Sometimes in life it is not until someone questions the direction that we are heading that we take the time to stop to ask that question of ourselves. Recently a link partner supplied me with just such an opportunity. Therefore, I would like to give all of you a little more insight into myself and my calling--simply in the interest of going beyond the six sentences on the surface that we usually get from people.

From my biography, you may notice that although I was very active at my church and with Jesus back in school, I seem not to be doing very much now. However, don't let the lack of recent "resume" information fool you. See, that is one of the traps of staying at home with children--your community and church resumes often seem to fall short. However, staying at home with my girls and raising them myself instead of letting someone at a daycare raise them for me IS my calling right now. I had some friends who sent their first child to kindergarten, and at Christmas time she was supposed to draw a picture about Christmas for homework. Sitting at her table that evening she was painstakingly drawing the nativity scene. Just before she finished, she suddenly stopped, looked at the drawing, crumpled the paper all up, and threw it into the trashcan. Stunned, her mother asked why she had done that to which the little girl replied, "I forgot. We can't draw anything about Jesus."

In our world today, we as parents are in an all-out war for our children, and being at home with my kids, taking them to church, bringing them with me while I sing in the choir--those are the things that I can't put on some resume, but they are the very things that I am here to do. To give my children a solid foundation of faith to build their lives on, not because I tell them to, but because they have the opportunity to see me live it everyday of my life.

The funny thing is the kind of judgment my linking partner made about me (that I was no longer as commited to Christ because I failed to include that information) is the same one my characters grapple with in "The Long Way Home". They look at someone's outward appearance (the six sentences that person chooses to show the world about themselves) and judge that they want nothing to do with that person. It is only when they are forced to look inside the other person's heart that they are able to get past the judgments and begin connecting with the person on a deeper, spiritual level.

I have also heard the complaint that my site only offers Jesus if you buy a copy of my book. First of all I want to assure you that my site is only in the beginning stages. I am working very hard to lay down a good, solid foundation that I can build upon. As you well know, sites don't just happen overnight although to be honest sometimes I wish they did. But my plan at the moment is to add a new newsletter and one new article a month to the site, so that in a year, there will be a wealth of information (for free) to anyone who wants to come and visit--whether they ever buy a book or not. I am setting this goal because I am currently finishing my ninth book, with 3-4 more already started, and about 10 ideas behind that. Therefore, my main goal right now is not working on the website, it is getting these stories down. Also part of my limited computer time is taken up right now by writing and responding to link requests, but the content is coming. Please be patient, God isn't even close to finishing this project through me yet.

Second, I want you to consider the following. The Bible, or Bibles that you have in your house, where did you get them? Where they gifts from someone who bought them somewhere? Or did you go out and buy them yourself? Does your minister hold services every Sunday for no fee whatsoever? And if you go out and work, are you never compensated for your time and effort, or are you simply doing it out of the goodness of your heart? You see, I didn't start writing my books because I wanted to be rich. I started writing because God wouldn't leave me alone. He put this calling on my heart, and kept showing me dreams--stories about the power of His love and forgiveness until one day, I finally said, "Okay, okay, I'll write one of these down." And so I did--then He gave me another story, and another, and another until now I've got so many, I have a hard time keeping up with them all. After I finished my first one, I printed off $75 worth of copies of it (which amounted to five copies), and gave them out to a few friends just asking them to see what they thought. Many of them liked them--one so much that she asked that she be able to keep the copy I gave her. I said, "Yes, have it. It's yours." Right now, besides that one, I honestly couldn't tell you where those first copies are--I've lost track of who gave them to whom.

When I finished my next book, I had more people who wanted to read it, so I printed off $75 more in copies and handed them out. It wasn't long, and I had a "readership" of over fifty people that I was trying to get four or five copies of each of five books around to. It was only after I had finished and distributed the fifth book that I began to see that simply making a few copies and giving them out to my friends wasn't going to get the books as far as God wanted them to go. So I began to look into publishing them "for real." My friends loved the idea because now they won't be the only ones who have the chance to read them, but several who have said, "Oh, I wanted to let my (fill in the blank--mother, sister, friend, co-worker) read one" can now go out and get a copy for the other person.

