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Guest Post From Jerel Law

June 26, 2012 at 6:28 am | Posted in Books | Leave a comment

Guest Blog Post From Jerel Law, Author of “Spirit Fighter”

Book One in the Sons Of Angels Jonah Stone Series

 

“Dad, this is awesome!”

Those were the first words my lanky eight-year old son, Christopher, hit me with as he walked down the steps to the family room late one night (long after he should have been asleep).  He had just finished reading the first draft of Spirit Fighter, my first book, so it wasn’t hard to look past a missed bedtime.  The truth was, I was nervously awaiting his reaction to the novel.  Kids are nothing if not brutally honest, after all.  And while I didn’t want to admit it, the opinion of a third-grader was a pretty big deal to me.  When he said those two beautiful words, I knew that I just might have something here.

But let me back up.

When I wrote Spirit Fighter in the fall of 2009, my intention was not just to write something I thought could be published…I wrote it specifically for my two oldest kids, Bailey and Christopher.  At the time they were 10 and 8, and voracious readers.  I couldn’t keep enough books in their hands – as soon as they finished one they would ask for another.  As my son was racing through the Percy Jackson series, I began to wonder why there wasn’t a Christian series that he felt the same way about.  That he couldn’t put down.  The only ones I could think of were a little too mature for him, and I really didn’t think either he or my daughter would go for Amish fiction just yet.  I had been writing off and on for ten years, mostly at night, since I am a pastor by day.  I began to wonder if the seed of an idea could be here.

I love stories as much as my kids do.  Stories of adventure that take the reader into a new world, stories that present timeless truths in new ways, that allow me to not only get lost within the pages, but to wrestle with things that are meaningful and true.  Stories about life and death, and things that matter…those are the ones I am drawn to.  And the ones I try to spend my time writing.

Around that same time, I came across a passage from the Bible that really caught my attention.  Genesis chapter six speaks in hushed tones about an ancient people who were the children of both angels and humans…the half-human, half-angel race known as the nephilim.  There simply isn’t much there about them, which made it all the more interesting.  Suddenly it began to seem as though my desire to put something inspired by the Scriptures into my kids’ hands, and the intrigue I found in this passage in Genesis, began to intertwine.  I began asking a lot of “what if” questions.

What if nephilim existed not only in ancient times, but today?  What if they were pretending to be normal people…maybe even in my neighborhood, or yours?  And what if they had children?  They would be one-quarter angel, and three-quarters human…would those children have some angelic powers?

These questions became the core idea for Spirit Fighter and the Jonah Stone: Son of Angels series.  The story revolves around a brother and sister who discover that they are part-angel, and as a result begin to develop certain abilities only angels possess.  When their nephilim mom is kidnapped, they find themselves right in the middle of the battle between Good and Evil.

I’m still blown away and humbled that Thomas Nelson has been so enthusiastic about Spirit Fighter.  My hope and prayer is not only that kids say “it’s awesome!”, but that they find themselves somewhere in the pages of this book, and begin to ask their own “what if” questions.  What if God has given me gifts to use?  What if He really does love me?  And what if He wants to use someone like me to change the world?