I don’t make a habit of reading email during church, but as I was following the biblical text on my phone one Sunday last July, I was alerted to a message from Eva Marie Everson, a novelist from Florida. Okay, I peeked.

She told me she and her daughter overheard a man in a store say, “I don’t believe in all this mumbo-jumbo but I really need to find these books.” He told a clerk, “The first one is called Left Behind and then I don’t know how many come after that.”

The store didn’t carry them, so Eva Marie said she turned around and told him how many there were in the series and added that there was a movie coming out this fall starring Nic Cage.

The man said, “You seem to know a lot about the books.”

“I know the writer. I consider him a friend.”

Eva Marie suggested several other stores, including a Christian bookstore, “but they won’t be open today.”

The man was amazed that a bookstore would not be open on a Sunday. He said he really needed to finish the first book. “I started reading it five years ago, but it belonged to a buddy of mine and I didn’t get to finish it.”

Eva Marie wished him the best in finding the books.

Minutes later he found her and her daughter in another department. “I had to come find you again,” he said in tears. “I’m in my early forties and I’ve been sick since I was 19. I’m pretty mad at God right now. I’ve had cancer for five years, first in my colon, then in my lungs, and now in my stomach. I’ve had more than fifty surgeries and more scheduled. The doctors tell me I have about six months to live and I feel like I have to read those books. I have to figure all this out.”

Eva Marie said, “Of course, my daughter and I talked to him about our bodies not being the end of life, that we—all of us—will spend eternity either with God or with the other guy. I told him I’d grown up in church my whole life but in my mid- to late 20s I was a mess. I asked Jesus to come into my heart and change me, and he did!”

The man told Eva Marie he needed to see to believe. She quoted the elf from The Santa Clause that “for adults seeing is believing, but for children believing is seeing.” Then she quoted from Matthew: “Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.’”

By then, Eva Marie was crying too.

She passed along to me his name and address and I emailed him that I was sending all 16 Left Behind titles. Meanwhile, he has accepted Eva Marie’s invitation to join her family at church Saturday evening. He wrote me that he’s looking forward to being there “& be able to ask god into my life & allow him into my life as being my lord & savior.”

I responded: I look forward to welcoming you into God’s family! That is a simple yet profound process that is made plain in the Left Behind books, but even before those arrive, Eva Marie can easily explain it all to you, and you can invite Christ into your life even before you attend her church.

He wrote back: I am getting excited just thinking about it.

Well, so am I.

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