Preaching To Mend Broken Lives: An Interview With T.D. Jakes
Preaching: You've just written a novel. How does writing a novel compare to preaching?
Jakes: It is very similar to me because I am a story teller. My mother said I had a wild, lascivious imagination! Nothing about little Tommy has changed. He is still telling stories. Doing Cover Girls (Warner Books) gives me an opportunity to discuss a story, to introduce characters — fictitious characters but they're not totally fiction. They are little threads of many women that I have met along the way. I have had the rich opportunity of meeting president's wives, presidents, kings, princes, nobility, actors, actresses, homeless people. I have been on death row with people before they were to be executed. I've been in the hospital room when babies were born dead and I've been in the room when mothers were gasping for breath and went home to be with the Lord. I have seen the very best and worse moments in life — divorce settlements, marriages reconciled, marriages terminated. I have been in the room with the groom right before he got married and calmed down the bride because the groom didn't show up. I've done a lot of things. When you read these characters they embody all of those rich experiences, and Cover Girls is just a pitcher of water pulled from the brook of an experience that is too vast to put in one book. But in that pitcher of water you get a taste of everything that is in the brook.
Advertisement
Preaching: Why did you call the book Cover Girls?
Jakes: I find that one of the strongest proclivities that people have — and women in particular — is a tendency to hide who we really are. It has lead to more divorces than anything I have ever seen, the inability to share with another person who we really are for fear of rejection. It causes companies to fall apart. It wrecks staff relationships. It kills giftings in ministries. Even in the church — where there is such a pressure on us to be a certain way and live up to a certain standard or image — we often hide who we really are.
The characters in Cover Girls are very, very different — some white, some black, some rich, some poor. Some women who have been through child abuse, some women who have been very, very successful,;there is one character who is afraid of getting old. There is one character who is deeply religious. But the one thing that each one of them ultimately finds out that she has in common with the other woman is that she is hiding something. Hiding something that she's afraid that anybody will see but also hiding something that she's afraid nobody will ever see.
We hide from people who we really are and hope that they don't see. But secretly we wish that somebody would look behind the mask and care enough about us; to become involved with who we really are and not what we do or what we have. I call the book Cover Girls because these women are afraid to reveal what God longs to heal.