'I Could Hear God': Christian Author Karen Kingsbury Once Planned to Disprove Biblical Truth but a Message From the Lord Changed Everything
Beloved Christian novelist Karen Kingsbury has inspired and enthralled readers for decades, selling tens of millions of copies of her celebrated books.
Kingsbury, whose upcoming TV series "A Thousand Tomorrows" will premiere on Feb. 24 on Pure Flix [http://www.pureflix.com], has increasingly been adding to her literary prowess to tell powerful stories through movies and shows.
"'A Thousand Tomorrows' is a standalone book. It was one of my favorites that ... I wrote a number of years ago," the author told CBN's Faithwire and "The Prodigal Stories Podcast." "It is about an angry bull rider and a sick barrel racer, and a love story that really never should have happened."
In addition to Kingsbury's current projects, she also spoke about her faith journey, explaining how she grew up in a "great family," but didn't attend church as a child or engage much with Scripture.
"We didn't really go to church very often, I'd never opened a bible, did not have a relationship with Jesus," she said.
But things changed as a young adult when Kingsbury met Don Russell while working out at the gym. She was instantly intrigued, recalling how he was a clean-cut guy who didn't party — something she found to be quite rare at the time.
After they met and chatted, Russell asked her a question that seemed pretty surprising.
"[He said, 'I] was wondering if I could please bring a Bible to our date ... we could like read the Bible first,'" Kingsbury recalled. "And, I mean, honestly I thought, 'That's the craziest thing I'd ever heard.'"
She reluctantly agreed and listened quite disinterestedly to the reading. Over the following months, Russell kept bringing that Bible along and starting spiritual conversations with Kingsbury — but her response remained pretty tepid.
"I was like, really, this is just exhausting ... I felt uneasy," she said, noting how she now believes this awkwardness was the conviction of the Holy Spirit. "After three months, we had this big fight about it."
Kingsbury told Russell she was done going over Scripture with him — and then she did something pretty shocking: she tossed the Bible on the ground.
"There was this day, this sunny afternoon — we were standing outside his car looking at the Bible, and I just took his highlighted, precious Bible and I threw it on the ground," she said. "And ... the binding actually split ... we just kind of both were frozen."
Russell picked up the pieces of his Bible and drove off, but Kingsbury, undissuaded, found herself with a new mission in mind: proving her way of living was just as good as Russell's biblically-minded existence.
"I thought, 'You know, I'm going to prove to him that my man-made ways of thinking ... my way of life was ... the right way," she said. "So, I thought, 'I need to go get a Bible so I can argue with him and debate this. I need to understand what it is.'"
Kingsbury went to a Christian bookstore, bought a Bible and a Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, and dove right in; what she discovered sent shockwaves through her heart and mind.
"I began to read, and it was speaking straight to my heart," she explained. "And I could hear God say, 'Karen, you have a choice. This is a crossroads in your life. You can either hold onto your man-made ways, and you can fall apart with them, or you can grab onto my word and never let go.'"
Kingsbury chose to cling to the Lord, Russell forgave her, and the rest is, well, history.
