A Flower Guessing Game for a Chance to Win a Book

Flower 1

Flower 2                                                                                  Flower 3

The Innocent is Ready for Readers

The Innocent is going out to readers. The internet sites are shipping the paper copy of the book already. It's about three weeks before the official release date, but if the book is out there, that date doesn't mean much. I haven't seen it on a store shelf but where I live, don't many stores have bookshelves. Just our local WalMart Store, but they don't always carry my books. Local connections don't mean much in the corporate world. 


First Review Spotted

But I did just see the first review of The Innocent online and I was happy to see that the reviewer highlighted the spiritual thread in the story. Here's a bit of the review from Jeanette's Thoughts "Keep praying. When you feel like giving up...keep praying. When you are hopeless and scared...keep praying. This book had such a powerful message. Keep praying." 

Pray Anyway

My character, Carlyn, did find out that no matter the circumstances in her life, prayer could help. Perhaps I zeroed in on that theme in this book because I was writing it during those last hard months of caretaking for my mother who suffered from dementia before she passed away. Prayer got us through some tough days. Not only my prayers, but many of you and also my Facebook friends lifted Mom and me up in prayer then and also later when I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Now I have a niece going through cancer treatment and she has prayer warriors making her difficult path of treatments easier. Prayer is powerful.

So it was good seeing that the reviewer appreciated the prayers or need for prayers through my new Shaker story.

Yellow Flower Contest - Maybe Win a Book

I did finally figure out a contest to use my yellow flower pictures. For those of you who don't join the conversation on my Facebook Page, let me explain. For thirty days in May I spotted and posted a different yellow flower every day. Then the thirty-first day came and I hunted but couldn't find a new yellow flower. Since then a few more yellow flowers have popped up for me to spot. The game is to guess which photo of the three above is a new yellow flower that wasn't posted on my FB page. Flower 1, flower 2 or flower 3.

Every guess gets an entry, but if you guess the correct new flower (the one that wasn't posted on my FB page during the thirty day run), you'll get two entries. One winner, chosen by random drawing, will win his or her choice of one of my books. That includes the new one, The Innocent, if that's the one the winner wants. Your comments have to be on here by 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 17 when I'll draw and post the winner on my next blog post. Then I'll put up a new set of flower pictures to play again with the winner posted on the next Sunday. Two winners this week and two winners next. Open to all readers over eighteen. 

So I hope some of you will play my flower guessing game. Thanks for reading.

Prayer - A Matter of Faith

Prayer is simply talking to God like a friend and should be the easiest thing we do each day. (Joyce Meyer)

Prayer - a Matter of Faith

Do you believe in prayer? I'd guess that most of you who stop by my blog here do. You've probably had plenty of times when your prayers were answered. Sometimes just as you hoped while other times you may have had to wait for an answer or accept an answer different from the one you sought.

On Facebook, we see plenty of requests for prayer when our friends or someone in their family has some sort of crisis - medical or emotional. You may wonder about whether our prayers in those cases really make a difference. But the Bible says prayers matter. That they not only matter to us, they matter to God. The Bible tells us He wants to hear from his people. 

Pray Always

In my book that releases this summer, The Innocent, prayer is one of the recurring faith themes. My character's mother has continually admonished her to pray in all situations as Corrie ten Boom suggests in the following quote. 

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden. (Corrie ten Boom)

Prayers Answered

In the last couple of weeks, I've seen prayers answered on Facebook and down here on the farm. On Facebook prayers were requested for two youngsters involved in accidents. One a near drowning. The other a child finding and swallowing prescriptioin medication. Both children were in dire conditions with worries they might not come out of the experience. Both children, on last report on-line, were playing and back to their normal selves. I didn't know either of these families or children, but along with other concerned friends of friends, I prayed. Prayers answered.

Pinpoint Prayers

I've been dipping into a book titled The Power of Praying Boldly by Will Davis, Jr. In one section, he advises not making general prayers asking to be blessed in a vague way, but to send up pinpoint petitions asking for just what you need or want. A good way to pray that helped my husband a week or so ago.

