Life-changing Fiction! _Lost Shepherd_

On Mick Silva's blog, he poses the question, how relevant do we Christians feel in society today? My answer goes along with the concepts presented in the book mentioned earlier, Read for Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System

One of the most relevant stories I ever read is Lost Shepherd.

Out of print, now, but available, used, on Amazon, it's about a minister whose church is dying on the vine, and a strange woman down the street who prays for the minister's injured nephew. The young man gets well--too fast for comfort.

What will the vestry (or board of deacons, whatever) say???

The pastor tells the woman to leave his nephew alone....

She also has a favorite memory of a dear friend, a boy where they had lived as children in the Orient, who had heard the screams from the fields of torture. She moved away; eventually, he quit writing, and she lost track of him.

There's a lot more, new thoughts and applications for the pastor, with new people, a new love, and a stranger from the past.

It's powerful food for thought by the late Agnes Sanford, who writes of foreign mission fields and things we in the sheltered and skeptical church in the USA never heard about.

But ask any missionary. God hasn't changed a bit. His church has.

And now, we long to be taken seriously, while "having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof."

My heroine gets an awesome taste of power, some good and some bad, but all real and all part of what one author called "The normal Christian life."

But as we all probably learned in seventh grade health class, "normal" and "average" are two different things.