The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 ushered in a tumultuous period for Russia and Ukraine. The Soviet Union broke apart, Communism was exposed as morally bankrupt, and Russian leaders turned to the West for help. In an astonishing development, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin invited a group of American evangelicals to give advice on restoring morality to Russia. The nation was moving toward democratic and religious freedoms until, one decade later, Vladimir Putin abruptly reversed course.

In 2020, as the world entered a long dark night of the soul, I returned to a nearly 400-year-old manuscript for guidance.  In it, I found a trustworthy companion for living through a pandemic ̶ or any other crisis.  The words leaped out at me from the very first page of John Donne’s Devotions…nothing had prepared me for his raw account of confrontations with God.

I had originally conceived a book called What’s So Amazing About Grace and Why Don’t Christians Show More of It? in order to speak to the growing enchantment of American Christians with right-wing politics.  Christians were becoming known mainly for what they were against: pornography, homosexuality, abortion, etc.  That disturbed me, as I see grace as one of the great, often untapped, powers of the universe that God has asked us to set loose.

In Where the Light Fell, I reveal the details of my impoverished upbringing in the South and a secret that set me on a search to understand the truth of my family and the culture in which I was raised.  It’s a kind of prequel to everything else I’ve written, the story of my widowed mother finding security and purpose in a strict fundamentalist faith that fought against everything: integration, Communism, the social changes of the 1960s, her wayward sons. By reading this previously untold story, you’ll understand why my books have so often centered on the themes of suffering and grace.