It was 11:40 on a Tuesday night, and the dishwasher had just started that grinding noise it makes before the rinse cycle. I was on the couch with a library copy of Redeeming Love, the one with somebody else’s coffee ring on page 212 (I added my own by Thursday). My daughter had gone to bed asking me whether God ever gets bored. I didn’t have an answer for her. I was too busy crying over a farmer in Gold Rush California who doesn’t exist.
For years I treated christian fiction books like the sugar cereal of the reading world. Fine for other people. I read commentaries and the occasional Puritan, and I privately decided novels were what you reached for when you were too tired for real books.
That Tuesday ended that.
can christian fiction actually help your faith
Francine Rivers built the whole story on the book of Hosea, and I knew that going in. What I didn’t expect was how much Hosea 3:1 would bother me afterward. “Go, show your love to your wife again.” I’d read that line maybe a dozen times and filed it under minor prophets, interesting but far away. After four hundred pages of watching a man keep driving out to bring back someone who kept leaving, it stopped being far away and sat on my chest like a cat that won’t move. I thought about a friend I’d quietly stopped texting two summers ago because she’d hurt me once and I’d decided once was plenty.
I’m convinced a good novel can do more for your prayer life than a mediocre devotional, and I’d say that to any pastor who asked. Jesus seemed to think stories got under people’s skin. “Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable” (Matthew 13:34). Nathan didn’t hand King David a lecture about Bathsheba either. He told him about a poor man’s lamb, and David was furious at the rich man for a full minute before he found out who the rich man was.
That’s the trick. You get angry at the character first, and then the floor tilts.
I texted my friend that Wednesday. Two words, “thinking of you.” She sent back a blurry photo of her dog wearing a cone.
how to read a novel without skimming the parts that sting
This is where I’m not proud of myself. Last spring I was reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, the old preacher John Ames writing a long letter to his young son, and I hit the stretch where Ames can’t bring himself to trust Jack, his best friend’s son. I put the book face down on the nightstand for three weeks. When my husband asked why I’d stopped, I told him the pacing was slow. That was a lie. Ames’s cold politeness toward Jack looked exactly like the way I talk to my brother-in-law every Thanksgiving, and I didn’t want to keep reading something that knew me that well.
I went back eventually.
These days, when a chapter makes my neck go hot, I stop and pray “Search me, God, and know my heart” (Psalm 139:23) before I turn the page, and then I read the chapter again, slower. I keep a pack of yellow sticky notes from the dollar store in whatever I’m reading. One word per note, stuck on the page that stung. My Gilead copy looks like it caught a rash. You could start tonight with whatever novel is already on your nightstand, even if it’s only got one sticky note in it by the time you fall asleep.
what to do after you finish a christian novel
Closing the back cover is the easy part. James puts it bluntly, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22), and I think that applies to the stories that point us back to the Word too.
My habit now is to pick one character’s choice and ask where it shows up on a Monday. After C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, I spent a week noticing my own version of the ghost with the red lizard on his shoulder. Mine turned out to be checking my phone during bedtime stories. Small, embarrassing, real. I started leaving it in the kitchen drawer next to the batteries.
When I can’t decide what to read next, I’ll play a few of the Christian book summaries on Holy Reads while I fold laundry. Whichever one is still nagging at me by the last towel usually gets picked up next. But I’ve also learned not to rush to the next book the same night, because the one I just finished usually has more to say if I let it sit on the counter a while.
My daughter still wants to know if God gets bored. I told her last week I don’t think so, because He keeps telling the same story about people who wander off and get carried home, and He never seems tired of it. Find a novel this week and watch for that story somewhere in it.