He had a problem here on the farm with his cattle. Nothing earth-shaking, but a definite concern. He needed to get his bull up but the animal refused to go into the barn. This went on for weeks. Either the bull would not go in the corral or if he did, he would calmly find a way to push out. My husband was frustrated to the point of arranging to tranquilize the bull. But then after pinpoint prayers from him and from me, the bull went in the barn. Problem solved. The Lord to be thanked.

Another prayer story from the last week is about my niece who is taking treatment for cancer. Things are often hard for her when she goes for the chemo. Last week, the technician wasn't able to get blood for a test before the chemo. It looked like Julie would have to go to a different part of the hospital, go through the process of registration again and have a perhaps more difficult procedure to get the necessary test results before her chemo. But she asked the technician to try one more time, that she had asked her friends, via Facebook, to pray. Friends had prayed. The hospital worker said she had prayed too and was willing to give it another try. Julie says the blood flowed easily. Prayers answered. 

Several years ago, I was in a low place with my writing. Nothing had sold. I wondered if I should quit. But I wrote one more book and prayed for the story. Prayed for myself as a writer. That book, Scent of Lilacs, found a publisher and gave me new hope and purpose as a writer. Prayers answered.

But if we have doubts about some of what we consider impossible prayers being answered, we are not alone. Think about the story where Peter's friends and family were have a prayer meeting for him because he was locked up in jail. And yet, when the Lord led Peter out of the prison and Peter went to his house where the people were praying, it took a while for his friends to believe the servant girl who told them Peter was at the door.

Powerful Prayers

Indeed, prayers are powerful. May we always be ready for the joy of the answers to those prayers.

Joy is prayer; joy is strength: joy is love; joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. (Mother Teresa)

Have you had a time when a prayer was answered in an amazing or perhaps an everyday sort of way?

Author Rose McCauley Shares Some Thoughts with Us

 My Friend, Rose

One of the best things about writing Christian fiction is the people I meet. Not only readers, but other writers as well. Rose Allen McCauley is one I feel blessed to count among my writer friends. 

Rose has a generous heart and even before she was published herself, she was always ready to support any area writers with her presence at book events and with her encouragement and prayers. She started a blog to give shout-outs to her friends walking the writing trail. 

Now it's her turn to have a few shout-outs herself with her second book, Christmas Grace, now available for readers. Read on to see what Rose says about prayer and how the Lord often gives us the desires of our heart.

Thoughts on My Second Fiction Book Being Published

By Rose Allen McCauley

I want to share a prayer I wrote a few years ago based on this verse: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” Exodus 14:14

“Thank You, Lord, that I can be still and let you fight my battles for me. But, just as the Israelites had to step out on faith and leave Egypt behind before You performed the miracle of parting the Red Sea for them to cross, help me to do as You lead.

I wonder if part of “be still” is to help us to listen to You so we follow Your lead daily in whatever task You put before us. As a writer, I cannot expect to be published if I never put words to paper—or my hand to the keyboard. A student cannot expect to pass a test if she never studies. A farmer cannot harvest a crop if he doesn’t first plant it.

We need to listen, then do our best as we follow You, and wait and trust You for the outcome. Then we will know that it is You who has accomplished it and who deserves all the glory. In Your Son’s precious Name. Amen.”

Writing my book Christmas Grace has caused me to think a lot about God’s grace, not just at Christmas, but throughout the year. He gives us the desires of our hearts, and gives us the abilities and health to perform them. If we don’t receive what we desire, then perhaps He has a better lesson for us to learn or to share with others. I am so happy that because of His grace and mercy and love, we can be assured He knows what is best for us, and trust Him for the results.

I give God the thanks and glory for letting me write this story, and pray that the readers will be blessed as they think about and experience His grace.

