passionate and ardent ones, in fact, and I’ve never seen any of them shown anything but grace and mercy. The Church itself might be another thing. I haven’t heard too many admit that sin at the altar, so to speak, and the Church does need to come into way better balance on hot button issues, as we’ve lost many a Christian struggling with homosexuality to the enemy because they were too ashamed to ask for help.

Stylistically, the author chose to tell the story in dual first person, from both Stacie and Jonica’s view, and knowing her attachment to Jonica, and that Stacie needed to be a view point character, that close intmacy with both of them was warranted. However, she had a hard time dealing with the urge to show scenes from both point of view, and this resulted in several scenes being showed twice, with telling over the portions that we’d already seen, or simply summarizing the other person’s view, and we lose some of the immediacy we gained there and some of these passages get a tad dull, but she still manages to connect with her reader’s on a human level.

I tend to agree with previous reviewers, Stacie’s side in particular makes this book a good ministry tool to reach out to women going through that agony. Infertile women will get that good “I’m not alone, and I didn’t do anything to deserve this!” feeling after she raises the question in the first place.

The poor thing recieves a “prophecy” that if she repents of some unstated sin, she’ll be blessed with children, and that last part is theologically accurate, children are a blessing from the Lord. Unfortunately, scripture hints, in specific circumstances that only God may be able to forsee,  infertility is also a blessing, though I would prefer to exchange it for the latter blessing myself.

Interestingly, I didn’t react with the anger Joy, er, Jonica felt, but rather with, “Tell me what I’ve done, Lord, so I can repent of it!” (This reader identified perhaps too much.) It’s a whole lot easier to lift a curse caused by sin than it is to live with infertility God’s allowed for specific, usually ministry-related reasons which He may or may not decide to share with us. That’s why good people fall into the same mentality as Job’s friends in the first place.

Truthfully, I’d be a lot more concerned about the soul of someone who voiced their own personal opinion and decided to give it more authority by saying, “thus says the Lord” when the Lord has not thus said. In old testament times, the penalty for prophesying falsely even once was death. Even with grace, I like to naively think no one would dare risk the Lord’s wrath in that manner, but I’ve lived long enough to know better. Thankfully, God does forgive us, all of us, when we are truly sorry and turn from our sin. Even if it’s abortion. Even if she did have a hard time with showing both sides without resorting to telling or repeating scenes twice, Joy DeKok does a wonderful job of conveying that timeless and timely message without being overly preachy. She likewise develops the friendship between Stacie and Jonica in a believeable way that does a good job of showing how Jonica’s love and compassion for Stacie’s loss, without agreeing with Stacie’s decision, draws her to the Lord without making the reader feel overly lectured on how to be a good witness.

Readers particularly sensitive to books with a message might disagree with me on the preachiness level, given my perchant for message-oriented fiction, but if you like books that make you sob like a baby (I did, anyway) you’ll love this.

Popularity: 3%

Dear Andrea,
I feel like such a hypocrite. I’m a 30-year-old mother of two. Never very religious except for a vague belief in God. Family and exercise are my passions. A few days ago I was robbed at home by a pair of intruders. I was unhurt but left very tightly bound and gagged, face down and hogtied, in a closet. I struggled for awhile but soon realized I’d have to wait there for three hours until my husband and children returned. I’ve always been a very competent person and being all tied up was a blow to my pride and my dignity. (As they were tying me up fear was replaced by an overwhelming feeling of embarrassment). At some point I began to pray, mostly for strength. Emotional strength. I gradually felt a serenity and was able to relax. Though my arms and legs were bound I felt very free. When my family finally arrived and untied me I made them promise that we’d all regularly attend church, but I can’t help feeling that all my life I ignored God, then ran to Him when I got into trouble. Will He see me as just another hypocrite? I still feel all

–Tied Up

Dear Tied Up,

First, I praise God that you weren’t hurt! Home owners have been shot and killed in home invasions, though what you’ve been through is certainly horrendous in and of itself. And you are far from alone in your experience. Often times, those who draw near to the Lord for the first time as an adult will do so in a time of crisis. However, the sad statistic is that most who do so forget the Lord when things get better again and tuck the Lord away in a nice box in the closet until the next crisis, in which they again draw near to him just long enough to get through it. Does this make them hypocrites?

