An undeniably fun love story: Review of Undeniably Yours by Becky Wade

The cover should have been my first clue that this book is not just your average Christian romance. It’s also fun! I was so surprised by author Becky Wade’s writing style (in a good way) because it was so realistic. The thoughts and actions of both Meg, the reluctant heiress to an oil company, and Bo, the hubba-hubba cowboy, are believable and sometimes, laugh out loud funny.

(Disclaimer: I received an electronic copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.)

In the opening scene, Meg is in the process of firing people her father needed to run his company and his life, including Bo, the man who runs the horse ranch on her property. Meg has no interest in horses and has been advised to shut down the farm, fire its workers and sell the horses. But she has a soft spot for people, and when Bo disagrees with her plan and asks for time to turn the ranch around, Meg gives him six months. Bo considers it a personal challenge to not only turn a profit at the horse farm but convince Meg that the farm is worth saving.

That becomes both easier and more difficult as Bo finds himself attracted to Meg in ways he considers in appropriate because of her position as his employer while Meg finds comfort from panic attacks in the presence of Bo and the horses.

It’s a fun dance between the two as they’re obviously attracted to each other but both wanting to maintain professional distance. Throw in a shady character from Meg’s past who threatens to destroy everything and you’ve got yourself a classic romance the keeps you turning the pages.

Sometimes I think Christian novels in the romance genre are too safe in that they don’t acknowledge the reality of physical attraction between characters or the goofball thoughts that people have. I connected with Wade’s characters and I’m almost kicking myself for not grabbing a copy of her first book, My Stubborn Heart. (You can bet I’ll be changing that!)

All the Wrong Places {How We Got Here, Part Four}

On Friday we signed a lease for a new place to live. We’ll be moving soon, a process that has been a long and winding road. Here’s the story of how it happened. Read Part One here , Part Two here and Part Three here.

As spring began to bloom around us, and life emerged from its winter rest, so our hope began to revive.

Olga Koldin | Stock Exchange

Phil got a promotion and a raise. It wasn’t a lot but it was something, and I hoped it would be enough to change our circumstances.I told our landlord we were searching seriously now for a place to live and that I would give her our official 30 days when we knew something for certain.

Soon, I thought. It’s going to happen soon. End of May. June at the latest, I thought.

I searched online, bookmarked sites, e-mailed, learned about Craigslist scams, made phone calls (and I hate making phone calls!). I calculated our income and faced the embarrassment of being turned down because it wasn’t enough. One woman practically hung up on me. I cried that day, too.

The places I thought would work wouldn’t have us or had already been rented by the time I called. The places we could afford were in areas I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in.

Too small.

Too expensive.

Too far away.

I felt like Goldilocks looking for “just right” and wondering if it even existed. I’d given up hope on a job for me and later got an e-mail confirming that the job was filled. I’d already moved on.

And God was moving my heart.

What are you afraid of? He asked.

I was afraid of the city and poor schools and poor people and violence, but those things are everywhere. Slowly, I surrendered my fears and hesitations, begging God to give us a place–any place–to live in Lancaster. I trusted God and knew He could keep us safe anywhere.

I would live in the city–if we had to.

I would learn to ride the bus–if we had to.

I would homeschool, maybe–if we had to.

But none of that felt right.

Then I got a Facebook message that changed everything.

Did I dare to have hope?

Disappointment {How We Got Here, Part Three}

On Friday we signed a lease for a new place to live. We’ll be moving soon, a process that has been a long and winding road. Here’s the story of how it happened. Read Part One here and Part Two here.

We’ve missed a lot of holidays, birthdays and family events since we moved to Pennsylvania five years ago. But this was the first time we’d ever missed Christmas. Phil’s new job, at a restaurant near a shopping outlet, meant holiday hours for everyone and no time off. So, we scheduled our visit to Illinois in early January, after the holidays.

Around the same time, I learned that the second interview I’d been waiting for wasn’t going to come.

Talk about a blue Christmas.

We spent Christmas Day with friends who made us feel like family, and on New Year’s Eve, we drove all night to be in Illinois for the start of 2013.

Two weeks at home soothed our spirits and at the same time stirred our longing for resolution. It was hard to leave our hometown when we felt we had nothing going for us back in Pennsylvania.

I’m not much a fan of winter anyway, and I wasn’t looking forward to the dark, cold months ahead.

“Nothing was changing” became in my mind “Nothing is ever going to change.”

I was losing hope.

Losing faith.

My words were seasoned with bitter herbs as I talked about our life. I cried a lot. And for a while, I turned my back on God.

I wanted to fix our life. To make it all work out. But I didn’t have the first clue how, or even what was broken, if anything.

