Once upon a time a young Christian girl set off on an adventure with God. It began when she prayed for a home. “Dear Father, you know all the homes out there. Would you look down from Heaven and find our home for us, please, please…” And God did. God gave Angel forty acres in Tennessee, near Nashville. It had a forest, a gorge with beautiful waterfalls, a little cave, a Mill pond, an old grist Mill, a dam, a tiny Chapel with a tiny stained glass window, and a huge log and stone mansion sitting on a cliff overlooking the Mill. No one had lived there for a dozen years and it was full of spiderwebs and broken windows. But Angel and her husband, Robin, and their childen, left their home in Houston and set off on an adventure with God.
Angel named their new home “Chapelgate,” because it seemed like a perfect little jewel, set on earth - “it must be like a chapel in God’s eyes,” she thought. “I’ll make the spirit just as beautiful as the land,” and she set out to do so. Angel had begun writing Contemporary Christian Music and Chapelgate was near Nashville, the Gospel Music capital. As she and Robin and the kids restored Chapelgate she began going into Nashville to Koinonia, the meeting place for Christian artists. She made friends and began bringing the “writers and singers of God’s songs,” out to their home. She and Robin built a small outdoor stage, and another corner stage in the old Grist Mill. They set up a 12-track recording studio in their home, the Lodge, the huge cliffside pioneer style mansion. They fixed screens, sanded floors, repaired chimneys and brickwork. They fixed an old coal furnace, the Lodge’s only heat source. They built bridges and staircases and painted the old buildings. And the artists kept coming and singing and the spirit matched the beauty of the land.
Then tragedy struck on Christmas Eve, and Robin died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Like dominoes all was lost, and Angel and the kids were plunged into a decade of loss and poverty. “God has a reason, for this,” Angel thought. And she kept singing and writing her beautiful songs, poems, and stories, as she and God walked together, caring for the kids. These are her writings, old and new, and together they form a spiritual wonderland where God looked down one day from Heaven and blessed a young starry-eyed girl.
Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication (1984) Abilene Christian University
Master of Divinity (2007) Lipscomb University
15,000 hrs.+ independent study of ancient biblical Hebrew and Greek - my passion!, lifelong independent Contemporary Christian Music recording artist/songwriter, & currently enrolled in Wilkes University’s Creative Writing Master’s Degree program studying Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction.
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