Fragments of an interview with Francine Rivers

Can you tell us something about your Christian testimony? 

... I thought being born into a Christian family and raised in the faith made me a Christian.  It didn’t.  Each person makes their own choice, and it took me years to surrender to Jesus – not until after I’d gone through college, married, had children and started a writing career... Having control is an illusion.   As a child, I’d asked Jesus to be my Savior.  What I didn’t understand is I needed to surrender my life to Him and allow Him to be LORD of my life as well....

Studying the Bible changed our lives.  Our hearts and minds opened to Christ.  We both accepted Jesus as Savior and LORD and were baptized in May 1986.  Since then, God has been changing our lives from the inside out.   The Lord also healed our marriage.  We celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary this year.  

Tell us about your God box and how it inspired you to write this story.

Before I started writing Redeeming Love, when I was still rather new at loving God with my whole heart, I had been a secretary at one point, and regularly used an inbox and outbox. I got the idea to start using what I called a God Box—an inbox for God. I would write out prayers and put the papers into the God Box. This practice helped me to let go of the issues, to put them into God's hands by physically putting them into the box. Every few months I would read the papers and marvel at how God had answered the prayers, often in unexpected ways.

I also put into the God Box things like the Angel Tree Project ornaments, or the ornaments from the Salvation Army tree. I'd never know those children or what happened to them, but putting the ornaments into the box was a way to give them to the Lord and trusting them to his care.

When I was asked to write a short story for the Angel Tree Foundation, I wasn't sure I could do it. I had never written a children's story before. One afternoon the story came to me, based on the practice of the God Box. I wrote The Shoe Box in one afternoon—it just flowed out, and I knew exactly what I needed to say. That's the only time a story came so easily!