It’s been a whirlwind of activity here in Cane Creek. We had to move out of our old house because of the black mold and radon. Since then, we’ve been camping out in a little 26′ × 20′ apartment that was originally intended to house furloughed missionaries a day or two as they passed through.

We didn’t mind the coziness, but our new digs seemed to re-awaken in Mike the desire to see his home-building project completed. Mike left the office duties to me for a few weeks while he’s been working furiously this summer to get our new house built.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to complete work on The Test (the second book in The Last Publishers series) as well as several other surprise projects and trying to keep things going at the office. I get so distracted, my thoughts get scattered, and I forget where I put my glasses, purse, shoes, etc. Too funny!

Mike is stopping work on the house for the winter as I write this — YIPPEE!!! It will be so good to have him putting together the Jan/Feb issue of NGJ Magazine. We already have several articles that we did not use last time so it is mostly ready.

So many wonderful things are on our plate. So much good work to be done. It promises to be an exciting ride . . . Hang on!

In 1967, four years before Mike and I married, we were part of an outreach ministry to military men stationed at Millington Naval Base, just north of Memphis, TN. Several times each week, Mike would travel to Millington to witness on the street or in a coffee house near the base. Every Sunday 40 to 80 young men would be invited to a lodge where we played ball, fed them bologna sandwiches and then preached the gospel. There was a sense of urgency as we knew that not all of these men would return home.

A year after this began, in the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King, was assassinated.

It was an unsettling time. While young men were being drafted to fight and die for their country, many of those same young men weren’t even allowed to drink from a public water fountain, use a public toilet or eat a meal at some local eateries. A champion for the cause of civil rights was dead. Life seemed uncertain, and eternity hung in the balance.

We married in 1971. Our outreach continued during the Vietnam War and for years afterward. Mike faithfully visited Millington, and we still had our Sunday lodge ballgames and gospel preaching. Once a week, we had Bible studies with young men in our home. We did this for 20 years, until the 1980s.

We have heard back from many of the men who were saved during this time. It always brings back memories:

In The Vision, Cheyenne is in the grocery store trying to find real food without a lot of additives. That’s not always easy to do. One of the easy healthy foods I learned to make is yogurt.

I learned how to make yogurt from one of my neighbors. Her method saves refrigerator space and insures that the yogurt is in sterile containers for transport. I like the convenience of having my preparation and storage space all in one place.

I use 1 gallon of raw milk and about 2 cups of plain Dannon yogurt.

You will need a pot large enough to hold 4 quart-sized canning jars. You will need two additional pots. One will hold your gallon of milk. The other will be used to heat a gallon of water. You’ll also need a cooler large enough for your jars.

In one large pot, I place 4 quart sized canning jars, with their lids and rings. I add a couple of inches of water and then cover this pot with its lid. Bring the water to a boil for 10 minutes and then remove the covered pot from the heat and let stand with the lid still on.

Place your pot of milk on the stove and heat it to just below boiling (185 to 195 degrees or so).

Move the pot to your sink and set it into a bit of cool water. Meanwhile, have about another gallon of water heating on the stove. Stir the milk until it cools to around 125 to 130 degrees. Add your 2 cups of yogurt to the milk and stir well to be sure that it completely dissolved in your milk. If you want flavored yogurt, you should add flavoring at this stage, but be careful to use glycerin-based flavorings as the alcohol in extracts will kill your starter. We like vanilla and lemon. I use two to four tablespoons to taste. If you like sweeter yogurt, try a bit of honey.

Let the water out of the sink and place your hot jars next to the pot of warm milk in the sink. Use a dipper or a clean measuring cup to move the milk from the pot to the jars. Secure the lids and bands to the jars and set them into your cooler. Cover with the cooler’s lid.

The water on your stove should be heated to around 125 degrees. When it is hot enough, pour it into the cooler around your jars. If your cooler is large enough, set a pan of hot water on top of the jars also. Cover the cooler and leave it undisturbed for at least three hours or overnight.

When the time is up, remove the jars from the cooler and empty the water. Replace the jars into the cooler and add crushed ice around them and on top of them. Cover the cooler with its lid.

Now, you’ve got lots of high-quality yogurt without filling your refrigerator.

“I can’t talk” I told my friend on the phone, “Mike’s sick. I have to take him to the doctor.” I hung up the phone went to check on my husband. He was feverish and started to have a seizure.

After a few days in the hospital and lots of testing, the doctors were all puzzled. Mike’s white blood cell count was down, and they couldn’t figure out why. They started talking about cancer and bone marrow transfusions. His immune system was shutting down.

