All through the seasons of my life, devotional writing was my favorite style of writing. I loved the challenge of telling a story with a spiritual truth in only 250-300 words. Since this kind of writing came easily to me, I was still able to write an occasional devotional even as a counselor and missionary, two of the busiest seasons of my life.
For many years, I dreamed of one day publishing a book that would be a compilation of all that devotionals I’d written, some of which had been published. I recently found an old file folder with the title “Homespun Faith” which contained ideas for my book in dot matrix and the old style computer paper where all the sheets were attached. The idea was in my heart for a long time–even the title!
At times, I thought the book of devotionals would never happen. But finally after we returned from our second term as missionaries in Japan and both our foster daughter and our foreign student were gone from our home, I allowed myself to hope the time had come. After a lot of thought and prayer, I made an agreement with Xulon Press on Black Friday of 2013, to complete my book within the next year.
Soon I discovered that compiling more than 30 years of devotionals was not an easy task. At first I considered doing it topically, but then realized that since many of the devotionals were about our children, if I did it topically, it would be difficult to transition smoothly from one devotional to the next because of their varying ages. I decided the order of the devotionals would need to be chronological, which then became the story of our lives. If the book was to tell the story of our lives, there were still many devotionals to be written because there were many parts of the story still to be told.
So all throughout 2014, I wrote new devotionals, using information from my journals and from our Townsend Tokyo Times newsletters, and rewrote and edited devotionals that I’d written in the past. It was an intense time of reliving the seasons of our lives and putting them into words that would accomplish what had become my main goal. I wanted people to realize that God will speak, not only to giants of the faith, but also to ordinary people through the common, every day happenings of our lives, if we will listen and obey.
On the back cover of Homespun Faith, I wrote, “When our ears are ‘tuned’ by the Holy Spirit, we will be amazed at the many ways that God speaks to us in addition to His Word. Everything we hear must, of course, align itself with Scripture because we also have an enemy who is eager for any opportunity to deceive. People whose intention it is to hear from God must also immerse themselves in His Word and make themselves accountable to others in the body of Christ.”
My prayer for Homespun Faith is that it will whet your appetite for developing a deeper relationship with the God Who Speaks and experiencing for yourself the plan that He has for you.
