My book Keeping the Tryst has been out for a little over a month and a half now. It's been doing pretty well sales-wise. Okay it's NOT a bestseller by any stretch. But enough people have been buying and reading it to make me pretty happy so far. Maybe there will come to be some word of mouth and knowledge about it will spread around.
People are reading it. And their comments have been rather kind. One of my friends said that it's a real page-turner that he's barely been able to put down. A number of people have praised its readability, saying that it doesn't come across as a 500-some page volume. I've also gotten good word about the design: it's page color, the font size... so it's something comfortable on the eyes. Considering that I had to design everything about this book, hearing those things makes me smile.
There have been a number of questions from those who have been reading Keeping the Tryst. I've been doing my best to answer them as well as is possible. Here's the latest question that's been asked. I suppose it's a good one, because I didn't expound on it very much in the book...
"What happened in the cafeteria in chapter 19?"
 |
| Harden Cafeteria, Elon College, circa 2000 |
The answer is: I don't know.
I have vivid and troubling memories about what happened a few hours earlier, then a week and a half following my salvation experience in November of 1996. I remember being in my bedroom at our apartment, sometime after midnight. There is the memory of calling someone. What took place between going to the cafeteria and winding up back home, that's gone. Just... gone.
When dawn came, I didn't get ready to go to class. I was too torn to pieces, too wiped out. My mind was a wreck. I skipped school that day. And the next. Friends called me, wanting to come over. But I turned them down. I wasn't ready to see anyone.
My friend Gary was the one who suggested that something very horrible had happened that evening in the cafeteria. And over the course of the next few days, a number of friends from what was a close-knit community of Christian students intimated also that a terrible occurrence had transpired and that I had been at the center of it.
There are some mysteries in my life. Things that I can't explain or have ever fully grasped. What happened that night in Harden Cafeteria at Elon College is one of those. It's among the biggest enigmas that have come about in my time on this earth.
What I wrote about in chapter 19 of Keeping the Tryst is whatever it is. Something terrible, that I've never had a solid answer about. But I believe that God has brought me a long way from that. It doesn't cast a shadow over my life as it had. In fact, in the grander scheme of things it's really something pretty minor. I came through it, God is good, and that's all that matters.
But maybe someday, though it's already been almost thirty years, there will come to be a clear understanding of what happened. And who knows, but maybe I'll write about it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment