Truth and Fiction

Okay, I read two or three books at a time. I'm weird like that. I guess I've read more fiction in the last two years than in the previous five combined. Anyway...I love it when a writer weaves heavy-duty truth into a fictional tapestry. This is my most recent example.

She had prayed for him frequently over the years. On more than one occasion, forces had tried to rise up and destroy him - but none like those coming at him now. Still, such attacks shouldn't surprise her. If he was to become such a formidable threat to evil, why shouldn't the forces of evil concentrate their attack upon him? It made perfect sense.

However, there was one thing that she had never understood: the boy's own weaknesses - his internal doubts, his external sins.

Why? Why did her Lord always choose to fight the impossible wars? Wasn't battling against the outside evil enough? Did he always have to choose as his champion someone who was wounded and weak on the inside as well? And what of the young man's sins? He was certainly no saint. How could her Lord use someone like him to accomplish such great purposes?

The thought had barely risen before Gerty broke into a quiet smile. Wouldn't she have said the same thing about Jacob the con artist, Moses the murderer, David the adulterer, or Paul the persecutor?

Her eyes welled with moisture. It was true, his ways were not hers. And if one of his habits was to choose the weak to confound the wise, then so be it. - Bill Myers in Threshold