Tuesday, October 07, 2014

PERFECTLY UNANSWERED PRAYERS --- by guest author Amanda Cabot

Perfectly Unanswered Prayers
  
Show of hands, please.  Is there anyone who’s not familiar with Garth Brooks’ song “Unanswered Prayers”?  All right.  Since I see a few hands, we’ll have a brief refresher course.  In the song, when Garth attends a football game with his wife, he sees his high school sweetheart, the one he prayed would love him.  There’s only one problem: she’s not the way he remembered.  And with that realization comes his understanding that one of God’s gifts was not answering that particular prayer.

I have a slightly different view of the story.  I think God did answer Garth’s prayer.  He simply gave Garth what he needed, not what he wanted.  As authors we’re taught that a satisfying resolution to a story is giving the heroine what she needs, not what she thinks she wants.  How did we learn that?  From the Author of all things.

Okay, you’re probably saying, that’s fine in stories, but does it happen in real life?  I’m here to tell you that it does and that it happened to me.  When I was a junior in high school, I was a candidate for a year-long foreign exchange program.  No one from my school had ever been chosen for that program, but I was convinced that I would be the first.  Like Garth in his song, I wanted this desperately.  Part of me longed for the distinction of being the first to accomplish something, but mostly I clung to the idea of living abroad as a way of escaping a less-than-perfect home life.  I prayed and prayed and prayed that I’d be selected.

You know what happened, don’t you?  I wasn’t chosen.  To say that I was heartbroken is a major understatement.  I was devastated as only a teenager can be, convinced that nothing would ever be right again.  But then, on a day when I was feeling particularly low, I stayed after school to help one of the Latin teachers with a project.  She and I were cutting up pieces of fabric to make tents for a model of a Roman camp when one of the seniors came into the room. 

He and I started talking.  One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, he was walking me home, then inviting me on a date.  He became not just my high school sweetheart but the man I married, the man I’m still married to decades later. 

God had answered my prayers in a way I could never have imagined.  He didn’t give me the year abroad that I wanted.  

Instead he gave me what I needed: a man to love and a man who would love me.  It was the perfect answer to what had seemed like an unanswered prayer. 



Her life is set to warp speed. His is slowing to a crawl. But love has its own timing.

Marketing maven Kate Sherwood’s world is fast-paced, challenging, and always changing. The last thing she wants to do is grind to a halt at Rainbow’s End, a dilapidated resort in the Texas Hill Country. Still, she cannot deny her ailing grandmother’s request to visit the place where she and her deceased husband spent one glorious week fifty years ago. There, Kate meets Greg, who appears to be the resort’s unassuming handyman. But there’s more to Greg than meets the eye—billions more, in fact.

Kate isn’t looking for romance, but she can’t deny the sparks of attraction that fly every time she and Greg are together. Could there be a future there? Or will Kate’s long-sought promotion take her back to the big city?

Amanda Cabot invites you to step into a place away from the pressures of the day. You might be surprised by what you find at Rainbow’s End.

ABOUT AMANDA CABOT

Amanda Cabot is the bestselling author of more than thirty novels including the Texas Dreams trilogy, the Westward Winds series, and Christmas Roses. A former director of Information Technology, she has written everything from technical books and articles for IT professionals to mysteries for teenagers and romances for all ages.  Amanda is delighted to now be a fulltime writer of Christian romances, living happily ever after with her husband in Wyoming. 


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