Worn Sandals and Unfinished People
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Paul is Paul. The church survives. Christianity spreads across the Roman world. Two thousand years later, I can sit comfortably with a Bible in my lap and read about Thessalonica, knowing that the frightened little community described in Acts 17 eventually became part of something that changed human history.
But the people living through it had no such luxury.
That realization eventually became Worn Sandals.
It started with a sermon I listened to that mentioned Jason.
If you read Acts 17 too quickly, you can almost miss him. Paul and Silas arrive in Thessalonica and begin teaching about Jesus. Some people believe, but most don't, and opposition grows. A mob forms and goes looking for Paul and Silas at Jason's house.
They don't find them, so they drag Jason and some of the other believers before the city authorities instead. Jason eventually posts bond and is released.
And then Luke moves on, describing how Paul and Silas leave for Berea that very night, and Jason essentially disappears from the story.
I couldn't stop thinking about him. Here was a guy who claimed Jesus, and whose life had apparently been changed radically enough that he opened his home to people seeking Christ. It cost him. His house was raided. He was dragged before the authorities and had to pay for his freedom. Then, almost immediately, the man who had brought the gospel to his city was just… gone.
What happened the next morning? What did Jason do when he walked out of jail?
There was no New Testament to tuck under his arm. No church building to return to. No seminary, study Bible, denominational structure, or two thousand years of Christian theology to consult. There was simply this astonishing news he had been given about Jesus, and a small community of people who believed it.
Then there was Monday morning, and the Spirit of the Living God never left them.
That is where I found my story.
We know from Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians that he worried about them too. He eventually sent Timothy back to see how this infant church was doing. Timothy returned with good news. Their faith and love endured, and they were still there.
Somewhere between Luke's account of a frightened group of believers sending Paul away under cover of darkness and Timothy returning with that wonderful report, there is a story Scripture doesn't tell, and I wanted to imagine it.
I am careful about that distinction when I write biblical fiction. Scripture provides the bones. My imagination supplies flesh only where Scripture is silent. I don't want fiction to replace the biblical story. I want it to slow us down long enough to notice the humanity already there because those people were remarkably human.
We sometimes flatten biblical people into stained-glass saints, right? We know Simon becomes Peter and Saul becomes Paul. Deeply chronicled within the pages of the New Testament.
We don't know so much about that frightened little collection of believers that eventually becomes the Church.
They had to live the story forward, and so do we, and this is where my faith and my writing most often meet.
I'm drawn to grace, particularly the radical, undomesticated love of God we encounter in Jesus. It is a love that continually crosses the boundaries human beings construct around it. Respectable and disreputable. Jew and Gentile. Powerful and powerless. People who have their lives together and people whose lives have come completely apart.
I don't want to write about exceptionally religious people. I want frightened people. Stubborn people. Wounded people. Funny people. People carrying regret. People who occasionally get things gloriously right and sometimes get them spectacularly wrong.
People an awful lot like us. Because conversion doesn't erase our humanity. It is far more beautiful and untamed when Grace meets us inside.
That idea permeates much of what I write, whether fiction or the shorter reflections I occasionally share on social media. God works with unfinished people.
I am cautious about calling my writing a ministry because I don't want that word to imply that I have figured something out and now need to explain it to everyone else. Most of the time, I'm writing about things I am still wrestling with myself.
But if there is ministry in it, perhaps it happens when someone recognizes that following Christ does not require pretending to be whole. We don't have to dress ourselves up for God.
He already knows about the doubt. The anger. The addiction. The grief. The shame. The divorce. The fear. The thing we promised we would never do again and somehow did again. The questions we're afraid good Christians aren't supposed to ask.
He knows, and He loves us anyway.
That is what I hope someone encounters in Worn Sandals. Not merely a recreation of first-century Thessalonica, but recognition.
I hope a reader meets one of these ancient believers and thinks, I know him. I've been her.
Two thousand years have passed. Empires have risen and fallen. Our clothing, languages, technology, and understanding of the world would be almost incomprehensible to Jason and his little church.
Human beings haven't changed nearly as much, and neither has God.
Maybe that is the greatest thing writing Worn Sandals has taught me about faith. We read Acts knowing what happens next.
But Jason didn't. He walked out of jail into uncertainty, carrying little more than this outrageous new hope that Jesus really was who Paul said He was.
And then he took the next step.
I think most of us are much closer to Jason than we realize.
We are unfinished people following Christ without knowing what the next chapter holds. Sometimes we walk confidently. Sometimes we limp. Sometimes we wonder whether we have enough faith to take another step at all.
But still we walk. And if we walk behind Christ, we allow the dust His sandals kick up to settle upon us. That is why we must never stop following Him; why our sandals must become worn.
Grace and Peace
Sean Lyon writes historical biblical fiction, with a few contemporary stories waiting in the wings. His debut novel Worn Sandals opens a continuing journey that he is expanding in his most recent project, Unsung Psalms. Sean lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with his forever wife and has three grown sons, two by birth and one by choice, and he loves good stories, good food, and the quiet work of grace in ordinary lives.
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