Check out Rose's New Book, Christmas Grace

Grace Buchanan and Chris Fisher were best friends for sixteen years...until he fell in love with her other best friend, Terrie. Chris and Terrie married after high school, then she died three years ago.

A renewed friendship soon awakens stronger feelings in Grace and Chris. Can they both let go of the past long enough to claim the future God has for them?

Books are available online at Amazon for Kindle readers now and soon will be available in paperback.

More about Rose Allen McCauley:

Rose has been writing for over ten years and has been published in several non-fiction anthologies and devotionals. This is her second Christmas novella. Christmas books are her favorites. A retired schoolteacher who has been happily married to her college sweetheart for over four decades, she is also mother to three grown children and their spouses and grandmother to five lovely, lively kids! You can reach her through her website and blog at www.rosemccauley.com or on twitter @RoseAMcCauley and FB at https://www.facebook.com/RoseAllenMcCauley?ref=hl

Thanks for visiting us, Rose, and for sharing your prayer. 

Now Rose and I want to know do you enjoy Christmas stories? Leave a comment to win a free download of her story if you have a Kindle or a Kindle reading app plus a copy of my Christmas novel, Christmas at Harmony Hill. I'll draw a winner next Sunday.

 

A Life Well Lived

I just got back from visitation time at the funeral home for a dear church friend. He was 96 years old and one of those men who was always ready to share a funny story about something he'd done in the past. He was a good storyteller. He used to tell me I was his favorite piano player. He obviously didn't have a good ear for music, but love made him not notice all those sour notes I hit.

He and his wife were married 76 years. He was twenty when they married and she was almost 17. They made it through the Depression years together. They made it through wars together. They always had enough to take care of their children. They always believed. They read their Bible through many times and wrote down questions to ask the pastor when he came to call. She still cooked for him. She still smiled at his stories and the way he'd sometimes gently make jokes about their long life together. Now he's gone on ahead of her. And she's sad. But she's trusting in the Lord to see her through.

Loretta is one of those wonderful prayer warriors we need more of in our churches. She prays for people. She doesn't just say she will. She doesn't just aim to pray and then forget. She prays. And I always imagine the Lord leaning down to hear her just a little bit better and saying if Loretta wants it to happen, then it needs to happen. She prays for me. And I am honored and blessed. Tomorrow I will pray for her as will the dozens, perhaps hundreds of people who have been influenced by Earl and Loretta and two lives well lived. They have numerous direct descendants. Loretta's told me how many grandbabies and great grandbabies and great great grandbabies, but her memory is better than mine and I've forgotten the number. But the best blessing, way more important than the number, is how well they both are loved by all those family members. And church family members.

So with all these people Loretta and Earl have prayed for over the years lifting her up in prayer, then she will be able to bear this sadness. For sure, he's up there in heaven sitting under a tree telling about that time he got the tractor stuck in the creek and for sure the people around him are smiling.

Prayers can make a difference. I'm also praying for a barely one-year-old twin boy who's having a bone marrow transplant (I think that's the treatment) for a rare disorder. Evan is his name. I've not met him, but I've met his mother. She believes in prayer. Evan starts the chemo tomorrow. If you believe prayer makes a difference, lift his name up in the coming weeks.

Here's a couple of quotes to keep us thinking and praying.

* The great tragedy of life is not unanswered prayer, but unoffered prayer.

* THE POWER OF PRAYER -- Peter Kreeft
"I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers make, and all the people those little prayers were destined to affect, and all the consequences of those prayers down through the centuries, we would be so paralyzed with awe at the power of prayer that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives."

As always, thanks for reading.

Cookies and Kool Aid

We're still going strong at Bible School. At least the kids are. They can get a lot more mileage out of those cookies and Kool Aid than us older folks can. I usually teach the teenagers, but this year the teens must have had other things going and nobody showed up for my class. So I've been helping with the Beginners. That's ages two to five. Very challenging when a couple of them keep crying for their mamas and daddies. I think those two aren't really ready for Bible School, but the pastor's wife and I are giving it our best try. And without the cookies and popcorn I don't know if we'd make it.

