Also by this author: The Promise, The Drummer Boy, Sinner, Green, The Dream Traveler's Quest, Into the Book of Light, The Curse of Shadownman, The Garden and the Serpent, The Final Judgment, Millie Maven and the Bronze Medallion, A Man Called Blessed
Series: The Caleb Books #1
Published by Thomas Nelson on April 2001
Genres: Fiction, Christian, Suspense
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One orphaned boy. A desperate race to keep him alive. And powers that are beyond comprehension.
“Whoever said a straightened hand was more dramatic than a healed heart anyway?”
A young orphaned boy was abandoned and raised in an Ethiopian monastery. He has never seen outside its walls—at least, not the way most people see. Now he must flee or die.
But the world beyond is hardly ready for a boy like Caleb.
When relief expert Jason Marker agrees to rescue Caleb from the monastery, he unwittingly opens humanity’s doors to an incredible journey filled with political intrigue and peril. Jason and Leiah—the French-Canadian nurse who escapes the monastery with him—quickly realize Caleb’s supernatural power to heal. But so do the boy’s enemies, who will stop at nothing to destroy him. Jason and Leiah fight for Caleb’s survival while the world erupts in debate over the source of the boy’s power.
In the end nothing can prepare them for what they discover.
You probably didn’t know that Ted Dekker owes part of his career to Tim LaHaye and the Left Behind franchise. As the Left Behind series was booming the late 1990s, Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright had a conversation with Tim LaHaye where LaHaye pushed him to write fiction. Or, you know, collaborate with a fiction author on a story. Bright had written over 100 nonfiction books, but it seemed like fiction was the way to go. He called around, somebody gave him Heaven’s Wager, and suddenly Ted Dekker’s career was taking off. (It took off so well, that while he gets second billing on the first edition covers, the names are swapped by the time reprints came out a few years later.)
Blessed Child is very much akin in tone to The Martyr’s Song books and maybe even Blink. It’s message-driven fiction awash with the supernatural that, for whatever it lacks in technical skill, makes up for in passion. At the heart of the book is an exploration of what a childlike faith looks like. What would a pure and complete belief in Jesus look like? What if you took a child, separated him from the influence of the world and kept him from evil? (Dekker would later play heavily with this theme in Showdown.) Further, what if that child was then loosed upon the world? What would happen?
Dekker and Bright manage to hit on a whole host of topics, such as God and suffering, the existence of the miraculous, the prevalence of so-called faith healers, and more. But that’s not the only quotable from the book:
“Maybe if we believed what they believed, we could achieve what they achieved.”
Caleb’s world is one of naïve innocence, where the supernatural is simply natural because he lives in such close communication with God. Didn’t God promise that his disciples would do greater works than him? Then why are the healings of this day and age often a sham? Dekker and Bright challenge readers in their faith, to become as a child—a blessed child—in order to live in the kingdom.
With the spiritual foundation set by Bright, Dekker crafts a compelling story about an young boy with supernatural abilities, a power-obsessed priest bent on exploiting the boy, and—somehow—a sinister conspiracy involving a candidate for the Presidency. Blessed Child begins with an escape. Jason had no idea what he was getting into. As a relief worker, he was used to going into some dangerous situations, but he’d never encountered anything like the attack on the monastery that left him fleeing with a French-Canadian nurse named Leiah and an enigmatic child named Caleb.
Jason and Leiah safely escape with Caleb in tow, but that’s when the story really begins. Dekker and Bright weave together a large political storyline in the background of a story about supernatural healing and God’s visible presence wrapped around a core of a story that’s just about a young boy with a pure faith.
Blessed Child carries with it a heavy and poignant theological theme, but one the story bears well. It’s about healing, physical and spiritual. Once Caleb’s abilities are discovered, thousands flock to him for healing. But the message that shines through is that while a physical healing is more noticeable, what really matters is a healed heart.
But don’t think the novel is good only for its message. Dekker weaves a compelling and emotional story that’ll keep the pages turning. The pacing lags a bit at times and the political storyline should probably have been streamlined or excised, but overall the tension builds. Dekker’s early works could be categorized as answers to questions and this one answers the question:
“Whoever said a straightened hand was more dramatic than a healed heart anyway?”
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