I am pleased as punch to present my first guest post!  Anabelle Hazard is a “real life” Catholic Author.  She was being gracious when she referred to me as an ‘author’ on her blog.  My book is only in the “soon-to-be-published” category.   But, her novels are ready and have beautiful illustrated covers and everything!  The bonus is that they are free! 

As I have been stating over the last couple weeks, her novels are romantic, clean and Catholic….just like this guest post.  She shares about her single life, her struggles and her love story.   

Your love story, like hers, will be uniquely yours.  The common threads found in all of our stories are:  God’s preparation, healing and of course, the power of Chastity.  Enjoy!

 Thank you, Anabelle!

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Runaway Brides 

I once belonged to a tight women’s prayer group who secretly called ourselves the “Runaway Brides”   (Well, now me and my big mouth have just outed us to the internet.) We didn’t bond as a fan club of Julia Roberts & Richard Gere but we were all fresh out of relationships and not exactly thinking about marriage.   At least I wasn’t anyway.  The whole single life and its offer of freedom was just exhilarating to me. 

In between Italian pesto dinners, karaoke spiels, Saturday movie nights, and sandy beach blankets, the Runaway Brides liked to… pray.  Really, we did.  I prayed to be able to find what God wanted me to do with my life and then I prayed for God to write my love story. “Someday, but not today,” I’d add.  The Runaway Brides chorused a loud “Amen” to that.

Discerning what God created me for (with the help of a spiritual director), rewrote my ongoing biography completely.  It was almost as if I received an internal makeover, re-learning the basics of my childhood faith and healing from deep scars and wounds.  I like to think of that chapter of my life as my faith story because that’s when I fell deeper in love with Jesus Christ and His Church.

While God was writing my faith story, He provided me with pseudo-angels- slash-bodyguards in the disguise of my protective male cousins, who gave me dating advice that cinched my chastity belt.

One told me the old metaphor about cows and free milk. “Men,” explained another, “are by nature hunters so if we are interested, we will do the chasing.”  The third faithfully hung out with me at singles bars and stared down a pipsqueak or two. All in all, I think their collective presence chased off many wrong, wrong prospects, thankfully.

By the time I figured out that I wanted to write Catholic books and attempt to become a mother of saints, God was ready to write my love story.  So I met my future husband in a most unlikely place at the most perfect time. (Long story of that meeting here).  The bigger surprise is that my husband does not like to read books without pictures! (What can I say?   God likes to author stories with an unpredictable twist.) But because my husband was a man fully in love with God and the Catholic Church, I was a-running to the altar to get married.

That part of my single life as a ‘Runaway Bride,’ figuring out my life’s purpose, determined to keep my chastity with the support of home-girls and the help of protective cousins stuck with me and became an idea for my second novel…

Fireflies Dance is a story of a Catholic law student, a jilted bride, with overprotective brothers and awesome sorority sisters.  Through the machinations of the angels and saints, she meets a runaway groom… an Atheist, at a wedding. (This Catholic novel is free on my website.)  A disclaimer before you download it: there are no other similarities between this work of fiction and my life.  Well, except for the fact that…nah, I won’t give the end away.  You’ll have to read it yourself.