Francine Rivers (Author of Redeeming Love)

The episode you're about to listen to was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're still going to love these older episodes because the majority of each conversation focuses on how the gospel influences the work of our guests. With that disclaimer out of the way, please enjoy the episode.

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every week, I host a conversation with a Christian who's pursuing world class mastery of their craft. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how their faith influences their work. Today's guest needs no introduction. We're talking with Francine Rivers, the New York Times bestselling author of many books, but most notably Redeeming Love, which has sold more than 3 million copies since it was released for the first time 30 years ago. It's almost Valentine's Day. It felt like the perfect time to release this episode. Francine and I sat down together back in December. We talked about what her involvement was in the upcoming Redeeming Love film. We talked about her three year bout of writer's block right after coming to Faith in Christ. And we talked about the striking parallels in her life story and that of seeing S. Lewis. This is a terrific conversation with my new friend, Francine Rivers. Francine Rivers, thank you so much for joining me.

Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

So my listeners have heard me talk about this in the past. I read basically zero fiction. I. I write non fiction. That's the craft. I know. So I don't read fiction. The exceptions being C.S. lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

Oh, yeah.

And Redeeming Love. That's it? That's the whole list? Oh, that's the whole list?

Not the screwtape letters?

Yeah. Okay. Screw tape.

Yeah.

But come on, it's basically nonfiction. So it's a short list, but a dense one. One dense with quality. And you got the 30th anniversary coming up with a book.

Yes.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

And you got the movies. The movie's finally coming out.

The movie is finished and it should be out, we're hoping in spring of 2021.

Yeah. Pandemic permitting. That's wonderful. I'm curious how involved you were in the adaptation to the screen.

I was very involved because I wrote the script. Actually, I wrote the script because the scripts that I had seen before just didn't Measure up. They didn't understand the character of Michael. So I wrote the script. I got final draft, and just kind of looked at how scripts were written because I wanted to show them what I was looking for. And then they said, oh, well, we like this one. So that was a surprise. And then working with DJ Caruso, of course, he's the director of the movie and he does everything visually. So we needed to restructure because you wouldn't want to go in a theater and see all the backstory of that little girl. That would just be too difficult. So we. All the major scenes are in there from the book. You don't have all the head stuff going on. You don't know what's going on inside the minds of the characters. But he did a really outstanding job. The question is, what is it going to be rated? Because it is really, you know, they're adult themes all the way through. Even though it's about a child to begin with, you know, it's a lot of rough stuff that she goes through and things that we're seeing in our culture now with sex trafficking.

Sure. So how did this work? Did people throughout the years come to you with scripts and be like, hey, I want permission to do this, and you just said, no, and decided to do it yourself?

Well, we had two or three different companies that actually worked with us, and the scripts that we read just didn't work. And then, you know, their. Their option time would run out. We'd just say, nope, we're moving on. I think the first one, it was actually a young woman because I was hoping to have a young person who's starting out actually do the film. And she had it for almost 10 years. And my agent said, you know, you just can't.

You can't wait around forever.

Can't keep waiting around. So we. We had to pull the plug that one. And then there were, I think, where. There were two other companies before we worked with Cindy Bond, whose Mission Pictures and then Pure Flix also is on board.

I love it. I can't wait to see the film. So a lot of people, I think, listening, obviously, they know you for Redeeming Love and your other great work, But a lot of them don't know your backstory and that you came to Faith in Christ later than a lot of people. Right. At your age. You were in your 30s, is that right?

