Cheryl Sloan Wray recalls several late nights when her two young daughters were asleep and her husband, Gary, was “sleeping right beside me while I was sitting in bed with my laptop computer e-mailing people in Singapore and China.”
E-mail was one of the ways Wray and her mother, Joanne Sloan, gathered information for “Faith Stories,” a devotional book recently published by Woman’s Missionary Union in Birmingham. The book contains 366 devotionals based on the lives of missionaries, both historical and contemporary, from a wide variety of denominations and parachurch organizations.
“Faith Stories” is the third book for the mother-daughter writing team, but it is their first devotional book. Sloan lives in Northport and is a member of First Baptist Church, Tuscaloosa. She, along with her husband David, a University of Alabama journalism professor, are the founders and directors of the Southern Christian Writers Conference.
Wray, who lives in Hueytown and is a member of First United Methodist church there, has written hundreds of magazine articles, as well as the two books she has co-authored with her mother and another book, “Writing for Magazines: A Beginner’s Guide.”
Although the concept for “Faith Stories” originated with Sloan, both women worked together, each writing 183 devotionals. Deciding on the division of writing responsibilities was no problem, the authors said.
Sloan, a Texas native, has a degree in English and history and has always enjoyed reading biographies of famous Christians, so she wrote the devotionals about historical missionaries. Wray was inspired by stories about contemporary career missionaries and others who have served in short-term missions work, so she enjoyed writing those devotionals.
Wray says gathering information from missionaries made every day exciting as she looked forward to receiving letters, e-mail messages and conducting telephone interviews. She used the Internet to locate directories of several denominations and organizations listing names and locations of missionaries. Friends and church acquaintances also supplied names and information about people who had served in short-term missions assignments.
Sloan accumulated numerous books while researching missionaries. Because accuracy was important, she sometimes read many resources about a particular missionary to verify information. She jokingly gives credit to her husband’s patience with the stacks of books that surrounded her desk for months.
Major editing
A major challenge, according to Sloan, was to narrow the information available into a limited number of words. “Sometimes I would write 600 words and have to hone it down to 250 words,” she said. Because so much information was available about historical figures such as Lottie Moon, William Carey and Hudson Taylor, she wrote more than one devotional about their lives.
Sloan recalls reacting emotionally to many of the stories and frequently weeping as she researched and wrote. Being touched by the stories is a natural response, though, she says, when reading about missionaries such as Eleanor Chestnut, a medical missionary to China, who performed surgeries in her bathroom and used skin grafts from her own body for her patients.
Although they want readers to appreciate the sacrifice and commitment of missionaries, they have another goal in mind for the book. According to Sloan, they would like readers of “Faith Stories” to be inspired to create their own “faith stories” by realizing every Christian is called to be on mission every day, regardless of place or circumstances.
The book is available through http://www.wmustore.com or by calling WMU at 1-800-968-7301. It is also available at LifeWay Christian Bookstores.
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