What it makes them is self-centered people who try to use the Lord when he’s convenient and toss him aside again when he’s not.  One might consider that hypocrisy or not, but either way it’s a destructive  behavior pattern that will land them in Hell if they don’t turn from it. But I should add this character flaw is deemed a virtue when it’s candy coated with pyscho-babble, so most of us struggle in this area to one degree or another. If we fall down, God is gracious to forgive and pick us back up again.

Now, hypocrite comes from the Latin hypocrita, which was, literally, a stage actor. Thus a hypocrite is someone who pretends to be something she’s not.

Far as I can see, you’re not pretending to be something you’re not; you’re a young woman who went through a horrendous experience and in that  moment of desperation turned to the Lord and discovered His love and comfort, and a freedom that indeed transcends physical bounds, amen!

The natural inclination of someone who doesn’t intend to throw God back on the shelf until the next time is to want to share this exciting feeling with your loved ones. Hence your family finds the woman who just days ago  couldn’t care less about God twisting their arms into going to church

While such sudden changes can confuse your family and get you accused of hypocrisy, that is mainly a lie from the devil to keep you from pursing the freedom the Lord is offering you, hon. He wants you to put God back on the shelf until the next time He proves convenient, not start going to church and accept Christ as your Lord and Savior. Though what the devil fears most is that you’ll then get so excited, you’ll go around sharing your testimony of how the Lord got your attention while bound in a closet and inspiring others to draw close to the Lord as well. So that voice whispering you’re a hypocrite is trying to use shame to deceive you into doing what he’s accusing you of.

The truth is, oftentimes, the reason God allows these things to happen in the first place is to get our attention. If this was God’s way of getting your attention, why in the world would He accuse you of being a hypocrite for giving it to Him? The Lord wants to be a significant part of your life, Tied Up. He wants you to turn  to Him and rely upon and trust in Him. He wants you to to choose to serve Him. By nature, we’re sold to sin and the devil, and the penalty is death and eternity separated from God.  Christ came and died in our place to set us free from sin’s bondage so we could be reconciled to Him.

By the way, the top reason the Church is often accused of hypocrisy today is that too many Christians misunderstand what it means to be set free from the law of sin and death, thus remain in bondage to sin and mistakenly call it liberty. But you can silence the devil’s accusations against you by asking the Lord to forgive you for all the times you’ve ignored Him in the past and remaining in relationship with Him even when things are going well. And if you sinecrely mean it, the Lord won’t hesitate to forgive. He loves you, Tied Up. He wants you to be reconciled to Him. If you’re going to stick to it, don’t be ashamed of the circumstances that brought you to Him, shout it out loud!

In Christ’s Love,
Andrea Graham

Popularity: 1%

The jacket description for Forsaken, a suspense novel by James David Jordan, tells us:

When Simon Mason, the world’s best-known televangelist, receives threats from Muslim terrorists, he hires Taylor Pasbury, a former Secret Service agent, to take charge of his security. When the terrorists strike, making a demand of the pastor that would shake the most steadfast saint, Taylor draws on all of her training to save Simon’s daughter. Along the way, she discovers that she is not the only one who has done things she would like to forget—and she is not the only one who understands that some things are more important than living.

Positive elements:

1) authentic characters. Jordan does well at making his characters come alive. Simon and Taylor especially are “real” people, with real strengths and real weaknesses, with motivations most readers will easily relate to.

2 Jordan clearly knows how to connect with the readers emotions, to engage his readers in the story and make them feel the characters’ emotions. This invites us to put ourselves in the situation and ask ourselves what we would do.

