Today, I’ve invited my friend Dineen Miller to stop by. While her first novel releases next year, she has an important non-fiction title out right now: Winning Him Without Words. This book is designed to give hope, encouragement, and advice to women who are married to an unbeliever.
How did you and your co-author, Lynn Donovan, meet and what led you to write Winning Him Without Words?
Unbelievably, we met online. God had inspired us both with the idea of blogging about being unequally yoked at the same time. Lynn started the blog site, www.SpirituallyUnequalMarriage.com in 2006 and I came on board shortly thereafter. The rest is amazingly and wonderfully covered with God’s fingerprints.
As for the book, there just wasn’t much out there that was current or designed to be a Bible study as well. Churches for the most part aren’t equipped for this issue, partly because the focus is mostly on family, and partly because the spiritually mismatched tend to stay in the shadows of shame or despair. We listened to our blog readers’ needs and broke down over 30 years of mismatchdom into what we saw as 10 key areas and the truths God had showed us in our own mismatched marriages.
Seeing it all come together still blows us away. That’s what God does best—redeems everything, wastes nothing. Now we get to share all that with others struggling in their mismatched marriages. That alone leaves Lynn and I awestruck on a daily basis.
So, you both have been blogging and writing about this topic since 2006?
Yes! When you live it, you tend to write it. So to answer the next logical question, yes, I’m spiritually mismatched. My husband is an atheist, has been for 15 years now. My cowriter, Lynn Donovan, has much the same story though I’m pleased to say her husband is slowly coming around and starting to search a bit. The power of prayer…
Was it difficult writing about such personal issues?
No, actually. That’s part of the miracle of this book. We each have areas we are passionate about. Amazingly, that turned out to five key chapters for each of us to write. The rest we collaborated on, like the introduction and the resources in the back of the book.
As Lynn says, we complete each other in this ministry. God knew exactly what He was doing (when does He not?) when he put us together to write the book AND for the Spiritually Unequal Marriage ministry. We share different strengths and overlap beautifully.
Let’s pretend you just met someone who is spiritually mismatched and they are really struggling with their marriage. What would you tell them?
First, I would tell them, they are not alone. There are a lot out there. I would encourage them to keep pressing into Jesus for the strength and guidance they need in their marriage. Lynn and I write on our site almost everyday. We also have a Yahoo group, 1Peter3Living, that is a wonderful and safe place to share prayer needs and receive encouragement. We are there and we want to help any way we can. God wants more for us than to just survive our mismatched marriages. He wants to show us how to make them places filled with his love so we can thrive!
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