An Evening with Jesus: A Novel of the Father's Heart
A New Book by
Hegumen Abraam SlemanThere is a question that lives in the heart of almost every person who has ever believed - or wanted to believe - in God.
Not a theological question. Not a doctrinal one. Something quieter and more personal.
What is He really like?
What does God say to an ordinary person, on an ordinary evening, when that person is honest enough to stay a little longer instead of turning for home?
That question is the heartbeat of this book.
What the Book Is
An Evening with Jesus: A Novel of the Father's Heart is a work of Christian fiction - a novel written as a long, unhurried conversation between an unnamed narrator and Jesus, set along the roads and hillsides of Galilee, from evening through the night into the following day.
The narrator is no hero. He is simply a man who stayed when everyone else went home - full of questions he had never found the courage to ask, and a hunger he had never been able to name. What happens over that evening changes everything.
What the Book Covers
The conversation moves through the deepest questions of the human heart - questions belonging as much to a reader today as to a traveler on a first-century road:
Why does the Father seem so distant? Does He truly love me - not humanity in the abstract, but me? Why is the world so broken? Where is God when we suffer? Is death truly not the end? What is the Church for? How do I remain near God when the feeling of His presence fades?
Each question is met not with a lecture, but a conversation. Jesus speaks in parables, in questions that answer questions, in images drawn from the road around them. He is patient. He is unhurried. He is never distant.
Slowly, the narrator discovers that every answer leads to the same place - not merely to correct belief, essential as that is, but to a living Person. To know the Father's heart is not to leave the faith behind. It is to enter it fully, for the very first time.
The Heart Behind the Book
Many who struggle with faith are not struggling with theology alone. They are struggling with the Father.
They have read about God, prayed to Him, received the Holy Mysteries, kept the fasts. But somewhere the living sense of who the Father truly is has grown dim - and without that, even the richest sacramental life can feel like a house whose light has gone out.
This novel seeks to lead the reader into a living encounter with the Father's heart - to hear, in the voice of Jesus, what the Father is actually like, and to discover that the Scriptures, the Church, the sacraments, and prayer are the Father's own arms reaching toward His children, drawing them ever closer to Himself.
Who This Book Is For
This book is for the believer who prays, receives the sacraments faithfully - but has quietly lost the living sense of connecting to Someone real.
It is for the doubter who cannot quite walk away from faith, because something keeps pulling them back.
It is for the seeker standing at the door of the Church, drawn by something they cannot yet name.
And it is for anyone who has ever asked the oldest question a human heart can ask:
Does the Father know me? And does He care?
This book answers that question - not with an argument, but a story. A story that ends not with all questions resolved, but with something better: the discovery that you are known, you are loved, and that the Father's door is not merely unlocked.
It is open. And He is standing at the threshold.
An Evening with Jesus: A Novel of the Father's Heart will be soon available.
www.amazon.com/author/frsleman
www.frsleman.org - [email protected]
