Comment: Hostages had been part of everyday news for all of the decade of the 1980s. It seemed appropriate to look back into the scriptures to see if there were any materials that might have meaning in that kind of historical context.

While Paul was not a hostage in the classic sense, he was under house arrest a number of times, thus separated from his family and friends, and from his task as ambassador for Christ. I decided to drop the hostage notion and just concentrate on the way things were for the story line. Storytelling can do that to you, give you a premise and then take it away, and still come up with something you feel is worth working on.

It was not hard, once I examined the letter to the Philippians, to imagine a satellite linkage which would allow an interviewer in Philippi…