I was. I grew up in the church, But I saw a lot of things that went on that I thought, why would you want to be a Christian if this is the way Christians act, and then went away to college and, of course, did not go to church or have anything to do with faith. I went to school at college in the 60s, so I made a lot of the mistakes of the 60s, including having an illegal abortion. And then Rick and I got married. I've known Rick since fifth grade, and we reconnected when he was serving as a marine in Vietnam. My brother was in the army over there, and he was captured during the Tet offensive. And then after the. When the Marines came into the city, there was so much confusion. He was able to get away. He'd been really badly wounded. But the story came out in the local paper in Pleasanton, where I grew up, and Rick's mom sent him the articles, and he wrote to me at college, and we started just corresponding. And he came home on December 21, 1968, and we got married on December 21, 1969. And then, of course, he never grew up in the church, and I did. And we, you know, we were struggling in our marriage. You've got two very different people. You know, he's a Marine, and I was, you know, not a flower child, but I had other ideas about politics and stuff. So we. We really struggled a lot. Had three children. We were close to divorce, moved to Northern California, Sebastopol. And God just put us in the only rental home in the town between two Christian families. And a little boy of eight came over and said, have I got a church for you. And then on the other side, on the other side, the ladies bringing us pie and inviting us. And it was to back up a little bit. We had tried church in Southern California, but Jesus had left the building of this particular church. And Rick had actually served as chairman of the board of trustees. And they didn't know he wasn't a Christian. We didn't know we weren't Christians. You kind of think, well, if your parents were, you know, you're born into it. So I started going. He didn't want to go. He didn't want to have anything to do with church anymore because he saw the inner workings of this particular one. So I asked the pastor, would you be willing to have a home Bible study? He said, if. If your husband says yes, sure. So Rick said, fine, and the rest is history. We were both baptized on the same day in 1986, but I was, like, in our late 30s, probably 36, 37 years old. Yeah.

And at that time, you were already a successful author.

Yeah, I'd written about eight or nine books in the General market, steamy historical romances. As soon as I became a Christian, I literally couldn't write. It stopped. And I think God was saying, you know, you want to be my child, but you need to get to know me. You don't know anything about me. I'd never really read the Bible. So there was that three year period of where I started just reading through the Bible and we were doing Bible studies every Tuesday night, which is still going on. As a matter of fact, after all these years, Freak is now teaching it. You know, I realized that I had made writing and my career an idol. And I think God was just saying, I need to be your priority. I didn't care if I ever wrote again. That's when he gave me redeeming love because we were studying the minor prophets.

I want to get back to that a minute. But yeah, I read that, you know, writing for you is an escape, right? When, when, when your marriage was hard, when life was hard, you just threw everything into work and that kind of became. That was your idol.

Yes. Yeah, I think it was my identity and my idol. And it was when it turned around, when it didn't matter to me anymore, I was working with Rick and he had started a business and we were working together, working through our marriage and. And all of a sudden we come to the minor prophets in the book of Hosea and I just felt like God's saying, this is the love story I want you to write. Still a steamy historical love story. And so that's. I spent the next year working on that and really felt like Jesus was sitting right next to me, telling me about himself and talking to me about. Because I did not grow up in the kind of life that angel did. I mean, I had wonderful parents, I had a wonderful childhood. So I feel like. And I didn't do a lot of research about child abuse and I didn't make the connection with sex trafficking. That Noise is my 6 month old German shepherd barging into the office.

I love it. He's free to say hello.

Yeah, he's here. I think that Jesus was sitting there revealing different things about the character because it just kind of played out gently over time to what was going on in her mind, in her heart. And I felt like in a sense I was like her. Because, you know, we start out, we all start out as children of darkness where we don't have any knowledge of God and there's that defiance. Nobody's going to control my life. I want to be my own master. And then fear when you think of, you know, God doesn't want little bits and pieces of you. He wants everything. Past, present, future, the whole deal. And then the humility comes when you realize your position and your wonder and your, you know, your awe of God and wanting to serve him. And then there's joy in the morning. Just that relationship with God changes everything.

I was reading your story in preparation for today, and I mentioned CS Lewis a few minutes ago. I'm just really intrigued by the striking parallels in your two stories. Right. You're both successful writers before coming to Faith in Christ in your mid-30s, and neither of you abandoned your careers as writers, but your faith radically changed your motives for writing and what it is you wrote. I'm curious if Lewis was an inspiration in this regard for you.

