Raising the Dead

Written By: Timothy Fish Published: 9/26/2007

Have you ever tried to bring someone back from the dead? It is hard work. No, I am not going charismatic all of the sudden, I am referring to a character in my latest work in progress. When I started on this project, one character was doomed from the beginning, poor guy. When I finished the first draft, this character was dead and buried. They had had his funeral and daisies were growing on it. I thought I was done with this character, but he was like Lazarus or the pizza from last night, he would not stay down. I knew that there had to be one less death than I had originally planned, but doing that would require drastic changes to the story. I would have to rewrite whole chapters and the parallel between this character and one of the people in the Bible would no longer be as clear as it was before.

As I looked at the situation, I felt a little like the woman who had sixteen kids. One of them fell into a barrow of tar. The woman pulled him out, but then she stuck him back in and said, “it will be easier to have another one than to clean you up.” I wondered if it might not be easier to let the character die and if I needed him later, I could invent a character similar to him.

I pulled my character out of the grave anyway and as I work to clean him up, I am realizing that the changes that it has made to the story make it better than it was before. Without giving too much away, before, the story was primarily about our commitment to serve the Lord. As the second draft takes shape, it is becoming much more about God and our willingness to step aside and let him work. It is a shame that one of my characters had to come back from the dead to show me the problem with the premise of the story, but that is what has happened.

It is so easy to get caught up in asking what more we can do to serve the Lord and yet fail to recognize the part that God plays in our success. We look to great leaders of the Christian work and we talk about how many great things they have done for God. We look at the churches that have experienced great growth and we begin to mimic them in hopes of seeing the same growth in our own churches. We tell ourselves that if we do not see growth then we are not doing enough. This sometimes true, but nothing we do will ever accomplish anything if God is not in it. We can preach to crowds made up of thousands of people and hear thousands of professions of faith, but if the Lord is not in it then these thousands of people may be farther down the road to hell than they were before.

Many of us are quick to say that we are willing to do anything for the Lord. We will follow his call, we will even give our lives for him, if we much, but how many of use are willing to become nothing for the Lord. What if, instead of trying that one more thing to reach the lost, we simply let go and let God do the work? It will be a while before it is available for purchase, but I will raise that question in my next book and I hope you will join me in this grand adventure as we discover the answer together.