What are the challenges (or benefits?) of writing these kinds of stories while keeping them grounded in a biblical worldview?
The challenge is making them believable. Even though the Bible is built entirely on a supernatural foundation and is full of supernatural stories, many Christians balk when they hear about supernatural things in novels.
A friend of my mother-in-law told her, “I really love Jim’s book, but wow, he always has fantastical things in them. Is Jim really a Christian?” That cracked me up since any supernatural elements I weave into my stories come straight from Scripture.
So even though my fantastic elements come from the Bible, I have to make people believe they could happen in present day. Of course, the benefit of my type of stories is I have few limits to what can happen, which people have said make my stories deeply intriguing and unique.
What spiritual themes are there in The Pages of Her Life?
Identity is the major spiritual theme in Pages. I think we long to know who we are at our core. The Holy Spirit comes to live inside us and wants us to rise up to all He has designed us to be, yet because of the wounds of our past we’re often held back from stepping into that glory.
As Saint Irenaeus’s famous quote says, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” We want this because we sense something inside us died long ago. I believe God wants to resurrect those things and usher us into the life we always knew was there but didn’t quite know how to grasp.
In what ways does your faith impact how you approach storytelling?
It doesn’t impact it at all. Let me explain: I never set out to be a Christian author. When the Lord invited me to become a novelist, it was an invitation to become a novelist, not a Christian novelist. So I’m an author, period, who also happens to be a Christian.
I simply write the stories that won’t get out of my head unless I get them down on paper. And since the center of my life is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, my stories have so far ended up having the Trinity woven deeply into them.
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