Today, I’m pleased to feature a longtime writing friend, Gayle Roper. Gayle is going to tell us first about the heroine she is writing about now. And then I’m going to let you know about her current release, FATAL DEDUCTIONS.

Here’s Gayle Roper:

“Dinah, my heroine in the as yet unpublished book Lost and Found, is a young woman who has waited her whole adult life for the chance to meet the right man and have a family. She has a full life in the mean time, but she reaches thirty single, only to suffer a total hysterectomy.

She’s devastated. God has taken her dream of being a mother from her. She has what she calls her Hannah moments, times of deep despair like Hannah experienced in I Samuel 1.

Hannah, deeply mourning her childless state, goes to the temple and weeps before the Lord. “I am a woman deeply troubled,” she tells Eli the priest. “I have been praying here out of my great anguish and grief.”

God honors Hannah’s heart cry, and she gives birth to Samuel, the great priest of God.

But what if God doesn’t answer your prayer? What if there is no Samuel for you? What if, like Dinah—and like me—there will never be children of your body? What if that dream is dead, beyond resurrection?

There are many other dreams that we hold dear, that we cherish and talk to God about, good things, fine things, things that would honor Him, things that would allow us to serve Him, things that never happen in spite of our pleadings and our tears. A husband’s salvation. Higher education. A specific career. Financial freedom. A child’s restoration.

As I told a young friend who yearned for children but was unable to have any, “You can either stay mad at God the rest of your life because He ‘stole’ your dream, or you can agree with Him that He has the right to call the shots and look for other ways to have a rich life.”

Question: which takes more faith?

-To be a Hannah and have the joy of God granting your dream?

-To be a Dinah and learn to trust Him in spite of lost dreams?

To be Dinah requires looking beyond one’s dreams to alternatives. In the case of my husband and me, our alternative to my surgical sterility was adoption. Our two boys are now grown men with families of their own. Looking back, we see the hand of God in the death of our dream. Where would our boys have been without growing up in a Christian home? Who might they have married? What might they have done without the guidance of the Lord?

When your dream dies, trust God through the pain. Trust God to bring good out of bad. Trust God to give you an alternative that is rich in its own way, richer really because He gave it.”

Thanks, Gayle. Accepting that God has different plans than our own is one of the hardest challenge for a Christian. I will look forward to inviting you back to tell us about Dinah in Lost and Found and which fortunate publisher she ends up with. GRIN.

Now about Gayle’s latest release with Multnomah, a trade paperback Fatal Deductions.

Blurb:
Libby Keating finds herself temporarily sharing a beautiful but tiny historic home in Philadelphia with her estranged identical twin. Less than 24 hours after her arrival, Libby trips over a dead body on the front stoop. As the murder mystery unfolds—with the aid of crossword puzzles the reader is encouraged to do—so does Libby’s back story, which includes a series of traumatic events that ruined her adolescence. Good Christian friends including her new neighbor, the handsome Drew Canfield, support her as she finds a way to love her enemies while standing up to them.

Rave Reviews:

“Roper’s dialogue and character development are spot-on, which is no small feat, considering that Libby’s world is peopled with everyone from elderly patricians to two-bit gangsters…a pleasure from start to finish.” – Publishers Weekly

Drop by www.GayleRoper.com and click on Standalone Novels. You can purchase this suspense novel right there.

Gayle, thanks again for posting!
Lyn