I’ve got another writing idea to share and this one may be more exciting for you. Instead of a general comment that people should write about the Holy Spirit, this one is more specific. Quite a bit more specific. So if you’re interested in how I think the Holy Spirit could be powerfully, if subtly, displayed in a novel/series of short stories format, read the ideas below about what I’d call the doctor.
I’ll admit I have many pet peeves regarding how people talk about or describe the Holy Spirit. I think actually reading the passages in Scripture that mention Him would radically shift general assumptions.
Along those lines, I was thinking about how little people speak about Christ being filled with the Spirit in His daily life following His Incarnation. Here is the Son of God made man given, in a sense, the vocation to live by faith. Here is the Son of Man living life as True Man in a platonic sense.
So, consider this: a novel following a quiet but faithful Lutheran as he goes about as a doctor. There would be time for to build relationships, professional or personal, and the mundanity that is sometimes more of an obstacle than big, even life or death, problems. But an overarching theme would be how we understand faith and the work of the Holy Spirit in normal life. Where is the Holy Spirit in vocation? Where is the Holy Spirit in conversations of either a professional or personal relationship? Where is the Holy Spirit when one is seeped in the First Article stuff that takes up so much of our time? How does He appear in less obvious ways?
In our small town, our doctor takes a turn at the local hospital, spends an afternoon or a day at a nearby Reservation, works with the VA system, and volunteers at a church-led free clinic. (Regretfully, not Lutheran church-led). Anyway, why not have a call out to a pregnancy resource center, too? Or on police scene? There could be limitless possibilities, even if you avoid “preachy” opportunities. Imagine that, vocation and conversation showing need and thankfulness for God and forgiveness.
“Call the doctor” could play off of office/house calls and \vocation. It would show a baptized believer living the days assigned him by God. It could explore the Holy Spirit, the Lord of Life, working to sustain life in this world, even if it is through ordinary means like a man, His education, and a prescription pad.
I imagine a quiet guy but when he speaks, he is gentle, wise, and a proponent of life and healing. Follow him in his work and plumb the sort of advice a devout man might give in the face of suffering, hopelessness. And then, as a climax, put him into that place of Jesus in John 11:4: an illness which leads to death, but not eternal death. A horrible experience that is for the glory of God, yet a time of scorn and disbelief. Show how the Son of God can be gloried even through a physician who falls so far short of the miraculous. Show the Holy Spirit’s role(s) in vocation. Demonstrate how it is to the glory of that we are not God, only He is.
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