Monthly Archives: April 2014

Exodus’ Remains

PublishedApril 11, 2014 Post authorraggedclown

My recent book, Exodus’ Remains is a story about what remains after the Israelites leave Egypt.  The story focuses on one person’s experience, and occurs far outside the traditional narrative we hear about God leading His people to the promised land.

I think the original inspiration for this type of story came to me from the first verse of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!'”  The idea of what things are left out of the traditional stories is very intriguing, and I have written several pieces in that vein, including Eve’s Favourite Fruit.  Right now I can’t help but think of the new movie Noah as a comparison.

This is a short novel, so the good news is it’s not necessarily a week long commitment to read, and you can hold the whole thing in your head at once.  The setting is fluid and at times surreal, and the timeline and events are meant to provide a sense of wonder, while the characters that appear in each chapter have a very real and identifiable human quality to them.

I read Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane last year, and I think some of the surreal mood from that carried over into this piece.

Exodus’ Remains is available in ebook format only, although in the future it might be published in print.  The book is currently available on Kindle and Kobo.  (hint: You can download apps for both Kindle and Kobo for free onto your smartphone and you’ll find it surprisingly enjoyable to read that way if you’re a smartphone user.)

The book is priced at $3.99 (although this fluctuates with the dollar), which is about the price of a fancy cup of coffee.  I hope you enjoy reading the book, and I would love to hear feedback on what impression it makes on you.

There will be more books to come.  The next project I am working on in this style is about the prophet Jeremiah.  I can’t wait to see where that one takes me!

rc

April 11, 2014

Take the Gospel to the Churches

PublishedApril 1, 2014 Post authorraggedclown

Ok Rachel. I’m in.

There’s a call to action here so make sure you read the end.

Last week I saw death and destruction.  World Vision USA was not the villain or the victim, but the battleground.

The worst thing that I have seen perpetrated by The Church in my lifetime was when they agreed to starve specific individual children to death to force a their neighbours to continue to marginalize a particular group of people.  Children whose names they knew, whom they had corresponded with, and whose pictures they had in their homes.

These are not the worst atrocities that have happened in my lifetime. Political regimes have done much worse. Things have happened in North Korea, Somalia and other places abroad. Genocide blazed in Rwanda. Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their parents on Canada for the purpose of education and civilisation.  But The Church has more to answer for.  We are the church and we literally preach about love.

I’ve read the gospels a lot lately. Jesus never marginalized and he continually de-marginalized.  (Recall the woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, Zacheus, the sick, the poor, the widows) He never held back grace for compliance. The church’s mistakes are only so heinous because we are the church.

If all we do is blog about this then we’re doomed. We need to talk to the people in our churches. The people that need to know are not the ones reading these blogs. We need to get the message into the churches.

We need to take the gospel to The Church.

I’m in.

April 1, 2014