I'm Learning -- Really, I Am (Guest Post by Author Christine Lindsay)

I taught Sunday school for decades, and I find writing much the same. While preparing the lesson, I always learned more than my students. As an author of historical novels, I often learn the same spiritual lessons my characters are learning.

While writing Captured by Moonlight I thought hard about the spiritual theme of surrendering ... All ... to God. Eshana is my fictional character, a young Indian woman who is a former child Hindu widow and who is now a Christian.

Eshana is convinced God wants her to run her former mentor’s mission in northern India. But after Eshana and the other heroine of this book—an English nurse—rescue a young girl from the abusive sex trade, they must escape. Eshana and Laine flee to the south of India. There, Eshana’s uncle—a very traditional Hindu—captures and imprisons her in a house hidden in the thick of the jungle.

When Eshana is forcibly dressed in the course white garment of a Hindu widow, she can’t accept the fact that God would allow her to be captured, imprisoned, and dressed again in these funeral clothes when she has known such freedom and life in Christ. Why is God curtailing her dreams? Her life?

Eventually Eshana learns that God has allowed these trials to teach her that she must surrender all her aspirations to Him, to trust that His plans are best. This means that she will not run that mission she had set her heart on.

What Eshana learns in Captured by Moonlight is something that I am learning too.

As I matured as a Christian, the Lord opened up all sorts of avenues of service, but I enjoy writing the most. 

But as a published author, with my first book in print and my second one newly released, I get caught up in what I am doing for the Lord. Like Eshana I must learn to wear funeral clothing for my plans and put my focus on ‘being’ with God.

Oswald Chambers in his devotional book, My Utmost for His Highest, puts it this way:

No one enters into the experience of entire sanctification without going through a ‘white funeral’-- the burial of the old life. Romans 6:4 “Buried with Him ... that ... even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

As a writer I am learning to put all of what I want to death, even the work that I love, so that God’s will comes first. Whatever good work you are doing for God, remember that it is His work. 

What has God been teaching you lately?

About the author: Irish-born Christine Lindsay writes award-winning historical novels. In Shadowed in Silk and Captured by Moonlight, Christine delights in weaving the endless theme of the Heavenly Father’s redemptive love throughout stories of danger, suspense, adventure, and romance. The Pacific coast of Canada, about 200 miles north of Seattle, is Christine’s home. Drop by Christine Lindsay’s website.

Read the First two chapters of Captured by Moonlight!