The word odyssey is often defined as an extended adventure, or as an intellectual or spiritual quest. I often wonder where my quest began. Or why I was moved to write a book set in Gypsy Spain. I’m sure God knew. He just wasn’t giving me all the details.
And I, given the nature of my personality, didn’t need to know. I’m a fiction writer. For more hours than I care to admit, I live in a fictional world. Anything is possible. I see stories that other people don’t, or aren’t compelled to see. But my novel Azahar (orange blossom in Spanish) did not start as a story; it started as an experience. I first traveled to Spain as a wide-eyed-twenty-two-year-old anxious to see the world. I didn’t know anything about Spanish Gypsies then. All I knew was, as Jeff Goins says on his blog Pilgrimage of the Heart, “they were the kind of people the travel agencies warned you about.” (check out Jeff’s encounter with Gypsies on his blog jeffgoins.myadventures.org. It’s a great story). I heard similar warnings repeated by Spaniards. “Be careful around the Gypsies; they’re cheats, liars, and thieves. Maybe. I suppose some of them were. But when several Spaniards started confusing my friend from India with a Gypsy, and treating him accordingly, a story formed in me. That man from India is now my husband, and the confusion his ethnicity caused eventually inspired a novel.
Twenty-six years later, that novel finally germinated. But, I knew that in order to do justice to subject I was writing about, I had to return to Spain. And this time, I had to meet and get to know the people whose culture I was writing about. The only problem was, I knew that most of the Gypsies in Seville lived in poor, dangerous sectors of the city. My husband knew that too. The only way I was going to convince both my husband and my pastor that I would be safe in these marginalized areas was by connecting with a Christian church that had ministries in the Gypsy community. Well, to make a long story short, I ended up in a Pentecostal Gypsy church called Dios Con Nosotros (God With Us), in one of the most sordid sectors of the city (Las Tres Mil Viviendas). And the day I arrived, Pastor Pepe clearly told me that God had not brought me into his church for my book, but for a very different purpose.
And so it would seem. God transformed my life through my experience with this group of evangelical Gypsies, and convicted me to share the power and wonder of that experience with other Christians who are faithfully following Him – wherever that may be.
Keep coming to The White Tent and experience the richness of what God can do when he chooses to transform a life.
And I, given the nature of my personality, didn’t need to know. I’m a fiction writer. For more hours than I care to admit, I live in a fictional world. Anything is possible. I see stories that other people don’t, or aren’t compelled to see. But my novel Azahar (orange blossom in Spanish) did not start as a story; it started as an experience. I first traveled to Spain as a wide-eyed-twenty-two-year-old anxious to see the world. I didn’t know anything about Spanish Gypsies then. All I knew was, as Jeff Goins says on his blog Pilgrimage of the Heart, “they were the kind of people the travel agencies warned you about.” (check out Jeff’s encounter with Gypsies on his blog jeffgoins.myadventures.org. It’s a great story). I heard similar warnings repeated by Spaniards. “Be careful around the Gypsies; they’re cheats, liars, and thieves. Maybe. I suppose some of them were. But when several Spaniards started confusing my friend from India with a Gypsy, and treating him accordingly, a story formed in me. That man from India is now my husband, and the confusion his ethnicity caused eventually inspired a novel.
Twenty-six years later, that novel finally germinated. But, I knew that in order to do justice to subject I was writing about, I had to return to Spain. And this time, I had to meet and get to know the people whose culture I was writing about. The only problem was, I knew that most of the Gypsies in Seville lived in poor, dangerous sectors of the city. My husband knew that too. The only way I was going to convince both my husband and my pastor that I would be safe in these marginalized areas was by connecting with a Christian church that had ministries in the Gypsy community. Well, to make a long story short, I ended up in a Pentecostal Gypsy church called Dios Con Nosotros (God With Us), in one of the most sordid sectors of the city (Las Tres Mil Viviendas). And the day I arrived, Pastor Pepe clearly told me that God had not brought me into his church for my book, but for a very different purpose.
And so it would seem. God transformed my life through my experience with this group of evangelical Gypsies, and convicted me to share the power and wonder of that experience with other Christians who are faithfully following Him – wherever that may be.
Keep coming to The White Tent and experience the richness of what God can do when he chooses to transform a life.