But I really do love Bible School and getting to know the kids better and hearing what they tell you. In one class the teacher was impressing on the children how they could pray and God would always be listening. This little girl pipes up and says, "I prayed I wouldn't have to stay at the babysitter's and I did. I don't think He was listening that day." That makes us smile, but you know a lot of us might have felt something the same at this or that time. But as Br. Fred often says, there are more than one way for the Lord to answer our prayers. There's yes. There's no. There's wait. There's not yet. There's trust Me. The Lord sees the whole picture and we sometimes only see the part right in front of our eyes.

Just take my Shaker book, The Outsider. I came up with the original idea over thirty years ago. Wrote the book. Had it rejected over and over as too religious. Got a really nice letter from Harlequins, but it was still a thanks, but no thanks letter. Then all these years later I dug it out of my closet, rewrote it for the inspirational market and Revell published it. Best of all readers read it. So maybe the answer that I thought was no way back then was really wait. Not yet. This story's time will come.

The Believer didn't have such a wait time. Now I can only hope the time is right for Elizabeth's and Ethan's story. I think you're going to like them as characters and that you will like reading their story. Some of you have already pre-ordered the book and I certainly appreciate that. In fact so many people did that when I called Baker Books to order more copies for myself, they didn't have any. I couldn't complain about that although I did ask the lady I was talking to if they'd printed any copies. She assured me they had and that they would be printing some more. That was good news.

And thank goodness, she did some switching around and found some copies for me. It might not be good to try a book event or signing without books. I'm planning a local book event at the Anderson County Library on Saturday afternoon, August 22. I'll have door prizes and other fun things that day. But first I'll be having the book's coming out party at Shaker Village in Mercer County this coming Saturday morning. I'm looking forward to that. There will be a traditional Shaker breakfast. Well, the food anyway will be traditional. We'll be breaking their traditions by talking. The Shakers didn't allow talking during meals in what they called their "biting rooms." That would be difficult for me this Saturday morning. I plan to do some talking and sharing with my friends. If you can't be there, I'll let you know how things went on Sunday.

Hope you have some fun things planned for this weekend. Summer is zooming past. They're starting school here week after next. Seems way too early. Kids are supposed to go swimming in August. Not go back to school.

My Little Church

Today is Sunday. I go to a small country church where I play the piano - badly. It just so happens that nobody who is a member there can play any better or at least they haven't admitted it if they can. I am limited on my song selections and I can only play out of the hymn book. Sometimes I think I can only play because the Lord takes pity on the church people and helps my fingers land on the right keys - most of the time. When I first started playing the piano for the church several years ago, I would get so nervous that my fingers shook. At least that gave me an excuse for hitting the wrong keys. But now I just plunk along and don't get too uptight when I mess up. That's because I know the people in my church are going to forgive me. They might wish I practiced a little more or that a better piano player would move his or her membership to our church, but they love me anyway in spite of my failings.

That's the best thing about having a church family. Knowing that you are in fellowship with other Christians who will forgive you and who will love you and who will pray for you. They'll rejoice with you when good things happen and cry with you when bad things come along. My church is very small. If you've read my Hollyhill books, you know sort of what Goshen is like because I based my Mt. Pleasant Church in the book on Goshen the way it was back in the sixties. Except of course, only the devout and good members were based on people in my church. And that's really true.

On most Sundays, we average maybe 40 or 45 now. When I first started going there, we averaged 60 or 70 and there were a lot of families and children. Those kids grew up and moved on to other neighborhoods, other churches. Now we are an aging congregation and we only have a few young families. So we treasure each baby or young child who comes our way. We don't have the youth activities that the big churches have. We don't have a youth minister. Our Sunday School is struggling due to lack of enough committed teachers and few young Sunday school students. But my children grew up in that small church and while they didn't have as many activities as the youth in some other churches in the area, they did learn a lot about the Bible. At the same time I think youth activities are great and I wish our church could do that. I wish the big churches would open their doors to youth from little churches and I'm sure many of them do.

