Vance attended boarding schools and colleges in the UK, Switzerland, and USA. He earned a doctoral degree in clinical psychology in Florida, worked as a US Air Force psychologist, and served on faculty at an accredited doctoral program of psychotherapy practice in California with his wife. For the past decade or so, he has served with an international charity in southwest China, the UK, and New Zealand. Now Vance lives and practice as a licensed psychologist in Hawaii.
Vance describes his work: "I’m a clinical psychologist. I’ve heard a lot of stories practicing my job. The way I develop Jesus’ interior life and his outer relationships is shaped by those stories. I write about Jesus’ style of connecting in a genuine way with real people going through real issues. God’s Spirit, Windy, coached him all the time—“Shut up, speak up, wait, act now. Nice idea, but too quick; go a bit slower here."
Jesus learned to listen well by failing. He kept one ear tuned to Windy and the other ear tuned to whoever was in front of him or walking beside him. These stories are a training manual for how to live a wise life—regardless of your faith, or lack of it.
Jesus’ Silent Years is written in today’s language, not ancient-speak. Jesus is my hero, so it’s no accident that these books follow the classic path of the hero. Men and women heroes aren’t born that way. They grow that way, often through hardship and abuse. Jesus was no exception. But here’s the thing about heroes. Mainly they come in three stripes—depressed, damaged, and dead. However, a few go down, and down again, finally rising into brave, vulnerable, and courageous people; people with faces like maps of a wounded world—but people who can still laugh.
In Jesus’ Silent Years we experience him growing up through the eyes of his girlfriend, his family, friends, enemies, the Devil, and God. The overlapping stories are cutting and shaping tools on a carpenter's bench—they sandpaper and chisel Jesus' character.
The point of my stories is to show what works to grow us up or shrink us down. Like in the Breaking Bad television series, you can learn about a career in cooking methamphetamine, but without actually having to do it.
Like Wicked is the backstory to the Wizard of Oz, Jesus’ Silent Years is the backstory to the biblical Gospels. Both Wicked and Breaking Bad are full of promise and warning. So is Jesus’ Silent Years. So, fasten your seat belts and hang on. This will be a wild ride.
