Vampires to Christ

I finished reading Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt by Anne Rice a few days ago. Yes, you read me right--the Anne Rice of Interview With A Vampire fame. She became a Christian a few years back and decided "that if I believed in Him as completely as I said I did, I ought to write entirely for him," in her words. What resulted from that commitment is a truly wondrous fictional account of Jesus's childhood. Rice brings to life to the human side of Jesus in a way that will probably forever impact the way that I think about Jesus and his life, while not at all diminishing the side of him that is God. She writes with reverence about Jesus and his family while adding fascinating details from her extensive historical research and from her own imagination. Her next book, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, comes out in a few days.

I could write so much more about this book, but I'll leave it at that and encourage you to read it yourself. Rice writes two short essays at the end of the book explaining her conversion and detailing some of her research. She spends some time explaining the role of faith in her coming (back) to Christ and I found her words particularly thought provoking.

She writes (sorry this is long): "I didn't have to know the answers to these [theological and social] questions precisely because God did. He was the God who made the Universe in which I existed. That meant He had made the Big Bang, He had made DNA, He had made the Black Holes in space, and the wind and the rain and the individual snowflakes that fall from the sky. He had done all that. So surely He could do virtually anything and He could solve virtually everything. And how could I possibly know what He knew? And why should I remain apart from Him because I could not grasp all that He could grasp? What came over me then was an infinite trust, trust in His power and His love. I didn't have to worry about the ultimate fate of my good atheistic friends, gay or straight, because He knew all about them, and He was holding them in His hands. I didn't have to quake alone in terror at the thought of those who die untimely deaths from illness, or the countless millions destroyed in the horrors of war. He knew all about them. He had always been holding them in His hands. He and only He knew the full story of every person who'd ever lived or would live; He and He alone knew what person was given what choice, what chance, what opportunity, what amount of time, to come to Him by what path. That I couldn't possibly know all was as clear to me as my awareness that He did."

Maybe reading this should have been a "duh" moment for me, but I must admit I have a hard time trusting God with the unexplainable parts of life: I struggle with fear and my faith is severely tested when I dwell on death, sickness, evil. Rice's thoughts on faith have made me question whether I can truly lay my fears and anxieties upon Christ and move on in faith, fully trusting that God is in control and that I really don't have to worry.