At the moment I have yet to see one dime for any of my time or effort. However, I trust that not one penny of my time or effort has been spent in vain. God has a plan for these books. I know that all the way down to the depths of my soul. He has a great plan for each and every one of them. They may not bring a sweeping change. They probably won't change the whole world (although I'm certainly not limiting God's infinite plan for them), but maybe, just maybe they will touch the person they are meant to touch, and maybe a heart will change for the better. Maybe someone somewhere has never heard of God or Christ, or maybe they have and have thought, "Well, there's always time, I can do it tomorrow." And maybe, because of someone handing them one of my books and because God whispers to them, "Read it," that person will take a step that otherwise they would not have taken. I can't control who God will chose to touch with them, but if they are not available to the general public, God can't use them to touch the people He so obviously wants to get these messages to.

If my books touch the people that they are meant to touch, then I will be rich (what am I saying? Christ died for me and gave me the keys to God's kingdom, where the streets are paved with gold. Ha! I'm already rich!!) Further bear in mind that the publishing world does not print books only out of the goodness of their heart, there are people whose lives are tied to the money they can make printing material, and does it make any sense to require them to make that livelihood with trash when I have good content that can spread His word sitting on my desktop?

Also, I want you to consider that Christ said, "I came so that all men might live life abundantly." God is not against money. He is against the abuse of money, and people who put money over everything else including Him and His children. God loves me. Jesus died for me. And being a parent and a sister, I know that I want my own children and my brother and sister to have every good thing in life--spiritual and material. I want them to be able to be secure. I want them to live life abundantly. Now, money is certainly not the only facet I want them to be able to do that--because as my first book points out, all the money and power in the world are useless if you are unhappy and miserable in your heart and in your relationship with God. However, I do not believe that the two are mutually exclusive. I think happiness and money are available and attainable--especially if you are doing the work God has called you to do. And more than that, I believe that He wants us to have these good things--what parent wouldn't?

The story of the road to Emmaeus has always fascinated me. The fact that two friends, people who had known Jesus for three years, who had walked with Him, talked with Him, and eaten meals with Him wouldn't recognize Him and rejoice on sight was unfathomable. Then in the middle of a sermon during my second child's baptism, the real message of that passage hit home. The two disciples were looking at a man who happened to be traveling along the same road they were. They did not see Jesus because they did not expect to see Jesus. How many times on our walks through life do we not see Jesus? How many times are we talking with a co-worker or a parent or a child or a friend or even someone we have never met, and we fail to recognize that this person holds a precious piece of Our Lord and Savior within them? And so we treat them not as we would treat Jesus, but as just our friend, or just our co-worker, or just our child. It must make Jesus so sad that for all our flowery words and pious presumptions that we still do not recognize Him in each other.

I invite you to think about something: I think too many times in religious settings, we look at one another, and we see not Jesus but that person's religion, their label, and we say, "Well, they are so obviously not spiritual--look they stand when we are kneeling, or they use crucifixes instead of picturing the risen Lord (or visa versa), or they pray to statues and icons instead of to the living God, or they do not have our label, and so, obviously God is not going to let them into His kingdom." We spend so much time questioning each other's commitment to Jesus and so much time fighting over man-made rules and laws, that we forget about those people who are lost and hurting. We forget to do God's real work--which is ministering to those in need, those people who are hungry for His word and His truths to come into their lives, but we (having of course been seduced by Satan to believe that God's kingdom is some kind of exclusive club) spend so much time fighting with each other about who is going to get in that we don't even notice the world is going to hell in a hand basket around us.

I, as a parent, think that looking down, and looking around from people's hearts at what His children do to His other children must pound those nails into His flesh farther every time. I don't want my children in pain, and I would do almost anything so that they wouldn't be, but the one thing that God will not deprive us of is our free will. And so, the most He can do for a person who refuses to believe is to respond to the prayers of others by placing opportunities in the lost person's path. That's what my books are--opportunities to take a look at life and the direction you are heading. And I think that together, we can keep sending out those opportunities to the lost souls--keep not just telling them about God's love, but showing them in how we live our lives and how we treat one another, so that they look to us and say, "You know I want to be like them. I want to have what they have." And then maybe God's grace will touch their heart and make them ask, "How do I get it? What do they have that I don't?" That is God's work, and in whatever way it is accomplished, it is good.

© Staci Stallings