Once he was stable, the doctors decided to send him home away from all of the hospital germs. A couple of days later, I went to the basement to collect some canning jars. The recent rains meant that everything was in a constant state of dampness. That day, as I went down the stairs, I stopped and stared. There, on the dirt floor was a giant carpet of mold. It was a room’s width and very long. The mold was growing 2 to 3 inches tall and tiny mushrooms dotted the entire patch. Stunned, I surveyed the area, and then I looked up. There, a fourth of the rafters overhead were covered with black mold.

Mike and I decided to move out of the house and into our small prophets’ apartment. This 20 × 26 area became our living, cooking, sleeping and office space. We both immediately felt better and slept better than we have in a long time. Anything brought in from the house was first carefully cleaned.

Ten days later Mike returned to the doctor for bone marrow testing. The doctor was puzzled by Mike’s healthful appearance. Before proceeding, the doctor ordered a blood test. The results? Mike was totally healed…No cancer!!!! Since then, he’s had follow-up tests that confirm all is clear.

We pressed the doctor to give us an answer as to why Mike’s WBC (white blood cell) count and platelets dropped so low and why he was so terribly sick. What was it? Why did he get well so quickly? The doctor had no answers.

Of course, we know that God intervened for us in healing Mike.

For now, we are fighting this black mold. As with all things, there truly is nothing new under the sun. Leviticus 14:33-57 is a passage about how the Jews were told to get rid of mold. It sounds a lot like methods used by hazardous material specialists today.

Meanwhile, we are enjoying our cozy little honeymoon apartment and thanking God for His protection.

Natural births were unheard of back in the 60’s. Laboring mothers were sent to the hospital and most were given a drug that was referred to as “Twilight”. A majority of those babies were born blue due to stress from the drug and lack of response of the mother pushing.

Breastfeeding was a taboo at that time as well. It was thought that the only people to even consider nursing babies were dumb, backwoods people. A nurse told me that it was vulgar to put a baby to your breast to nurse. The doctors told us, ‘How can you know that your baby has enough milk unless you measure it?’ ‘Since you cannot measure breast milk, it is dangerous to nurse.’ ‘Breastfed babies suffer from hunger!’

Those same doctors went on to say that in order to get full nutrition you needed something that was proven by doctors to be nourishing for the baby. Babies grew fat on doctor-recommended home-made formula of pasteurized milk highly sweetened with Karo Syrup. At that time baby commercial formula or disposable diapers were still not invented.

Medical science had strayed too far from natural ways. Thinking mothers began to question their doctors.

In 1973, I was one of those young women trying to find the path back to God’s way of motherhood. I began to ask questions. A doctor pooh-poohed me. His arrogant attitude left me feeling dumb. An ancient motherly instinct rose up in me that gave me courage to speak out. “I WILL have my baby at home, and I WILL nurse! And if you call the Child Protection Agency on me, then I will run and hide and STILL give birth to and nurse my baby!”

But wars aren’t won by solitary soldiers. It takes a collective voice. The women of the 60’s took matters into their own hands and started writing books on how to have a natural birth, how to nurse, and how to bond with babies instead of sending them off to a nursery. Homeschooling was born in that moving, changing environment. Since that time there have been hundreds, maybe thousands of books written concerning these subjects but it was the pioneers who blazed the trails that wrote with a passion birthed from their struggles, and even rebellion. It was this same passion that made young mamas jump up and scream, “Yes I CAN!”

Now because a few courageous authors used their voices and their pens, blue babies and twilight births are a thing of the past. A doctor would be laughed out of his clinic if he told a mother it was vulgar and unsafe to nurse her baby. These first home-birthed, breast fed and homeschooled children are now highly educated and successful adults homeschooling their own balanced happy children. In the end when it comes to her babies, Mother knows best.

While the books and literature I read weren’t from the perspective of believers, there was a lot of valuable information being made available to women who wanted to re-discover natural methods. I was able to benefit from their willingness to share their knowledge and experiences.

The Vision has been one of the ways I have sought to ‘pay it forward.’ Just as I have gained much from the visionary writings of women who came before me, I hope that the information I share will be used by those who follow.

In writing The Last Publishers series I had three goals. The first goal was to entertain with drama and romance that will intrigue readers.

The second goal is my passion. It’s what provoked me to start writing and keeps me going. I want to share with readers my burden and dream of reaching the world with the gospel. It’s my hope that others will catch a vision for missions.

