Mark Gilroy

Bringing Books to Life!

Search Results for: label/Book of Job

Walking With God in America …

Anyone who doesn’t believe God has blessed America just needs to take a long walk and witness her beauty posits Ken Duncan, a world renowned Australian photographer, who visited all 50 states with his camera and notepad.
In the intro to his book, Walking With God In America, Duncan writes:

It might seem funny that although I am Australian, God has given me a real burden for America. No nation in the world has been more naturally blessed than the United States, and I believe God has done that so people will understand how much He cares for the nation. America’s faith in God is what had made it one of the greatest countries on earth, and faith is a beacon of hope for other struggling nations around the world.

From “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance (the phrase was upheld in 2004 by the Supreme Court 5-4 because Sandra Day O’Connor argued that the phrase is “meaningless” — “any religious freight the words may have been meant to carry has long since been lost”) to removing references to God in textbooks on American history, the place or name of God in America’s public square — literally — is an ongoing political and legal powder keg.

I’ll defer any attempts at an argument that maintaing liberty requires virtue — and virtue requires true religion, to John Adams:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

For now, I’ll leave debates on whether or Constitution intends for there to be freedom of religion or freedom from religion and follow Duncan’s simple advice to look for America’s spirit in her beauty!
Acknowledgments: Panographic photographs are (c) Ken Duncan and used by permission; all rights reserved. The quote from Sandra Day O’Connor and John Adams are from Rediscovering God In America by Newt Gingrich (Thomas Nelson).

About Mark Gilroy

Mark Gilroy is author of Cold As IceMark Gilroy has had a long, varied, and successful career in publishing, from his first paid creative assignment as a newspaper sports writer while in college, to serving as head of gift, specialty, and backlist publishing for Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher. Throughout his journey in the world of books he has worked with leading authors such as Max Lucado, Sarah Young, John Maxwell, Darlene Zschech, H. Jackson Brown, Donald Miller, Billy Graham, Newt Gingrich, Beth Moore, George Foreman, and many others.

Mark has had a leadership role in numerous publishing phenomena, including God’s Little Devotional Book and Jesus Calling—two series that each sold more than 10 million copies and touched countless lives.

Mark won’t claim he has done it all in the world of publishing, but he has packed boxes, edited manuscripts, made sales calls, created marketing plans, directed design and illustration, started companies, consulted, agented the works of others, and written advertising and catalog copy. He’s authored, compiled, and ghost written books that have landed on an array of bestsellers lists and sold millions of copies. His first ghost writing project, The Wal-Mart Way, was done for Don Soderquist, Sam Walton’s longtime right-hand man.

In early 2012 he put on a new hat as a fiction author. His debut novel, Cuts Like a Knife, was released in April 2012 and was met with rave reviews from USA Today, Fresh Fiction, Publishers Weekly, and other leading national reviewers. His second novel, Every Breath You Take, second in the Kristen Conner Mystery Series, released in Fall 2012 to similar acclaim. Kristen Conner returns in Cold As Ice, which releases in Fall 2014.

Gilroy has extensive writing credits. He scripted and served as creative consultant for a two-hour training video that was honored with the Award of Excellence by the International Television Association. He has compiled and written close to fifty books and penned hundreds articles and curriculum pieces for a variety of periodicals and publishers.

Gilroy is a graduate of Olivet Nazarene University (B.A.) with a double major in Biblical Literature and Speech Communications. / Journalism. He also holds two graduate degrees, the M.B.A. from Baker University (4.0), and the M.Div. from Nazarene Theological Seminary (magna cum laude).

Mark enjoys his family - which keeps growing!

Mark enjoys his family – which keeps growing!

Gilroy and his wife Amy reside in Brentwood, Tennessee. Their six children are Lindsey, Merrick, Ashley, Caroline, Bo, and Zachary—the youngest has now headed off for college, so he and Amy are officially empty nesters.

PROFESSIONAL SERVICES

Kisses from Katie – A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption

The story of Katie Davis in Uganda.

The amazing story of an adoptive mother of 14 girls.

We moved to Brentwood, Tennessee, in January 2006. My youngest daughter, Caroline, was a junior in high school. You can imagine how nervous we were as parents on how the move would go for an almost-senior (and for the two other kids still in the house). Within days Caroline met two Katies who welcomed her to Ravenwood High School and made her feel as if she had grown up in their circle of friends. I’m still sighing with relief.

One of the wonderful Katies – Katie Davis – took a different path after graduation to say the least. She is now the unmarried mother of 14 young girls.

Is that even possible? Is this one of those stories about youth gone bad?

I need to give a warning to any potential readers at this point. Do not pick up Kisses from Katie if you live a comfortable life and don’t want anything or anyone messing up your comfort zone.

Katie’s story is a story of youth gone good. It is both heartwarming and heartbreaking – and in reading it you will never be satisfied with a status quo lifestyle again. If you have never felt a gentle nudge from God that you have something beyond yourself to accomplish in this world – or if you have suppressed and ignored the nudge – this book serves as a loud, clanging, blaring wakeup call to hear and embrace your call.

“Kids” can be idealists – and when Caroline told me Katie was going to do a yearlong mission project before attending college, I thought that sounded great – that it would be good for her. Little did I know … I did know Katie’s parents were quite nervous when she said the project would be serving in an orphanage in Uganda. After surveying the situation in Africa carefully, her dad reluctantly gave his permission for her to go – with the condition that she promise to come back in one year, enroll in college, and move on with her life. She was true to her word – but even as she attended classes the fall of her return, she was miserable, thinking only of her “girls” back in Uganda.

Katie – high school homecoming queen and student body president and honor student and girlfriend to a handsome, committed, spiritual, star athlete – had every reason to “come home.” But her heart was back in Uganda with the motherless children she had fallen in love with. Is it any wonder that the name she has been given by the people of her village is “Mommy.” Katie’s ongoing adventures in Uganda are  amazing and fit the adage that truth is stranger than fiction. In her case, it is not just stranger, but more incredible.

My family has been blessed by the Katie who befriended the “new kid” at school. We’ve been privileged to meet two of her daughters, Patricia and Grace. Most of all we have been inspired to step out of our comfort zone and to look around to see what God is doing in the world that we need to take part in.

I can’t recommend Kisses from Katie highly enough for the spiritual blessings you will experience reading this story of relentless love and redemption.