613 Media — Telling the Story

It really takes a good author to get my attention anymore. When you’ve become a published author, you only got there by putting on the hat of an editor. The writing is the fun part. The editing is the hard part. It involves cutting and pasting and trimming and rewriting and sacrificing beautiful scenes for the sake of moving along the story.

When I read books now, I put on my editor’s hat. I critique the choice of words, the sentence structure, the character development. And, to be honest, I can’t find that many books anymore that pull me in beyond the editor that I’ve become and immerse me in a powerful story that Lives! Well, Charles Martin just did that. I had never heard of this incredible author. But, I will now run out and buy every book he has written and cherish each one. I will read each sentence with the joy of savoring a good seven course meal.

“When Crickets Cry” caught my attention at LifeWay. I picked it up after reading the blurb on the back. A man living on the edge of a lake in Georgia with a mysterious past makes the acquaintance of a little girl in the small town who is in need of a heart transplant. As the story unfolds and the man’s past comes back to haunt us, you realize where the story is headed. Ah, but getting there is a distinct pleasure I haven’t had in years. I laughed. I marveled at the wonderful and complex characters. And, yes, I reached way down in my hardened author’s heart and cried like a baby. Not once, but several times. Women, beware! If it affected me this way, you don’t stand a chance!

Now, guys, don’t let this effect on me distance you from the book. There’s enough boat building and fishing and pig roasting and, yes, bar hopping to keep any of us happy. Just give it a try and I guarantee you will never be the same again.

So, thank you Charles Martin. I have been lost in demon haunted halls for years planning and writing the Jonathan Steel Chronicles and it was so refreshing to return to a book about the heart. You filled me up with love and imagination and hope and praise for the miraculous God that often moves unseen around us. Now, if only the Well really did exist and I could get “the Transplant” I’d probably be eating the best burger in the world!

Check out: charlesmartinbooks.com

I hate depositions.

Of course, I’m a doctor.

To say that a doctor hates depositions is a given. Sort of like saying God hates sin. We would like to abolish both.

What is a deposition? Let me give you a word picture.

You sit at the end of table with a court reporter beside you. You are sworn in by the court reporter. Then, two, three, sometimes four attorneys ask you questions just as if you were on the witness stand. These questions are hard. These questions are loaded. These questions are not designed to get at the truth. No one cares about the truth. It is a game of impressions. What can an attorney get you to say that will support their side in the case? How can they put the words into your mouth that they want to hear? So you sit nervous, sweating, stumbling over your words furiously trying to keep one step ahead of the questioning while reading between the lines and glancing at the attorney representing you to make sure you don’t say something you shouldn’t and all the time trying to keep your bladder under control and . . .

Well, you get the picture. Once, I was deposed as a material witness because of my involvement in a case and I ended up in the Emergency Room afterwards because I thought I was having a heart attack! So, to say the least, I was not looking forward to this deposition. I am not at liberty to discuss any of the details but I had heard that the attorney who was going to question me was a very tough person. According to my fellow physicians, this attorney was known to eviscerate doctors, poke out their eyes, and suck out their brains. Uh, you get the picture. Your worst nightmare!

In the hours leading up to the deposition, my wife called on some friends to pray for me. She knew how it would affect me. And, she didn’t want me to end up in the ER again. I arrived, took my seat next to the court reporter, took a deep breath and prayed. And prayed. And prayed. And prayed. For attorneys, depositions are routine, just business. Sort of like with doctors cleaning out an abscess of 2 liters of stinky pus is just business. But, to a doctor a deposition is a degrading, dehumanizing, depressing ordeal. It is a personal attack against our integrity and our ability as physicians. It is a strike at the very heart of who and what we are. We took an oath to do anything it would take to heal our patients. And, we took an oath that in the process of healing we would “do no harm”. Depositions imply that we did harm.

The attorneys arrived and the inquisition began. And, it was not bad. I discovered there was a very simple principle to follow. Tell the truth. If the truth was twisted by an attorney, I had no control over that. But, I did have control over what I thought and what I said. I would not compromise my principles. Whatever the consequences, at the end of the day I would have to look at myself in the mirror and answer to God for my actions. If I spoke the truth, I could do that. I would be faithful.

You may wonder what this has to do with 613media? Simple. God likes to surprise us. We ended the deposition and I was still alive. I wasn’t having chest pain or facial drooping or incontinence. And as we all stood up to go, the attorney shocked me.

“Dr. Hennigan, I really enjoyed your book.”

“Excuse me.” My jaw hit the floor. “You did what?”

