Safely Home - Randy Alcorn

I just finished reading “Safely Home”, by Randy Alcorn. Though I had read this book once before (before Into the Book was created) it still really impacted me and I discovered things in it I didn’t know existed before.

The book is centered around the lives of two men: Ben Fielding and Li Quan. At the beginning of the book, Ben Fielding is a successful man who has succeeded in his job and is on the fast track for CEO of his company, Getz International. However, he has had a divorce, and he fires his own brother-in-law for talking about religion on the job.

Ben is asked to go to China, where he hooks up with his college friend Li Quan. Though Ben originally comes to China for business purposes, he soon gets pulled into much more. Quan is arrested for being an illegal Christian, and Ben stays in China to help him. With the disapproval of his company, Ben takes vacation time to try and free Quan, and ends up re-dedicating his life to Christ.

The book closes with Li Shen, Quan’s only son, dying in a jail, and being the last martyr. The armies of the Lord charge the earth and the ending picks much from Revalation. All in all, Safely Home has a great plot and is extremely well-developed. The characters and setting, in particular, stood out to me.

This book could receive criticism, because like the Martyr’s Song and Ninety Minutes in Heaven, it talks quite a bit about heaven and spirits protecting people (especially at the end of the book). However, there is a difference between this book and others. As Li Wen, Li Tong, and others are watching things down on earth, they are only in heaven’s entryway. Randy Alcorn never attempts to describe heaven and he does not attempt to describe Jesus, either, who is in the book as well.

Throughout “Safely Home”, Li Quan’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather are watching his life on earth. Like I said above, this can receive criticism, because Alcorn is only guessing about these things. Still, I think that he does a good job not to embellish anything set in the Bible, and he by no means claims that this description he gives IS heaven, or is really what heaven is, which others do, such as Don Piper.

When I read this book, one of the things that really stood out to me about the book was the horrible detail it went in to about the persecution of Christians, especially in China. Randy Alcorn based much of this book on actual happenings, and I had no idea that such things took place. The accounts of Li Quan in prison, and other parts, tore my heart apart as I know that Christians are treated that way in parts of the world.

Another part that I really liked about this book was when Ben Fielding goes to an underground seminary. Throughout three days, this man who had drifted from the Lord reads through the entire book of John and teaches others there. At the end of this gathering, Ben is saved as he realizes what the emptiness is inside.

This book is very, very good and I highly recommend it to anyone. It is a hard read (it took me four days to read) and it is about 400 pages long, but it is worth it. “Safely Home” definitely ranks in my top lists of books, which is quite a feat for any book.