About a year after my return to the Lord in 1978, my (then) husband and I were on our way to a Sunday School concert with our young sons. It was a blustery, cold winter night. We stopped for gas along the way and as I watched my husband, after paying, return to the car through the swirling snow, an idea plopped into my mind.
“I am going to write a book,” I said as he began to merge onto the highway.
“What about?” he asked.
Without skipping a beat and with no fore planning, I said, “Ministers and their kids.”
As if it were the most normal thing in the world, he said he thought it was a great idea.
I was surprised that he responded positively, but deep inside, absorbed the support as confirmation that I could really achieve such an amazing thing as writing a whole book.
I knew I’d need to do some interviewing and would need a tape recorder. Looking around in the stores, I found one for $127.00. At the time, my husband co-owned a multimedia company and they had boxes and boxes of slides that had to be cleaned prior to being used in productions. I offered to clean them at 50 cents per box for boxes of 50 slides. Day after day, I’d polish slides until, finally, I had the $127.00 and went and bought my recorder. It was very exciting.
Then there was the problem of typing. I had never done it! Nevertheless, someone loaned me a Selectrix electric typewriter. All I had to do now was become a typist. So – I dug out an old “How to Type” book of my mother’s, figured out where to place my fingers and the rest is history.
I made up questionnaires for my subjects, interviewed pastors and the children of pastors all across the country, correlated my statistics (thanks to my Sociology 400 class at Acadia) and began to write.
The house in which we were living was small and, with no office, I set up shop on the dining room table. I set a goal of writing five pages per day. Sometimes I got those five pages done when my little boys were at school in the afternoon, but more often than not, after I got them into bed at night, I’d have to fill my daily quota. There were nights when it took until two or three in the morning before those five pages were finished.
As I wrote, sometimes I felt as though I was working in a vacuum because I had no contact in the publishing realm, knew no publishers and had no idea how to actually get a book published. Sometimes I would look over at my piano and imagine my book sitting casually on top with a few others.
Finally the book was finished! I ran up the road shouting, “I’ve finished! I wrote a whole book!” My neighbors were all excited and it was a very happy time.
Because David Mainse and his “100 Huntley Street” program had been so instrumental in my return to the Lord, I dared to hope that he might write the foreword. Surprisingly, I was able to make an appointment with him and, wonder of wonders, he not only agreed to write the foreword, but he was so taken with the book that he wanted to publish and promote it over “100 Huntley Street!”
Twelve thousand copies later, it was obvious that God had been at work; plopping the idea into my mind, providing my needs every step of the way and opening doors that needed to be opened. It was a miracle – by design!! 🙂