After awakening from that an all-night series of dreams, which I truly believe were meant to be a prophetic warning to our nation, I took a very long season to process and learn.
My family was part of a multiethnic church in Nashville, TN. As white Americans from a lower middle class background who had achieved graduate medical degrees, my husband and I had learned heaps from multiethnic ministry and relations. But I knew that I didn’t yet have the tools to write the Divided series.
So, what did I do?
I took several years to research our nation’s history of slavery.
I read every slave first-hand account I could find, researching slaves' lives in other places and centuries, including the stories of the gladiators in Ancient Greece and Rome and the modern-day freedom fighters involved in trying to stop human trafficking.
I had already completed a thorough study of the Bible in the area of community development, social justice and biblical answers to oppression (which I'll be offering as a free pdf download on my website after I publish Divided).
But I was just getting started.
Then during the church planting process in Cincinnati, OH, a city wracked by race riots and division along ethnic lines, I glimpsed what I was missing...
the answer to how my characters would fix the world of Divided.
I was missing the Underground rebellion, an movement in which the different ethnic groups not only learn how to be together, but to work together, despite their differences.
I was missing the hope of reconciliation.
I found the Underground while touring the Underground Railroad Museum in the Freedom Center, which had just opened along the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati in the earliest days of our church planting process.
Just like the slaves in the days of Harriet Tubman and the other conductors on the Underground Railroad, this world of Divided needed men and women willing to risk their own lives to see their brothers and sisters freed from tyranny and oppression. It needed the men and women of the Underground, who would use the tunnels under the city of Queenstown, a relic from the days of Prohibition and beer-brewing, to meet and train in secrecy.
And that’s when I met Moses and Julianna. A couple who was alive in the old America. They'd survived the nuclear attacks and the EMPs and the mega-gang attacks in Cincinnati.
A Ranger (Moses) and a high school math teacher (Juli) who, through grit and survivalist training, survived the civil war and Supreme Commander Martin's takeover, and formed the Underground. [psst - Get their story for free by signing up for my monthly e-newsletter.]
Hope is alive in the Underground.
A hope that justice, mercy, and truth can win in the new Federated Republic of America, despite decades of fear and oppression.
Will we be brave enough to join the Underground?