Michael Kaufmann | Stock Exchange

Our daughter turned 5 in March and everyone started asking her about school in the fall.

School. That was the deadline in my mind. I needed us to be settled somewhere before then because kindergarten was going to be a big change for all of us, not just her.

God could do that for us, right? I held out faint hope.

Around this time, another job opened up at the place I’d applied at in the fall. We still weren’t making ends meet and even though I didn’t know how we’d swing daycare and two work schedules, I applied again.

And still heard nothing.

Was God even still interested in us?

Possibility {How We Got Here, Part Two}

On Friday we signed a lease for a new place to live. We’ll be moving soon, a process that has been a long and winding road. Here’s the story of how it happened. Read Part One here.

The kids and I had been at the library one Friday in early fall, and when we came home, I asked Phil how the job searching was going.

“Well, I found a job you can do,” he said.

I laughed and dismissed his comment. Then we talked about it and decided if that would get us to Lancaster, maybe we should consider it.

I hadn’t written a cover letter or updated my resume in almost five years, but I went for it anyway. I applied for a job I was both passionate about and qualified for–a rare combination, especially for someone who left the job market to stay home with her kids.

Then, we waited.

The day before my first interview was scheduled, I found out the job had changed from its initial description, but I went ahead with the interview anyway. The timeline, also, had changed, so my second interview wouldn’t be for a few months.

More waiting.

In the meantime, Phil kept looking for jobs. We and our families kept looking for solutions. There were days I wanted to move back to Illinois. Or to Canada or Colorado or somewhere we could just start over. I was restless for change, tired of feeling stuck.

In a word: impatient.

Because life wasn’t working out for us here.

Then Phil saw an ad that the Chick-fil-A in Lancaster was hiring. It wasn’t his first choice for jobs, but at this point, we didn’t have any other choices. We knew they’d be closed on Sundays, which is something our family needed, and we’d heard they were a good company to work for.

So, he applied and was hired. It was a step we had to take even though it didn’t solve everything. It was more pay but not enough, and it involved two hours of commuting each day.

But it felt like the right next step. So we leapt.

Nate Brelsford | Stock Exchange

It was late fall and we were hopeful that things were moving, even if they were moving slowly. We had hope that any.day.now the pieces would come together and we could once-and-for-all move to Lancaster.

I started packing boxes here and there with no real effort.

We felt confirmed in our desire to move to Lancaster.

But, still, we waited.

The question was: How long would we have to wait?

Stuck {How We Got Here, Part One}

On Friday we signed a lease for a new place to live. We’ll be moving soon, a process that has been a long and winding road. Here’s the story of how it happened.

The story begins last summer at the Tomato Pie Cafe in Littiz over fair trade coffee, tea and rich dessert.

Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo | Stock Exchange

Maybe the story starts a few months before that, when my husband graduated from seminary but learned he wouldn’t have a placement in a church. Or maybe this is just a set of chapters in the middle of our life story.

But really, I think, this part of it starts at the Tomato Pie Cafe. 

Phil and I met a pastoral couple from our denomination there to talk over what it would look like for us to join their congregation in Lancaster in an unpaid, unofficial ministry capacity. It was an introduction, of sorts. I barely knew either of them. Phil knew the husband a little better. Anything I knew was mostly from afar, and I had no idea how this get together would go down.

What I remember is feeling like we’d always been friends. We shared some of our stories. We caught a vision for ministry. We connected.

Though we’d been practical strangers when we walked into the cafe, we ended our time with hugs. And hope.

Phil and I began narrowing our job and housing search to Lancaster.

It was there that we both had circles of support that were important to us.

It was there that we believed we had a church we could attend and enjoy and love and help.

What we needed to get us there was a job.

Phil spent hours each day searching and searching for jobs and growing frustrated. Because who wouldn’t be frustrated that they had a master’s degree and no place to use it?

During these days we battled disappointment and anger. God, don’t You want us in Lancaster? we cried.

Nothing was changing. Not for months.

We were stuck. Wanting to be there. Still living here. Feeling like we didn’t really belong anywhere. It was impractical to commute that far for church, so we delayed our arrival, continuing to hope that it would be soon, all the while preparing our hearts to say good-bye to our current church family. Any day now, we thought. We felt like we’d overstayed our welcome.

And in the midst of our state of stuckness, we wondered: Had we heard God wrong?

To be continued …

What it’s like to step into the pages of the Bible: Review of The Well by Stephanie Landsem

I’ve read the biblical story of the woman at the well, recorded in John 4, enough times for it to become familiar. Maybe too familiar. Which is why I appreciate what Stephanie Landsem has done with her debut novel The Well. (Disclaimer: I received a free copy of The Well from Howard Books in exchange for my review.)

