Irony: Opening and running a Christian bookstore has been the biggest challenge to my faith. It trembles, it questions, it screams, it huddles in shambles in the corner. My faith survived the loss of my husband, my life goals, my marriage better than running this business. I've started to doubt almost everything about how I feel about God and the relationship I have had up to this point in my life with Him. The image of gold being purified, melted down to a flowing, shapeless liquid mass to bring out the sludge to create a finer more perfected end result: I identify with the extreme heat necessary to melt a prior image into something with an unknowable future. I have no idea what I'm supposed to look like at the end of this process, and it's wearing thin on my spirit; I'm losing vision of what the result is supposed to look like. I beg God to show me at least a shadow of hope for what my future holds, only to be shown silence. More important lessons are learned in the delay rather than in the deliverance, but hope deferred is weighing down my soul. So I step out for another day of inventory, accounting, scheduling, marketing, ministering with a raw soul, weak, ineffective bandages on the wounds, hoping that my Savior will be right by my side even if I don't feel Him right away.

Oh the irony. As I sit down to blog about my upcoming commitment to read only Christian authors for my next 5 books, Amazon sends me the announcement that the just-released Dark Monk has now downloaded to my Kindle. I've been on the pre-release list for this followup to The Hangman's Daughter for MONTHS. (Which will you find more offensive: that my reading time is spent more with secular works, or that I use a Kindle?) I've struggled to find Christian fiction that really excites me, that keeps me hungry for more rather than reach for the next secular book on my bookcase because I want to read 'something good' next. So here's where you, our faithful Facebook family, come in: send in your suggestions of authors/series that you've come to love, and help me choose the next 5 books to read. You can recommend fiction, biographies, historical - almost anything but romance series. You'll be given an opportunity to vote for which of the five books you believe will give me fresh hope for a future as a Christian fiction enthusiast, and one of you will win a gift basket to start off your summer right!