To Know You (9781401688684)
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5. Destiny was raised in a Christian home with conservative values, yet she felt rejected when her boyfriend Luke “discovered Jesus” and then chose not to have sex with her until marriage. Why do some people (women and men) assume sex should come along with a committed dating relationship? Is following God’s plan for our sexuality a burden or a blessing (or both)?
6. When we first meet Chloe, she seems to be a submissive wife who lives to serve God, her husband, and her medical research. However, we learn that she’s got one foot in the real world and another in a fantasy. How common do you think this is for women in particular? For men? What motivates a person to compartmentalize his or her sexual and emotional energies in such a way?
7. Chloe obviously paid a high price for her poor judgment with Rob Jones. Although this may be an extreme case, what other consequences may arise when we try to turn a fantasy into reality?
8. If you were her counselor, how would you suggest Chloe go about rebuilding her life and restoring Jack’s trust? Do you think it’s possible to rebuild spiritual and relational trust after such a fall? Why or why not?
9. How did you see God’s sovereignty, mercy, and unconditional love unfold through the development of the characters?
10. Was there a particular character in the story that you identified with? If so, were you challenged or inspired by the character in some way?
11. What are the risks of letting ourselves be fully known to those who love us? What are the risks of knowing them? How could it impact a person’s life and view of God to feel as if another human being knows them intimately, yet loves them completely?
12. What message do you hope other readers get from To Know You? What message was most valuable to you?
13. Does God holds our sexual sins against us more than other types of trespasses? (See Hebrews 4:15–16.)
14. When loved ones fall into inappropriate sexual or emotional entanglements, how should we respond? How would it impact our relationships if we showed as much grace, mercy, and unconditional love to our friends and family members as God shows to us?
15. What might happen if we fully accepted God’s gift of forgiveness and chose to be as patient, kind, and loving with ourselves as God is with us?
Acknowledgments
Shannon and Kathryn:
Special thanks to Lee Hough and Joel Kneedler of Alive Communications for introducing the two of us. It’s been a match made in heaven! We also want to express our deep gratitude for the Thomas Nelson team of professionals who caught this vision, guided us ever so gently, and cheered us on fervently. Working with the editorial and marketing teams has been a privilege and a delight!
Shannon:
I’m incredibly thankful for my husband and all of my non-fiction readers who’ve asked for over a decade, “When will you ever write fiction?” You kept the storytelling dream alive in my heart long enough to see it come to fruition. Thanks to Robert McKee for teaching me just enough about fiction to know that I didn’t know enough. And finally but most importantly, to Kathy Mackel, whose perseverance, patience, and passion for this story was relentless. Your masterful creativity is what turned my lump-of-coal idea into a brilliant diamond.
Kathryn:
I am so grateful to my writers’ group for what feels like a lifetime of support and guidance, matched only by that of my husband’s loving care. A warm hug is due to my church brethren in Dunstable who, when they see me holed up in some dusty corner of our old New England church, know enough to simply pray God is there with me and my laptop. And of course, thank you to Shannon Ethridge for a vibrant and necessary ministry to women—young and old—and the men who love them.
An Excerpt from Veil of Secrets
Pizza runs.
Melanie Connors knew all about pizza runs. That’s why she had to fly to New Hampshire and find her daughter. She needed to make it clear to Sophie that there would be no more pizza runs.
She sat in stalled traffic on the Everett Turnpike, staring at a sea of brake lights. To her right, she could see the Merrimack River, laced with ice. The wind surged, rattling the windows of the rental car. Even with the heat blasting, frigid air snaked down Melanie’s back.
November was New Hampshire’s ugly secret. The brochures and agencies boasted about the state’s sparkling lakes, flaming autumns, and serene snows. No one talked about trees ripped raw and skies tarnished to soot.
The flight from Nashville had been poorly heated and blankets nowhere to be found. The wait for the shuttle bus was endless. By the time Melanie took possession of the SUV in Boston, her icy fingers could barely wrestle the key into the ignition.
