Best-selling author Randy Alcorn has an uncanny way of leaving agents, publishers, and book-sellers completely bamboozled. "You can't write fiction and non-fiction," they once protested. "And look at your topics;they're all over the map. What on earth makes you think you can write with authority on subjects that range from eternity and sex to money and abortion; and fiction to boot? If you want to build readership, you've got to stick to one thing! Readers have got to know what to expect."

In a word: baloney.

Unlike many authors who, after landing their first contract, find themselves on a runaway treadmill trying to churn out one manuscript after another, often about topics about which they have no passion, Randy Alcorn has cleared a different path.

"I ask God every time, 'What do you want me to do?' says Randy, who's written 20 non-fiction titles and seven novels, including the new, long-awaited blockbuster, Deception. "I don't care what makes sense to people; what makes sense to people and God are often very different. Publishers think they know what the world needs, yet they are continuously surprised by what people respond to."

Randy doesn't view things the way most people do. It's as if he's wearing some kind of supersonic infrared spy goggles that empower him to see truth and reality while the rest of us see only shapes and shadows. "We live in a world full of images and slogans. Reading the papers, seeing the news, our culture teaches us that happiness can be found in sex, nice cars, cold beer, and an accumulation of money; but that's a myth. We keep chasing mirages, but things are not what they appear. Evil is real. We see it, but we tend not to understand that the God of providence is doing a redemptive work," Randy says. "Life here is short. Our time is limited. The vast majority of good things we should do, we can't do. But, what very few things does God actually want me to do?"

One thing God has apparently wanted him to do is write fiction - that sells. In 1994, Randy penned his first novel, Deadline, which he calls a "complete experiment." "I didn't think I'd write another novel, so I threw a little of everything into that book: homosexuality, abortion, media bias. I was surprised how strong the response was." So strong, that it remained on the best-seller list for 28 months. Actor Chuck Norris said the book changed his life and is making a motion picture of it.

"Fiction has subversive potential," says Randy. "It can open the gates of the mind and people let it in, and they don't really know what they're letting in. You hook them with the story and God can be working below the level of their consciousness. It can catch a person off guard. It can be propaganda for evil or a theme that impacts people for good."

One woman in Randy's community impacted for good by his books was a staunch pro-choice advocate who was given a copy of Deadline. Randy feared her wrath when he saw her a week later. "She eyed me from across the room, marched straight up to me and said, 'I read that book of yours called Deadline and I loved it. My favorite scene is when you show heaven's point of view of unborn children.' That's the classic difference between fiction and non-fiction," Randy explains. "If that woman had read the back cover of a pro-life book she would have been totally on the defensive. But in a work of fiction, she loved the most potentially offensive part of the book. There was a paradigm shift in her thinking about unborn children."

A number of Randy's novels offer that unique "viewpoint from heaven" in which a character who has died is shown in heaven, witnessing and discussing what's happening on earth. Randy says it's a form of style God laid on his heart to bring perspective. "In my books, there's a lot of darkness, confusion, grief, and anger," he says. "But things are not as they appear on the outside. Heaven is real. And what I want to show is that there is a whole unseen reality that we don't see with our eyes."

Randy's new novel, Deception, the third book in his mega-popular 3D series, tells the story of homicide detective Ollie Chandler, who's angry at God because his wife's recent death. Ollie's wife is shown in heaven on several occasions, talking to Jesus about her husband. While books one and two in the series, Deadline and Dominion, were written in the third-person omniscient style, Deception is penned in first-person, from the perspective of the bitter and resentful detective.

"I liked Ollie's character well enough, he was real enough to me, that I felt he lent himself to further development," Randy explains. "Ollie's in pain, he's suffering, he doesn't believe God, and he can't accept his wife's death. He wants justice, that's a huge theme in the book. But God is withholding His justice, temporarily. It's His mercy that allows injustice to continue long enough for us to come to repentance."

Randy is a research fiend, often reading dozens of books to provide ample insight and understanding of the topic and setting about which he is writing. In preparation to write Dominion, he read 80 books on African Americans, interviewed black pastors, and spent hours in inner city ghettos. "I received many letters from black readers who assumed I was black, saying 'Thank you so much. We have to help our white brothers and sisters understand.' Another black man wrote, 'Our whole family has read Dominion. Eight of us think you're black and one of us thinks you may be white. I got a $50 bet that says you're black. Would you settle the bet?' Then he emailed me back and said, 'I just checked your web site. Never mind. You cost me fifty bucks.'"

Randy Alcorn is a Bible scholar, pastor, evangelist, missionary, and author, all wrapped up into one estimable package. At age 22 he began pastoring Good Shepard Community Church in the basement of his home in Oregon with friend Stu Weber, who remains the lead pastor today. In 1988, Randy and his family canvassed six countries, visiting missionaries from their church, sometimes "walking for hours to be sure we weren't being followed."

