#SaturdaySpotlight is on Sandra Bretting & Shameless Persistence!

Good Morning Friends!

I always love a true miracle story. Movies and books like, Breakthrough and Miracles from Heaven do so much to build our faith and trust. That's why today's guest, brought to us from Adams Media is so special. Critically-acclaimed mystery author, Sandra Bretting shares her personal story of a miraculous healing in her new release, Shameless Persistence.

How many times have you been asked to pray for someone and thought, “Here I go again?” Maybe it’s for someone’s physical healing. Or his financial situation. Perhaps someone’s made a bad life choice and now she’s suffering the consequences. (The infamous “unspoken prayer request.”) Whatever it is, sometimes prayer fatigue sets in. What’s the point? What difference does it make? I probably won’t even find out what happens to him or her.
And sometimes that’s exactly what happens.

We pray for days, for weeks, for months, even, but we never see an answer to our prayers. We wonder whether God still hears us, or whether he even cares. Then, he startles us awake. He performs a miracle right before our eyes, at a pace that takes our breath away.

Do you need a shot of adrenaline today to bring your prayer life back into focus? A reason to believe you’re not wasting your time? Some real-life examples to bolster your faith in prayer? I hope you find it here, and more. Because my story shows how God works through the prayers of his people. How he heard their cries over one icy weekend in Houston, when more than a thousand Christians came together to rattle the gates of heaven on my behalf. Sometimes, the people who prayed over me didn’t even know my name.

Excerpt from “Chapter 1: AND SO IT BEGINS” from Shameless Persistence

I never set out to be a medical miracle. I never wanted to be a medical miracle. But sometimes, what we want and what God wants are two very different things.

Like many people mentioned in the Bible, God chose someone perfectly ordinary that day when he reached down from heaven in January 2018.

Just another fifty-five-year-old suburban wife and mother who lived on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, with her family. My posse included a husband of almost thirty years (Roger), two daughters (Brooke and Dana), and a slaphappy rescue dog with more brawn than brains (Chance). Brooke had recently married her college sweetheart and moved to Dallas to pursue a career. Meanwhile, Dana lived at home while she wrapped up her senior year of high school and applied to colleges both near and far. Life was pretty good, to be honest. Ever since I graduated from The University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1985, I’d wanted to be a writer. I’d freelanced for newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, when I still lived in California, and then for the Houston Chronicle, when our family moved to Texas for Roger’s career.

Deep down, though, I wanted to write mysteries; my favorite kind of books. After taking a zillion creative writing classes and reading even more rejection letters, God finally granted me a publishing contract in 2012. I wrote one hardcover mystery, and then another. By 2015, I had a six-book contract with a New York publisher to write something called “cozy mysteries,” which are soft-boiled stories that dial down the sex and violence. I was right in the middle of writing my fifth book in the series when Baby New Year arrived in 2018. In other words, I had a loving husband (check), a job I’d always wanted (check) and two amazing daughters. (Check, check.) Life wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough.

Does that sound familiar? The Bible is full of people like me…ordinary people with everyday lives, who chug blissfully along until God upends everything in one fell stroke.

Consider the prophet Jonah. He lived in a mountaintop village about eight-hundred years before Christ was born. Jonah had everything going for him: a close community of family and friends; access to both the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean Sea; and a respectable career as an oracle for God.

What he didn’t have was a desire to preach to the Israelites’ sworn enemy, the Assyrians. So, when God called him to do that very thing in a city called Nineveh, he balked. Several calamitous detours later, including one inside the smelly stomach of a fish, he finally got with God’s program and got his life back on track.

While nothing quite so dramatic happened to me, I felt very much like Jonah pre-Assyrians: blissfully unaware things could ever change.

Until the morning of January 17, 2018, when I woke up feeling “not quite right.” I’d been suffering from lower back pain for a few days, but I passed it off to a wonky spinal cord that acted up every now and again.

Sandra Bretting is the author of the critically-acclaimed book series, “The Missy DuBois Mystery Series” (Kensington Publishing, New York). A graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, she spent two decades writing feature stories for national newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and Houston Chronicle. She is a long-time member of The Writer’s League of Texas and the national chapter of Sisters in Crime. She lives with her family in a suburb of Houston, Texas. For more information visit www.SandraBretting.com. Connect with Sandra on Facebook and BookBub.

Shameless Persistence can be purchased at Amazon.

Wow, wow, wow! Sounds like a book we can all use to bolster our own spiritual walk. Thanks Sandra for sharing your story!

Hope you enjoyed today's post friends. Let's help get Sandra's story out by sharing this post! Be sure to leave a comment so you can be entered into the drawing for a gift card!

Until next time take care, God Bless and remember.... When the going gets tough, the tough get on their knees!

PamT