Mind Soul Ink Paper (and Other Essays On Faith, Reading, and Writing)
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About this ebook
In this collection of essays, author Rachel Starr Thomson delves into the heart of writing and reading as a Christian. Thought-provoking and delightful, Mind Soul Ink Paper includes some of Rachel's most popular and eclectic work.
Highlights include "Hero Hunting," "Paint the Light," and "Beauty and the Beast," which explore the influence of writers like George MacDonald and Tolkien while sounding a call for Christian fiction that is vibrant and beautiful. "Fire Words" examines the written work of famous 19th-century missionary Amy Carmichael, ending with a paragraph that sums up the thrust of Thomson's work as well:
"It is the eternal in books that makes them our friends and teachers—the paragraphs, the verses, that grip memory and ring down the years like bells, or call like bugles, or sound like trumpets; words of vision that open to us undying things and fix our eyes on them."
Other essays collected here include "Mind Soul Ink Paper," "Living the Past," and "Our Father."
Rachel Starr Thomson
Rachel Starr Thomson is in love with Jesus and convinced the gospel will change the world. Rachel is a woman of many talents and even more interests: she’s a writer, editor, indie publisher, singer, speaker, Bible study teacher, and world traveler. The author of the Seventh World Trilogy, The Oneness Cycle, and many other books, she also tours North America and other parts of the world as a speaker and spoken-word artist with 1:11 Ministries. Adventures in the Kingdom launched in 2015 as a way to bring together Rachel’s explorations, in fiction and nonfiction, of what it means to live all of life in the kingdom of God. Rachel lives in the beautiful Niagara Region of southern Ontario, just down the river from the Falls. She drinks far too much coffee and tea, daydreams of visiting Florida all winter, and hikes the Bruce Trail when she gets a few minutes. A homeschool graduate from a highly creative and entrepreneurial family, she believes we’d all be much better off if we pitched our television sets out the nearest window. LIFE AND WORK (BRIEFLY) Rachel began writing on scrap paper sometime around grade 1. Her stories revolved around jungle animals and sometimes pirates (they were actual rats . . . she doesn’t remember if the pun was intended). Back then she also illustrated her own work, a habit she left behind with the scrap paper. Rachel’s first novel, a humorous romp called Theodore Pharris Saves the Universe, was written when she was 13, followed within a year by the more serious adventure story Reap the Whirlwind. Around that time, she had a life-changing encounter with God. The next several years were spent getting to know God, developing a new love for the Scriptures, and discovering a passion for ministry through working with a local ministry with international reach, Sommer Haven Ranch International. Although Rachel was raised in a strong Christian home, where discipleship was as much a part of homeschooling as academics, these years were pivotal in making her faith her own. At age 17, Rachel started writing again, this time penning the essays that became Letters to a Samuel Generation and Heart to Heart: Meeting With God in the Lord’s Prayer. In 2001, Rachel returned to fiction, writing what would become her bestselling novel and then a bestselling series–Worlds Unseen, book 1 of The Seventh World Trilogy. A classic fantasy adventure marked by Rachel’s lyrical style, Worlds Unseen encapsulates much of what makes Rachel’s writing unique: fantasy settings with one foot in the real world; adventure stories that explore depths of spiritual truth; and a knack for opening readers’ eyes anew to the beauty of their own world–and of themselves. In 2003, Rachel began freelance editing, a side job that soon blossomed into a full-time career. Four years later, in 2007, she co-founded Soli Deo Gloria Ballet with Carolyn Currey, an arts ministry that in 2015 would be renamed as 1:11 Ministries. To a team of dancers and singers, Rachel brought the power of words, writing and delivering original narrations, spoken-word poetry, and songs for over a dozen productions. The team has ministered coast-to-coast in Canada as well as in the United States and internationally. Rachel began publishing her own work under the auspices of Little Dozen Press in 2007, but it was in 2011, with the e-book revolution in full swing, that writing became a true priority again. Since that time Rachel has published many of her older never-published titles and written two new fiction series, The Oneness Cycle and The Prophet Trilogy. Over 30 of Rachel’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction works are now available in digital editions. Many are available in paperback as well, with more released regularly. The God she fell in love with as a teenager has remained the focus of Rachel’s life, work, and speaking.
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Mind Soul Ink Paper (and Other Essays On Faith, Reading, and Writing) - Rachel Starr Thomson
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Introduction
AS A LIFELONG READER and lover of words, I’ve always taken pleasure in the thought that God wrote a book—that his word to us has come through the written word and that he has used writers to communicate to us through history, poetry, parable, and prophecy. My own life has been so shaped through literature, not only that of the Bible but also that of many others, fiction and nonfiction, weighty and seemingly trivial, that I’m aware of an enormous debt to the power of reading and writing.
The essays in this book express some of that debt, along with some of the thoughts and principles that have shaped my own vocation to writing. Whatever your relationship to the written word, I hope you find here something to delight in.
Rachel Starr Thomson, 2012
Fire Words
THE 19TH-CENTURY POET Thomas Gray defined literature as Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
A more prosaic definition might say that literature is a work of letters that explores the human condition, that endures because it puts form to something we all feel.
Thomas Gray’s definition made me think of a poem by another 19th century poet, this one better known for her work as a missionary: Amy Carmichael, who wrote of words shaped by a lifetime of experience with the Consuming Fire of God. O God, my words are cold,
the poem begins, and a voice answers:
Thou shalt have words
But at this cost, that thou must first be burnt
Not otherwise, and by no lighter touch,
Are fire-words wrought.*
A voracious reader all my life and a more discerning one now, I’ve seen a lot of literature that explores romance, loss, pain, beauty. But rarely have I found words that burn
when they speak of God and relationship with Him. This part of being human — this walking with the ancient Spirit who once hovered over the deep — this, it seems, is hard to capture in words.
When I was 8, my father read Nancy Robbins’s God’s Madcap: The Story of Amy Carmichael out loud to us. Amy’s biography, which had secret visits to Hindu temples, ranked up there in my childhood imagination with Mary Slessor’s, which had cannibals. But God’s Madcap didn’t mention Amy’s writing — at least, not in a way that made any impression on an 8-year-old — and it wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I learned that Amy had ever wielded a pen.
Wield it she did. Amy was a writer’s writer. Extremely literate and well-read, she wrote poems, letters, songs, biographies and devotionals. Her earliest books, including the influential Things As They Are, told missionary stories and illuminated the needs of India. After a bad fall in 1931 left her bedridden almost continually until her death 20 years later, writing became her major outlet. She wrote fire-words. Amy wrote in Dust of Gold, the newsletter for her ministry, Dohnavur Fellowship, Pray that every book, booklet, letter that goes out from this Fellowship may have blood and iron in it.
By the time she died Amy had written 35 books and been translated into 15 languages, seven European and eight Asiatic. Her books went through multiple printings. Among those touched by Amy’s writing was Lady Brenda Blanch, wife of Stuart Blanch, Archbishop of