Participation Matters by Liz Flaherty

"The small towns I write, I realize, are the ones where every kid gets a trophy because participation matters. Where everyone is important. Where 'love thy neighbor' doesn't depend on race or gender or income or who you voted for."

I wrote that a few years ago. I was glad to find it this morning, because it served as a reminder of why periodic avowal of "this is my last book" doesn't really mean anything. 

I'm pretty sure I'll always write, even if I discover I really don't have any more books in me. Because I still see scenes both in real life and in my mind that I want to write down before I forget them. 

This weekend, all of our kids and a few of our grandkids were here. We had our first extremely successful meeting with JP, our first and only great-grandson. Ten of us went for breakfast together at a local restaurant, laughing and remembering, taking bites of my daughter-in-law's cinnamon roll pancake, and drinking a lot of coffee. 

It's a hard time for our family, the kind of year that all families have at some point. But that paragraph at the top, believing it and trying to live it, writing its meaning into books, sitting at a table with nine people I love with all my heart ... those things are so rich, so life-giving, that I'm not going to declare anything as the last. I will participate until I can't anymore, and celebrate the trophy that life has been. 

Blessings to everyone.

Pastor Cari Newland’s life is stuck in the middle.

Her friends and parishioners at Harper Loch are mostly older than her thirty-three years… or they’re younger. While she likes being a single minister, she would also like to meet someone who sees her as someone besides “Preach.”
She gets hugged a lot, she realizes, but she never gets held. She’s never been the daughter her parents wanted or the woman her long-ago fiancé needed. Her life is good, but it’s lonely.

Enter handsome navy pilot Zack Grant. Visiting his parents at the lake, he attends a wedding Cari officiates. They talk and they dance and they are … interested. But Zack’s life is a thousand miles away and Cari’s life is firmly in Harper Loch. When interested begins to grow into something more, Cari and Zack must decide how to fit into each other’s world and whether or not they can make a long-distance romance work.

But Cari’s life is in the small lake community in Michigan. Zack’s is in the Florida Panhandle. And neither of them has any intention of changing locations.

Buy links:
Amazon: https://a.co/d/0dKnw8fA
D2D: https://books2read.com/u/3RRAgL