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Courtesy Deborah Bedford

Deborah Bedford's 94-year-old grandmother is not sure what she thinks of Deborah's latest romance novel, If I Had You. It's not one of the conventional romances Deborah used to write, containing saucy sex scenes between unmarried characters. This romance novel reflects Deborah's Christian faith, and it confronts the explosive issue of abortion.

Deborah's grandmother read If I Had You, but she tucked it under her pillow, where friends and staff at her retirement home aren't likely to stumble across it. Deborah was surprised to hear this, but she understands. She's felt a similar nervousness about the book, especially when she introduced it to 500 booksellers at a trade show last year.

She remembers waiting with a stomach full of butterflies and praying, "God, tell me what to say." In answer to that prayer she felt peace and calm when she addressed the booksellers. "I'm not a preacher," she said. "I'm not a speaker, but I wrote this book because I had an abortion and I want to share how God healed me."

Moments like this one, butterflies and all, are why Deborah left a 12-year career writing novels for Harlequin Romances—her bestselling books appeared in 15 countries and a dozen languages—and chose the niche market of fiction centered on Christian faith.

Starting over
Her inspiration to make the change came during a sermon preached at her church in Jackson, Wyoming. "My pastor gave a sermon on 2 Samuel 23. He made this one point about this one guy that went over my head and then another point about another guy that also went Whoosh! over my head," she says. Then he mentioned Shammah "and how he stood in the middle of a field of lentils and fought the Philistines and not one lentil was harmed. I knew writing books that had [premarital] sex in them was giving away lentils in the Lord's battlefield."

If I Had You by Deborah Bedford Warner Faith, 2004 304 pp. $10.36

Harlequin was not interested in publishing Christian romances at the time, so she took a leap of faith, left her agent and her publisher, and began reinventing herself in the tradition of Christian writers. "When I was making this change, I would go to Barnes & Noble and sit on the bottom row, where the religious books were, and pull out all the authors that were really well known and loved in both markets—C. S. Lewis, Catherine Marshall, and Madeleine L'Engle—and I have this memory of myself just sitting with these books around me." She laughs a little as she describes her initial thoughts on breaking into the market. "I thought, These little Christian publishers are going to just snatch me up," she recalls. "After all, I knew my way around the business."

But Christian publishers weren't snatching her up. Perhaps they were thrown off by her history in secular publishing, perhaps they questioned her convictions or marketability, but they steered clear of offering her a contract. "When they rejected me, it was like God was saying, 'Do you really want to write for me?'" she says. Deborah answered Him with a prayerful "Yes." She continued to submit scripts and to court agents, all the while living on her credit cards and praying for Christian publishers to open their hearts to her work.

Three years passed without her selling a novel—one of her stories appeared in a compendium called The Story Jar (Multnomah, 2001)—and she was questioning her career change. Then publisher Jamie Raab of Warner Books told Deborah that Warner was planning a new Christian imprint and invited her to become part of it. "I knew God had a special place for me right there at Warner," she says.

Her writing has thrived since then. "It's wonderful writing for Warner," Deborah says. "So many of the letters I've gotten say, 'This is the first Christian book I have ever read and I want to read more like it.' And I'm getting so many letters, maybe ten times as many as I got before."

Paul writes in Romans 5 that "suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope." This truth is evident in the story of Deborah's personal and literary conversion.

This change is giving her a chance to literally rewrite her own history. She's currently acquiring the rights to her previously published novels and writing a "redeemed version" of each. In addition to making cultural updates (on fashion, language, the advent of cell phones), she will revise other passages to reflect her new understanding of living out her faith. "Sex is out and God is in," she says.

Nudging readers toward God
So far, her faith-based rewrites are working well. She says deleting scenes that don't honor her Christian beliefs and replacing them with depictions that celebrate her new values is "almost like using interchangeable Legos."

Bearing witness to faith is the crux of Deborah's latest work, If I Had You. The novel tucked under her grandmother's pillow at the nursing home is a story of hope and healing and a testimony to the power of God's love and the work of the Holy Spirit. She offers her readers a melding of the lessons gleaned from her personal experience with abortion, faith, and the healing power of God's love. Through this work she explores her faith, and hopes to nudge others toward finding God's peace.

The novel also prompted conversations with her mother and her grandmother about Deborah's abortion, the healing she's experienced, and her choice to go public with her story. "My mom and my grandmother have talked about it now," she says. "It's been a beautiful thing."

Sarah Sawyer is a Minneapolis-based culture writer and arts critic. For more information on Deborah Bedford, visit www.deborahbedfordbooks.com.

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