Reading between the lines

Salvos Online continues a new weekly column – Three Books. Today, we focus on Captain Amanda Lennestaal. Amanda is The Salvation Army’s General Manager of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. An avid reader, Salvos Online asked Amanda three book-related questions:

Besides the gospels and Psalms, which is your favourite book in the Bible and why?

For years, I kept Exodus buried in the pantry, convinced the real taste of radical community lay in the New Testament’s shared loaves and fishes. A fresh reading uncovered an earlier banquet – and women were among its first chefs. Midwives Shiphrah and Puah refuse the Pharaoh’s lethal recipe, preserving infant life and seasoning the story with female courage. Miriam later leads the liberation chorus, reminding diners that justice has a soprano line.

Yet freedom is only the entrée. In the wilderness, God publishes a standing menu: every seventh day, the ovens switch off for householder, servant, migrant and even the livestock turning the mill. Rest is not a privilege but a mandated course, guaranteeing bodies worn by bondage, age or disability the same pause enjoyed by the strong. Daily manna reinforces the policy; whether one gathers little or much, each plate arrives full, affirming different capacities and rejecting the myth of scarcity.

The finale is a crowd-funded dining hall. Gold, fabric, and skilled hands are offered freely, not extracted, turning collective generosity into sacred architecture. By the time Acts depicts believers sharing bread, they are simply reheating a dish Exodus perfected long before I pulled up a chair.

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Besides the Bible, what is a Christian book that has strongly influenced your faith?

Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror became my bedside lamp the year my world went dark. When illness gutted my family and headlines roared with violence, I wanted Scripture to soothe me; instead, I found stories of concubines dismembered and daughters sacrificed. Trible does not wrap these passages in apologetic gauze. She lays them on the table, naming each wound, then invites readers to sit with the violated women whom the canon rarely lets speak. That fearless literary autopsy gave me a strange comfort: if the Bible can hold such agony without editing, perhaps God can hold mine.

Trible’s method – “telling sad stories softly” – taught me that lament is part of the liturgy, not a detour around faith. By tracing Hebrew verbs, she helps the silenced L’ishah, Tamar, Jepthah’s daughter, and the nameless concubine regain narrative agency, reminding me that compassion begins with accurate listening. When anxiety contorts memories in my mind, I now practise her hermeneutic: slow down, name the harm, refuse to euphemise. The book does not solve terror, but it keeps me from spiritual denial. It convinces me that Christian hope is honest, not naive, and that resurrection talk means little unless we first honour the graves beneath our feet.

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What is a secular book that has revealed to you a Christian message or theme?

Shankari Chandran’s Safe Haven reignited my imagination around the Christian practice of setting an extra place at the table. The novel centres on a remote detention facility where refugees are confined, but the drama turns on the small, stubborn acts of hospitality that breach the razor wire – cups of tea slipped through fences, a volunteer nun who listens, local townsfolk who risk their own comfort to insist that strangers belong. Reading these scenes beside the Gospel call to welcome the outsider, I heard an echo of Christ’s promise: “I was a stranger, and you invited me in.” The plot’s pivot – an inquiry into the tragic death of a teenage detainee – lays bare what happens when a society withholds sanctuary: trauma multiplies, and hope curdles. Yet Chandran refuses despair. Her characters embody a quiet resurrection ethic, trusting that each courageous welcome is seed for a more just world. For me, the novel locates Christ not in institutional chapels but in the detainees’ resilient fellowship and in ordinary citizens who smuggle love past bureaucracy. Safe Haven enlarges the Exodus feast; it reminds me that the table God spreads is portable, generous, and always has room for one more, especially those left waiting outside the gate.