Nuggets of faith can be passed down as family heirlooms from parent to child, sibling to sibling, spouse to spouse.

Book 1: Baby, Baby

Book One Family Heirloom: Accepting God’s will

A Proverbs 31 wife wonders, does “submissive” mean giving up having anything of her own?

Thirty-seven-year-old Tamara Wolfe married her childhood sweetheart, Robert, right out of high school and proceeded to have a passel of children who fill her life to capacity. With the last of her children in preschool, Tamara decides to make a business out of her long-time love of creating designer gift baskets. She doesn’t expect Robert to be against it from her first word.

Robert has always prided himself on giving Tamara the option of staying home to raise the children, just as his father did before him. Since birth, it’s been drilled into him that a man who doesn’t provide for his family is the worst kind of loser. What will happen if her business takes off? She won’t have time to take care of the family. Worse, maybe she won’t need him anymore. Although they’d agreed years before their family was complete, Robert considers that perhaps the cure for Tamara’s restlessness is another baby.

Tamara prays for wisdom. All she wants is a small space of time for herself. Is she being selfish? Or is God leading her to continue being an outdated model of the Proverbs 31 wife–submissive, but never equal?

GENRE: Inspirational Romance    ISBN: 978-1-921314-29-2    ASIN: B00MBOYW70    Word Count: 73, 926

Book 2: Shadow Boxing

Book Two Family Heirloom: Building Love

Joined before God and family out of a sense of responsibility? Or love?

As a teenager, Justine Morris’s escape from the pressures of caring for her dying father was stolen moments with Joshua Samuels. But their tender, desperate liaison found them facing teen pregnancy. Afraid of their Christian families’ responses to the situation, they married quickly and built a life for their child.

But now that their daughter is ready to fly the nest, Justine can no longer ignore the truth: She and Joshua haven’t had a real marriage for a long time. Maybe they never had one at all.

Joshua is only too aware that his busy, professional attorney wife is an independent woman who never really needed him. After nearly two decades of marriage, he’s quit trying to get more than a piece of her at a time. Without their daughter holding them together, he knows the chasm between them will grow to epic proportions.

Their empty nest looming, they face the hard questions. Had they married in love…or out of a hasty sense of responsibility? Was it God’s will for them to be together? And now, is it worth the effort to learn to become one as the Lord intends for a man and a woman…or better to simply let go?

GENRE: Inspirational Romance     ISBN: 978-1-922066-23-7    ASIN: 1312328851     Word Count: 64, 363

Book 3: Foolish Games

Book Three Family Heirloom: Healing

She was one of his late wife’s best friends. He’s the man she’s loved from afar for as long as she can remember. Falling in love could take simply letting go of their fears…or a miracle.

Peter Samuels had lost his beloved wife Lydia to a brain tumor just one year earlier. His grief continues to overwhelm him, especially now that he’s the sole caretaker of their growing children and he’s alone once more in the world without a partner.

Kimberly Wolfe has always loved her boss Peter, but she’s loved him from afar. For years, she’d endured Lydia’s misguided attempts to fix her up with one Christian man after another. She’d envied Peter and Lydia’s love for one another, and, most recently, she’d consoled him in his grief over the loss of his wife and her close friend. But for as long as she can remember, her domineering father has used the Bible to justify his God-given place as head of the household, destroying Kimberly’s mother and her own ability to trust men. A committed Christian, she struggles to forgive her father when he refuses to repent and see the wrong he’s done.

An innocent kiss on New Year’s leads to a growing awareness between Peter and Kimberly. Peter wonders if there can be love again after such devastation. Kimberly wrestles with her fears borne of the past. Can Peter ever see her as more than an employee and a shoulder to lean on? Can he accept her as a Christian woman who’s nowhere near content to live out her life without the love of a man and a family of her own?

GENRE: Inspirational Romance     ISBN: 978-1-922066-93-0    ASIN: B00MGU3RMA    Word Count: 66, 869

Book 4: Glass Angels

Book Four Family Heirloom: Forgiveness

A young Christian woman struggles with seeking pardon from those she’s hurt when she can’t seem to get past her own inability to forgive those who have wronged her.

