The Diamond Mine of Christian Fiction: The Mine Discovers More than Just a Book with Christine Lindsay (Giveaway)

Christine Lindsay

Please welcome Christine Lindsay to the Diamond Mine! She’s telling us all about her latest release, Finding Sarah, Finding Me. This is a special book for her and we’re going to find out why. I can’t wait! You can even win a copy of this great book…check out the giveaway at the end of the interview. Let’s get started!

Renee: Hello, Christine, welcome to the Diamond Mine, can you tell us how you came up with the idea for your book?

Christine: Thanks, Renee, I’m so happy to be here. I wanted to tell the true-life story of giving up my baby girl to adoption since the very day I relinquished her in 1979 and of our heart-breaking reunion 20 years later. But as time went by I wanted to tell not just my story, but other people’s adoption reunion stories as well so that the issues of adoption and reunion could be looked at from different angles. People are made up of such different emotional stuff. We can’t all be expected to feel the same in shared situations. I had to learn to respect the emotions of my daughter’s adoptive parents when their emotions were so vastly different from mine regarding the reunion. Everyone has a right to their emotions.

The Reunion

Renee: That sounds like a powerful topic and such a personal one. I can understand why you’d want to write it. How did you pick your title?

Christine: My working title for this book was originally Just Like Hannah because so many of the people in the book referred to their adoption experience—whether they were an adoptive mother or a woman who struggled with infertility, or me as a birth-mom—as “just like Hannah.”

But my publisher suggested the title Finding Sarah, Finding Me because that is the main theme of my personal story—finding my true identity in Christ while I was searching for a love relationship with the child I relinquished.

One other thing you might want to know about this book—100% of author royalties will be donated to the Mukti Mission in India. If you want to know the special reason for this, you’ll have to read the book.

Renee: Well that’s a teaser isn’t it, folks? LOL You have a very giving soul, Christine. On a more professional note, what’s easiest about writing for you?

Christine's daughter, Sarah

Christine: Strangely, I find it easy to be transparent in all I write and when I speak in public. Perhaps that’s because I had to live with a secret for so many years that I felt such freedom when that secret was revealed to the world. My secret was having a baby out of wedlock and keeping that secret for almost 20 years before I could even tell my kids that I later had with my husband. But that was the way things were done back then. I felt that I was living but people didn’t know the real me. I didn’t even know the real me.

So with that background as the inspiration for all I write, I find it easy to delve into those deep human issues and emotions that affect our lives and show us our great need for God.

Renee: Secrets can be destructive. They can cause a lot of pain. How long have you been writing and why did you start?

Christine: That’s a long-held secret for sure. That and my desperate need to tell others that I had another child. I wanted so badly to write that book about my reunion with my birth-daughter shortly after the reunion in 1999, and I completed that manuscript, but no doors to the publishing world opened at that time. That was when I felt the Lord urge me to put the spiritual and emotional healing I had received from my birth-mother experience into Christian fiction to hopefully help others.

That was the beginning of my Christian Fiction career. Then 16 years later, and after the publication of 6 successful novels, my publisher wanted to release my non-fiction book. Finding Sarah, Finding Me is a very different book from the one I wrote all those years earlier though. There was so much to learn, mostly about who I was in Christ and how He used my heartache to draw me to himself in a deeper love relationship.

Renee: How has your life changed over the years in other respects? Do you have any fun hobbies or activities you like to do?

Christine: I’m a grandmother of 5 grandsons, and just two days ago my first granddaughter was born. So I love to spend time entertaining my grown kids and their children. I love to make our home an oasis for our kids to come and relax, so I work on my garden and outside living area as well as making the house as cozy as I can. Cooking large family meals around the holidays and decorating too are what inspire me.

We know you’re a Christian, so I have a couple of quiz questions for you. If you were at a party, what would you do?

I like to meet new people and make them feel welcome. So I’ll go up to strangers and start a conversation, get them to tell me about themselves and their lives. It’s great to see people’s faces light up when someone takes an interest in them.

Oh, you’re bolder than me. I’m not as shy as I used to be, but it’s still hard for me to approach strangers. LOL Has God ever told you NOT to do something you wanted to do?

For sure. He definitely told me back in 2000 that I was not to publish my birth-mother story in a non-fiction format. He wanted me to wait on that book until He had taught me all the deep things of the heart about my daughter being someone else’s daughter. He wanted me to see the situation from their point of view, and that took time. It took time for the heartache to be healed so that I could see things from the Lord’s perspective, and thereby write that story the way He wanted it written.

Thanks for joining us at the Diamond Mine, Christine. It’s been a pleasure and I know your book will be a success!

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I hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know more about Christine Lindsay! She’s also offering a digital copy of her new book, Finding Sarah, Finding Me.

To Enter, simply ask her a question about the interview or leave a comment on the following:

Who taught you the love of God?

(Leave your name and email address with your comment or question to validate your entry. Minimum of five comments required. One winner will be selected by random draw on 9/21/2016)

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About Finding Sarah, Finding Me:

Sometimes it is only through giving up our hearts that we learn to trust the Lord.

Adoption. It’s something that touches one in three people today, a word that will conjure different emotions in those people touched by it. A word that might represent the greatest hope…the greatest question…the greatest sacrifice. But most of all, it’s a word that represents God’s immense love for his people.

Join birth mother Christine Lindsay as she shares the heartaches, hopes, and epiphanies of her journey to reunion with the daughter she gave up...and to understanding her true identity in Christ along the way.

Through her story and glimpses into the lives of other families in the adoption triad, readers will see the beauty of our broken families, broken hearts, and broken dreams when we entrust them to our loving God.

Amazon (Paper and Kindle)

Barnes and Noble

About Christine Lindsay:

Christine Lindsay is the author of multi-award-winning Christian fiction with complex emotional and psychological truth, who always promises a happy ending. Tales of her Irish ancestors who served in the British Cavalry in Colonial India inspired her multi-award-winning series Twilight of the British Raj, Book 1 Shadowed in Silk, Book 2 Captured by Moonlight, and explosive finale Veiled at Midnight.

Christine’s Irish wit and use of setting as a character is evident in her contemporary and historical romances Londonderry Dreaming and Sofi’s Bridge.

A busy writer and speaker, Christine, and her husband live on the west coast of Canada. Coming August 2016 is the release of her non-fiction book Finding Sarah—Finding Me: A Birthmother’s Story.