Instant winner!

I will choose a winner at random from the first five readers to comment on this Book Blast in the comment boxes below. You can see who the winner is and read more about Private Justice at the end of this Book Blast.

In Private Justice, firefighters and police take risks every day just by showing up for work. These risks bleed into their personal lives when their wives are targeted for murder. Terri Blackstock writes a very suspenseful novel dealing with characters in these occupations just doing their job.

 Real Life Suspense

 Suspense novels usually deal with situations where life and death are at stake. In real life, most people take other kinds of risk. For the Christian, risks are part of the life of faith.

Since my husband and I are missionaries, we’re often invited home to dinner with the pastor of a supporting church. One particular time we were meeting a pastor for the first time. He seemed to be in his early sixties but when we arrived, he and his wife seemed to be unsure about how to serve the dinner. They kept asking each other questions that most couples their age don’t have to ask. They had hardly any pictures hanging on their walls, which seemed a bit odd as well. Then we found out they had only been married two weeks and we were the first guests to be served in their home!

That got me thinking. Sometimes a missionary wife dies and her husband finds he really needs to remarry. How would a missionary in his fifties go about dating someone in his home country which he only visited during short furloughs? And what would it be like for a woman who had never been in fulltime ministry to consider a relationship with a veteran missionary?

These days, while I experience the ups and downs of ministry during Covid and approach retirement age in our ministry, I’m making my fictional characters take risks as well. Since Christmas I’ve been working on the second draft of Give It a Go and pushing my fictional character, Jennifer Titus, into a bungy jump of faith. She has to ask God if he is leading her away from her comfortable life into a new direction. She learns God sometimes leads us away from the well-worn paths that keep us comfortable, into new paths that stretch our faith.

At present I’m about 75% of the way through my second draft. After that comes a final polish and edit, sending it to my proofreader and beta readers, making final changes, and then publication. While I hope to publish it later in the year, Covid continues to change the plans we make. At this point we’re hoping to take a furlough that’s overdue by about two years. I’ve learned I have to be flexible, sometimes changing my life to fit Plan B or C or D.

How about you?

Do you ever find yourself wishing you could see even five years ahead in your future? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make plans and decisions, to get some certainty in your life?

 I often feel this way. Lately I’ve been challenged by this quote from Elisabeth Elliot: “There is no grace for your imagination.” My friend, Donna Hart, who lives with ALS every day, continues this quote with her words: “God never promises grace for my desperate peering into the future, when He has told me to concentrate only on today. But God does promise sufficient, overflowing, abundant grace for every real moment of my life, for every trial He leads me through.”

May God give you peace in the struggle you may be facing today, when you want to walk by sight but God asks you to walk by faith.

Here are five inspirational true stories of Christian woman who learned to walk by faith. They had to overcome hardship by trusting God in difficult circumstances. Their stories can encourage us when we face obstacles in our own faith journeys.

Now for the free drawing.

And the winner is … Anna K.

Here’s my review of Private Justice by Terri Blackwell #1 in Newpointe 911 series:

When someone seems intent on murdering the wives of firefighters, Mark Branning has to figure out how to keep his wife alive while his marriage is slowly dying. This book was well written and suspenseful. I especially appreciated the Christian emphasis in this book: the importance of a personal relationship with Christ and regular worship at a local church, daily feeding on God’s word, the dangers of alcohol, and the importance of building your marriage.

This series presents a community of firefighters and police in the town of Newpointe, Louisiana. Many of these characters are also connected to a church whose pastor is a firefighter. I love the community spirit these portray and have given 5*’s to most of them. I highly recommend this series.