The third goal is to educate my audience about survival. I don’t have any super-knowledge that bad things are coming, but I do have common sense. Observation and common sense are enough to tell me that bad things are coming. I desire to learn all I can and teach it through my stories, enabling my readers to become better equipped to survive when bad times come.

In order to teach these things, I first had to learn them myself.

I spent a lot of hours talking to experts in many fields. These experts come in all shapes and sizes. They are young men who play around in their garage with hydrogen fuel cells built with mason jars, old farmers who have grown gardens from heirloom seeds for over 50 years, a pig farmer who knows a lot about life, a chemist, Bible theologians and of course, I spend a lot of time on the net trying to figure out how to clean water, heal weird diseases, political issues that tie in with Bible prophecy and anything else that happens to involve my characters.

Sometimes all this research evolves into survival web sites put together by one of my main researchers. You can learn some of these survival things at www.survivalscoop.blogspot.com, www.survivalscoop.com and www.farmerjohnny.com.

My mind is always working. I love thinking up stories. That love, combined with a dream and some good exercise were the seeds for the series of stories that make up The Last Publishers.

The ladies in the No Greater Joy office like to take fast walks around the Amish community during our lunch break. One spring, three others and I were headed out on our usual route. To break up the monotony, I asked if I could tell them about a dream I had the previous night. They were agreeable, so I launched into the story.

I was so caught up in the plot that we found ourselves back at the office, our walk over, without noticing the path we had taken. The sights and sounds of the countryside coming to life had fallen away as we pictured the characters caught up in a drama of eternal proportions. As we walked through the door to the office, I finished my tale.

All three women turned and looked at me as though I were a stranger instead of the person they saw on a daily basis.

Where did all of this come from? I can’t believe all that stuff is in your brain. You need to write a book!

And I knew they were right. How hard could it be?

Famous words! This little dream turned out to be 4 books, not just one. That same day, I outlined the whole story — all four books: The Vision, The Test, The Cave and Starlight. The outline alone was 30 pages long!

Within the next month I had the general story line for the first book completed. After that, it was sheer hard work. Sentence by sentence, word by word, I rearranged, deleted, and added to the text. Then I had someone come in and slash the manuscript to shreds, rearranging entire events. This was too much! I almost gave up, but my own vision would not let me rest.

I don’t think that my dream was prophetic. My dream was born of my own burning vision to see the gospel go forth to the Muslim people, to ALL people. Telling this story is also a way of teaching and introducing new concepts to the reader in an easy to understand format.

The Vision is the story of a group of people, united by their desire that Muslims hear the good news of the gospel. It is the story of their commitment, their hardships, their joy, their frustrations, their passion, their grief and ultimately their victory.

When writing the storyline for The Vision, I drew on my familiarity with the Smoky Mountain landscape to set the scene. Early in the story, after Asher leaves Washington, he’s spending a morning observing deer in the mountains. Here’s the scene:

> Tracing the high ridge to the east, he could see the golden flecks of dawn beaming like jewels as the first rays peeked over the top of the tree line and glimmered off the leaves. As the moments passed, he watched the shimmering grow in dazzling brilliance. The first penetrating light spilled over the rim. A gentle breeze stirred the new poplar leaves. The hilltop fluttered with dancing sounds and trembling shadows. Asher’s face was towards the light as he worshipped his Creator. “God, Father, how great and mighty is your name.”

This picturesque scene is soon shattered by one of the story’s plots. But I’ve seen countless mornings like this in the Smokies…

My husband Mike and I have challenged thousands of readers and listeners to look at the Scriptures for what they say and not through the lens of unscriptural theologies. I’ve included some of these points in The Vision.

Early in the story, two of the characters, Hope and her daughter Cheyenne, are discussing some of the herbal remedies Hope has concocted in her laboratory. After Cheyenne responds in disbelief that the Tree of Life couldn’t still exist on earth, Hope responds with some biblically accurate theology:

> The young woman was shaking her head in unbelief. “No…I can’t believe the tree of life could still be here on earth. God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden to keep them from eating and…and…well, it doesn’t say it was removed from the earth. But it is too fantastic to believe.”
“Why not?” Hope challenged. “I almost think I could recognize it, because I would know how the leaves would smell. I have worked with so many healing herbs, you just get where you know healing chemistry by the smell.” The old eyes stared transfixed as she considered the possibility of such a discovery, then shrugged her shoulders in defeat. “One of the Israeli researchers wrote that he had sent a team of young workers to look for every tree they could find, so obviously he thinks it is a possibility.”

There are more unscriptural theological boxes that The Vision tackles in the course of the story.