It never should have come to this. Why couldn’t Will listen to reason?
She scrolled through her phone, clicked on Will’s private number. Did New Hampshire have a law against talking on the cell while driving? That didn’t matter, given that she’d moved ten feet in the last five minutes. The traffic was a monolith, staked to the highway like a dying beast, gasping in jerks and starts.
As chief of staff to Senator Dave Dawson, her husband carried two phones. His assistant carried at least two more. Will said his family was his priority, important enough to separate their calls from the staffers or the press.
Will answered on the first ring. “Hey, sweetheart. Can I call you back in a whi—”
“No.”
“No? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Will…” I’m here, she should say. I’m here and I can’t wait to see you. But she couldn’t get Sophie out of her mind. “You told me she’d only be in New Hampshire for two weeks.”
He sighed. “Babe. Not this again.”
The traffic bucked forward. “A couple weeks, Will. You said she’d only be in New Hampshire for two weeks.”
“What I said was ‘a short time.’ You put the two weeks tag on it. Honestly, Lanie. You’re a bit irrational about this.”
“What’s so irrational about wanting my daughter home?”
“You’ve seen her blog, the articles. And now she’s working with video. Her portfolio is going to wow any admissions officer. Sophie will have colleges begging. And the father-daughter time we get—priceless.” His voice softened. “I wish you were here with us. That’s my only regret of having Sophie here. That you’re not with us.”
Melanie tugged at her scarf, trying to release the sudden heat under her skin. Talk about irrational. Flying all the way from Nashville to wrest her daughter away from a loving father—who is deep in the weeds of a presidential campaign. “Is she going with you to the Sixty Minutes thing?”
“No, she’s at the phone center.”
“Doing what?”
“She’s working on a training video. And then she’ll sit with the kids and make some calls on Dave’s behalf.”
“Is that wise? Talking to strangers?”
“Like you did? How old were you when you started for your father—fourteen?”
“Sophie’s not like me.”
“She’s doing exactly what you did at her age, and what I did. Think about it—our little girl is campaigning for the best presidential candidate this country has seen in years.”
“Don’t play the patriotic card on me. I cherish Dave as deeply as you do, Will. But that doesn’t excuse you from not supervising Sophie. Is it wise to allow our daughter to go off on her own?”
Melanie rifled her fingernails on the steering wheel. When was this traffic going to move? She was so close to the exit for downtown Manchester—twenty cars at the most—and yet the distance might as well put her back in Tennessee.
“For Pete’s sake, she is not on her own. And she’s not a baby,” Will said. “Let me tell you, Lanie, she is definitely making an adultsized contribution to this campaign. She manages the literature better than the people we’re paying to do it. If something in the office or on the bus needs doing, she anticipates it and gets it done. Whatever your problem is with this, we’ll have to talk about later.”
“Pizza runs.”
>
He laughed. “What?”
“Sophie told me that she does pizza runs.”
“Bless her, on occasion she does pizza runs for us.”
“I don’t like you letting her drive in a place she’s not familiar with.”
“She knows all the roads, Lanie. She’s got an innate sense of direction.”
“She’s barely sixteen years old. She doesn’t have an innate sense of anything. Except adolescent foolishness.”
Melanie shivered at the thought of Sophie caught in this cold mass of steel and insane drivers. Her car running low on gas, a truck coming up behind her on the breakdown lane. She wouldn’t see the truck because she was too inexperienced to check the side view mirror and she gets out of the car and—
“Lanie, please. She’s a safe and very mature driver. You know that. And now I really need to go.”
He clicked off before she could tell him she was less than a mile away. And that she was going to sweep Sophie up, get her out of this foolishness and on the red-eye back to Nashville.
—she doesn’t see the truck and she gets out of the car—
“I will not get crazy,” she said to the rearview mirror. “I’ve exhausted all my crazy for the day.”
Inching now. Close enough to see the roof of the Radisson in the city center. Close enough to wrap her arms around Will and feel his heart beat and remind him about how tricky pizza runs can be.
