Read My Books

I’ve written a lot of books, and I’d like to share some of them with you.

Why do I write?

For twenty centuries, followers of the Lord Jesus Christ have used the word “calling” in a special sense. It means the way God gets us into the kind of work He wants us to do and then equips us to do it.

That’s why I like to say that I have been called as a writer.

I’ve always been interested in what others have written; in other words, I’ve always loved to read. I came through all the educational levels from elementary school to graduate work. At different times I’ve been a summer camp worker, part-time cafeteria employee, schoolteacher in the inner city, part-time music and youth director of a church in the suburbs, and pastor of a church in the backwoods. After all of that, for many years I was both a foreign missionary and an editor of books, magazines, and Sunday School lessons. Now I’m back in my native country again, working as a translator, interpreter, and community volunteer. Yet during all of this time I have also kept on being a writer.

You can’t write a lot unless you live a lot. God has been good to me: He’s given me a faithful wife, two strong sons, two daughters-in-love, seven remarkable grandchildren, two lovable great-grandchildren, and I’ve lost count how many nephews and nieces, both blood kin and borrowed, both American and Indonesian.

God has let us hike up Vesuvius and the Great Wall of China, splash in the surf of the Malacca Strait, weather a hailstorm in Bryce Canyon, hydrofoil down the Danube, cruise through fjords in Norway and New Zealand, and sail across lakes in Scotland and Switzerland, Russia and Chile.

For three decades God let us live in a gorgeous tropical country where you can sleep out on the slopes of a live volcano and see a lava flow glowing red through the night, . . . where you can swim outdoors 365 days a year, . . . where you can climb temple towers built six centuries before Columbus sailed. All of that time, God let us meet all kinds of people – as many different shades of skin among them as you’ll find different candy colors in a Whitman’s Sampler.

My job in life is to tell the people I meet about my Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. And I especially like to do it through writing. After all, that’s my calling.