I had never even read Lewis, and he is so brilliant to even be put in the same sentence with him, it's amazing. I mean, I learned about him later on after becoming a Christian, and I've read most of his books. I think I've read the Chronicles of Narnia to our children and then see, you know, the Screwtape letters I thought was amazing and was so revealing to me about the different ways that I would think and how we, you know, we get sidetracked so easily. You know, I just think he's an amazing author.

Will you please adapt Screwtape into a movie?

No, that's his. That was his. I wouldn't touch his work. No way. It took somebody a lot brighter than me to do that. Oh, man.

So his stepson Doug Gresham, is a friend, and we were having dinner in London a couple of years ago and talking about the challenge of adapting that particular book because lots of people have wanted to see it as a movie, as a play, and it's. It's. It's tough to do. So on the issue of copyright rights, licenses, all this stuff, I have a really nitty gritty technical question I'm really curious to ask you. So I pulled up my copy of Redeeming Love. It's an older edition of the book.

The original. Do you have the original from Bantam?

No, it's not from Bantam. It's from Multnomah.

Okay.

And on the copyright page, there's a line that reads, quote, this is the redeemed version of Redeeming Love.

Yeah.

What's the story there?

Well, it. Originally, I wrote it for the general market, and I submitted it to my original publishing house, and they. And my editor said, no, this is an allegory about Jesus Christ and We do not publish books about Jesus Christ. And so I thought, okay, well, that's the end of my career in the general market. I wasn't sure, now where do I go? But my agent was kind of matching me with an editor. Well, there was an editor at Bantam Christian, and she was trying to get Christian stories into the general market, into the women's fiction line. So she was actually there for a period of time while redeeming love. When redeeming love, she read that, she knew exactly what it was, and she's the one that purchased it. And it was in. I think it was in print for maybe a year, a year and a half. And as soon as I could, I got the rights back because, you know, you grow as a Christian. You're changing and transforming all through your life until we get to go home to the Lord. And there were things that I wanted to take out of the book, and I really couldn't have a conversion scene in the original for the general market. So in the redeemed version, it's a little less racy, and there's a conversion scene in it, and there's no language. There was. There was one scene where, you know, she used some language in talking to Paul, and it fit and it would be what would come out of her mouth, but it just, you know, was not necessary. So that's something we tried to do too, with the movie, is there isn't any foul language. Nothing is straight in your face. There are two love scenes, but they're married and they're. Nothing shows. But it's still adult themes, so we'll see what. How it's rated.

Yeah. Kudos to you for having the courage to buy back and redo it.

That.

That takes some bravery. So let's talk about the craft of writing for just a few minutes. So, you know, you've achieved, I think, every author's dream of having multiple perennial sellers. And, yeah, I don't think there's a recipe for creating a perennial seller. But I'm curious what advice you have for those listening who want to create work that just sells for decades, that lasts beyond them.

Well, I would say write what you need to read. That's usually my advice. And then I use writing as a form of worship now. So I start with a question, and I don't have the answer. I'm trying to figure out what's God's perspective. So the characters are actually playing out the different points of view of how you might solve that particular question. And there's one struggling Christian that represents me as the writer trying to find how does God want me to behave in this situation. So like with After Redeeming Love, which was really, I consider that my testimony, my sharing my faith and showing the difference that, that Jesus made in my life. But the first book after that that I wrote was the Voice in the Wind for the Mark of the lion trilogy. And the question I had there was, how do I share my faith with unsaved family and friends who do not want to read the Bible? The only time they use the word Jesus is as a cuss word. And they don't want to hear about my faith. And what I learned in the process of writing that book is it's not what you say, it's how you live. They're always watching you. You know, if they know you're a Christian, they are watching you all the time to see what you're going to do, how you're going to handle stress or problems, you know what's going to come out of your mouth, you know how you're going to behave. And then sooner or later the question will arise, why do you believe what you believe? And I believe God gives you the answer at that time. He gives you the words to say to that person, particular person, to speak truth to them.

