First and foremost, I have clear understanding of Christianity. As a born again Christian, I not only know of God, I know God through a faith based relationship with His Son, Jesus Christ. I am not perfect, but forgiven. The bottom line is that Christianity is being attacked and distorted, sometimes from the very pulpits it’s supposed to be preached from. I am a realist in the way I see the world. I have seen the poorest regions in the world directly – Africa. I know God’s love heals pain, emotional and spiritual pain particularly. I have seen war and hate. I have been in the IDP camps in Uganda that I write about. I have seen and helped victims of the Ugandan Civil War, child soldiers and the like. I have held them in my lap. I know their story and I’m the one to tell it. They’re so ripped up inside that they can’t. Someone has to. I say it’s me.

I have talked with numerous veterans from Vietnam to current day. I lived in Knoxville, Iowa from 1965-1973, home of the Veteran’s Psychiatric Hospital. Many of the vets there came back from Vietnam with their brains scrambled. My father was the Chief of Chaplains there who combined his faith based approach combined with secular psychiatry helped these vets stop fighting the war at 4:00 am waking in cold sweats long after they got back suffering from ptsd. His good friend and colleague was the Chief of Staff, MD Stanford and Ph.D. (psych) Stanford. Both were faith based men who used their talents together to help patients heal. I learned a lot from both in dealing with spiritual counseling to help people overcome their issues. That story has to be told.

Given the distrust and hate we see from Ferguson, MO to the “killing fields” of Uganda, this message of faith active in love has to get out. The crystal waterfall experience in the 4th part was drawn/based on my own experiences up in the Volta Mountain Range in Eastern Ghana. I was a volunteer for Operation Crossroads Africa at age 22 building schools in the village of Wli, Ghana. We climbed up the mountain, about 2000 feet to the waterfall, about 6 tier. We took our showers there and basically cooled off in the waterfall. I walked directly into it! Afterwards, while sitting on a rock drying in the sun, I was looking down at the villages below that we were building schools in and heard the voice of God in my heart. Essentially, the Lord told me that this was what I was cut out for and from there on I would never be the same again. He was right.

At a church service in the village that Sunday, I put in a rather large sum of money in the offering plate. Much to my surprise, they gave me most of the money back and kept only a little bit for a “suitable offering”, informing me that the work I was doing, building the school as a volunteer, covering my own expenses (in fact, spent all my money saved to go to Law School to do this instead), I was offering so much more, “teaching how to fish to feed them for a lifetime as opposed to merely giving them a fish which feeds them only for a day”, it was an infinitely more valuable contribution than mere money in the offering plate. It was a tithe that they and the Lord appreciated a lot more. It was worth more than a lot of foreign aid policies which claim to teach them how to fish, but only leave them relegated to substance agrarian economy. The faith active in love story needs to be told. Development has to come out in a fiction novel before most people will grasp it.

We have seen contemporary American society try to trivialize and emasculate men’s issues such as schisms with their fathers. It takes a man to raise a man. If they schism develops and isn’t healed before the old man dies, there is a hole in the heart that works on a young man worse than cancer. It leads to a failure to come to terms with and develop a healthy grasp of masculinity. That issue needs to be discussed and that story needs to be told.

I have suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome since I was 14 and have overcome prejudice as bad as any form of racism thrown at me by people who didn’t understand, that have been cruel and discriminated against me. Faith was the key.

Because of all of the aforementioned points this story had to get out. They are all discussed in a story format that forces western readers to break out of their ethnocentric paradigms to face issues they often either don’t want to confront or simply don’t understand. I don’t pull any punches and I go against the grain of conventional wisdom. This story has to get out. Additionally, I think that the understanding reached will not only make people think, but open up the door to reveal the ideological approach we need win the war against terrorism and definitely to win the peace afterwards. Given our times, that is a story that definitely has to get out.