Welcome to the first Five Minute Friday link-up of February! This coming week is special to me because it’s the official launch week of my latest book, Longing for Home: 52 Devotional Reflections on the Hope of Heaven.

If you’re new to the FMF community, a special welcome to you! You can click here to learn more about the link-up and how it works.

In celebration of my new book . . .

This week’s FMF writing prompt is: LONGING

Setting my timer for five minutes, and . . . GO. 

Way back in 2010 (gosh that seems like a lifetime ago!), I started writing.

I was living in Cape Town with my busy pastor husband and our three young children, my mom was battling cancer in America, and I needed a distraction. I also discovered it helped me to process my emotions.

I started submitting articles to various websites and magazines, and soon had a handful of acceptances and published works under my belt.

Then my friend suggested that I start a blog, so I began to write even more regularly as I documented the weeks and months of bearing witness to my mom’s illness from afar.

As the months passed, and then even the years, I had quite a collection of work — eventually over 100 published articles in various publications online and in print.

I considered the primary themes that continued to show up in my work. As an American living in a foreign country and raising South African-born children, I found that much of my work revolved around the theme of home.

I decided to see what would happen if I collated some of those topics and angles into a larger collection on the topic of heaven as home.

Long story short, I abandoned that idea and turned the beginning of my efforts into a memoir, which eventually became A Place to Land: A Story of Longing and Belonging.

But all these years later, I returned to those original scribblings, revamped them, turned them into a devotional format, added several more entries, and voila! A new book. 🙂 (I wish it had been that easy . . .) 😉

The entries in this devotional reflect the repeated rhythms and longings of my heart.

I hope they will be a blessing to you as we continue this Homeward journey.

STOP.

Introducing

Longing for Home: 52 Devotional Reflections on the Hope of Heaven

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE BOOK HERE

Affiliate links used in this post; thank you in advance for your support!

I’m so thankful for each of the endorsements I received for this book, including this one from Brenda Yoder:

And it’s been so fun to see some early reviews come through already, like this one from Joyce:

I hope and pray this book serves you well!

xx Kate

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Join us with your own five-minute freewrite on the prompt, LONGING, below, then visit your link-up neighbor to read their post and leave an encouraging comment: