Several decades ago, a young couple stood outside on a Los Angeles street having an argument. The man had come to find that his life had value and purpose in a relationship with Jesus, a relationship he had learned about — and learned how to grow in — through reading his Bible. He had spent many hours trying to show his girlfriend how that relationship could change her life, too, but she found his constant discussion about God and faith unsettling. She'd known about religion all her life; she'd been dutiful to go to church and follow the rules, whereas he hadn't grown up around any kind of faith whatsoever.
Why did he suddenly seem to know so much about this God and His holy words? In a moment of defensiveness, the young woman wrenched her boyfriend's Bible from his hands and threw it to the ground. The binding broke, and the pages he'd so lovingly marked and highlighted splayed across the asphalt.
That woman was Karen Kingsbury.
In a new series of books that chronicle the people who surrounded Jesus during His lifetime, Karen delves deep into the heart of the Man whose call she heard, for the first time, shortly after she threw that Bible into the dirt. The Family of Jesus is the beginning of a four-part journey that takes readers into intimate moments with Jesus' mother and father; his brother, James; his cousin, John the Baptist; and John's parents, Elizabeth and Zechariah. (Photo of Karen Kingsbury by Dean Dixon Photography. )
Karen's books — of which there are almost 80 currently in print — have been popular with many people, so moving and so impactful, that she's fondly known as "America's favorite inspirational novelist." Her words have been a balm for many souls. But something new stirred within her when she decided to write about the "characters" in Jesus' life. In the process of writing The Family of Jesus, she found herself reconnecting with that 20-something girl on a Los Angeles street all those years ago, a girl who longed to know God but wasn't sure where to begin.
"I consider my readers my friends, I care for them and pray for them all the time. I began to sort of see this pattern [when I would hear from them] that they love my books, they can't wait to read the next [ones], but kind of in the back of my mind I wondered if they read the Bible? Statistics were showing that about 70 percent of my readers weren't believers, [and] I thought, OK, how can I use this gift God's given me for storytelling to help people fall in love with God's Word?
"After finishing The Family of Jesus, Karen went on to write The Friends of Jesus, The Followers of Jesus, and Firsthand Encounters of Jesus. She wrote each book in the series to better equip her readers to know and understand this Man so many of them may never have known outside the same religious traditions by which a young Karen found herself confused.
"In The Family of Jesus, you can just, sort of, fall in love with these people ... when you go and read the Bible, you have a deeper understanding [of who they are]. I may likely have some of the colorful moments 'off' — it's fiction — but something like that did happen, because there's more to these lives than what we're seeing in Scripture. We don't know if Zechariah and Elizabeth were still alive when John the Baptist, their son, was beheaded, but they could have been ... and just the thought of the heartache of that … Every family, we all have our struggles, our trials ... and Jesus' family did, too. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to place color on the black-and-white of these stories. I wanted us to feel the sand [beneath] our feet."
If anyone is acquainted with the power of family and how God uses it to teach and grow His people, Karen Kingsbury most certainly is that person. Her fiction, much of which follows the layered stories of families through trials and struggles of their own, resonates with readers because of its commitment to deal with real issues that all kinds of people face. She acknowledges that her own journey as a wife and mother has wholeheartedly shaped her writing and her ministry. Here, as she prepares to launch The Family of Jesus and its companion Bible study, we get a peek into Karen's own family life, her faith, and what she says is the most important habit she's adopted to be the best wife and mother she can be.
Woman of Faith
"I grew up in a home where we had a religion, like a denominational religion, but it definitely wasn't [about a] relationship with Christ. My family just didn't know any differently. My parents were great; they loved us and kept the family together and worked hard. I was the oldest of five kids — all girls and one boy — and being the oldest, I did dutifully go to church, I did the things I was supposed to do ... but I had never opened a Bible, I didn't have a relationship with Jesus."
Karen's faith story begins in the city where she took her first full-time job after college, as a reporter for a Los Angeles news publication. Not necessarily the place most Christians think to look for God's work, but a place that brought her into contact with the man she would one day marry — the man who would ultimately lead her to the Lord.
"I met Don, and he was searching. He had come to realize that there had to be more to life than what he was seeing. His parents had gotten a divorce when he was in middle school - there was an emptiness [for him] that couldn't be answered in this world ... So he was in the middle of reading the New Testament, when we met, and he asked if he could bring the Bible to our first date! He says to me, 'Let's read Philippians!' I don't know what Philippians is ... and I'm not really interested. [He's reading] and I'm checking my watch, hoping it will go faster, thinking, 'OK, our movie's gonna start' — I was uncomfortable. I didn't recognize the feeling of conviction. I can only imagine what the unseen battle looked like. But that began a three-month period of us dating and him bringing up the Bible, well, I felt like all the time. He was falling in love with Jesus so quickly, wanting to please God so much, and I was just not in that space."
Karen had grown up seeing God as an aspect of religion, a religion comprised of rituals and routines but having nothing to do with relationship. Her future husband longed to show her that knowing about God wasn't the same as knowing Him, and that a lot of what she'd come to believe the Bible said wasn't found anywhere in Scripture. "He was trying to show me some verses to point out that some of the man-made, traditional things that I believed were just not in the Bible, and I just wasn't sure how to defend myself." Her anxiety and uncertainty over what to make of all that Don was showing her resulted in the broken Bible in the street.
"I thought for sure the earth was going to open up, and I'd be the first one to descend the staircase, you know? But I left that spot and literally went to this Christian bookstore that I'd passed by almost every day of my life growing up. The first person I saw came up to me and asked if he could help me, and I said, 'I need a Bible, in English, and I need a way to look things up.' So I took home a Bible and Strong's Exhaustive Concordance. It took about 10 minutes of looking things up for me to hear the Lord say, 'You can either fall away with man-made traditions that are not in Scripture, or you can hold onto My Word and never let go.' It was life-changing, dramatic, a Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. I heard Him, and I grabbed onto Him, and I knew I would be in love with His Word forever." As a woman of faith first, Karen has sought to navigate the roles of godly wife and mother in a way that would please God and honor Him. But she's learned that faith first means, well, faith first.
