Thank you for all the kind comments about the beautiful cover of my new book, Guarded by Christ: Knowing the God Who Rescues and Keeps Us. I absolutely love it, and it’s a sweet gesture that God sees me and knows about my whole life. And He doesn’t waste anything.
Let me explain the coolest thing! The first cover design Moody sent me was stunning; they captured a forest of aspen trees to symbolize our strength in God’s guarding care (since aspen trees have a nearly indestructible root system among other wonderful facts). I was happy! It was a beautiful cover.
But my editor wondered if something wasn’t quite right about it, so the team tried again, this time focusing more on how much my book talks about God as our guarding fortress as described throughout so many psalms.
So the team sent this new design, but they weren’t sure I would know what it was or what it meant. I laughed when I realized it was Tintern Abbey in Wales, the very abbey I studied in my graduate school days of earning my PhD in Romanticism. I studied William Wordsworth–the very poet who wrote so famously about this same abbey staring at me from my cover. The poem “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” meant so much to me for so many years. One of the design team members even asked, “Have you ever heard of that poem?” Ha! Yes! Yes, I have!
It felt like a little wink from heaven! And now, all those years later, I’m talking about that poem and that abbey again.
I remember that God knows what we love and what will delight us, and He also knows how to bring back things we thought were now wasted or long gone.