What I Learned from Francine Rivers
We watched The Last Sin Eater last night. It’s a movie I’d seen years ago but my daughter hadn’t seen it and I wanted her to. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s based on a Francine Rivers novel and it’s about a tradition that was held in the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s in Appalachia where the community chose one person to “eat” their sins when they died, taking them all upon himself. The movie is rated PG-13 for violence and it would be a little scary for kids, but it has such a strong Christian message that I’m recommending it to my church family.
I’ve never been the kind of person who swooned over superstars or asked for autographs and I’m not beginning that now, but Francine Rivers is a Christian author I really admire. I read a blog post of hers once (can’t find it now) but it was a call to Christian authors to write Christian fiction. Not just clean books with a Christian worldview, but books that would simply fall to pieces if you tried to take the Christian aspect out of them.
That really got to me.
You see, we have so many anti-Christian ideas being promoted on television and in books. I’ve always said that if you’re told something enough times you’ll believe it, whether it’s true or not. And we’re constantly being fed lies. Christian authors want to combat this. They want to write books that are clean, with characters that have morals, stories with no gore, excess violence, or sex. And that’s great. But there are a lot of authors doing that. Some of them aren’t even Christian, but they’re writing “clean” very well. What we need more of are stories about how people come to faith, how hard it is to struggle in our Christian walk, how to lean on Jesus in our everyday lives. How beautiful it is to trust God even when you’re going through the hardest of times. (You’ll notice that I stopped posting “clean” books when I took Christian Book Finds back for this reason. I want to promote Christian authors, not just clean authors.)
Francine Rivers was brave enough to write a Christian book with a prostitute as a main character. And it was made into a movie as well. Redeeming Love is a modern day classic novel based on a story in the Bible.
That’s the kind of author I want to be. Brave. Bold. And unabashedly Christian.
And I think it was Francine Rivers’ call to Christian authors that sparked the idea for the story that has lived in my mind for many years and is finally being turned into a web novel. I’m no Francine Rivers, but it’s my hope to use my writing as a tool to further the kingdom of God. And I hope I can inspire other Christian authors to do the same.
