I want you to put the book down and sit with it for a minute.

Not because you are confused. Because something landed and you need a moment before you move on to the next thing. I want there to be a residue. A weight. Something the story left in you that was not there before you opened the first page.

Specifically I want you to feel like the world is larger than you thought. Like the visible reality you move through every day is not the whole story. Like there is something operating just on the other side of what your eyes can reach and it is not neutral about you. It has an interest in you. A stake in what you do next.

I want you to look at the person in your life who is sitting on unrealized gifts and see them differently. See what is buried under what is visible. See the Alan Charms version of them — the version that has more in it than the circumstances have allowed to surface yet.

And I want you to feel something about your own life. I want the question the book is quietly asking — what is in you that has not come out yet, what are you carrying that you have not claimed — to follow you after the last page.

That is what the great books did to me. Peretti made me feel the spiritual world was real. Dekker made me feel like a story could hold that kind of weight across multiple volumes. LaHaye and Jenkins made me feel like an ordinary person could be inside the biggest story being told.

I want Black Water to do something like that. Not the same thing. Its own thing. But something that stays.

That is the whole ambition. Nothing less.

Stephon Rudd