“The 13th Demon. I really loved it.” The attorney looked at my attorney. “And you ought to read it, too. The thing I like about it was the spiritual emphasis. It was a great book and I can’t wait for the next one.”

I was stunned. I was shocked. I was surprised. I made my way out of the building after asking my attorney if I needed to do anything else, like contact a bailsman for instance. When I got to my car, the two deposing attorneys were getting into theirs. The main attorney turned to me and said, “Dr. Hennigan, I wondered if you were the same person who wrote that book. When I found out you were, I knew today would be no problem. I knew you, of all people, would tell the truth. Thank you.”

Never in a million years would I have expected such a potentially damaging situation to turn into a testimony to God. Never would I have imagined that the simple act of telling the truth would be a testimony to the ultimate Truth. Yes, God likes to surprise us! And, He likes to remind us that people are watching and listening and reading us. They are looking for the Truth. Let us make sure we show it to them. Always.

I have been continually amazed at the positive response to “The 13th Demon”. Over and over again, people who have read the book stop me and seem amazed at the book. Now, I do not want to toot my own horn. Their amazement is not about my writing or the fact that I am an author. What I am hearing over and over is the nature of the story. Specifically, what I hear is that the story managed to blend believable, real world circumstances with flawed and imperfect characters whose lives were centered around God, specifically Jesus Christ.

Now, stop for a moment and think about this. The story is not saccharin, it is not fluffy and warm, it is not filled with holy aphorisms and Bible verses. It is real. Real, flawed people grappling with real, everyday problems. I’ve believed for over twenty years that Christian fiction had become too pat, too tame, too safe. Where do you buy Christian books? In Christian book stores? How many non-believers come to Christian book stores to buy a good novel? Zero! They come, if at all, to buy a Bible for a friend or relative. The truly effective work of a Christian takes place out in the world which means we have to move beyond the comfort of our Christian worldview.

Now, I’ve always taken Jesus’ admonition to be in the world but not of the world literally. How can we as Christians make a difference in our declining culture if we are not engaged in our declining culture? Sometimes I think we’ve built ourselves these great halls of comfort called churches. We spend enormous time and money on perfecting the most moving worship service possible.

But, lately I’ve been seeing that what we may be doing is very dangerous. We are creating a generation of spiritual consumers who show up on Saturday and Sunday, get their spiritual mojo boosted and then go back out into the world to continue to enjoy other experiences. That’s the key word, experience. We are so focused on experience we may be forgetting the most important part of any human, the mind.

Jesus said to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Now, I can love God with my soul on Sunday in a great worship service. And, I can fill my heart with moving, emotional laden experiences. But, the real substance of changing and moving the world for God lies in what we can do with our Minds! And, part of that is to become producers, not consumers!

We are made in God’s image. He is the Creator. We have the power to also be creative. It’s hard to be creative with your hands raised in a worship service, zoning out on the latest worship song. Don’t get me wrong. This is an essential ingredient to the Christian life. We must experience God. But, we must move beyond the spiritual and heart felt consumption to creating culture with our minds.

In a wonderful lecture by John Mark Reynolds, the church is charged with bringing its members to a point where they can create culture. The church can recapture the rational learned atmosphere of the university that was once the center of Christian culture. This “enculturation” involves not only edifying the mind through learning doctrine, and history, and apologetics but is also involves freeing the Christian mind to create. It is the process of creating art that we most approximate the nature of our Creator God. People can truly see the image of God in those things we create to glorify God. Music, drama, film, paintings, dance, you name it. I believe we should be doing it all and we should be raising up a new generation of Christians to not just go out and change culture, but to create culture.

Which brings me back to my book. What I am hearing from those genuinely surprised readers is that somehow God managed to inspire me to create more than just a story and written words. I managed to create a culture of belief in a transcendent being in my book. And, I made people think about and become open to the possibility that in this postmodern society there may actually be a Story for us all that is written by the Creator God of the Bible. “The 13th Demon” is frightening and disturbing but so is life at times. Ultimately, the book is uplifting because it focuses on God and his redemptive power; His unfailing love; his desire to bring us to the pinnacle of our potential through His own presence.

So, I want to ask you to immerse yourself in the culture of God. I want to ask  you to become in tune with the flawed and imperfect culture around you so that you can know the questions to which we must have the Answers. I want to ask you to open up the creative side of yourself. Write. Read. Paint. Draw pictures. Arrange flowers. Do something beautiful and meaningful just because you and I are created in the Image of God. In so doing, we will be participating in the most meaningful form of worship there is!