MY BLOG POSTS

Rachel McRae, Lifeway’s fiction buyer, invited me to be a guest blogger  today.

Thanks, Rachel!

Check out this fabulous website to find out what “Starbuck’s Fridays” were, and how those days led to the creation of First Date.

Tonight I had a book signing at my church. It was fun. Except for the part where I wrote down the wrong Bible verse.

My favorite verse is, and has been for years, Psalms 19:14: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing in thy sight, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer.”

But what did I put on almost every book I signed? PROVERBS 19:14. I figured it out about ten minutes before the signing ended. Prov. 19:14 says “House and wealth are an inheritance from fathers. But a prudent wife is from the Lord.”

I felt pretty stupid. But then slightly relieved because that verse works. Okay, so it sounds a little like me bragging about being a great wife. But other than that, it’s fine. (and I am a pretty great wife:))

At least I put Proverbs and not some other book. It could have been so much worse. So I looked up some other 19:14’s to see just how much worse it could have been.

Check it out:

Gen. 19:14 “…Up, get out of this place, for the Lord will destroy the city…”

Num. 19:14 “This is the law when a man dies in a tent: everyone who comes into the tent and everyone who is in the tent shalll be unclean for seven days.”

I Sam. 19:14 “When Saul sent messengers to take David, she said, “He is sick.””

Job 19:14 “My relatives have failed and my intimate friends have forgotten me.”

Ez. 19:13 “…This is a lamentation, and has become a lamentation.”

I’ll stop there. I’m feeling better already.

Moral of the story: Even if you’ve had the same favorite verse for almost 20 years, check the reference one more time before signing it to a couple dozen books in your church’s coffee shop.

Like so many others, I am deeply saddened by the tragic death of Whitney Houston.

She, of course, is not the first celebrity to have her life cut short. But her vitality, her beauty, and her incredible talent, leaves us all mourning what should have been, heartbroken by what is.

It seems that fame often leads to some type of tragedy. Why is that?

There’s a lot that goes into it, I’m sure. But I think that the biggest reason is a loss of hope.

The average person is looking forward to some future event — graduation, a wedding, a job, a trip, a raise, whatever. There is hope that the future will be better than the present. And that hope keeps many people going, trudging through the daily grind, sure that tomorrow or next month or next year will be better.

Stars, however, often lose that hope along the way. They dream of having a Top 40 single, of starring in a blockbuster film, of being on the cover of People or having their biography play on E! And then it happens…and then what? The song eventually drops from the Top 40. The movie goes to DVD and ends up in the $10 bin at WalMart. That magazine cover is being used as Fido’s training pad. And someone else is “it.” They’re forgotten. Hopeless. So they try to escape the hopelessness they feel, often with tragic results.

The fact is that the desire to hope for a better future is right. God has placed that desire in the hearts of all his children. But that thirst can’t be quenched with anything on this earth.

C.S. Lewis says, “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

This world is not our home. It is temporary. It is imperfect. It will disappoint. If we put all our hopes in this life – whether we are celebrities or not – we will be disappointed every time. We will become hopeless. We will make choices we regret.

But if we live with our hope in an eternity with Jesus, a home that is perfect, with no tears and no pain and joy beyond what we can imagine, then we can deal with this life’s disappointments. We can accept both tragedies and triumphs. We can be anchored in the Rock, and though we may be shaken by life’s storms, we will not be destroyed.

My son’s K-3 teacher was named Mari Paz. She taught at a bilingual school in Madrid, Spain, and she had very strong opinions on how to properly educate preschoolers.

In our first meeting with her, Mari Paz held up a drawing of an apple and told all of the parents in the room that every child will color that picture inside the lines. If they didn’t color inside the lines, Mari Paz said she would throw the paper away and give them a new one. The children would keep working at coloring inside the lines until they got it right. She had plenty of blank apples for them to practice on.

I came home one day, not long after that talk, to find Thomas sitting at the table with a coloring book open, his little tongue stuck out, his tiny fingers moving slowly across the page, trying desperately to stay inside the lines. It made me want to cry, to give him a blank peice of paper and let him create whatever he wanted.

This is sad when we think about a sweet little three-year-old. But what about us? How often do we feel the pressure to “color inside the lines”? We females, especially, get this. We need to look a certain way, dress a certain way, fit into a certain “mold.” And we sit, our tongues stuck out, our stomachs sucked in, trying desperately to stay inside those “lines.”

It’s just as crazy for us as it was for Thomas. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. God loves us, he created us for a purpose. And that purpose is most definitely not to try to fit into someone else’s ideals. That purpose is to be exactly who God made us to be. And we are created to be different sizes, different shapes, with different talents and interests.

So toss out that “picture” you’ve been trying to fit into, and look instead at God’s portrait of you. Beautiful. Made in His image. His precious child.

Besides, life would be incredibly boring if we were all pictures of apples colored inside the lines.