Guest Blogger Deborah Heal: Every Hill and Mountain

I'm becoming acquainted with author Deborah Heal through the John 3:16 Marketing Network, and was particularly interested in her Time and Again time travel-mystery book series since I'm writing my own time travel novel, Jordan's Shadow. I've started reading Time and Again, and I'm hooked! Deborah agreed to share some very personal insights from her faith and writing journey. And also the good news that the Kindle version of Every Hill and Mountain is on sale for 99 cents now through the end of November. Click here to buy it at Amazon.



I think of my novel Every Hill and Mountain as an assignment I turned in for the continuing education program I’m involved with. You know, that life-long business of becoming more sanctified. As slow as I’m learning things, I figure God may decide to keep me in school another hundred years or so before he lets me into Heaven.

By that, I’m not saying I will have arrived, become perfect, and thus will deserve to get into Heaven—not even after a thousand years. But apparently, God thinks it’s good for us to come smack up against our ignorance, stupidity, and foulness for a while in this life so we we’ll appreciate His perfection all the more in the life to come.

I have a friend of the New Age persuasion who does believe in the perfectibility of human beings. We had a conversation a while back about racism, in which I said everyone’s prejudiced to one degree or another. He got quite irate and said, “Hey, speak for yourself!” He claimed to be completely free of this fault.

But I know I’m right. No one reaches perfection in any aspect of his being. Not in this life. Whether I like it or not, I’m a racist to one degree or another. But I have come a long way through the years as God continues to work on me.

My first teacher on the subject of race was an aunt (God rest her soul). The lesson came when I was five or six and as a treat, she took me to shop at the Ben Franklin store. When we got out of the car, she called my attention to some people standing on the sidewalk across the street. “See those n***ers over there,” she whispered. “Watch out. They’ll cut your ears off if they ever hear you call them n***er.” The sad thing is, I think my aunt was really trying to help me.

It was the first time I’d heard the “N” word, and taking her teaching as Gospel truth, I solemnly promised never to use that word. For so many years I took it as the literal truth. My aunt’s anxiety was transmitted to me, but here’s the funny part: I couldn’t distinguish those people on the sidewalk from anyone else. I remember being so confused.

My racist education continued in the small rural town where I grew up. I don’t remember anyone slinging racial slurs in the elementary school, but maybe the subject of race never came up because the school was completely 100% bona fide white. My first experience meeting and speaking to a minority came when I reached high school in the late 1960s and was surprised to find four or five African-American students there. During that time, the news on TV was filled with stories about race riots in cities across the country, including nearby East St. Louis. I wondered (a bit indignantly) why those Negroes were so angry. After all, Lincoln had emancipated them, hadn’t he? The Negroes in our school seemed happy. Of course some of them seemed overly anxious to please and the rest just kept their heads down and mouths shut and worked on being invisible.

The African-American students at my high school never mentioned any reasons for discontent, and our teachers were completely silent about race issues. The rumor that Dr. Martin Luther King was a Communist made its way into discussions among students and around the family dinner table. And when he was assassinated, while we didn’t rejoice, we were relieved he wouldn’t be able to spread violence and his evil doctrines any more. I managed to graduate from high school and get on with adult life without ever once hearing anything about Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, “separate, but equal” or any of the other abominations the black community suffered through.

It wasn’t until I went to college that my ignorance began to be chipped away by the power of the written word. I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of using primary sources when I read Martin Luther King’s “Letters from a Birmingham Jail.” With no trumped up rumors and slanted newscasts between the writer and the reader, the truth came shining through on the page. I was astounded by his logic and moved to tears by his eloquence and gentleness. I decided that if he was a Communist, then I was an astronaut.

(Listen to a dramatic reading of Letters from a Birmingham Jail.)

Later my brain was exercised with the biographies of Frederick Douglas, George Washington Carver, and Booker T. Washington. Other books in the curriculum for this white woman’s continuing education were To Kill a Mockingbird and Black Like Me and Growing up Black and The Emancipation of Robert Sadler and Dick Gregory’s autobiography Nigger and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The written word had made a powerful impact on my thinking, and I took that lesson into the classroom when I became an English teacher at other small rural, all white schools. I wish I could report that my students were much more sophisticated in their thinking than I had been at that age. The majority of them probably were, but I’m sad to say that in virtually every class that I taught To Kill a Mockingbird and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, (much less mentioned Black History Month) two questions inevitably would be raised by students:

1. Why do we have to learn this? After all we don’t have any African-American students at our school.

2. Aren’t we the ones being discriminated against now, and isn’t everything hunky dory for Blacks now?

Their attitude caused me to shed a tear or two, but also to be reminded of how much my own sinfulness causes God to sorrow. But like Martin Luther King,

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

In other words, I long for the day when all God’s children will be freed from the bondage of ignorance and sin. On that day, we’ll be past all the striving and--with equal access—turn our attention to where it should have been all along, on God's glory.




Deborah Heal is the author of the Time and Again virtual time travel mystery series, which has been described as “Back to the Future meets virtual reality with a dash of Seventh Heaven thrown in.” She was born not far from the setting of her book Every Hill and Mountain and grew up “just down the road” from the setting of Time and Again and Unclaimed Legacy. Today she lives with her husband in Waterloo, Illinois, where she enjoys reading, gardening, and learning about regional history. She has three grown children, three grandchildren, and two canine buddies Digger and Scout. She loves to interact with her readers, who may learn more about the history behind the books at her Website , Twitter, and Facebook.


