Keeping the Faith

 Characters are like friends. You love each one for a different reason. There are some characters who emerge as favorites for whatever reason. Isabel Connor in Hidden Away is one of those characters. This a suspense book, so the focus is on the action and the danger. However, as the story unfolded, I found myself admiring Isabel. There is an element of surprise in writing that I don't know quite how to explain. I create a character. I know her background and her motives and yet she does and say things that I had not planned but that fit so perfectly. 

Isabel is a woman who has only recently gotten her life together. As a teenager, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and she fell in love with the wrong guy. All those choices let to her doing jail time for being the getaway driver in robbery. She has since found a relationship with God and has a job opening up and stocking vacation homes near a ski resort for clients. Her life is back on track. She is making better choices. 

But once again and this time not because of her poor choices, she ends up being caught up in a crime and at one point the lawman even suspects her of being involved. Call it bad luck, call it misfortune, call it God's timing. But she fears that all that she has worked to build will be ripped away from her. This is what made me like Isabel. Even with all the bad things that happen and the possibility of everything she has worked for being taken from her and the guilt over her past choices, her default position is to turn to God. They are just little moments in the book, again totally not planned by me, that reveal a woman of deep faith. 

Most people haven't been in trouble with the law, but all of us have had one time or another decided to clean up some aspect of our lives. It could be with finances, or losing weight or toxic relationships or just deciding to keep your house cleaner, or read more, or not be reactive to certain situations. We might be making huge progress. And then a setback happens that was not our doing. You may have been working on losing weight and working out and end up injured. You may have paid down your credit card debt, only to be hit with medical crisis that puts you right back in debt. Always when that happens we have a choice. To throw up our hands and say "see, I told you I couldn't fix that part of my life"  or to persist through the darkness and the set back, to point our feet in the right direction and to give it all over to God. I don't want to minimize setbacks and loss, part of the process of choosing hope and trusting God is going through a season despair and grief. But never to give up hope. 

I would love to hear about one of your favorite characters from a book you have read or tell me about a time when you realized you were at a crossroads after a setback. Leave your name and email address in the comments. I will be giving away copies of Hidden Away so you can meet Isabel too.