It was the summer of 2007 when this book idea was given to me. I had enjoyed a dinner with friends under the starry sky of a rooftop restaurant in Franklin, TN. It was a beautiful night and we had all marveled at the constellations overhead.

​

I went home and fell fast asleep with the TV running in the background. I immediately began dreaming about a manned mission to Mars. The dream was unlike any dream I’d ever had. It was vivid in its detail about the mission and the story poured out of my mind as if God was playing a movie just for me. I kept waking up, bothered by the realistic nature of the dream and trying to figure out how theses scenes in my head all fit together. I was certain I was only half-asleep and this story was actually a movie on TV. But it was only infomercials playing on the late night TV. Eventually, I would fall back to sleep and –just like pushing play on the DVD, the dream would take off from where I’d left off.

​

Again and again, I would wake, clear my eyes and try to figure out where this dream was coming from, where it was going and what it meant. It was so real and it was a topic foreign to me, as I’m not a big science fiction fan. Finally, I was compelled to get up and write down what was in the dream. It was 4am. I was exhausted. But the complete outline of this book poured out of my fingertips onto the keyboard of my laptop without stopping. When I was done. I had about 5 pages of outline format.

​

That morning I slept in, exhausted from the sleepless night. Around 10am, I awoke and opened my laptop to see what I'd written. I fully expecting to find I had written a list of incoherent random thoughts. What I found instead was a complete story –this story. I believe it was literally given to me by God. It was not created by my imagination. It was not something I worked on to craft. It was literally dropped into my lap and I can take no credit for it other than being obedient to God to take the time to sit down and write it.

​

I was sure it had been written before (one of the reasons I quit song writing). So, I spent the next few days researching the idea on the Internet. I found nothing. Well, I found a lot... but nothing that even came close to this story. For several days, I worked on the story line. I decided who my characters would be and how they would play into the plot and finally, one morning on my back porch. I did it... I just started writing.

​

A few days later, I was on a plane from Nashville to Los Angeles sitting next to a man in a suit. The conversation was sparse until we got to the in-flight beverage service. Seizing the opportunity to be friendly, I asked him if he was from Nashville. “No he said, I was in town for a Christian Book Seminar.” He went on to tell me he’d been in book publishing for several years.

​

“Really.” I answered. I hesitated to tell him I’d just started writing a book myself thinking, I bet he hears that from a thousand people a day. But I did tell him, almost embarrassed by the fact that I did.

“What’s your book about?” was his question. I told him about the dream and the outline I’d written. And I told him the 7 minute version of the story and I waited to hear his response.

​

“You want my advice?” he asked me.

​

“Absolutely,” I answered.

 

“Finish your book –and don’t ever tell another person this idea until you do.”

​

I have no idea who he was but I owe him a thank you for encouraging me to write it and validating to me that the story was good enough. I have told only a few others the story, of course my wife, my friends; Jenna and Brad, Chuck and Mandy, Rob, Dave and Melinda, Dillon, my mother, my neighbor Dee. All of them encouraged me that it is a great story. Most have the response “Surely, this has been told before.” But it hasn’t. Not until now.