The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

Andrew Klavan was married with children. He was successful. Two of his thriller novels--True Crime and Don't Say a Word--had been turned into movies, starring Clint Eastwood and Michael Douglas, respectively. But as he approached the end of his 40s, he felt something was missing. Klavan began to re-assess his life, entering a "five-month-long agony of self-examination," where he began to question his relationships and his beliefs. The Great Good Thing outlines his quest and the experiences that led him toward Christian baptism.

Klavan was born a secular Jew on Long Island, N.Y., and considered himself agnostic. "I believed in science and analysis and reasonable explanations," he admits, re-creating scenes from an impressionable childhood--his sensitivity, a hostile father, an unknowable mother, a kindly babysitter who rejoiced in Christmas and a picture of Christ that later encouraged him to read and absorb the four gospels of the New Testament. Travails and rebellions throughout college, meeting his future wife, battling depression and the lean, uncertain years spent honing his craft as a writer led Klavan to epiphanies that illuminated how the presence of God--consciously and unconsciously--shaped his life. His story culminates with his father's death and how that loss becomes the turning point in Klavan's search for spiritual enlightenment.

Klavan's conversion narrative is intellectual and well paced. It exemplifies the ways in which fate and providence crisscrossed and collided through many dark nights of the soul for a man dedicated to living a more consciously evolved spiritual existence. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

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