The Making of a Preacher's Family - Prep

Market Definition and Narrative Voice Synopsis

This book is narrative adult fiction.
Matt's story deals with family relationships.
Matt's story is about serving God through an imperfect vessel.
Matt's story is about evangelism through the challenges of life.
This book is Christian adult narrative fiction.

The ideal reader of Matt's Story is a preacher, who experiences life in the myriad human emotions and experiences. I pray the Lord will develop me as a writer, who appeals to a number of people in this niche genre, but at the moment, I guess the reader is me.


The Narrative Voice (synopsis):

Matthew Paul Marks is not your typical preacher. He tends to be very soft-spoken. Without a microphone, very few people in the congregation would be able to hear him. Matt has always wondered why God called him to preach because he doesn't fit the preacher profile. Matt loves God, and he wants others to be able to love God, too. He leads people to the Lord without the usual emotional strong-arm approach. This means, that relatively few souls have been saved under his ministry, although he has prayed for many, and he maintains a daily relationship with folks through encouragement and admonishing them to follow the Lord with their whole hearts.

Matt and Artista have twin daughters, during the three-year space flight from Earth to ZoNed4. The girls are quite different. Aurora is the strong-willed child until the Lord Jesus saves her soul at age 15. Zenith is the compliant child, who serves the Lord to please her parents because "it's the right thing to do" (Ephesians 6:1-3) throughout her childhood, growing "weary in well-doing," (Galatians 6:9) until she finally gives up on her faith at the death of her mother. Zenith does this reluctantly, not because she hates God from her heart, but because she has tried to serve the Lord for many years, without the results, both inwardly and interpersonally, that she had expected to get in the walk of faith. Her conclusion is "Maybe I just can't be a Christian, even as much as I hate the thought of going to Hell forever. I've tried, but I can't seem to live it. So, I'm done with trying. I've got to live the rest of my life in the happiest way possible before I leave and become forever unhappy."

The Making of a Preacher's Family is intended to be a cautionary tale of a life lived out-of-balance. Of course, the Lord wants us to live for Him with complete devotion, but devotion taken to the extreme of focus only on service to the Lord demonstrates the inability to rightly define the concept of "devotion to the Lord." Our love for the Lord will draw us to love our families and our fellowman with just as much passion as we love the Lord. There are seasons of life when the preacher has to focus on ministry as the family "takes the back seat," while great spiritual acts of service are being performed for the Lord's Glory. However, this season is to be followed by a season of focusing on the family, while the ministry "takes the back seat." The typical week will have at least equal parts of ministry and family time, outside of the time when the entire family is occupied with daily responsibilities like school, and jobs.

Matt lives a full life. There are great seasons of ministry, but he tends to get carried away in the ministry to others in a church setting, neglecting his family without really realizing it, since his emotional needs are being met in ministry. Matt often sees his only problem as Aurora, since "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." He's convinced, that Zenith is "okay" because she serves the Lord and Matt so faithfully, not realizing until it's apparently too late, that she has been dying on the inside, doing a thankless job without sufficient relationship with her dad on the heart-level.

Artista bears the weight of the family, while trying to show up well-dressed and pleasantly faced as the proper preacher's wife at every church function, but decades of service to the Lord, supporting a man, who gets all the attention is finally too much for her body. She dies fairly early in life at age, 60, and Matt is never the same. After a decade of grief and varying levels of depression, Matt preaches his last sermon, sees his twins restored as the family he is about to leave, and he breathes his last to be reunited with his dear wife and his precious Lord in Heaven.

The tearful "Goodbye" hands the baton to the twins, who are entrusted with the next tale to be told.