Blind Ambition (Light in the Empire)

By Carol Ashby

Description:

Sometimes you have to almost die to discover how you want to live.

It’s AD 114 in the Roman province of Germania Superior, and being a Christian carries a death sentence. Tribune Decimus Lentulus is on the fast track for a stellar political career back in Rome. When he’s robbed, blinded, and left for dead, a young German woman who follows the Way finds him. Valeria knows it’s his duty to have her and her family killed, but she chooses to obey Jesus’s command to love her enemy and takes him home to care for him.

It’s not his miraculous recovery that shakes Decimus to his core. It’s the way they love him like family and their unconcealed love for Jesus. In spite of himself, he falls in love with the Christian woman Rome wants him to kill. Can Valeria hide her faith to follow him into the circles of Roman power? Or should he abandon his ambition to help rule the Empire and choose to follow a different way?

Book Takeaway:

It’s risky to obey God’s command to love our enemy, but that love can change an enemy into a friend and maybe much more. Blind Ambition shows the power of love to open the eyes of someone so focused on success by the world’s standards that they’re missing what’s truly important.

Why the author wrote this book:

I’d been following the news about the persecution of the Church in many countries and thinking about how safe it is for me to follow Jesus. The faithfulness of my sisters and brothers in Christ got me thinking about how many are facing the kinds of dangers the early Christians faced in the Roman Empire. The Roman government at best ignored Jesus’s followers and at worst murdered them for entertainment if they wouldn’t deny their faith and worship the Roman gods. That inspired this story about living our faith by loving the enemy in a time of persecution and how that love can crack the hardest shell to let God’s light in.