Wesley Cannon Sheets
A novel about intellectual pride, a near-death encounter, and the cost of choosing reputation over truth.
"The truth has a way of finding you. The only question is how much it costs you to keep running from it."
From the novel
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A novel by Wesley Cannon Sheets
Christian fiction with literary weight
The tension between pride, identity, and unasked-for truth
Also available on Kindle Unlimited
Christopher Haynes is celebrated. His "Hammer and Scalpel" method of dismantling faith has made him a figure of significant intellectual authority. He is rigorous, witty, and absolutely certain.
After a high-speed car accident leaves him clinically dead for seven minutes, he encounters Jesus Christ instead of the void he spent forty years predicting.
He lies about it. Then he has to keep lying. The novel follows what that costs him: his reputation, his career, and eventually his carefully maintained sense of who he is.
The question at the center is not theological. It is human: what does a man do when the ground shifts under everything he built his life on?
"He expected the void. Clean, logical, consistent with everything he had ever argued. What he found instead was personal in a way that the void, by definition, cannot be."
"The lie was easy. The living with it was something else."
"What does it mean to truly be alive? That is the question the seven minutes left him with. He spent the rest of the book trying to answer it honestly."
Christian fiction readers
Who want a story with real theological weight, not easy answers.
Skeptics open to the question
Who have wondered what would actually change their mind, if anything could.
People in recovery
Who know what it is to have your certainties stripped away and have to build again.
Anyone who has hit a wall
A moment that shook your certainty. Seven Minutes of Truth starts there.
Wesley Cannon Sheets is a writer and lifelong Georgia Coast resident. He is the author of The Georgia Extraction, an investigative account of events in South Georgia; The Life and Redemption of an Ice Addict, a memoir; and Seven Minutes of Truth, his first novel.
Seven Minutes of Truth grew out of a question he couldn't put down: what does it actually cost a man to be catastrophically wrong about the thing he built his whole life on?
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