Fiction Friday #12 - Forever With You

A few months ago, I wrote a Fiction Friday post about Robin Jones Gunn, and now you get another one about one of her books. She just released a new book called Forever With You at the beginning of June. I have been ridiculously excited to read this book ever since she announced she was writing it over a year ago.

Robin's first books were about a teenage girl name Christy Miller who moved to Southern California with her family and found a great group of God-lovers to do life with. The 12 books making up The Christy Miller series launched Robin's career as a writer and gave readers a well developed world to fall into when reading.

Robin continued to give readers a peak into Christy's life through her next series: The Sierra Jensen series, which tells the story of Sierra, a spunky young woman who is friends with Christy and her group. Then Robin picked up Christy's story again in college in her series Christy & Todd: The College Years and The Katie Weldon series, which were all about Christy's best friend Katie.

Over the years, Robin has written a number of books and series that fall outside of the worlds of Christy, Katie, and Sierra; but readers continue to love those characters and want more stories about them. I know this because I'm one of those readers who has always loved these characters and their stories! I spent a lot of time as a teenager enjoying those stories when I didn't have anything else to do with my life.

So you can imagine my excitement when Robin announced last year that she was working on a new series all about Christy and her friends!

I got the new book Forever With You in the mail last week but because of the craziness that was my life last week, I didn't get to read it until this week. It was worth the wait! I loved this book just as much, probably more, than all of Robin's other books because it picks up Christy's life when she's around my age, so it's fun to read about her and her friends going through some of the same life stuff that my friends and I are going through.

One of my favorite lines from the book was when Christy and Todd find themselves in a major transition time of their lives and Todd is talking about Moses' prayer from Psalm 90:1-2 which says, "Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God." In response to this verse, Todd says, "God is our dwelling place. Not an apartment, not a certain town. Not a particular spot on the globe...Our home is in God, with God. Wherever he leads us, that's home for us. He is with us."

I just sat here stunned for a moment when I read that. Lately, as I've been trying to figure out my next step in life and what's going to happen with grad school, I tend to stress out about what I'm doing and where I'm going to live. Reading both that verse and the line from the book helped me to take hold of a new perspective about where I am now and where I will be in the next few years. It doesn't really matter where I am, God will still be there guiding me, so I just need to focus on following him not planning out every detail of my life.

All in all, it was a great read and I cannot wait for the rest of the books in this series! Hopefully I won't have to wait too terribly long since the next book is scheduled to come out sometime this fall!