Keith Potter served Paradise Alliance Church as lead pastor during the 1990s. Now living with his wife, Sue, in Eugene, Oregon, he is vice president for Advancement at Bushnell University (formerly Northwest Christian College) in Eugene.
In Potter’s new novel, Arthur Gilliam, comatose in a care facility, is visited by a younger pastor, Luke Thomas, making his rounds.
“From The Dark Domain: Novel Number One In The Luke Thomas Series” ($18 in paperback from Resource Publications; also for Amazon Kindle) is a story within a story. Thomas, “District pastor” in San Diego, finds a manuscript Gilliam has written, a long letter to his estranged son, Donnie, recounting a life broken, yet redeemed by God, which forms the crux of the novel.
Ever attracted to beautiful women, Gilliam falls hard for Alice. Donnie is conceived on their wedding night, but Alice is sexually cold and physically brutal. “As a protector, I failed beyond measure,” he writes his son.
She kicks Donnie out at 16. Later, after Alice dies, Arthur is alone, preaching but not much believing that stuff about Jesus. He moves to Tahuya, Washington. His neighbor, Lisa, is wondrous to look at, and she is attracted to the wimpy Arthur. Yet Lisa abruptly leaves, and Arthur ponders what God is doing.
In the early 1990s he takes a job teaching English in Rwanda at a Christian school. The headmistress, Prudence Nayinzira (“a woman who could have been Miss Universe”), is a Tutsi. One of the older students, Faustin Bizimana, a Hutu, becomes spiritual mentor to Arthur, and together they challenge each other in following Jesus.
“My own becoming,” Arthur writes, “presented hand-in-hand with that obscure little country; both of us crowded with regrets and unrealized impulses for the good, and yet capable of harm.”
Soon, they all must face the Rwandan genocide as attackers come again and again. If by God’s grace Arthur finds courage at last, what form will it take?
And how can Luke Thomas communicate this to those who have loved Arthur?
Potter’s novel is masterful — and the searing Rwandan events will leave readers breathless in the face of a God-haunted world.
Dan Barnett teaches philosophy at Butte College. Send review requests to dbarnett99@me.com. Columns archived at https://ift.tt/2ypsEDx
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