Debbie Macomber is one of the most inspiring people you’ll ever meet. I consider her a spiritual mentor, a model for a dynamic, active prayer life.
Yes, she’s been wonderfully successful as a writer, with more than 130 million books sold, mostly fiction but also non-fiction. She says, in her charmingly disarming way,
What girds her and sustains her in her busy professional life is a daily morning habit of Bible reading, journaling, acknowledging answered prayers, putting down the things she is grateful for, picking a Bible verse to memorize and praying for others. I have no doubt that her prayer list is as long as the list of titles she’s authored. She’s passionate about people and cares for so many.
LEARN ABOUT DEBBIE MACOMBER’S 3-BOOK SET, BLOSSOM STREET TRIO
Her own story is an astonishing one of persistence and belief. She struggled as a student and had to hear her third-grade teacher say to her mom, “Debbie is a sweet little girl, but she’ll never do well in school.” When she exclaimed that she had ambitions to be a writer, another teacher said, “You can’t write, Debbie. Why, you can’t even spell.”
She refused to let those negative voices rule her, clinging to Bible promises like this one that she committed to memory:
For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power, love and discipline. (2 Timothy 1:7)
She also found tremendous help in Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, frequently saying this prayer of his:
I believe I am divinely guided. I believe I will always take the right turn in the road. I believe God will make a way where there is no way.
Indeed God has made a way, again and again. She wrote and wrote and wrote.
Not long ago, I had breakfast with Debbie, and we talked about her dreams, for she still has exciting dreams for the future, projects she believes in, more prayers to be answered. More to do. She’d just received word that one of her dreams seemed unreachable and for a while she became deeply discouraged.
“As I was praying,” she told me, “I could hear all those negative voices again. Those teachers who told me I could never accomplish anything.” And then she remembered how God has shown her that he’s quite capable of handling the impossible. “I went back to saying that prayer of Dr. Peale’s, I believe I am divinely guided…”
Discouraged? Not for long. Not when she remembered whom to trust. A voice much louder than any of those negative voices that we all can hear.