They're also watching. They're watching our actions, they're watching our words, but they're also watching, I believe, commitment to craft. So I've heard many stories of people who were in positions of sharing the gospel precisely because they were world class at what it is that they did. They were winsome. Excellence is winsome to people. It's attractive. Have you experienced that? Like, have people from your former general market days come to you years later, be like, hey, like you're killing the market still, like, what makes you tick? What makes you different?

Well, that was one of the advantages of writing Redeeming Love. And I think the reason that God had me write it because I had a readership from the previous books. And then I didn't write for three years. So people were writing and saying, why aren't you writing anymore? And then I wrote Redeeming Love. And then they'd write and they'd say, oh, I wish I could meet a Michael Hosea. And I could write back and say, well, you can. His name is Jesus Christ. And that's what's happened. So it gave me an opportunity to share my faith.

So what do world class writers do that their less masterful counterparts don't do? You talked about starting with questions you Started, you talked about, you know, writing, what you want to read, what else? What's the delta between good and great.

As a writer, planting your seat in the seat, spending hours at it, looking at it as a responsibility. You know, it's a gift that's given to us that we need to develop. And I think we're always apprentices. You never stop being an apprentice as a writer. You're always learning new things about the craft. You're always learning new ways of doing things. And I'm on a group of women writers. There are nine others. And we get together every year. We couldn't this year because of COVID but we've been getting together on Zoom, you know, to brainstorm and talk and develop craft. So I think it helps to have that community to challenge each other, you know, iron sharpens iron type thing, and to attend conferences and take classes and learn more about it. Especially majorly important is to stay in scripture daily. I always start my day with studying scripture because you want that to be your formation.

So you already mentioned starting your day with scripture. I'm really curious what the rest of your day looks like. A typical day, typical working day for you. What does it look like?

Well, actually, the early morning, my husband gets up between anywhere between 3:30 and 4:30 in the morning. He has Parkinson's, so he awakens early. Plus he was a businessman, so he was up early in the morning to go to the office. And then I'm up about 5:30 and we spend the first probably hour and a half together just talking, watching the news. And we do a devotion time together and we read through the one year Bible. And then I have my own time for study. And then after that, you know, breakfast. After that, get ready for work, just like you're going to the office and then you plant your seed. And I write four pages. I try for four pages a day because writing was so important, too important at one time. I try to limit the amount of work that I do per day and not just keep going and keep going. Even if you have that role, sometimes it's better to just stop. And I do a lot of work in the yard. Housework, errands. We have a vineyard. We don't drink, but we moved into a fixer upper and the backyard was a wreck. And I've had the greatest time out there working in the yard. I love to get my hands on the dirt. And the vineyard was let go for the longest time. There are a hundred vines out there, and there are so many spiritual messages and lessons. In a vineyard. So I've been working with a gentleman who's in the management of the vineyard for over 50 years. He started in the vineyards, you know, when he was a really young man. So he's been teaching me how to prune. You know, what I need to spray for the fertilizing will come up next. Just watching and cutting, taking the laterals off and limiting the branches. And I mean, it's just been fascinating. And then we found a couple to take the fruit and make the wine because we, you know, otherwise the fruit just go into a garbage can. It's not table grapes. They are literally wine grapes or Pinot Noir, I think.

Yeah. I've got a great book for you. It's called the Soul of Wine. Really short, really beautiful book. I'll send you a copy. It's written by this theologian who grew up in a winemaking family in Germany and explores kind of the spiritual undertones of wine and wine making. It's a beautiful book. It's a beautiful book. So, yeah, I'll have to send you a copy. So I'm curious, when you're out in the vineyard, do you use that for breaks in between bouts of wine writing? Do you work, you know, you work with your mind, you rest with your hands. You find that restorative?

Yes, very much so. And now that we have a puppy, you know, we had a German shepherd and he passed away in March. And then we waited for a while and my husband just said, you know, his heart just ached for a dog. So we. For a German shepherd. So we got another one. So we're now in the process of training. So when I'm not working, I'm training. I'm out there working with the dog, which is challenging. And there are a lot of lessons there too. I'm thinking, you know, I want to be. I want to have dog faith, you know, where they want to be at your feet. They want to do things to please you. They, you know, that's the way we should be with God. As opposed to a cat that comes to you when it needs something and a little affection then goes off on its own.

