I Thessalonians

We have been studying, and I have been teaching, I Thessalonians for the last two months. It has been a special study for me, for one reason that I Thessalonians is a quiet book, one with treasures to be unearthed but often overlooked. In that way, I Thessalonians is like most people--quiet with overlooked wonders. This is one reason I want to write fiction, to uncover the lives of unnoticed people, of unnoticed good people (much fiction today tries to elaborate the lives of bad people or people who have hidden darkness or evil secrets.) P.D. James said once that it is much harder to write about good people, but I don't know truly evil people, nor do I care to, so I'll pick up the challenge of writing about the good.

I have put my writing aside for a while because in the middle of the school year there are too many demands, but my mind is starting to turn over plots for my next novel or novel series, which is set here in northwest Georgia/Chattanooga and resembles my husband's family's lives. They are a far more dramatic and interesting group than most of my family. We are excessively boring. As I was telling some colleagues, David Baldacci, the famous writer, is my cousin's cousin. Not a relation of mine, but the first cousin on his mother's side to my second cousins on my father's side. His aunt Hazel was also the girl that accompanied my mom to Washington, D.C., when they moved to the "big city" after WWII. The two girls met cousins and married them. So I'm connected to him on two fronts (I'm a fan of the six degrees of separation theory, if you haven't figured it out). One of his books, Wish You Well, is about his family members and my mother read it, saying, "I know who that old man is, that's his grandfather." And so it goes.
I said all that to say he would have to look to that part of his family to find anything worth writing--he wouldn't find it in the family his aunt married into.

I Thessalonians reminds us of the good people of the church. It is almost free of intense passages about the evil world around the persecuted Thessalonians, emphasizing that the Thessalonians must find strength from one another through Christ. And I am thankful that I get to experience that in my own church.

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