I grew up in the Protestant Evangelical side of the religious family, so I was raised believing that questions were enemies. To ask questions of God or the Church was tantamount to rebellion.
Over the course of my life, I have learned to love the questions and I write to explore good questions.
So, The Shack is written around questions regarding the goodness of God in the face of the tragedies and sadnesses of our life. Cross Roads asks the question, “How does grace get inside the world of someone who doesn’t want it.”
Now, I’ve written Eve, and Eve is centered on another layer of questions, daunting ones for me, and have been since I was a teenager.
So my questions are these:
What happened?
Where did we all go wrong?
What is it about us as human beings that can produce such great wonder and do such catastrophic damage?
For forty years these questions have led me to some disorienting realizations.
Eve is the result of forty years of work on just that.
To be honest, I never thought I’d tackle this one. In some respects, it’s too big. It’s proposing a fundamental paradigm shift. By far, it’s also the hardest work I’ve ever done.
And it all took me back to Genesis.
The more I’ve worked on it, the more I believe many of us have missed some deep truths in the story of Creation. Eve is my attempt to explore some of those deeper truths using, of course, a fictional narrative.
Interested? I hope so. Here’s a little of the official plot description:
When a shipping container washes ashore on an island between our world the next, John the Collector finds a young woman inside—broken, frozen, and barely alive. With the aid of Healers and Scholars, John oversees her recovery and soon discovers her genetic code connects her to every known human race. She is a girl of prophecy and no one can guess what her survival will mean…
No one but Eve, Mother of the Living, who calls her “daughter,” and invites her to witness the truth about her own story—indeed, the truth about us all.
Eve is a bold, unprecedented exploration of the Creation narrative, true to the original texts and centuries of scholarship—yet with breathtaking discoveries that challenge traditional misconceptions about who we are and how we’re made.
As The Shack awakened readers to a personal, non-religious understanding of God, Eve will free us from faulty interpretations that have corrupted human relationships since the Garden of Eden.
Eve opens a refreshing conversation about the equality of men and women within the context of our beginnings, helping us see each other as our Creator does—complete, unique, and not constrained to cultural rules or limitations.
Eve has been arduous work, but it’s everything and more that I hoped it would become!
It’s full of surprises—incredibly good surprises.
There is still work to be done, but I wanted you to know it was coming. You can pre-order the book here.
