People like to know something about the author of a book.  I’ve always disliked the ‘Tell us a little about yourself.”  kind of writing challenges and ‘getting to know you’ question and new small group meeting openings.  Tell me/us a little about yourself, who are you, what do you like to do, etc. I enjoy listening to other people share about themselves, but I’ve never felt comfortable answering such a general question about myself.

There are so many facets to our lives.  I’m a wife, mother, mother-in-law, grandmother.  I’m a sister and a cousin and a niece.  I’m a second generation American.  Both of my parents are deceased, my father died when he was 66 (1985)  and my mother when she was 80 (2005) – 20 years of widowhood.  Those 20 years were a huge blessing, I had so much time to learn about my mother, who she was, what she had endured through her lifetime.  See, I’d rather talk about them.

Back to me – I earned my Bachelors Degree in Psychology by default.  I kept switching my major around, dropped out of college for a semester, transferred schools and it was getting to the point where I had to quit switching majors so I looked at where most of my credits were with one of my advisors and we realized I was interested in Psychology so that’s what I finished my degree in.  Then I got married, and used that education in all my other careers and in my married life and parenting.

I earned my Masters Degree in Religious Studies when I was much older.  I was in a discernment process about ordination.  I interviewed at one Seminary and was told not to consider a different one, in any case – the college I attended and the major I had chosen included classes in World Religions and the Seminary didn’t.  People had been calling me an Evangelist and I felt I needed to learn a little more about some other religions before I moved forward.  I’m glad I did that.  Some people told me it wasn’t good to be learning about other religions and a few wondered if I was converting to a different religion.  I disagreed with the first and assured the others I wasn’t converting to a different religion, but that taking these classes was helping me to deepen my conviction and appreciation of being a Christian.  So, when I wrote this book, I chose to use Scripture quotes in between the Chapters instead of wisdom quotes.  I felt it was important to maintain integrity with the Subtitle of the book, which is Drawing Wisdom from the Lord’s Life and Prayer.

When you study Christian Scriptures you learn that Jesus sometimes quoted the Hebrew Scriptures.  Which really shouldn’t surprise us at all because he studied them as a young boy and even the rabbi’s were impressed with his understanding of them.

Ahhh – I digressed again, didn’t I?  Oh, well, not to worry about this digression because I do believe that God is the Author of our lives and Jesus the perfector of our faith.

Writing is part of a perfecting of my faith process and perhaps reading what I’ve written might help others in their process.

What do you think?  What do you believe? Have you ever delved into reading the Scriptures as a way of perfecting your faith?