Hi all,

Well, 2024 has started off a bit challenging what with being sick with the flu the whole first week.  Then I had a staycation scheduled during the second week when I planned to get a lot done around the house but my neck of the woods got a not-so-fun mix of snow, ice, and wind that delayed many of my projects (and led to a ridiculous amount of shoveling).  But my family and friends and I all stayed safe and warm so I'm grateful.  Because I didn't get to do all of my home improvement projects, I ended up starting to add material from "The Advocate" onto the Timeline and Encyclopedia.  And I finally finished just this afternoon... with something like eighteen Timeline entries and nearly 150 Encyclopedia ones!  As I was working on it, I jotted down some questions and answers that I planned to sprinkle through a few newsletters.  However, I'm now really in need of a break from the computer.  So I'm just going to put several of them here and call it good!  I'll be back in a couple of weeks with something NOT related to the Dyeland/Asteriana stories.

God bless,
Jenni
Some Q and A Inspired by "The Advocate"

How do the angels maintain boundaries between what they know to be true about God and respecting the religious beliefs of their assignments?

I think like everything with the angels, it's all a need-to-know basis.  Sometimes they have assignments where it's important for the people involved to know Jesus is God... chiefly when we're talking about people who already had some sort of Christian foundation in life.  Like let's use Steve as an example.  Steve is the son of a Christian pastor.  He was himself training to be a Christian pastor until he realized he was gay.  A lot of the pain in his life stemmed from not having a good example of Christian faith and being queer coexisting.  He wasn't going to be well served by an angel appearing to him and telling him that an ill-defined God loved him.  He needed to know Jesus specifically loved him.  And so Joshua set things in motion, via Sandy and Loreena and Ant, so that Steve would learn exactly that... from Joshua himself.  But if for some reason Joshua hadn't been physically present, Andrew or Azrael or someone would have made Steve aware that God the Son loved and treasured him.

But a lot of times there really is no reason to get specific.  A lot of times assignments just need to hear that God loves them.  In those cases, Jesus/Joshua isn't going to come up and that's fine.  Consider Ed.  He was born in 1000 AD.  He was fully aware from the moment of his birth that the Trinity existed.  But at no point was he directed to tell the Māori that.  He respected and even participated in their religious beliefs.

I think the only time an angel is going to hit back at an assignment's religious beliefs is when those beliefs are causing direct harm to that person or others.

Also, just a note that while Andrew and other angels sometimes wear crosses or whatnot in the stories, that's only during their personal time or when it would be helpful in an assignment.  Obviously no one is showing up to an assignment at a synagogue wearing a cross.

And I think all of this is just the logical extension of what we saw on TBAA.  Even though some episodes seem to strongly suggest the existence of a Triune God, the angels never pushed that.  It seems pretty obvious to me that non-Christians were getting into Heaven.  And while I have theories on how that happens that I go back and forth on, I have no doubts it IS happening somehow.

Why is JenniAnn immune to angels... for lack of a better term?

Because as Cephas pointed out... she has to be.  For one, her relationship with Andrew would suffer if she was regularly in awe of him and maybe even angels in general.  That's not really a good way to build a solid relationship.  I think because she's so close with him, she sort of subconsciously adopts his stance on the other angels... with a couple notable exceptions.  Even though he's nearly a thousand years older than her, JenniAnn feels very protective of Ed in part because he's Andrew's much, much younger brother.  On the other hand, she treats Crowley like an older but sometimes irresponsible and erratic older sibling because that's who he is to Andrew.  Andrew and JenniAnn both view Marty as a lovable, responsible older brother but got to a point of feeling a bit stifled by him.  It's almost like she married into a family and just adopted her husband's relationships which I think sometimes happens.  The only real exceptions are Monica and Tess who, in the past, really annoyed and even angered JenniAnn whereas Andrew never seemed nearly as bothered by them.  And that may even play into why she's not automatically awed by angels.  If you met five angels (Andrew, Adam, Monica, Tess, and Gloria) and those were the only five angels you knew and you were in love with one, really liked the other, sometimes wanted to throttle two of them, and found the fifth kinda grating... do you think your initial reaction to a sixth, seventh, eighth, etc. would automatically be awe?  Probably not.

