Janet Clark Shay
Writing "For Such a Time as This"
A B I O G R A P H Y
OMA VAN GELDEREN'S JOURNEY OF PRAYER
Six years short of a century after her birth, Oma Van Gelderen's earthly life ended as humbly as it began. But in the intervening years, she grew as an intercessor, a woman of faith who understood that God answers prayer.
Today Oma would be thrilled at what God is doing in her family. But her family believes they are who they are because of the gift she gave them: her legacy of praying in faith.
The Reason
for the Story
"Oma's biography, The Prayer that Makes a Difference, belongs to ... those who knew and loved her, but it is not meant to glorify a woman or a family. It is written to encourage all Christians who desire a close communion with God and an effective prayer life that they can have both." --The Author
... and Don't
Forget to Write
by Janet Clark Shay
While old letters are by their very
nature a thing of the past, as time
changes our way of communication
they will eventually become rare antiques. If you have old letters I suggest you keep them. They reflect a personality and a touch with the past that email and texting do not.
When I was a young girl my great aunt wrote
lengthy letters about the comings and goings of
the large Italian family on my mother's side. They
lived on the southern California coast, at that time
a world away from our ranch in eastern Colorado. My aunt was a storyteller at heart, weaving the most mundane events into fascinating sagas. Unfortunately, we didn't think to preserve these letters so they exist now only in our unreliable memories.
On another note our publishing company, Sable Creek Press, is currently working with an author who has an extensive collection of journals. They were written by her grandmother and the experiences she had when she came as a young woman to teach school for a year in northern Arizona. The description of her daily life with the students and their families in remote little towns during the early 1900s is both enlightening and fascinating. These aren't merely diaries. They are colorful reenactments of life as it was then. They include a love story that ends in tragedy--more believable than some novels I've read.
The biography, The Prayer that Makes a Difference, would not have been written had it not been for stories and incidents recorded on paper. Our memories can play tricks on us and when attempting a factual account of someone's life we are always thankful for written accounts.
Historical writers of fiction benefit from the wealth of information preserved through the written word. While the way we read may change--ebook readers are on the rise--the fact that we do read will always be with us.
Save those old letters. You never know when they will come in handy in your next writing project.
A U T H O R
