A completed project

As many of my regular readers know, I take on a writing project every spring.  Sometimes I start it in late winter, but it always needs to be finished around the end of May.  The project is a summer devotional book for the sailors in our church's Patch the Pirate Club.  It has a daily devotional page for each day of the summer, plus coloring pages, word searches, recipes, crafts, and sometimes even a science experiment or two.  Oh, and a memory verse for each month.

This all came about because the club material provides daily devotionals -- "Sailor's Logs" -- for the school year when the club is in session, but nothing for the summer.  Long ago our club leaders at the time decided that if daily devotions are important for kids during the school year, they are important in the summer too.  I agreed to try my hand at writing a devotional book -- and the rest, as they say, is history.

I've written enough of these by now that I can just re-use some of my older manuscripts.  (This one, with an Adirondacks/outdoor theme, is from 2008, so you see the kids who will be using it will find it all new material.)  However, sometimes -- like this year -- the way the dates fall for the ending of Patch the Pirate Club for the summer, and the starting up of the club again in September, I find myself adding a few pages.  This year I added eleven pages: ten daily devotional pages, plus an additional craft.  It's always a challenge to come up with material that's interesting and fresh and will hopefully be applicable to the kids' lives.  Always a blessing, too, though!

And what a great feeling of accomplishment to have finished the writing, to pick up the books from the print shop, and then eventually see them in the hands of the children.  I'm so thankful for the strength and encouragement God gave me all along the way.