In 1989, while serving on the board for the Crisis Pregnancy Center, Randy participated in nine passive, non-violent gatherings in the front of abortion clinics to speak up for the rights of the unborn. His actions made Oregon judges livid and resulted in threats of lawsuits for civil disobedience which have altered the course of his ministry. "One of the abortion clinics garnished my wages from the church," explains Randy. "Anything above minimum wage, they could take 25 percent and give it to the abortion clinic."

To prevent his wages from being siphoned into the tillers of abortion clinics, Randy resigned as pastor of Good Shepard in 1990 and started the aptly named Eternal Perspective Ministries (www.epm.org). "We started by doing what was close to our hearts, which was missions, and part of my job description would also be writing. We decided that 100 percent of our royalties would go to the ministry, not to me, because they could be garnished if they went to me. We wanted all the royalties to be given away." To date, several million dollars have been given from EPM to some 40 different ministries, including missions organizations, Voice of the Martyrs, Bible translators, the Jesus Film project, prison ministries, and groups who work with the handicapped.

"The ministry pays me minimum wage and my wife makes a secretary's wage," Randy says. "We're just regular middle-class people who have to watch our finances just like everybody else. There's a real joy and simplicity in giving to God's kingdom. It honors Him. We wouldn't have it any other way."

Randy's reading audiences vary, but he sees himself writing mostly to Christians who genuinely want to be challenged in their walk with Christ, and desire to get serious about things such as purity, giving, and holiness. "God is challenging people, opening their hearts and minds through fiction and non-fiction, changing them, drawing them to Christ, and allowing our ministry to be a fundraiser for kingdom projects that are close to our hearts."

One reason Randy's writing rings so true-to-life and is so undeniably convicting is because he knows, firsthand, what it's like to have lived in an environment steeped in unbelief and antagonism toward God. His father,a bar owner who rented jukeboxes and pinball machines to other tavern owners, often expressed his anger and judgmentalness toward Christians. "Dad was the most resistant man I've ever known," Randy recalls. "He was a pagan and was proud of it. I have vivid memories of what it was like to not know Jesus. I can still feel the emptiness as I talk about it."

The one Sunday Randy's mom took him to church as a boy was the Sunday they gave away free Bibles. Randy got one. It became the only Bible in the Alcorn home. When a sophomore in high school, Randy went to church one evening to see a girl he liked from another school. That night, he heard the Gospel, went home, and began reading the scriptures. After seven or eight months, he realized he believed what he was reading and prayed to invite God into his life. Years later, he married Nancy, the girl he went to see at church that night.

Although Randy was granted the gift of leading his mother to the Lord in 1969, his father and brother remained extremely resistant to the Gospel. In his father's later years, Randy wrote to his dad, expressing the need to share Christ with him. The next time his father saw Randy, he seethed, "I don't want you to ever bring that up again." After a bout with prostate cancer and a threat to commit suicide, Randy's father lay in a hospital bed, ready to go in for major surgery that the doctors said he may not survive.

"I came in the room an hour before the surgery and said, "Dad, I know you don't want to hear this, but I'm going to share it anyway," Randy remembers. "He couldn't move, so he couldn't do anything. I went to Romans." Randy explained to his father that men are all sinners, that the wages of sin is death, and that the gift of God is eternal life through belief in Jesus Christ.

"I did not for one moment think he was going to come to Christ; he was an impossible case. I said, 'Dad, have you ever repented of your sins?' He said, 'No, I never have.' There was a long pause, as Randy thanked God, silently, for allowing him to share for what may be the last time. Then his father's words shattered the silence: 'But I think it's about time I did.' Randy's father lived four more years, with Randy visiting him often for times of prayer and Bible reading.

Perhaps it's Randy's relationship with his father and others like it that have brought the author to the place where he is today, coming out with a new novel in the 3D series some ten years after the last book, Dominion, was released. "Particularly in my fiction, I've realized that when you tell a story, you earn the right to be heard. You build themes into fiction that non-believers can get their hands on. In Deception, I'm extremely mindful of the non-Christian, the main character is a non-Christian, and he remains a skeptic. We see Christianity through his eyes and much of what we see isn't good."

Randy describes Deception as a murder mystery in which a professor has been killed and long-time character Ollie Chandler and his partner are assigned to the case. "As the case develops, Ollie begins suspecting certain people. The more he sees, the more his suspicions are confirmed that the murder was committed by someone he doesn't want to believe did it."

Although there's been speculation that Deception will bring a close to the 3D series that has spanned 13 years, Randy says he's not sure. Somehow, we get the impression that he'll know what to do - when the time is right.

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