Some of you may have read my fairy tale, Beloved, or heard me read it through a podcast. Well good news! I’m in the process of reworking it and handing it off to my editor, my dear sister in Christ Elaine Phillips, for a cleanup. Probably mid July I’ll make it available for download.
What’s it about? Here’s a snippet from the introduction:
If you’ve ever flipped through the Bible— meandering from the creation account through the garden of Eden, flying by the era of the kings to the time of Jesus, skimming the book of Acts, and then beyond—you’ve probably had a thought like, “There’s something larger going on here.” And you’re right. But what’s that larger thing? What’s going on?
Well, for one thing, the Bible has been described as God’s love letter to humanity. John Eldredge goes further, calling the Bible a love story—the most beautiful love story ever told. That thought resonated with me, inspiring me to write the story you’re about to read.
True, others have transposed the Bible into a pure story form—but Beloved is my best attempt at recasting it within the inimitable pomp and spunk of a particular type of story: a fairy tale. Fairy tales whisper to us about our truest longings and desires, and that’s what God wants his story to do to us.
As Chesterton reminds us, we live in “a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where it is often hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name… that is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.”
Amen?