3) in a word: deep. Jordan is unafraid to tackle hard questions that most Americans, to my knowledge, would rather not consider. Martyrdom and Christ’s demands on his disciples need talked about a heck of a lot more. The fact Christ requires His followers to put Him first before everyone else in our lives, including even our own children, is a very unpopular scriptural truth today, so Jordan gets kudos for even bringing the topic up.

Negative elements:

4). Taylor, the first person narrator, frequently goes into Dragnet-style narration that takes several paragraphs to describe actions over a period of time. These passages get a little dull and, especially in a suspense novel, tempt the reader to skip over them.

5) in a word: weak. The novel at times reflects the common failure in the American Church to appreciate the gravity of sin, as betrayed by apparently buying into the common and good-intentioned heresy that a Christian is a sinner saved by grace. A sinner is, by definition, not under grace. A sinner is someone sold out to sin and living to obey the lusts of the flesh. Those of us who get caught by this snare of the enemy have good intentions, namely to be humble. However, to say we’re sinners is not humble, it actually knifes Jesus in the back. The devil deceives us into confessing we’re sinners because in doing so he has tricked us into denying the Lord.

At the point, the reader may be asking, so what is a Christian? A former sinner, in the process of being changed by God’s grace into a saint. We were, not are. We cannot serve two masters, Christ tells us in Mt 6:24. Either we will hate the one and love the other or be loyal to the one and forsake the other. To be a Christian means forsaking our allegiance to Sin and giving ourselves wholly to Christ. As we are by nature slaves sold under sin, this only happens by the grace of God. That is what is so hideous about “a sinner saved by grace.” It has a form of godliness, but denies the power.

The way some folks talk, you’d think the whole cross thing was God playing a sadistic mind game with himself to justify letting sinners into His presence, where they cannot go. The bible, however, teaches the Cross not only made a way for us to not only be forgiven, but cleanses us of sin. The work of the cross is to take sinners and transform them into saints.

Which is why one must be careful of how we sorrow. There is a sorrow that leads to life, and a sorrow that leads to death. For instance, let’s say someone denies Christ in order to save the life of their child, and then, hoping to make up for this, goes overseas and baits terrorists into killing them. This is actually a good way to end up in Hell, because our works are filthy rags. You can’t make it up to Him. You can only be so sorry you would rather your child had died than you had denied your Lord. That is the godly sorrow that leads to repentance and salvation. So long as such a person is glad their child is alive and would do it again in a heart beat, they haven’t repented of anything.

Now, Peter was reinstated after denying the Lord by being asked to declare his love for the lord three times, but this came only after he wept for having denied his Lord. Since it was his own life at stake, his later martyrdom did prove his repentance. But if it’s someone else’s life at issue, then it’s their life you need to be willing to risk, not yours. Otherwise you’re trying to make a deal with God. “You can have my life, but not _____” Sorry, it doesn’t work like that.

Note having characters with flawed views is not a bad thing in itself. The problem comes in when bad theology comes across as correct theology to the undiscerning. But I’m inclined to chalk up most of the novel’s weakness here to timidity. As I said, Jordan has my kudos for even having the guts to broach this topic, and he deserves a hearing.

The truth of God’s word on this topic is politically incorrect and most of us prefer to give Christ a make-over, effectively cutting out of the Bible the demands Christ places on His followers. This is a road that leads to destruction, my friends.

God’s truth doesn’t change because it’s unpopular. If we fail to give people the whole gospel, if we talk only of mercy and grace, we do them great harm, not good. God purchased us back from sin at Calvary, and we absolutely must talk about that mercy. But there’s a catch to being bought. We are not our own. We are bought with a price. (1cor 6:19-20) If Jesus is Savior, He is also Lord, and if He is not Lord, He is also not Savior. The Church must start holding believers accountable to the requirements Jesus laid out for discipleship in Luke 14:25-35, which says:

Now great multitudes went with Him. And He turned and said to them, “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple. And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it— lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’?

“Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace. So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.

“Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is neither fit for the land nor for the dunghill, but men throw it out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

Popularity: 24%