"I have a routine: Every morning, I get up earlier than everyone else and hit the treadmill, listen to praise music, and in those 30 minutes, that's my prayer time. I pray diligently about every one of my kids and my husband. The Lord just meets me down there and gives me a clean heart, fills me with His Spirit. It's beautiful. It's from that half hour that the rest of the day flows. It hasn't always been my habit, but it makes such an amazing difference."
Woman of Family
Karen's family began shortly after she and Don married, when she was working for the Los Angeles Daily News and he was in school full-time. They lived in a small garage, paid $100 for rent, and had planned to wait five years or so before beginning a family. When Karen learned, about a year into their marriage, that she was pregnant, she confesses she handled the news less than well. "[Don] was just beside himself excited. He said, 'You know, God must have a great plan in all of this!' But I was devastated.
I said, 'I'm never gonna know this child!' I was working full-time ... it was a 10-hour a day job. It just didn't make sense how it was going to work ... I didn't understand how God could have let this happen. Don told me that he was praying every day that God would show me a way that I could work at home. At the time, it felt like praying the sky would turn purple, but he prayed faithfully and I prayed reluctantly alongside him. I ended up selling a story to People magazine and from there, I sold that story as a book. I was able to quit my job four or five days before my maternity leave was up. It was a miracle. It was a total answer to prayer."
Karen's love for her husband, both then and now, permeates her discussion of the years that followed — raising not one child but six — and learning how to maneuver through life as a parental 'team.' She points out that, though her ministry is obviously rooted in a gift God has specifically given to her, Don is the head of the home, the leader, and she cherishes him for that. "He's been that godly leader, that incredibly devoted man, from the beginning, all the way through."
Their teamwork-style parenting has served them well, too, not just because it's resulted in rewarding relationships with their now-grown children, but because it's cemented their relationship as a couple. "The two of us do a lot of talking together ... he might be more likely to get frustrated [with the kids] than me, but he'll share that with me first and we'll talk each other out of that place. We learned really early on that, if you're feeling frustrated as a parent, most likely, it's something you need to change, not the kids. If we're feeling frustrated, it's probably because we lowered the bar somewhere. Don has been the most amazing best friend [in] parenting I could have ever hoped to have ... we laugh even, behind the scenes ... we really have a good time parenting. We enjoy it."
Karen's children, five boys and one daughter, have lived in a home where intentionality is the rule. She and Don prioritized setting aside time to do the things so many parents find it hard to carve out time to do or find not all that valuable. She laughs recalling that her daughter, Kelsey, now thanks her and Don for family meetings, which the kids joke seem to happen constantly, because Kelsey recognizes that her parents care enough to stop and make them happen, despite the busyness of each of their lives. Asked what words best describe life in the Kingsbury home, Karen quickly says that her house is filled with faith and laughter, and that it's extremely conversational.
"We're really communicative ... I think that makes a big difference. The TV's off. We're more about each other. When kids are in process, [and] there's a lot going on ... we can really miss things as we get busy and fall into routines. [Don and I] really try to be intentional. Although it's easy to make everything in a family look OK on the surface, we want to go below the surface. Part of that is praying to ask God to give us the eyes to see what He sees and the ears to hear what He hears and the wisdom to know what He knows about our kids."
"Sometimes, it's easy for us parents to think, You know, I'd rather not know. That whole thing where you ask your children how they're doing and they say, 'Good,' and we accept it and move on, that surface life ... that's what leads them to talk to their friends instead of you." The pursuit of the non-surface life: that's where family meetings come into play for the Kingsbury household. They're forums for connection with their kids, places where honest words can be spoken and relationships can be forged. "We need to remember who we are, who we serve. We only have one chance to do this; as parents, we don't want to offend our kids or upset them, so we tend to avoid the uncomfortable places, but really, we need to ask the tough questions. Knowing your kids takes so much time. But it's all worth it."
Woman of Ministry
Karen's writing, of course, is a huge part of her life, and it requires intentional, committed time as well. But again, her family comes before her work: Without one, the other would cease to exist.
"People will say, 'Gosh, how do you do it all, how do you have the time?' The answer is [that] my husband and my kids are the top priority for me. In the process of being really intentional and devoted to my kids and my husband, God has given me a lot of great ideas to write about … I mean, certainly the Flanigan family is shamelessly patterned after our family. What I experience in life is what I write about, so if I didn't make life, and the joy of raising kids and loving them well, a priority, I wouldn't have anything to write about. At the end of my life, the kids will say, 'You know, the best story she ever wrote was the story she wrote with her life.' The legacy isn't as much the body of writing as the family that inspired the work."
Of course, her other "family" - the large audience of devoted readers she's come to cherish and pray for fervently - also beckons her consideration as she generates work she hopes will encourage and challenge. The stories Karen has told have stretched across a gamut of topics and characters, but her mission in writing is always the same. She takes her role as a writer seriously because she knows that what she's seeking to accomplish is weightier than simply telling a good story.
"I want [to inspire my] readers to love their family, to love their story and the characters in their story ... [to see] that their story has a finite number of pages, and to appreciate the day and what God is doing in their life. The only way you're going to have a guaranteed happy ending is if Jesus is the hero of your story. I always pray that, in reading my stories, they will see their own stories reflected, and in the process, their stories will become richer because of reading whatever it is I wrote. That the power of the story will change their story."
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The Family of Jesus Bible Study
This article is courtesy of HomeLife Magazine.