THE HIDDEN HAND OF GOD

A novella focuses on the hidden workings of God in the lives of ordinary people.

This story by Paul and Bland opens with a seemingly incongruous sight: Two men eating their lunches on a bench in a freezing downpour. And the more readers learn about the men, the more bizarre things get. The younger-looking one is Charlie, a substitute mail carrier who was recently finishing up his route when he suddenly died. And his companion is Everett, an unconventional angel Charlie sometimes suspects may be a kind of substandard model. Charlie knows that it’s part of Everett’s purpose to “show how the mighty hand of God worked in people’s lives.” Witnessing this is a step in Charlie’s own post-death journey. As for Charlie himself, “he could feel evil and how it tried to latch on to anyone within reach”—the diametric opposite of the heaven he had experienced, a place that “pulsated with love.” This eager reaching of evil to seize everyone around it informs the meetings Charlie and Everett quickly have—with Martin, the owner of a local bike shop; Eva, a postal worker already frustrated on her first day on the job; middle-aged waitress Karen, who “went about her life without realizing she was a mighty warrior, a saint who was troubling the Enemy’s plans”; and others. With clear, inviting prose and remarkable concision, the authors draw readers into these separate lives and twine their tales together. The fantasy backstory of angels is seamlessly woven into the well-realized depictions of regular town life, and the chapters are paced with a page-turning sensitivity. One prominent atheist character is portrayed as the thinnest straw-man caricature of an unbeliever, but readers willing to overlook that flaw will find a surprisingly complex and heartwarming tale in the rest of the book.

A heartfelt and engaging Christian parable about the mechanisms of divine will.