Last Light by Terri Blackstock, a woman writer, is a novel the like of which I have never read. On the jacket of the CD, in addition to the title and the name of the author, there are three more words: A Restoration Novel.

What is a restoration novel? I did not have any idea until I came to the second or third CD: the novel is in 11 CDs. It’s about what Christians do, or would do, or should do, or could do, in an emergency.

It’s not an ordinary emergency like someone in your family having a heart attack or your child being falling into a pond. It’s a catastrophe that hits out of the blue, a disaster that is caused by a so-called atmospheric event.

Somehow, all came to a sudden stop. Your car went dead. Your cell phone went dead. Literally nothing that was high-tech and wired up with a network was working. In the cities, big or small, there was no electricity, no water, no gas. And there was no traffic except for a few people walking on their legs.

The world was plunged into the primitive days thousands of years ago, when people hunted in the forest and grew crops in the field to feed themselves, when refrigerators and washing machines were all unknown.

Thieves and thugs multiplied overnight. They took advantage of the confusion to create more of it, fishing in a muddy pond. Cars and trucks, which had got stuck on the road when outage happened, all had their windows smashed and everything that was worth a penny was looted.

Doug Branning and his family found themselves in such a situation when the novel began. There were six people in his family, his wife Kenn and their two sons and two daughters. The oldest child was Deni, a 21-year-old girl who had finished college in Georgetown University, where she was engaged to a young man who worked for a senator.

They were not the most unfortunate, however. In their neighborhood, there were families that found themselves in an even more desperate situation. A next-door neighbor, for instance, was a young woman whose husband had just left her with a little baby: he had run away with another woman. The young mother found herself short of almost everything ranging from food to diapers.

Some people believed that it was a black who had committed the crimes, for no other reason than his skin being black.

Doug didn’t buy that racist conclusion. True, the black man was roaming the neighborhood on those nights when the murders happened, but he had always been a decent man and a humble Christian. Doug didn’t believe that he would have murdered anyone.

Rifles and guns became treasures. People all took them up to protect themselves and their families. Doug and his 16-year-old son Jeff took turns every night guarding their house, rifle in hand. One day, Jeff was home alone. A group of five student-turned gangsters tried to take bikes from his home. They attacked him ruthlessly, beating him black and blue. Jeff had to use his gun to scare them off and keep them from taking away bikes.

A debate broke out in Doug’s own home when he decided to give a rifle to the young woman with a little baby. It was the ideal weapon almost everyone in the neighborhood had to protect themselves. The Dougs had more than one rifle, and he thought that he might as well give one away. But his wife Kenn and children thought differently. On the other hand, when Kenn gave some napkins and food to that woman earlier, Doug had protested as much as his children. “We are running out of them,” he shouted.

“So I tell you, don’t worry about everyday life – whether you have enough food, drink, and clothes. Doesn’t life consist of more than food and clothing? Look at the birds. They don’t need to plant or harvest or put food in barns because your heavenly Father feeds them. And you are far more valuable to him than they are. Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? Of course not.

“And why worry about your clothes? Look at the lilies and how they grow. Yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautiful as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for flowers that are here today and gone tomorrow, won’t he more surely care for you? You have so little faith!

“So don’t worry about having enough food or drink or clothing… Your heavenly Father already knows your needs. Instead, be concerned above everything else with the Kingdom of God and with what he requires of you, and he will provide you with all other things.（你们要先求他的国和他的义，这一切都必加给你们。）

“So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

Doug and his wife came to see that they had done right in helping their neighbors in need. But what does St. Matthew mean when he says “be concerned above everything else with the Kingdom of God and with what he requires of you （你们要先求他的国和他的义）?” Could this teaching be applied to the situation they were confronted with?

Thinking leads to ideas. They came up with the idea of organizing an event for their neighbors to trade things. They would first visit their neighbors one by one to find out what they had a surplus of and what they wanted. Then they would sponsor a meeting for people to swap things. So Doug split his family into three groups to do the job of visiting individual families. 

Some time later, they also sponsored a church service in their own home for Christians to study the Bible. Not a big congregation, but those who came benefited a lot from the study of the Scripture. They left Doug’s home full of faith, hope, and love. With God in your mind, you had nothing to fear: God brought peace of mind to everyone who believed in him. The neighborhood became a big family where people loved and cared for one another.

Troubles didn’t come to an end, however. Indeed, the worst and most dramatic event had yet to come to Doug’s family.

Deni, who had planned to marry Crag, assistant to a senator in Washington D.C., got fed up with the new way of life after the outage, a life with no shower, no TV, no refrigerated food, etc., etc. Instead of having fun and pleasure, she had to work hard to clean the house and eat whatever was available. She decided to go to Washington D.C. to be with Crag. “If he doesn’t come to me, I’m going to him,” she told herself.

It so happened that Deni’s friend Mark had a father who had an independent business. Nobody knew exactly what kind of business he had, but he managed to develop a horse-drawn carriage ingeniously so as to distribute his goods to various stores scattered in the southern part of the country. When Deni learned that he was going to drive the carriage to Washington D.C., she begged him to take her along, which he readily agreed.

And so, the very day Doug had a church service in his home, Deni left when it was over. She had not consulted her parents about her decision. “I’m twenty-one, old enough to do what I want to do,” she had said time and again to herself and to her parents. She left a note in her room, telling them about what she believed to be her wise and independent decision.

In a visit to Mark’s home, Doug made the surprising discovery that it was none other than Mark’s father who had committed the heinous crimes of murdering nearly 10 people in two families. Back at home, he was astounded to find that his daughter had run way with the murderer. The whole family was thrown into utter confusion. Carrying a gun, Doug went in pursuit of the horse-drawn carriage on a bike.

Deni soon learned that the man who she ran away with sold pornographic books all over the south. Boxes on the carriage were packed with bundles of those books. She hated to go along with him. She hated herself for making the silly decision to leave home for Washington D.C. Taking advantage of darkness, she quit the journey, but the man wouldn’t allow her to leave him so easily. He caught her and put her back into the carriage after killing an old couple who had provided a night’s shelter to Deni.

Doug’s bike ran faster than a horse-drawn carriage, but he had to stop at every cross-roads, every town or city, and every suspicious means of transport to inquire about Deni and/or the murderer. It was almost a week after he left home that he caught up with the carriage. A desperate fight followed in which Deni shot the murderer with a revolver.

The Dougs were together again, Deni having learned a profound lesson about God, who had not forsaken her in spite of her mistakes but instead had provided her with everything she had needed, from food to drinking water, from shelter to safety, at the right time and in the right place. Her prays had all been answered.

A global catastrophe revealed the darkness in human hearts and lighted the way to restoration for a self-centered world, about which the Bible says, “Don’t copy the behavior of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.(不要效法这个世界，倒要藉着心意的更新让神把你改变成为新人。)”