Can You Relate to Jordyn?

Surrendering Control without the Help of Famous Amos cookies

Nearly everything about me revolves around surrender. As a wife, mom, mentor, speaker, and author my heart beats so that everyone, including me, experiences freedom through surrender. For years my tagline has been “Encouraging you to surrender the good, the bad, and—-maybe one day—-the chocolate.”

I thought this post could start a series on surrender as it pertains to my latest series, Surrendering Hearts. I write small-town romances that feature Christian surrender themes and chocolate mentions. What does that mean?

Surrendering Hearts showcases the Hart sextuplets as they discover their identity and try to find a love like their parents shared. Each sibling will have a book that includes a surrender issue and of course, a chocolate mention.

The surrender issue will be things we all can relate to. In my books, I use principles Christ lived by when He was going through all the same things. I’m not religious, so I’m intentional about writing in a way where it’s not preachy. The Hart family is living in a place of pain, and there’s no freedom in that. Through their circumstances, readers find hope and new fictional friends. Reader feedback has been strong.

The oldest sextuplet is Jordyn, and her story is available on Amazon in Anchored Hearts. Jordyn’s surrender issue is control and let me tell you, authors usually live through the themes of their book. Me? Anchored Hearts nearly broke me.

Birth order personalities are real, and I’ve devoured The Birth Order book by Kevin Leman. Jordyn is a typical oldest child. She’s organized, a tad bossy, and knows what she wants. More than that, she grew up filling a gap. She’s the one that tied tuxedo ties for prom. She made school lunches. She made sure her dad took his cholesterol meds.

The problem in Anchored Hearts? She’s no longer needed to do those things anymore. They are young adults, and their dad is in transition. As if that’s not enough for Jordyn to process, her job changes. It’s one she didn’t expect and it doesn’t line up with her carefully planned career goals.

The fun in writing Jordyn’s story is conflict makes for great fiction, and of course because it’s a romance she has a colleague who messes with her work life. The brutal part was as I tried to write the story, everything around me was falling apart.

I considered myself pretty free of control issues before I started Anchored Hearts. Then my mom became ill and I left home to take care of her for a couple of months. My family was 300 miles away. It was so hard. Mom had never been sick and we’d nearly lost her. Turns out that just when she was getting her life back, she was gone. That trauma threw my sister into a cycle of grief that I didn’t think I could climb out of.

Control? I’d lived in NY long enough taking care of my mom that once home, I couldn’t remember how to work our microwave. My kids were hurting and scared. My husband had taken on my duties while working a 60-hour-a-week job. I woke every hour even after Mom was gone thinking I had to check on her breathing. It was rough.

As I tried to fix situations and people I learned how much like Jordyn I was. Scared. Desperate. And in need of a surrender.

Like Jordyn, I took to my chocolate drawer to solve my problems. Famous Amos became my BFF, but he left me sad and twenty pounds heavier. Jordyn has her black moment where all hope seems lost. For me, it was more of a process. I just knew I didn’t want to live that way anymore.

Sure, there are times I want to step in, fix, or be bossy. I know in the core of my soul I never had control to begin with. There’s a fairly well-known meme of Jesus and a little girl. I try to picture myself holding the doll and handing it to Him. Because I know He is good. He has something better for me than whatever I’m navigating.

What I love about the series is readers will see the characters transform in all the books. Jordyn isn’t the same in Repairing Hearts, but by no means is she perfect. Our journeys are full of steps forward and back. So it is with the Hart sextuplets.

How about you? Is control an issue? Do you have a chocolate drawer like Jordyn?