That Ticking Sound

I’m not sure when an elevated cognizance of my own mortality first impinged on my thoughts. It might have started when a childhood friend and neighbor passed away a little while back. As young kids, Mark and I spent many hours tossing a football around my yard, pretending to be Terry Bradshaw and Franco Harris. Or throwing a wiffle ball while one of us threw sidearm pitches like Kent Tekulve, and the other did the famous Willie Stargell windup at the plate. I changed schools in the ninth grade, and we lost contact for decades. A little over two years ago, he sent me a Facebook friend request, and I was happy to reconnect after all those years. I intended to start an online conversation to catch up with him, but never quite got around to it. Good intentions and all that. And then, in early 2022, he died. Because he was two years younger than me, his passing reawakened my own sense of mortality.

Or perhaps it started when I realized that all the doctors I have seen in recent years are younger than I am. That was not the case twenty years ago. But it is now, and I’m not sure exactly when that happened.

And speaking of doctors, I just got a diagnosis that rocked me back on my heels. It wasn’t the worst kind of news — I’m not terminally ill, or disabled, or anything like that — but it was significant enough to make me imagine my life’s clock ticking away the seconds more insistently than before.

All these things bring me to Reason #7 why I believe Kindred Spirits, my second novel, will be worth reading: With my unknown expiration date clearing its throat in the background (“Ahem!”), I gave serious thought to what I want my writing legacy to be. Sure, I wanted to tell a good story that would get your adrenaline pumping. If the protagonist’s pressures at work and issues at church don’t get your attention, her homicidal neighbor will. But I also wanted to give people something to talk about after they’ve digested the plot. I wanted to make this one count.

Let me put it another way: I’ve preached more messages and taught more Bible classes than I could possibly count. And I know that even people who were there for most of them will forget the lion’s share of the messages. That’s just human nature. But a published book may long outlive its author. So I’ve tried to think of all the things I’ve learned, all the mistakes I’ve made, and all the things I’ve taught. I asked myself what I’d want to say to readers if this were my last chance to say anything. What great truths would I want to convey? The Solid Rock Survivor series is intended to convey my most hard-won convictions about life. Fighting Back accomplished some of this. Kindred Spirits, I think, does it better. And book three, with a working title of The Long Game, should be better still, a fitting capstone to the series, and to my career as an author even if I never write another book after it. It reminds me of a snippet of conversation between my protagonist Roz and one of her neighbors:

“How long have you and Mrs. Grimm been neighbors?”

“Half a lifetime, I guess.” He sighed, perhaps an old man’s acknowledgment that the road ahead was now much shorter than the road behind.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not feeling at all morbid. I’ve had nonagenarians on both sides of my family tree. I still have a lot of plans. I hope to be running my firm, writing books, composing tunes, taking road trips — and still preaching and teaching — decades from now. But if it doesn’t turn out that way, I’ve done my best to make Kindred Spirits a book worth reading. And rereading. If you can see yourself enjoying Christian fiction with a bit of an edge, a bit of political incorrectness, intense action, and some deep thoughts, then I am confident you’ll like this book. I wrote it like it might be the last thing I ever did. Release date to be announced soon!