I like that. That's really good. We want to be dog Christians.

Right?

So after you got back into writing, so you took this three year hiatus, you couldn't write. You start writing Redeeming Love. I'm curious if you eventually found that you were paradoxically more ambitious for your work after it was reimagined as a form of worship.

I don't think so, because when I Wrote Redeeming Love. I thought that was it. I had stayed in my faith. That's all I needed to do. But then the question came up, and I kept thinking about that question, you know, how do I share my faith? And then this story started coming. I thought of Hadassah, and I was reading about the early Christians and the early church and how, you know, their lives were on the line. And I was thinking, well, what's wrong with me? My life isn't on the line. Why am I not sharing my faith? So that really started the journey and the way to express it and to work through all that just naturally seemed to be writing. So I never take it for granted that I'm going to write another book. As long as they're questions and there's a reason and a purpose to the writing, I'll keep writing. But there, I mean, God could take it away anytime he wants. He took it away once before for good purpose. He could do the same again.

What's the question you're wrestling with right now as you write?

I don't have one right now other than I'm studying right now. What I'm doing is I'm reading a lot of books on the Middle Eastern culture and. And, you know, how Jesus was a Middle Eastern man, God incarnate. So there are things in the parables and in the lives of the people that we miss because we don't understand the Middle Eastern culture. So I'm reading, you know, the Blue Parakeet. I'm reading Jesus through the Middle Eastern lens. I've got a whole. I took a Bible study over the summer from a professor back In Nashville, Christy McLellan. Fascinating, fascinating Bible study. And I asked her, can you give me your bibliography? Which she did. So I just got all the books, and I'm going to go through and just study that. And then if I do any writing, the one idea that just kind of keeps rolling in my head is to do a parable story and write it with all those Middle Eastern aspects to the story that we miss.

I love that idea. I really love that idea. By the way, I was thinking about you the other day. I was reading. Are you a Dorothy Sayers fan?

I have read Dorothy Sayers, but it's been a while.

She wrote this play called the man who Would Be King, which is basically just reimagining the Gospels as a play and, like, really kind of digging in some of the backstories and reimagining kind of like what you did in what was the series, Lineage of Grace. Is that the name of the series? Yeah, it's kind of that through the Life of Jesus. And I'm not sure if you've read it, but I think you thoroughly.

I'm writing it down right now.

It's really great. C.S. lewis. I found this deep in a biography. Lewis read it every single Lenten season. Every season before Easter, he would. He would read Dorothy Sears play. It's really remarkable. So, Francine, redeeming love's 30 years old. You've published a lot since then, A bunch of bestsellers, a bunch of critically acclaimed books, but none of them match 3 million sales of Redeeming Love. And if I were in your shoes, I hope you don't struggle with this.

But I'm just curious.

If I were in your shoes, I think I would struggle with the temptation, I don't know, to be. I don't know if it's anger, but just frustration that God had to give me an idea of equal or greater impact rather than just being grateful for showing me extreme grace one time. Does that make sense at all? Have you struggled with this?

Not really. Because, well, from the very beginning, A Redeeming Love has never been my book. Yeah, I felt like that was. That was God's story from beginning to end. Hosea is really the allegory about Christ and how much God loves us. And so we haven't kept any of it. I mean, Uncle Sam gets his share and the rest of it goes to the Lord. So it's always been his. And it's just the writing to me is just a way for me to work through issues in my own life. And like, for example, the atonement child. That's when I work through having gone through and having had an abortion and all the rationalizations and justifications and all that stuff that goes on. So every single person in that book is impacted in some way by abortion. And it brought tremendous healing. It was like. And everything I thought, all the criticism I thought I'd get from both sides, you know, the pro life and the, you know, the ones that are pro abortion, pro choice, I thought I'd get flack from both sides and never did. And Tyndale knew, you know, they asked and they knew my story and they said we're behind her 100%. So it was like an amazing, very difficult, very trying year to work on that, but it was healing at the end. So for me, writing, that's what. Yeah, it's kind of like a self help therapy. Yeah.

