A runaway slave in Alaska

When Onesimus and his first wife were living near Dallas, Texas, close to some of the best medical care in the country, when she was diagnosed with ALS. Knowing that she’d face the loss of all motor skills over the next two years, a small town in far-off Alaska seemed like the last place to which they’d want to move.

But one winter, several years ago, that’s exactly where they went.

“I have no doubt it was the prompting of the Holy Spirit that led us here,” says the man who calls himself Onesimus, (the name of the runaway slave who was the inspiration for the Apostle Paul’s letter to Philemon in the New Testament).

Seven years earlier, he and his wife were atheists. Then, one day, a discussion on the radio led them to the writings of C.S. Lewis, the author of the “Narnia Chronicles” and “Mere Christianity,” and one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all time.

“Lewis, too, had been an atheist,” Onesimus said. “And he wrote of the man who was one of his greatest inspirations, the man he called his “master,” George MacDonald. Once we read MacDonald, and turned to the Gospels, there was no going back: we were followers of Jesus Christ.”

Onesimus spent two years caring for his wife before she passed away.

“We had purchased a small home in Alaska sight unseen, based purely on the views out the living room windows, for they revealed God in all his glory,” he said. “Double rainbows would arch across the heavens, the moon rose above Pioneer Peak, and all the while the words of George MacDonald brought the living presence of Jesus Christ, and all the comfort of his forgiveness and love, into each precious moment of our lives.”

MacDonald was a Scottish poet, novelist, and minister and a mentor to Lewis Carroll — who read the first draft of Alice in Wonderland to MacDonald’s children — and a friend of Mark Twain, Onesimus said.

George MacDonald was at once a deep thinker and profoundly practical, as these words penned by Onesimus in the introduction to the book he edited, attest:

“MacDonald has no patience for mere doctrine, no matter how clever, how insightful, how correct; the thing that matters is not to hold a set of beliefs about Christ, but to live as he lived, to ‘take the will of God as the very life of our being.’ ‘To follow him,’ he says, ‘is to leave one’s self behind.’ We are not saved through beliefs about Christ, interpretations of why he died on the cross, or faith in what he accomplished, but through faith in him. And what does it mean to have faith in Christ Jesus?

In a word: obedience.”

Last fall, Onesimus was seized with the idea of doing a project both to raise money to find a cure for ALS and to make the writings of George MacDonald more widely known.

“I decided to take what is perhaps his greatest work — the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons, which were such a huge influence on C.S. Lewis — and lovingly transform them into a daily devotional.”

And thus was born “Consuming Fire: The Inexorable Power of God’s Love,” published in early June and available from Amazon and select bookstores. All of the royalties from Consuming Fire go to the ALS Therapy Development Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts (als.net), recognized as the foremost nonprofit biotechnology organization dedicated to finding a cure for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

“ALS is not an incurable disease, it’s an underfunded one,” Onesimus said.

Consuming Fire has received extensive praise from philosophers like Thomas Talbott, author of “The Inescapable Love of God,” who calls it “the perfect introduction to MacDonald’s reflections on God and Christian living,” and from pastors such as John Kermott of First Baptist Church of Sterling, IL, who writes, “When I came to read the ‘Unspoken Sermons’ of George MacDonald, the thought that came to me was, ‘This guy knows Jesus,’ and I saw my need to know him better. This devotional will give any reader fresh ways to ponder the scripture and the One toward whom the scripture points.”

Onesimus is now happily remarried, and he and his wife are expecting a first child with a due date eerily close to MacDonald’s birthday of Dec. 10.

Jess Lederman lives in Wasilla. The book “Consuming Fire: The Inexorable Power of God’s Love” is available on Amazon or at Fireside Books in Palmer.