But the really good thing I like about my small church is that everybody is the same as family. This morning when I came out of Sunday School, our oldest member who is about 88 was holding our youngest member who is about two months old. He's a cutie. Well, she is too even at 88 because she always comes to church with a smile on her face even though walking is getting increasingly difficult for her.

Today it was hard for most of us to keep smiling. One of our deacons has been sick for a few weeks. Last Friday he got a diagnosis of advanced abdominal cancer. The doctors give him a short time to live. He's struggling with how to accept and handle that kind of news and so are we. He's our brother in Christ. And it made me wonder whether it's better to know or not to know. If you know you can get your affairs in order, but it's hard to count down the days. Especially when one is so sick. Pete's a committed Christian believer, but he also has much he loves here. So we're praying for him.

On a lighter note, I went back to help out with the twins a couple of days last week. They are doing very well. Eating and sleeping and pooping which is what babies do. Along with just a little crying, but not much. I'm still planning to post a picture of them on my website in the next few weeks - if I can get the photos together and sent to Susie who takes care of my website for me. She lives in the Keys and says they got a lot of wind and rain from the tropical storm, but was grateful it didn't turn into a hurricane.

Also I took advantage of a quiet day alone Friday (Darrell's group, the Patriot Qt went to Missouri to sing this weekend) to read over the first draft of my new Shaker book. And I think it's going to be an okay story. It read well and the characters seemed to have life. That was a big relief. Now I'll have to work it over chapter by chapter and line by line to see if I can make it read better and weed out spots where I was too wordy or said the same thing too often.

Hope you all have a wonderful week. And keep Pete in your prayers.

A Reason to Smile

Hey, guys. How about a story to make you smile this week? I got my bulletins (the blank ones I have to print for the church), and this cute story was in the bulletin aids they send along with it. It's too long for me to put in my church bulletin, but it did make me smile. I'm going to change it a little here and there. You know writers and how they always have to edit everything.

Br. Jim's kitten climbed a tree in his backyard and wouldn't come down. The tree wasn't sturdy enough for Br. Jim to climb it to rescue the kitten or even to prop a ladder against it to climb up. He didn't want to bother the fire department. He wasn't even sure they really came out to rescue kittens and besides, he prided himself on figuring things out himself. The first thing he figured out was that kitten wasn't coming down on her own. So he pitched a rope up high in the tree and looped it around the tree. Then he hooked the other end of the rope to his car bumper. He figured he could bend the little tree over until he could reach up and rescue the kitten. Things were going pretty well. He eased the car forward and the tree leaned down. But the kitten, clinging tighter than ever to the branch he was wrapped around, still was a bit too high. So he pulled the car up a bit farther and then disaster struck. The rope broke. The tree went "boing!" and the poor little kitten went sailing through the air out of sight.
Needless to say, Br. Jim felt awful. He searched all through the neighborhood, but nobody had seen a stray kitten. Finally he gave up after praying, "Lord, I just commit the kitten to your keeping," and went about his business.
A few days later he was in the grocery store and met one of his church members. He was amazed to see cat food in her shopping cart. This woman was very vocal in her dislike of cats, and so he asked her why in the world she was buying cat food since she hated cats so much.
She said, "Br. Jim, you see it's like this. My little girl has been begging and begging me for a cat and I kept saying no. Finally I told her if the Lord gives you a cat, I'll let you keep it." The woman's face changed, got a look of awe, as she went on. "Well, my little girl went out in the yard, got down on her knees and started praying for the Lord to send her a kitten." The woman slowly shook her head. "Preacher, you are never going to believe this, but I saw it with my own eyes. A kitten came flying out of the blue sky, with its paws outspread, and landed right in front of my little girl."

Never under estimate the Power of God and His unique sense of humor. And keep finding reasons to smile. Proverbs says laughter worketh good like a medicine.