Early the morning of September...
Early the morning of September 11, I watched my sixteen-year-old son Jeff--who had just gotten his brand-new drivers’ license late the afternoon before--back out of the driveway in our old Buick LeSabre with his little sister and her friends in the backseat, sitting straight and tall in his Jackson Broncs letter jacket, the first day of being grown up. I went inside, answered the ringing phone, and heard my friend Sherrie Lord’s voice. “Debbi? Do you know what’s happening?” “Yes, I do,” I answered, because we’d been watching the World Trade Center disaster live on television for the past hour. Planes were still dropping out of the sky. “Can we pray?” she said. “Oh, yes,” I said. “Oh, yes.”
For the next twenty minutes, I held on to the telephone receiver the way I wished I was hanging on to Sherrie’s hands, and we prayed. I specifically asked God to protect all those who were still alive inside the buildings. I asked that nobody else would be hurt and that He would bring everyone alive out to safety. Then I hung up and went to stand in front of the television again, trembling, my hot tea in one hand, my dachshund Annie in the other.
That’s when the first World Trade Center tower collapsed. On CNBC, a solemn announcer said, “Many New York firefighters just died.”
Never could I have guessed, as I wrote A Rose By The Door this past year, that the book’s message would be so pertinent this day, or that it would be speaking to a country so traumatized by evil. In a small Nebraska town, Beatrice Bartling prays for her estranged son Nathan to return home and forgive her. She discovers, in her grief, that this prayer will never be answered the way she expected. She also discovers that bad things happen on this earth, not because it is God’s will, but because man was given a choice to make his own decisions, and the earth can sometimes be a very unsafe place. In the book, when a bedraggled young Gemma and her four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Paisley, show up on her doorstep, homeless and claiming to be Nathan’s family, Bea must to decide whether to accept this new possibility in her life, or to turn it away.
To turn away from our questions about our Heavenly Father right now would be to turn away from the power, the deep, unfathomable love He has for us as individuals, and for America as a nation. Our forefathers came to this land so they could worship in freedom. Two hundred years isn’t very long in the big scheme of things. Our history is still new. We have still been living underneath a blessing.
Even though A Rose By The Door has been labeled by Publishers’ Weekly as humorous, ironic and sweet, I have to tell you that every page of the writing was a search for me. My own prayers have often seemed like miserable failures. My prayer for a friend with breast cancer ended in her death. I prayed for Martha Jo’s son to be born safely, and he wasn’t. Prayers for my little brother, Jim, who has been struggling with alcohol and drug addiction for years, have brought about a string of events that not even a novelist would think to write of.
I’ve wanted to lift my hands to the sky and shout, “Okay, you! Are you up there? What gives?!” Plenty of times, I’ve wanted to stop praying because, not only were my prayers not effective, they seemed to be hurting people outright.
As I was driving across Wyoming to a book signing last winter, a beautiful voice spoke into my heart. It was early morning, mid-December, and the snow that covered the elk refuge stood smooth and unbroken and sparkling like marshmallow crème sprinkled with sugar. When the first realization came, it came as a quiet, sure knowledge that here, six years after I had prayed for Martha Jo’s baby, as I drove along alone, He was going to tell me something about that prayer. Ten minutes later, as I cried, the rest of the message came. Your prayers are not frugal. It is precisely because of how strong your prayers are, because I knew how badly your friends would need them, that I called you to this place.
Through the very writing of this book, through keeping an open heart and telling A Rose By The Door the way I believed He would have me to tell it, I share these realities of prayer with you. As Catherine Marshall writes in Mr. Jones, Meet The Master, “When you pray, you must know that things won’t always turn out the way you expect them to. Prayer is then the ultimate act of trust in the Father.”
God created us so that prayers to Him would be healing to us. I am learning every day that we continue to pray, not because it is a magic formula, but because we are in capable, loving hands. We are careful to pray with the character of Christ, not bringing ourselves down to a level of rage and horror, but lifting our hearts in a cry for justice and mercy. We pray for lives to change where they will. And we pray for God’s hand to fall where it must.
Prayer does not always bring the immediate quick-fix answer we expect, and oftentimes life on earth brings us pain. But, always, we can expect this one thing to be true. Our prayer to our loving Father, offered in the name of His son Jesus Christ, will bring about His consistent, long-range movement towards our good.
If we expect these things and look for them, we will always find God’s treasure amidst the rubble.
Copyright © Deborah Bedford
Many times while writing When...
Many times while writing When You Believe, I questioned God's will. Maybe nobody's going to want to read about this, Lord, I said. Maybe mentioning the topic of sexual abuse is going to offend people.But every time I questioned, the Father would answer by bringing yet another broken, beautiful, loving, hurt woman into my life, yet another person who had lived this story. Just last week while doing a media interview to promote the book, the reporter grabbed my arm and burst out, "How could you have known? You've written my story."
So many parts of the book are based on actual events. The story about churchgoers separating into sides at the Sunday service. The story about the woman who said, "Kids know how to tell when it's a teacher or somebody like that. But when it's somebody in your own family, there isn't anything you know how to say." The story of a mother never believing her daughter because, if she admitted the truth, she would have to admit that abuse had happened to her, too.
Finding God in all of this was a struggle. Often, as I wrote, I felt like the Father was holding me back when I wanted to write something about Him. I did a first rewrite, and a second, without knowing exactly where Lydia's heard was going. Without knowing where my heart was going. As I began to discover where my own life ran in the same direction as Lydia's, the pieces began to fit together.
I began to see my own disbelief. Not my disbelief in Him, necessarily, but my disbelief in how God sees me.
For a long time in my life, I wrote Harlequin romance novels. One of my favorite things to do now is explain the course of my career as I moved from writing secular mass–market paperbacks to writing books for the Lord. When I was a teenager, ready to find my own Prince Charming around every corner, my parents teased me about being "in love with love." And it's true. Even now, as I look back at my life, the times when I knew someone was standing beside me, believing me, loving me more than I thought I deserved to be loved, those were the times when I felt like my life was soaring with purpose.
Lydia's newfound Scripture is the same as mine. How can I give you up, Ephraim? God cries to us. It was I who taught you to walk, taking you by the arms; but you did not realize it was I who healed you. I led you with cords of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from your neck and bent down to feed you.
As I finished the book that had made me ask so many questions, I finished it with much joy. I have discovered, during When You Believe, that I am writing books about the greatest romance of all. The Father created us to be in love with love. He created in us a need for romance, because that is exactly what He longs to give us.
The crusty, hard layers of our own disbelief have been laying deep and heavy for decades in many of our hearts. But God calls us to look not into the mirror of the world, but into the mirror of how He feels about us.
God wants to be the one who stands beside you, who gives you confidence, who sets you soaring with purpose.
He believes in you.
And that ought to change the way you believe in Him.
Copyright © Deborah Bedford