In it, we meet Mara, a teenager taking care of her crippled brother and despondant mother, in first-century Samaria. The mother, Nava, we will later discover is the biblical woman at the well who talks with Jesus and receives living water. That scene is uniquely imagined by the author and led me to look at the biblical passage in a new way.

And that’s only part of the story.

Nava is living sinfully in the village and Mara has almost no prospects of marriage. They struggle to find enough food to eat and they survive mainly on the charity of the other villagers, who equally despise Nava and feel sorry for her children. Then an outsider comes to the village, a man named Shem who has come to his grandfather’s olive farm to escape for a time while he’s hunted by Romans for killing a soldier. Shem has a soft spot for the weak and those treated unjustly. He finds himself unintentionally intertwined with Mara’s future.

When Jesus visits their village and speaks with Nava at the well, her life is changed and the course of Mara and Shem’s future is set in motion.

The ending, I think, will surprise you.

Landsem presents a believable picture of life in first-century Samaria, and the liberties she takes with familiar biblical accounts is refreshing. The Bible leaves a lot to our imaginations, and it’s fun when an author chooses to fill in the gaps. The plot is plausible and captivating.

The Well is Landsem’s first novel, but it won’t be her last. Look for more imaginative biblical stories from her in the future.

For more about the author, visit her at
http://www.stephanielandsem.com/
.

It’s so hard to say good-bye

It’s been a busy, eventful couple of days in our house plus it’s VBS week, so we’re tired, out of rhythm and emotionally spent. Thus, today’s post is a little later than usual. (FYI: The blog posts might be less frequent for a few weeks. We’ve got NEWS to share later this week!)

But first: We left our church this week. It was inevitable but the date snuck up on us. At the end of May, we were looking ahead at our summer calendar and realized there would be a stretch of 6 weeks where we’d not be in the same place two Sundays in a row before the end of July (and Lord willing, we’d hoped to be moved by then!). So, we announced our departure a week ago and said our farewells two days ago. (Although we’re attending VBS this week, so some of the farewells are stretched out.)

The tears flowed freely, which also caught me by surprise. Not because I’m not sad to leave but sometimes I avoid the emotion for so long that I think I’ve grown cold to it. Not so. I was sloppy crying all over the place. A book I read recently contained this line: “Sometimes prayers are wet.” And I like that because yes, sometimes they are.

Photo by Tim Nisly | courtesy of Stock Exchange

Almost five years ago, we walked through the doors of this church as strangers from Illinois with high hopes for seminary, an adorable 5-month-old, and not a clue how hard it would really be to live 800 miles from family.

But this church, these people, embraced us like we were already family. They became to us grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers. They watched our children. They fed us. Clothed us. Supported us. Encouraged us. They’ve given so much, and we feel the inequality of our lives in return.

As we looked around us on Sunday at the congregation, a special word or memory began springing to our minds about each person or family, and Phil and I knew if we started to count our blessings and name them from this church, we would find ourselves overwhelmed by the number and overcome with gratitude.

We leave, not as strangers, not even as fellow members of the same denomination, but as family whose bond will not end though distance will separate us.

As a writer, I don’t have enough words to describe how this community has touched us. But, of course, I’ll give it my best shot.

This was our first family church. My husband I have the same home church, but we’ve only ever attended there as singles or dating each other. Our first church after we were married we attended only until our daughter was five months old. It was more of a couples experience for us.

Here, though, we learned how to function as a family within a spiritual family. Our daughter has grown up here and has learned to love Jesus because of faithful teachers. Our son, this is the only church he’s really ever known, and he and his sister sometimes “play church” with one of them being the pastor and the other providing the singing. He has his favorite people; they both do, really, and I don’t know if they quite understand that we won’t be back except on a few special occasions.

We’ve done our fair share of leaving places in our short marriage, and it’s hard each time because we form bonds quickly, sometimes, and the leaving tears out a piece of our hearts and keeps it in the places we leave behind. And though social media and e-mail make things easier, it’s never really the same.

Good heavens, I’m going to start crying again if I keep this up.

It’s weird, how five years ago, these people were strangers and now they’re like family we didn’t know we had. And that’s exciting because we’re moving to another church where that’s possible, too. And I know it will be good for us.

Still, it’s hard to say good-bye.

But maybe we don’t say good-bye, just “see you later.”

Because in the end, that’s the truth. We will see our brothers and sisters again. It’s a mystery to me, this promise from God that our lives don’t end when our bodies die and that we’ll come together again as a family in spirit.

But that is our hope.

In the meantime, we carry with us the memories of our beloved family in Christ and the imprints they’ve made on our lives that will outlast our earthly relationships.

Until we meet again, dear church. Until we meet again.