When our blood is weak, the authors of fiction carry our oxygen and keep us alive. We owe them our life. Faith is fiction, fiction is faith. The gospel feeds our deep yearning for meaning. All stories are fiction, even biographies, and especially the biography of Jesus.
Nothing is purely nonfiction, for even the telling of a fact is the reworking of truth.
The Word of God is not just the Bible. It is a distillation of Peter Taylor, Walker Percy, James Dickey, Joy Williams, Mary Gordon, Robert Penn Warren, Bernard Malamud, Wendell Berry, and many others. They tell the tales that keep us human and take away some of our deep human loneliness. They heal us with their art. When I face something too big for me, a pain or vulnerability too intense to bear, I don't consider a voluntary stay in a psych ward or a trip to the emergency room.