Article: 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 © by Deborah Bedford 2003