I have exciting
news—last week I signed
a contract for another book in my small-town romance series. It’s titled, A
New Thing. I don’t have a release date yet, but I’ll keep you posted when
the publisher lets me know.
The book is about single mom, Sophia, who dreads facing an empty nest. Then a new handsome neighbor moves in and throws several challenges her way, an eccentric aunt shows up for a length of undetermined length, and something mysterious is going on in her small town of Worthville. I love these characters and hope my readers do, too.
The book references a verse in Isaiah 43:19, “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
We may look at the circumstances around us and cling to the way things are or the way they used to be just like my character finds herself doing. When presented with another choice, we’ll resist. To press on even in difficulty that seems a wilderness and wasteland but may seem preferable to God disturbing our comfort zone. However, God is all about the new thing he wants to do. He wants to bring those refreshing springs.
And that means we must change. I have a dear mentor and friend who has said many times, “God never changes, but we had better change.”
I have a love/hate relationship with change—even though I may look forward to it on the one hand, I’ll struggle to adapt on the other. When I paint a room, I go through what’s called “color shock” even if it’s just a minor tweak.
But God wants to do something new in us and through us. And when he does, it may feel shocking at first. We grab at what we just let go, but God is advancing us forward to the thing we may not fully understand, but to which we move toward in faith.
Folks ask if my books come from my life, and it is true writers often lift from their own experiences and transfer them to their fiction. And in this case, the resistance to change seems eerily familiar although I did not intend it. When I write, I pray and try to hear from the Lord, and so many times, the Lord will use my writing to speak to my own heart. I’m sometimes surprised at how my characters behave in my writing for this reason. Someone once criticized Jerry Jenkins for killing off a character. Jenkins said, “I didn’t kill him. I found him dead.” Ditto. Sometimes, we find things in our writing we didn’t expect to happen, especially when we pray.
Fun fact about this book. I started it before I received a contract for my last book, In Search of the Painted Bunting, but stopped to work on the edits for it. I went back to A New Thing afterward. The book has a thread about flying in a small plane and in the meantime, our grandson, Walker, decided to get his pilot’s license so I was able to interview him for the book, which thrilled my heart.
You’ll be hearing
more about A New Thing going forward, but in the interim, watch out for
those new things God wants to do.
Her blog, One Ringing Bell, has over a 1,000 posts in its archives. Her work has been featured on World Radio, in the Upper Room Magazine, a dozen anthologies, as well as other periodicals, and online sites. One of her screenplays was a finalist for the prestigious Kairos Prize in screenwriting. More at link in bio.