Every story has an Author.

The author

I don't have the credentials. I wrote the books anyway.

Let me get the confession out of the way first. No seminary degree. No PhD. No denominational endorsement, and no approval from any theological institution on the face of this earth. And I wrote a systematic theology anyway. In my early twenties that would have stopped me cold. I thought the men with the letters after their names had some special access to the truth that the rest of us didn't. And then I read the Scriptures carefully, and I noticed that God keeps choosing the unlikely ones. Shepherds. Fishermen. Tax collectors. A tentmaker from Tarsus who persecuted the church before he ever preached to it. And not one of them went to seminary. So I stopped waiting for permission.

• Day jobA programmer. I've been writing code since I was ten, on an Apple IIc I begged my parents to buy me, and writing software for the same employer since 1998.
• HomeA small town in eastern Kentucky, with Angie, the only woman I have ever dated, kissed, or loved.
• The hornTrombone in the Marshall University Tri-State Brass Band in Huntington, West Virginia. Angie brought me back to the horn during the pandemic, and I'm better now than I was as a kid.
• The long workThirty years of pristinegrace.org. Two hundred articles, over a hundred songs, a growing catalog of podcasts, all from my living room, all without permission from anyone.

I don't come at any of this the way a seminarian comes at theology. I come at it the way a systems analyst comes at a specification, because that is what I have done for a living for almost thirty years. You analyze the requirements. You design the system. You test it against every edge case you can think of, and you try to break it yourself before you ever ship it. And if it will not survive the tests, you do not ship it. You fix the bug. I have done that to my own theology for thirty years, arguing against my own positions and reading the strongest critics before I commit to anything. What survived is what you're reading. And now I'm doing the same thing with fiction. Different tools. One conviction: the invisible came first, and every story has an Author.

And here is the thing that took me the longest to say out loud.

I'm not a Calvinist, though people call me one. I'm not anything, in the sense that no camp contains all of what I believe. Campless is the only honest place to stand when the truth doesn't fit inside any fence.

Grace and Peace, Brandan