How did you spend your time during COVID-19 social isolation lockdown earlier this year?
One Highfields author published her new book 20 years after it was written – and then lost.
Doreen Rose says the genesis for Heaven to Gain and Hell to Shun came while attending church in the late-1990s.
The Christian author was inspired by a presentation from a Baptist church Minister and former manager of the Carinity Brownesholme retirement village, where she has lived for 15 years.
“Twenty-two years ago, Phil West did a series of presentations here at the Highfields church called There is a Heaven to Gain and a Hell to Shun, and it was excellent,” Doreen explains.
“I said to Phil it deserved a wider audience. He said, ‘Well I’m no writer so feel free to put it together if you want’.
“I spent the next couple of years going through it, sorting it out and getting it all fixed up. I put it on a computer disc and never thought any more about it.”
Two decades, several house moves and a few new computers later, Doreen rediscovered the computer disc in a drawer while cleaning her retirement villa.
“I found the disc and wondered, ‘What on earth is on this, I don’t remember seeing that.’ I thought I better find out before I ditched it, so I stuck it the computer and, blow me down, it was this book,” she says.
“I just couldn’t believe what I was looking at. After all those years and we’d all forgotten all about it. I thought this has got to be a miracle as God’s timing is never wrong.”
Doreen has released two books through American publisher PageTurner in the past six months, with Heaven to Gain and Hell to Shun following the publication of Come with Us to the Promised Land: A Pictorial Biblical Encounter late last year.
Come with Us to the Promised Land is a photographic account of sites of religious significance in Israel and Jordan the author visited in 2012 and 2014, detailing the ancient Biblical history of the locations.
Doreen regards the book as a travel guide for Christians visiting the Middle Eastern nations and a companion piece for those undertaking Bible studies.
“They can see the place exactly as it is and find out how things have changed since Biblical times,” says Doreen, whose favourite locations were, Wadi Rum, Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee.
Doreen’s new books come more than 60 years after the publication of her first tome.
Her debut book, entitled Travel with Me, details the author’s six-month exchange in USA as a guest of the Queensland Junior Farmer Association in the late-1950s.
Doreen is currently doing another deep dive into the Bible for her next book.
“I love working with words as much as I hate working with figures. I enjoy it, I love God’s word and I just want people to get to like it and love it as well,” she says.
Purchase Heaven to Gain and Hell to Shun and Come with Us to the Promised Land from the PageTurner website.