And worship, it's a form of worship for You.

Yeah, it's really. God has the answers, and he. I think he tells me when it's time. Okay. It was a number of years before I could deal with that. And it was like, okay, it's time. It's time for you to deal with this and have the courage to. To take a real deep look at it.

You've said, quote, I yearn for the Lord to use my stories in making people thirst for his word. End quote. No doubt this has happened with people who knew the Lord before picking up your books. You already touched on this a little bit, but I want you to talk about it a little bit more. What about readers who didn't know the Lord prior to buying a Francine Rivers title? Have you heard stories of people coming to faith in Jesus or exploring him through your stories?

Well, quite a few. But the way I look at it is God can use anything to reach the hearts of his children, even a work of fiction. I mean, he can use something that somebody says just off, off the cuff to get through. We. We never know the timing or what's happening. So I just think that it's a tool for God. He can do what he wants. I will never save anybody. It'll never be me that did it. It'll be something that God just. And, you know, sometimes we hear from people and they'll say, I got this out of your story. And I'm thinking, I didn't put that in there. It's just something that they got out of the story that God gave them. So it's. It's miraculous how. How many ways and how many things that God can use to reach his children.

But I do think stories are a particularly effective vehicle.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Through which God reach. Reaches people's hearts.

Absolutely. Well, the Bible. I think the Bible is God's story. It's the king's story and the kingdom story all the way through from beginning to end. And, you know, I think sometimes we miss that. We tend to think of it as, oh, I have to go through Leviticus. Well, Leviticus is there for a reason. It's part of that chain of story and what's happening and what God is doing to bring us to that revelation, to bring us back to the beginning. It's fascinating. So the ultimate storyteller of truth, truth story is God. And then Jesus, he was using stories to reach people, to blind some, you know, some didn't get it. But the ones that said, you know, I don't understand what you're saying there. Would you explain it to me, and they're drawn to him. You know, tell me more about what you're trying to say here. Those are the ones that he taught.

You know, going back to the version of your story, pre Christ, right. Work was this idol for you. Did you find that to be enslaving? And, you know, we're talking about sex trafficking, we're talking about slavery. Did you see parallels of that to work when work becomes an idol?

Oh, I do. I know for a while it was actually a learning experience at one point because Rick and I switched places. He had been working really hard and doing very well. And then we decided, okay, I had gotten a good paycheck so he could quit that job that he hated so much, and he could stay home and be Mr. Mom for a while, and I could be the breadwinner. And, I mean, after a few months, he was ready to go crazy because we had three small children at the time, and I was like the breadwinner and learning the stress and the heavy responsibility of the. The breadwinner. So it was really good for both of us.

Yeah. There's this passage in the book that I think hits on this theme of idolatry. Quote, they wanted angel in the same way they wanted the gold in the streams. They lusted talking about the men, they lusted for her. They fought for the chance to be with her. They paid to become enslaved. She gave them what they thought, thought was heaven and consigned them to hell. End quote. And I think that's worked for a lot of people. Right. We want success. We want all these things, in the end, find it unsatisfying because it's not Christ.

Yeah, Well, I think when you're not a Christian, a lot of it is. Success is a whole different definition. I mean, you're thinking of, oh, you know, I want to be famous, I want to be rich, I want to be well known or whatever. But when you want to be successful as a Christian, you really want to serve the Lord. You want to draw closer to him. You want to get to know him more. It's the relationship with your Creator that you're going for.

And work is a tool to that end. It's a tool to that, and it's a tool of serving others. And in that sense, we redeem work. Work is a good thing. It existed pre sin, but it needs to be redeemed for his purposes. You said in the book, in the author's note, quote, I used to believe the purpose in life is to find happiness. I don't believe that anymore. End quote. So what's the purpose of our lives and more specifically, the purpose of our work, our vocational work as Christ followers?