All that being said, I think JenniAnn is more "immune" because she's been around the angels since she was seventeen.  The little kids are potentially even more immune since they've never NOT known angels to be around.  Like I don't think Belle's teen rebellion phase is going to be muted just because her Daddy is an angel.  She's probably still going to think he's clueless at times.  I also think most of the adult Friends are past the point of being awed by angels in and of themselves.  I think there's always going to be some initial awe when the latest "big name" angel first appears.  But I don't think that awe is necessarily any greater than when a "big name" saint/spirit shows up.

But, yeah, I do think JenniAnn is in a bit of a different place just because her initial interactions with angels involved some adversarial feelings with Monica and Tess.  She's simply never going to assume an angel is automatically in the right because, as far as she's concerned, Monica and Tess did her man dirty for years.  She's in a much, much better place with them both now.  But that doesn't mean she doesn't still think they showed poor judgment at points in the past. 

How did you decide which of the apostles were married and unmarried?

Well, I kind of had no choice with Cephas although I supposed I could have made him a widower but then I'd still have to contend with a wife in the present day.  With Yehuda, I had mentioned him having a wife clear back in either "The Carpenter" or "The King" so, even though her name wasn't given, Tirzah was implied to exist along with three children.  From there, I decided on a rough timeline of who was oldest to youngest with Cephas being the oldest and Thoma and Yohannan being the youngest.  So that meant determining who had the most time pre-Yeshua to marry and start a family and who maybe wasn't yet quite established when Yeshua came along and they then had to direct their attentions elsewhere.  I also had Mattay as unmarried on account of his traumatic past and also I wasn't really sure who he would marry given he had stepped away from Judaism and yet I don't know that a Roman family would be thrilled about their daughter marrying a Jewish man.  But otherwise I just went with what I've been taught which is that most Jewish men of the era married in their late teens/early twenties.  My assumption is the wives traveled with Yeshua and Co. along with their children.  In the cases where a wife was pregnant or the couple had a very young child, I think they were probably taken back to their hometown to stay with extended family until they were able to rejoin the group.  Lazar's and Martha's house probably could have also served as a safe place for new mothers and babies. 

I ended up writing mini-bios for most of the apostles and much of that content didn't make it into "The Advocate" so I look forward to exploring those more in the future as well as fleshing out more of the wives.  With the exception of Rakhyl and Tirzah, they were kind of just mentioned in passing.  I will say I was pretty pleased with how Tirzah came out and I look forward to exploring that dynamic more in the future as I imagine things got pretty tense after Yehuda's betrayal.  I think some of the Twelve were probably pretty angry... shouldn't Tirzah have known what Yehuda had planned and spoken up???  Whereas the wives were more of the "Of course she didn't know!  If you ice her out then you'll be turning your back on everything Rabboni ever said."  And they, obviously having the sounder argument, won out.

As for choosing the wives' names, I just looked at a list of names from the era and chose ones that appealed to me.

Just as an aside, I do think it's pretty funny that The Chosen is largely written by evangelicals who do not have a tradition of priestly celibacy and yet only have one married apostle and one apostle on the verge of marrying (seemingly) and yet, here I am, raised Catholic and I have nine of them married.  Of course, it should be noted that I don't have to pay an additional nine people whereas The Chosen would have to.  So there may be practical reasons at play that I don't have to care about.

And finally...

Is Andrew okay?

Ha.  The last few stories I've written that feature Andrew have had him in a pretty angsty space.  However, I intend to keep the angst at a minimum for poor Andrew in the 2023 and 2024- set stories.  That being said, I tend to be reactionary with my writing so if something happens in the real world that I feel like Andrew would get upset about, that may still happen.  But I think Andrew is just in a kind of vulnerable place right now.  All of his kids are getting older.  There's not a one that he and JenniAnn can carry around in a baby sling and never let out of their sight.  They're off doing things and being their own people, even little Avi.  Which leaves Andrew with more time in his own head.  I also think because the kids are less dependent, he's probably covering more assignments these days.  But God will still ensure he strikes a good balance between work and family life.  Andrew will be just fine.


And speaking of writing about current events... this newsletter is dedicated to John Dye who was never shy about speaking out regarding social issues that were important to him.  I always admired him for that.

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