Three years ago, Samantha Samuels had suffered under the violent hands of Ryder Feldmann, a juvenile delinquent her pastor father had been counseling. Now she’s completed her psychiatry training and plans to help other victims of violent crimes at the rape counseling clinic in her hometown of Peaceful, Wisconsin. Unexpectedly, she finds herself sharing an office building and Sunday services at her new church with the older brother, a divorce counselor, of her attacker…the very man she’d been in love with before her rape.

In the time since Kyle Feldmann’s brother was jailed for his crime against Samantha, he’s lived with the torment of all he’s lost because of his sibling. Before the tragedy that stole Samantha from him and destroyed his dreams, Kyle had begged her to risk her father’s disappointment and elope with him. Seeing Samantha again after so many years, being near her, only puts him right back where he was before the rape. Kyle wants to heal Samantha, love her, and fulfill the dreams he grieved the loss of–by marrying her. But how can they be together forever when she’s still so broken?

All her life, Samantha had wanted her father’s approval, but his selfish part in putting her in a dangerous situation has led her to a painful place of desperately needing to forgive him and her attacker…and being unable to in all the time since the traumatic event that ripped her life in two. As she gives her heart to Kyle once more, her already fractured relationship with the Lord is tested. In the crossfire of faith, she wonders if glass angels shatter beyond recognition when they take a leap of faith, or if they can heal and become stronger than ever before.

GENRE: Inspirational Romance     ISBN: 978-1-922233-32-5    ASIN: B00MNNVMD6     Word Count: 86, 369

Book 5: Shards of Ashley

Book Five Family Heirloom: Learning trust

In order to reconcile her past, she must face the terrible truth she buried long ago…and, in doing so, she gambles with her heart and the salvation of her own soul.

Ashley Savage grew up in a troubled home with a competitive, pampered sister and an abusive, ridiculing mother who played at being a Christian when she needed to…and led Ashley to more addictions than one child could handle. As an adult, Ashley tells herself she’s put the extreme fears of the past behind her, but she spends most of her time repairing the crumbling wall holding back the horrors she’s not willing to face ever again. She’s become a woman against the world.

The one man who has the annoying habit of getting through her defenses is Jay Samuels, a military chaplain and soon-to-be pastor. Much as Ashley wants to leave him behind like she believes she has the rest of her past, Jay is ambitious to a fault where she’s concerned. He hears only what he wants to hear–and he doesn’t want to hear that she doesn’t love him as much as he loves her.

But even Jay doesn’t realize the extent of all she’s buried deep inside her own subconscious…and what keeps her from giving herself willingly to the God she knows is drawing her inexorably to Himself, to the one place she can’t run, where she can no longer hide…

GENRE: Inspirational Romance     ISBN: 978-1-921314-95-7    ASIN: B00MPQSAEA     Word Count: 79, 110

Book 6: Worlds Collide

Book Six Family Heirloom: Persevering in adversity

Dr. Marcus Samuels is a medical missionary in Japan, and his life has been God’s work despite a severe anxiety disorder associated with being far from home. After twelve years of watching his happily married siblings and their children, he can no longer deny the chronic ache inside him and knows he should start his own family life back in the States–though he has serious doubts about his wife-hunting abilities at the age of forty. Spurred into motion by his mother’s sudden illness, he’s caught off-guard when he realizes just how much he’ll miss Keiko Oichi and her brother Haruki, fellow pediatricians at the Children’s Christian Mission Hospital. The two have not only been his lifeline while in a foreign, distant place, but have also become family to him.

Keiko and Haruki grew up in the United States as foreign exchange students. It was through their host family that she and her older sibling became Christians. Her conversion to Christ, as well as getting to know Marcus, have radically altered her emotionally-detached acceptance of her traditional Japanese future. When Marcus says he’s leaving Japan for good, she feels lost at the prospect of living without her closest friend. Only with Marcus can she be the woman she truly is inside–if she can shed the cocoon of lifelong familial tradition and impossible expectations and be free.

Knowing Keiko has been betrothed since she was a child, Marcus had trained himself not to see her as a potential mate. But learning of her unhappiness and fear of being unequally yoked to an immoral man she can never love opens his eyes to possibilities he hasn’t allowed himself to consider. Who better to fall in love with than your very best friend? When Keiko’s parents learn of her conversion and feelings for a Christian man, the couple faces a crossroads in love and faith that will change both of their lives irrevocably.

GENRE: Inspirational Romance     ISBN: 978-1-925191-00-4    ASIN: 1312329017     Word Count: 66, 185