It was New Year’s Day and I couldn’t find a thing I wanted to read as a devotional each day for the New Year! For years I had used church devo books with one page a day staring at me every day. But they were bland to me. I wanted something fresh and new, not somebody else’s blender pulp that was rehashed to fit on one page. I had to search the content for one new “thought for the day” that meshed with my hungry spirit.
The answer came almost immediately. “The Heart,” He said to my heart.”
“How?”, I asked. “Where should I even start?”
He said, “Look in the concordance of your Bible and find the first occurrence of ‘Heart’.”
So I did. It was Genesis 6:5 where the Bible begins,
“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. The Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.”
Genesis 6:5-6, 8 NASB1995
I never saw how wicked people were! I knew and read the account at the beginning of Genesis about the Garden of Eden, but then very shortly all the “beggats” began!
That’s where most of us get discouraged from “reading the Bible through!” However, I got intrigued by God’s idea of going through my Bible’s concordance and looking up Scripture as it laid it out one after another!
I grabbed a pencil and a notebook that was about half used up just to take notes. But God’s “heart idea” flowed to the end of that and spilled over into my Pages app on my iPad!
It won’t be long before you’ll see what plans God really had for me!
Those concordance entries became my resource for daily devos with God. I’d write a sentence about what I learned, then another sentence would come!
Going back to the reference at the beginning about the wickedness of man, I learned that God saw that the intents of my heart and of all peoples’ hearts were only evil… continually!
That struck deep! God was looking, watching, at what man was doing. These actions proved to God that all people are evil all the time! Well, then, what hope did I have?
Next, in verse 8, you and I can see the “but” of God! There was Noah, who found grace (or, favor) in the watching eyes of the Lord! Yes! He watches the good as well as the evil!
At that point I would ask myself questions about those verses, such as,
• What does He see when He’s watching me?
•What does my life show? Anything He’s looking for?
• And now I see I need to ask God for favor and grace as I walk through my life.
I’d go from reference to reference learning about how God saw my heart.
That began to be the first devo I ever wrote!
I kept checking out references, going to Google for definitions, synonyms, and info on the subjects that came up from the Bible. I would write when I had my QT (Quiet Time) in the mornings. At the same time, I was reading the Bible through from beginning to end again. So I was getting really more from Scripture than I knew I was. I was excited to learn about the heart God wanted from me. But first I had to learn what my heart was really like from God’s point of view.
Then I came upon this scripture about the heart,
““The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?”
Jeremiah 17:9 NASB1995
I pondered that and researched other translations and versions of the Bible. I continue to go from one “spot” of information to another “spot” that was about the same thing. It was like unraveling yarn from a garment. I was trying to get down to the best understanding I could get. All the time my heart was talking to God and asking Him how all this could be?
Growing up in a Southern Baptist home, I knew all men were sinners. I knew we were to ask Jesus to forgive us our sins to go to heaven. Then each time or day we did something wrong, we were to pray and ask for forgiveness for that sin. Sometime that was hard to keep up with!
But now, I was learning my heart was sick and wicked!!! I thought I had a good heart that just needed to be cleaned up every time I prayed!
Nope! God says our hearts are wicked from the womb! He had to show me how to write what I had to say in my devo to clear all that up. For that, I had to take my readers back to the Garden. The Garden of Eden…
From that point on, I thought I knew what to write. Nope. God had to teach me and this sick heart of mine what His truth about me really was!
As I wrote pages after pages, erasing and drawing arrows to where paragraphs had to be rearranged. I had to be stretched in my own thinking, and search lots of Scriptures about different topics to get a full understanding of each verse God was teaching me.
When I felt I had a grip on a verse and made a devo out of it for myself, I would send it to my best friend, who knew more about the Bible than I did. Not long into this adventure she asked me if I had ever thought of using these devos to “write a book!”
What a surprise that was! “No!Not me!” I had never thought this old woman, at 68, could remember enough from high school English classes to write a book others would want to read. So I ignored her intermittent urges.
After awhile, I had become involved in a neighborhood Bible Study (Precepts). I enjoyed it even though the material we studied was in a notebook styled book with pages of homework! It was a little daunting at first, but I had already been digging into Scripture for a while. The author highly encouraged five hours of homework each week. I thought that wasn’t really so bad, I liked digging deep into the word of God. Sometimes it took less time and others more than those five. It has been amazing what I have learned and how He has changed my thinking! The Bible is God speaking to us. Maybe not all the time word for word, but seeing His character, what He wants us to become in His grace, His mercy! He wants us to become what He is without sweat and tears, just by spending time with Him!
Because my friend had read a number of my devos, I finally thought I would check into it. I was tired of the nudging from the Lord and her as well. So on a Sunday night I looked up “Christian book publishers” on my phone. I tested them by calling some. I landed on one I liked. But I was still hesitant to become serious enough to call and plug in.
In the quiet of my room, I asked God, “What do You want me to study? I’ve read church booklets, daily devo books famous authors have written, but what do You want me to read this year?
The next morning, I was talking to my sister-in-law and she was excited about something, so I let her talk. Well! Wouldn’t you know it, she had seen an ad on television that was from the same publishing company that I had looked into the night before! So, sometime that week I called them to talk to them. God works in mysterious ways!
This Christian publishing company gave me the best plan on how to get my book published. First of all, I had to send it in and let a group of editors read it and decide if it was something that the company would be willing to publish. Several days later I got a message back that I had been accepted to be published! That’s what started the ball rolling. After many months of editing and re-editing, my book is right now finishing up the last stages. Because of my timidity it has taken five years to this point. We now have to get the front cover and back cover completed, and then it will be ready to go on the bookshelves at Amazon, iTunes, and Barnes & Noble. I will actually become a published author!
Who knew I could write! 
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