PenWorks of the Word | Featured Author | B.D. Lawrence

Greetings, 

Today, I am pleased to introduce B.D. Lawrence. He is definitely someone I look forward to getting to know more. One of the things I hoped would happen with this Blog Tour was that the featured authors would be real and honest about the world behind the stories we write. B.D. conveys this beautifully in the post you are about to read, but I will let you read it for yourselves. 

Don't forget, the KingSumo giveaway is live until 11/1, and we would love for everyone who has found even one of the posts from the PenWorks of the Word Blog Tour to join the fun. 18 stories are being gifted in this giveaway. Without further ado, here is B.D. Lawrence. 

See you in the 'digital' pages, 

M.J.E. 

~~~

Not all Protagonists in Christian Fiction Are Saved

My faith journey started when I was thirty-eight. That’s when I accepted God’s gift of salvation and became a follower of Jesus. Before then, I lived in and of the world. My wife, my son, and one of my good friends became Christians a couple of years before I did. During those two years, I was on a journey to faith. During that journey, family and new friends surrounded me and covered me with their prayers. I watched these new friends closely to see what their lives entailed and wrestled with my own path. Did I want to stay where I was or embrace the life modeled by our friends?

My writing journey followed a similar path. I started writing short stories and novels in the early 1990s. I was not a Christian, and the stories and books I wrote embraced the secular worldview. Three of those four novels are on my hard drive waiting for a day when I might revive them. A couple of years ago, I cleaned up one of them and published it.

In the early 2000s, my work schedule forced me to stop writing. I didn’t produce any fiction for nearly fifteen years. Around 2016, things started to slow down enough for me to start writing again. By then, I’d been a Christian for sixteen years. I pulled out a short story I’d written about a one-armed detective looking for the murderer of a prostitute whom he knew and had been friends with. This short story and my eleven years of working in a youth group sparked the idea of a PI who dedicates his life to rescuing girls from sex trafficking. I worked on An Angel and a One-Armed Man, originally titled Save the Girls, for the next four years.

Lefty Bruder is the protagonist in the One-Armed Detective Series. I have a collection of short stories set in a fictional small Iowa town. The protagonist in that series is police chief Tom Petrosky. I wrote a stand-alone novel about a mob hitman who falls in love with a Christian woman. Finally, I have a private detective series featuring an ex-cop, tough guy named Jake Sledge.

What do all these protagonists have in common other than fighting crime? They are all unsaved men on a journey that may lead to faith in Christ. One has already been redeemed, but I’m not revealing who. And like my own journey to faith, they have significant people in their lives who are Christians, who are praying for them, modeling what the Christian life looks like, and telling them about the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ.

One old adage of fiction writing is to write what you know. One thing I know is the journey from not caring about anything about a god or even knowing who Jesus is, to becoming a child of God and receiving redemption. This journey to faith has profoundly impacted my writing. I believe having these types of protagonists makes my fiction appealing to men who do not yet have a relationship with Christ. These men can read about a protagonist, a hero, who does good, brings justice, acts like a man, yet struggles with faith in God. And these male readers, I pray, can read about our amazing God and see the people around the hero as they help him on his journey to faith.

If you know men in your life who like heroes who get things done, like to see justice served, and enjoy good triumphing over evil, but they don’t have a relationship with Christ, it can be hard to find Christian books that will appeal to them. I love Christian fiction, but so much of it is written to and for Christians, and honestly, most is written for women. Not my books. I am writing for men, especially men who don’t yet know Christ.

It took several years for me to realize my need for God’s grace. Will Lefty, Tom, and Jake realize their need? Only time will tell. And I hope there are a lot of men out there who will join these heroes in their faith journeys.