It's all about the relationship with Jesus. It's all about getting closer to him and finding out how do we walk through this world in our time and in our way, through Scripture, you know, because we don't live in the times of the law and all that. We have to figure out how to discern what we're supposed to do to walk the walk that he wants us to do.

So you're currently promoting a few new Redeeming Love products published by our shared publisher, Water Park Multnomah. Tell us a bit about this keepsake edition of the book and the devotional and all this stuff that you're. That you're launching.

Well, the keepsake edition is just. It's beautiful for somebody that wants to have it on their shelf and keep it there forever and not be passing it around to people. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Probably shouldn't say pass it around. Pass it around, you know.

Exactly right.

And, you know, with the companion study and the Devotion Pathway, the path book, it's something I've wanted to do for a long time because I know that Redeeming Love has been used in ministries, especially in sex trafficking, also in battered women's shelters, that kind of thing. But they don't have the tools to go with it. So I thought it would be wonderful to have a Bible study, but the way I would do it would be question. You know, it'd be just sort of bare bones. And I thought if I do something like that, I want to work with people who really know what they're doing. And Angela Hunt's been a friend of mine for years and she is one brilliant lady. So she and I worked together on the companion study to go with the book. And it's written in such a way that we're hoping people will get a journal, just a spiral notebook, and work separately, think about it, and really work through it. And the pathway was with Karen Bursma, who worked with me on Earth Psalms. I like to write blogs, or I call them Earth Psalms, about how I see God in nature, the lessons that I believe that he's teaching us through his creation. And so we took those offline and then she helped me and then added material in there. So she's the one that worked with me on the path, the 40 day devotional. Just terrific gals. So it's like I didn't do these Alone. These were team projects. And these are awesome women of God who worked with me.

I love it. So three questions. We wrap up every conversation with number one. And I always love posing this one to authors. Which books do you gift most frequently to others?

To the Bible. The Bible. We buy them by the case. We buy the Life Application Bible, the NLT Version, and then we also buy the One Year Bible, because that's the first time I. The first way I read the Bible, and it amazed me because you're reading the old, the new, a psalm and a proverb, and you actually go through the psalms and the proverbs twice in the year. And I could hear God's voice in all four, and I could see connections every day between the old, the new, the psalm, and the proverb. And it just. For me, it was a confirmation that this is God inspired because I could just hear him speaking to me through the Word. So those are the. Those are the two. The Life Application Bible and the One Year Bible are constantly gifts. We keep them on hand all the time.

I love it just in the back of the car.

It will. In our shelf of people come. We come to the Bible study. If they don't have. They don't really have a Bible here. We've got a life application for you.

That's beautiful. I love it. Who would you most like to hear? Maybe on this podcast, talking about how their faith influences. Influences the work they do in the world?

I mean, Anne Graham Lotz. I love her work and I've, I've heard her before, but, I mean, I could hear her again and again. I think she's an amazing woman of faith.

She really is. She was. I like that. I've never heard that answer before. That's a great answer. All right, last question. One piece of advice to leave this audience with. This is an audience of Christ followers that cares deeply about doing great work for his glory and the good of others. What do you want to leave them with?

Read the Bible every year. Stay immersed in the Word because you want it to shape you. You want it to shape you as a person, but you also want it to shape your work. It's God breathed. It's God actually speaking to us. So if you want a relationship with him, you need to spend time, you know, listening to Him. It's like that. Hear, O Israel, the Word is being spoken to you through the Scriptures. And that's. That's where you meet Him.

Amen. Francine, I want to commend you for the exceptional stories you've allowed God to bring into the world through your work. Thank you for not abandoning your craft, but redeeming your work in ambition for God's great glory. Hey, Francine's very easy to find, but if you're curious and you really can't find her, it's Francine rivers.com francine thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it.

That's an episode I will treasure for a long time. Francine is a legend. Understatement of the year. I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. Hey, if you're enjoying the show, make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode in the future. If you're already subscribed, do me a favor, take 30 seconds right now and go leave a review of the podcast. Thank you guys so much for tuning in to the Call to Mastery. I'll see you next week.

Sam.