When award-winning author Naomi Reed finished her last but one book, Time of Hope, which is, in her words, “a devotional book trying to capture this week of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation”, she felt indeed finished.
She added, “And I felt at the end of the year everything I ever thought, every insight or prayer I ever had was in the book.”
But the fact that Reed is speaking at the launch of Every Moment, Everywhere, her newest book, is a testament that after eleven great books telling stories of faith, including her own as a missionary in Nepal, there was indeed enough in her for a twelfth.
And Every Moment, Everywhere is an expansive book. After Time of Hope, Reed decided to take a break from book-length narratives and write short stories, actually testimonies.
And it is at this point, that I got to play a bit part in what happened next. She approached Eternity, a newspaper/website that I edited with a pitch to write several testimonies a week. And ,with the help of Penny Mulvey, now running Anglican Media Melbourne, Eternity and Bible Society took it on.
It was actually a no-brainer. Why not take on arguably the best Christian writer in Australia? So, after five years of collecting over 300 testimonies, Reed is still going. More of that later – there’s a plot twist to come.
We’re sitting in Springwood Presbyterian, launching the book where Reed was going to church when she began. “So I started to talk to people just immediately around us and then also got 38 stories also from other people in the Blue Mountain and in Penrith. So some of you are here today as well.” The room seems packed with people who have told their stories to Reed. Then, after a move to Oberon, the Central west of NSW and finally, tales from around the world became faith stories.
Acorn Press, also part of Bible Society, had hung back from publishing Reed’s faith stories as an anthology. That bothered Reed not a little.
But earlier this year, she sat down to re-read her 3000 Faith Stories. It took her a week. And patterns and insights began to emerge. She began to write reflections on what she was reading, drawing connections to what she had written over those five years. And then Every Moment, Everywhere became a book.
After 300 stories, Reed found there was no simple formula for how God brings people to himself. “We should never reduce what God can do and does today within us and around us throughout the world, throughout the decades in people bringing about transformation in Jesus.
“Joyce was actually one of my favourites, and she was 82, at the time. We were eating cucumber sandwiches, and she said to me, ‘Naomi, it is never too late to come to Jesus.’ But she told me that two years earlier, her husband died. She had three grown children, and they had all become Christians in their twenties, and they’ve gone into ministry. So, all three of them spent the next few decades inviting her to church. You can imagine she was bombarded with invitations. I became really good at resisting them.
“But then she said she was bad and lonely, but she went to the local knitting class, at the local church, where she was welcomed. People were kind. Over time, she said she slowly began to actually think something was missing in her life.. And so she asked one of her new friends how she could become Christian. And the new friends said, well, come to Jesus, pray to God, and be baptised. There was a group being baptised but she siad ‘none of that for me’. She went by herself to the local pool and she said, ‘I prayed to God. And the Holy Spirit zapped me.’ She suddenly felt completely complete incredible joy and freedom that she hadn’t felt before. And then she said to me, you will never believe what the Holy Spirit has done.”
Reading over the 300 stories, Reed did find patterns. An unravelling – life coming apart – in two-thirds of the stories, particularly for those coming to faith as adults. Friendship “Almost every single story, every single story of 300, a person just described a friend, a trusted person, a family member, someone who prayed or cared or sent food or made a quilt or invited a person to a gathering.” And a moment of realisation, when people knew it was true, that Jesus is real.
Reed recounted Louise’s story that had unravelling and friendship (well, a memory of friendship). “Louise, said that she grew up in a really hard life in Western Sydney. But she had neighbours on the other side of her, and they made a point leaning over the fence saying ‘hi’ and connected often. And then her life unravelled. Her mother died suddenly in front of them. She was aged 19 and everything fell apart after about a year or so. The neighbours had moved away by then, and she had no contact with them, but she remembered that they went to a church. So she rang the church and asked for help.”
Naomi and her husband, Darren Reed, are searching out new stories in a new way. They are setting out to visit the out-of-the-way and not-so-out-of-the-way small towns in Australia to collect another series of stories. And Bible Society is making sure the stories, once again, will be on social media. if you have not already found them on Facebook, tap in Faith Stories with Naomi Reed and prepare to be delighted.
Every Moment, Everywhere Naomi Reed, Acorn Press, 2024