Around the start of the year, I saw a lot of posts showing pictures from ten years ago along with pictures from 2022 labeled 10-year challenge.  2012 will forever be a year that was marked with grief in our family, but it was also a year of refining my faith and learning to lean deeper into my Savior. 


February 29, 2012 my mother passed away after a difficult battle with Alzheimer’s, my mother-in-law died unexpectantly from a pulmonary embolism in April, then my father passed the first week of May. In two months time, my children lost all their living grandparents.


Losing family like that had me wrestling with my faith and wrestling with guilt too. Had I made the right choices for care? Had I done enough? Why hadn’t I been a better daughter and daughter-in-law?


Were God’s promises truly there for them after all they’d gone through? Aging and the end of life are tough, not so pretty times. I wanted so much for them to be healed and under His eternal care. In a better place, as we say.

God is tender and patient. My faith came out of that chapter of grief intact. In fact, the losses are what led me to want to write inspirational novels. Novels about people like me who are wrestling to understand life and religion, people who sometimes struggle in their faith, people who are clinging to that eternal hope for the past ten years and the ones to come.

​I pray that if you are struggling, too, that you grab hold to that hope and don’t let go.


Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1
13 Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. 14 For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. 1 Thessalonians 4:13

Blessings in Him,
Janet
 
Bookish Things and Sales
Here are some of my friend’s sales or new novels. 
Misty Beller has a great deal on the Hearts of Montana series. The first one is 99 cents and the other two are on sale as well!
Stephenia H. Mcgee has a new online book store! Click here
Heidi mcCahan has a new release!
There are also two sweepstakes with multiple book prizes, ereader, or gift card!
https://www.booksweeps.com/giv…