These are her literary babies. She's expecting another in the spring of 2014.  

When Rejected, Remember Isaac Newton!

I am astounded. I actually have something in common with Sir Isaac Newton. If you’re a writer, maybe you do, too.

Awhileback, I mentioned that I had finally finished a draft of a novel involving time travel. Partially because of that, I’ve been attempting to learn more about the scientific view of time—including theories as to whether time travel might actually be possible.  After much study, I have come to my own conclusion that it is not possible…for me to comprehend physics.

As to whether time travel is possible, I have no idea. I don’t understand a word the physics writers are saying, no matter how basic they get. In fact, I even resorted to Gary Moring’s The Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Einstein. You guessed it. I can’t understand it.

Occasionally, though, Moring includes a few historical or biographical tidbits, at which point I feel very reassured that I can at least still read.

One of these asides was about Sir Isaac Newton and his book, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, also known as Principia.  Moring said, “Most physicists agree that this work by Isaac Newton is the single most significant book ever written about physics. In Principia, Newton brought together the knowledge about physics that had been discovered so far and expanded it. He combined and synthesized ideas that would remain unchanged for almost 300 years. Even then, the alterations made to his theories would be minimal” (p. 45).

For me, this wasn’t the most amazing part. What surprised and encouraged me was this: “Newton decided to publish his first work in the area of optics. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very well received by his fellow scientists. He became very depressed and was reluctant to publish anything else. If his friend Edmond Halley hadn’t intervened, the Principia would never have been written. Even so, it took Newton 20 years to put all his notes together and get the book published” (p. 45).

If you’re a writer, I’m betting you can identify with some part of this. Becoming dejected after rejection—or you’ve finally gotten published and those Amazon reviewers just aren’t kind. Taking years and years even to manage to write anything. Wondering all the while why you’re bothering, because no one is going to care, anyway.

And the importance of friends! I started to list the friends and family members who have gotten me going again when I've decided to throw in the towel, but the list was growing quite lengthy, and I was afraid I would leave someone out. If you're reading this post, you're probably one of them. I can never thank you enough!

Somehow I find it encouraging that even a genius who had so much to give the world could go through the same discouragement we all do. Our day is coming!

A Strange Thing About Time

Time is an odd thing. At least for me. I've heard it said that the job will always expand to fill the time you have, and I've found that to be true. Give me a deadline in about an hour and I'll do amazing things. Give me a two-paragraph letter to write and eight hours to do it--and it will somehow take eight hours. No more, no less.

Apparently I need structure. Or pressure. You know, all those things I rebel against and hate.
I had all those wonderful days off from work and basically accomplished nothing. I'm on my third day back to the old grind, and I've accomplished more than in my entire vacation.

But it's reassuring to know what God can accomplish through me even when I think there isn't enough. Not enough time, not enough energy, not enough money. But he multiplies it all and makes it come out right somehow.

Maybe that was the problem with all that vacation time, anyway. When I think I have plenty of time I just rely on me and my disastrous organizational skills. The results aren't pretty. But when I'm squeezed and under pressure, I have to go to God. Works out much better, doesn't it?

Time Flies When You're Reading About Time

I hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend. Mine was excellent, although not terribly productive. But hey, it was a holiday weekend, right? Surely those don't have to be productive.

I did manage to crack a few books as research for my work in progress. At this point, I have to digress and put in yet another plug for libraries. A few weeks ago, I came across a book on amazon.com that I really wanted to look at for my current manuscript. I'd had an idea of someone using insulin in an attempted murder, but I needed some ideas on how this might be done. Lo and behold, I found a book called The Insulin Murders, a historical overview of cases in which insulin was used as a weapon. I really didn't want to spend $30 on it, however, especially when it might not really help, or might not be what I thought. I looked it up in Worldcat and found it was only in about five libraries in the U.S. I hesitated putting in an interlibrary loan request for it where I work since a) I wondered if this would be too much trouble and b) you hate to ask at work for a book about murders and how they're committed. People might start looking at you funny and avoiding you.

Actually, though, our interlibrary loan guru didn't bat an eye. So let me reassure you--interlibrary loan folks have seen it all. Don't hesitate to ask. She also got my book for me within a few days, all the way from Vermont.

Next, I've mentioned being interested in time travel--again, for a story I'm working on. The other day it suddenly occurred to me to wonder if there were any serious scientific books about the possibility of time travel. Turns out there are quite a few. I ordered a couple of them through our library and they came just in time for the long weekend.

So I spent some time over the weekend reading about...time. I discovered one basic fact. The concept of time is a lot bigger than my brain. I think the side of the brain that does physics is completely dormant in me. It may actually give off no measurable brain waves.

I also came away with a sort of awe and wonder of how big our universe is. Turns out, there are more dimensions of space and time out there than we can imagine. And just think, God is not only big enough to imagine it all, He created it all.

I'll probably be telling you more on this subject. It's fascinating stuff. I think. Assuming I understood any of it.

Books I'm reading about time and time travel:

Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel through Time, by J. Richard Gott III

Enchanted Paths and Magic Words: The Quantum Mind and Time Travel in Science and in Literary Myth, by E. C. Barksdale

What God Knows: Time and the Question of Divine Knowledge, edited by Harry Lee Poe and J. Stanley Mattson