You make four or five campaign stops in one day. You don’t dare drink the wine someone thrusts in your hand because you’re exhausted and might say something dangerous if you let down for a second. You can’t eat because everyone wants to talk to you because they can’t get to the candidate. You need to make them think you’ve promised them the world when you’d made no commitment whatsoever.
Even though your hunger makes you cranky and light-headed, you don’t dare hide in a corner and shovel something down fast. Everyone has seen the YouTube video of the governor who choked on a Buffalo wing and coughed it out with a chaser of vomit. You can save the economy and soothe the soul of a nation, but throwing up on camera can dump a candidate faster than a boatload of mistresses.
So you get back to the hotel around midnight, ready to chew the wallpaper. If you’re on a grassroots candidacy, guys like Will are working the phones until the West Coast donors are in bed. So some lower-level functionary grabs whoever is least essential and sends you to get the pizza because up here they only deliver on weekends, and don’t forget the gum and breath mints and No-Doz.
The run itself is a shared experience; exhausted laughter as you and a stray pal unravel the day and poke gentle fun at the chanting crowds or narrow-eyed reporters. You arrive back as a conquering hero, the bearer of half-cold pizza. The feast becomes a grand communal experience, cheese and crust the great equalizer of presidential hopeful and staffers and you, the kid who literally brought home the bacon. There’s no big world pressing down, no victories to be won, only the four walls of a hotel room that smells like pizza and beer and the popcorn that someone made in the microwave.
And sometimes, when you’re the one left cleaning up the mess, someone senior will stay and help. That intimate time of quick glances and spilled secrets fill the late-night vacuum of campaigns until the sun rises and caffeine bubbles and you’re climbing in the hamster wheel all over again.
“Stop it,” Melanie told herself. She scrolled her phone, found Will’s itinerary. They should be launching into the CBS interview right now. The spin–Dave Dawson, shoe-leather candidate. Going house-to-house because the campaign didn’t have Karl Rove or Dick Armey funding them.
Dave and Will were due in Concord in less than an hour for the next event. Before Melanie even got to the downtown exit, they would be heading north. They’d know to use the surface roads because that’s what grassroots was all about—shaking hands, driving the dirt roads, making people believe things could be better.
When Melanie worked for her father, she knew every back road in New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina. And she knew every 24-hour pizza joint.
Traffic had stopped again.
Melanie opened the passenger-side window and gave the driver next to her a pleading look. He shook his head and crept forward into the gap she coveted. Behind him, the UPS truck waved her into the lane. She nosed into the break-down lane, chiding herself because the ticket she was about to earn would cost a fortune and the rental car company would not be amused by their SUV getting towed.
Some things just had to take priority.
And primary on Melanie’s list had always been her daughters. She loved Destiny with her whole heart. But her eldest daughter’s wildness had taught Melanie to keep Sophie close.
She pulled onto the dirt shoulder and as close to the guard rail as she could. She grabbed the keys and her purse, retrieved her suitcase from the backseat, and started walking.
The story continues in Veil of Secrets by Shannon Ethridge and Kathryn Mackel, available July 2014
About the Authors
Shannon Ethridge is a best-selling author, international speaker, and certified life coach with a master’s degree in counseling/human relations from Liberty University. She has spoken to college students and adults since 1989 and is the author of twenty books, including the millioncopy best-selling Every Woman’s Battle series. She is a frequent guest on TV and radio programs, and she mentors aspiring writers and speakers through her online B.L.A.S.T Program (Building Leaders, Authors, Speakers & Teachers).
Kathy Mackel is the acclaimed author of Can of Worms and other novels for middle readers from Putnam, HarperCollins, and Dial. Her latest book, Boost, tackles the thorny issue of steroids and girls’ sports. Writing as Kathryn Mackel, she is the author of the YA fantasy series The Birthright Books and of supernatural thrillers including the Christy finalist The Hidden. She was the credited screenwriter for Disney’s Can of Worms and for Hangman’s Curse, and has worked for Disney, Fox, and Showtime.