Guest Post! Understanding Injustice, Clinging to Hope

Last week I bragged about The Awakened, a new book by fellow MBI author Richard Spillman. I shared about my awe and admiration when I originally learned the gist of his story (hint: it sounded a lot like, ‘I wish I had thought of that!’). 

Now, book in hand (or, on my Kindle App, anyway) I’m enjoying the journey of Lazarus (yes, THAT Lazurus) and friends as they combat terrorist cells–both of the Isis and the demonic variety.

While the book focuses on events that rock our world every day on a global scale, it also touches on those secret things that can rock our world with shame and pain.

Click the book cover to read an excerpt of the book!

Today, Mr. Spillman shares a very personal post about the genuine evils that he has experienced, both globally and personally, that led him to write this amazing story.

It takes a lot of vulnerability to write a post like this, let alone an entire novel. I hope you’ll take a moment to share your thoughts and support in the comments!

Richard…take it away!

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Why did I write The Awakened?

Writers write for a lot of different reasons and I’m no exception. But, when it comes to The Awakened there are two reasons I wrote it…actually there are two reasons I HAD to write it. The first was that I needed to understand injustice in the world. The second was that I had to find hope.

I have written in other blog posts about my brush with ISIS in the Philippines. I told the story of how ISIS discovered I had a team working in the jungle, how they got phone numbers, and how they called me to threaten me and my team the whole time we were there. That incident was the final straw in my encounter with injustice. I came home and started writing.

It was the final straw but it wasn’t the only straw.

In my childhood, my damaged mother would hand me over once or twice a month to my uncle and his group of pedophiles. I survived eight years of this abuse but only by ripping it out of my memory. It was another part of injustice that I hoped, through my writing, I could come to understand.

So, the backstory of one of my characters, Ricki, includes this childhood injustice of mine. I had to make her female for the story to work but, besides that, everything about her is me. She experienced what I experienced; my nightmares became, word for word, her nightmares. My memory loss became her memory loss. While I knew every detail of her life as far as my memory would allow, I only hinted at them in the book. But that was enough for me to begin to understand injustice—on both the personal level and at the global level. 

And this is what I learned: others chose the direction of my childhood. I had no say and hence no role in the matter. What happened to me was wrong, terribly wrong, but not, unfortunately, unimaginable. 

We live in a fallen world.  A world in which innocence is not a shield—no—it’s more of an invitation.  A world in which the creative power of man makes inconceivable evil commonplace. There is no place to hide.  No one gets through life unscathed. The question never was: would I face injustice? It always has been: when and how would I face injustice? 

As I wrote this story, as I wrote about the injustice, I began to see that I was also writing about the hand of God. I watched as the story formed. I could see where God was, I could begin to understand the broader picture and taste the ultimate victory. A victory, which in the third book, I am going to write for Ricki. It will be her victory that I will write about but it will also be mine.

As I began to see the injustice in The Awakened I began to feel hope for my own injustice. Hope is the sense that something better lays in the future. Hope causes us to look ahead rather than behind. Hope allows us to forget our past, survive our present, and wait for the future. Hope is a gift from God that allows us to survive in a fallen world.

To live without hope is to be dead while still alive. Click & Tweet!  

As I came to the conclusion of the first book, I saw hope in my characters which fed the hope that was blossoming within me. My writing lit the path of hope for my life. In the end, I wrote this book for many reasons.

My salvation, the redemption of my past, is one of those.