Windle, a missionary kid, writes award-winning Christian fiction!
By Sharon Mager
BCM/D Correspondent
COLUMBIA, Md.—Award- winning Christian fiction writer Jeanette Windle, author of a over a dozen books filled with excitement, suspense, international intrigue and romance, releases her latest novel, Betrayed, this month. Like author Ted Dekker, Windle’s parents were missionaries and she, like Dekker, guides her readers through foreign countries filled with beauty and often with danger. Some of Windle's other books include Crossfire, Firestorm, and The DMZ, as well as books for young adults.
In Betrayed, Vicki Andrews works for an international organization that funds worthwhile children’s programs. She investigates them and gives recommendations as to whether or not a potential project should be funded.
In her research in Guatemala, she meets briefly with her sister, Holly, an environmentalist working in the rain forest. Holly says she urgently needs to talk to Vicki about something but is killed before Vicki can find out what it is her sister wanted to tell her.
Vicki begins an investigation into Holly’s death and is thwarted and strongly encouraged to leave. As she follows in her sister’s footsteps she only finds more questions and she discovers a link to her own past and her parent’s murder years ago. She works with several of Vicki’s colleagues and some romantic feelings begin to bloom, but soon Vicki begins to wonder whom she can trust and whom she can’t.
Windle beautifully intertwines faith throughout the book as Vicki struggles with her past, with her fears and with her God.
BaptistLIFE recently did an email interview with Mrs. Windle:
BL: Can you tell me about your spiritual journey? I know you were raised by missionary parents, but how did you personally come to know Christ as your Lord and Savior?
Windle: Yes, I grew up as a missionary kid in the countries and places described in my books. My parents were missionaries in Colombia, South America.
My own childhood was spent canoeing up and down the jungle rivers, flying in Cessna to boarding school in Venezuela, hiking up the Andes Mountains and into the jungles of South America. The guerrilla zone town in my second adult novel, The DMZ, is where I spent my teen years, exactly as described.
I do not remember a time when the existence, love and fear of God was not part of my life and thoughts. And yet there were several times in my early elementary years when I was overwhelmed with the consciousness of my own sin and prayed to Jesus to forgive me and come into my heart (just in case the prior time didn’t ‘take’!).
I would describe my spiritual journey as more inward than outward; I never openly rebelled, graduated with honors, went to Bible college, married and became a pastor and missionary wife. But I have always had an inquisitive mind and been a seeker after truth, and my own struggles with the who and why of God and this universe and especially the suffering, pain and human cruelty I witnessed are definitely themes that have spilled over into the pages of my books. I have come to expect that every major spiritual struggle and questioning I pass through will eventually become a new novel, Betrayed an example in point.
I will say that the greatest spiritual impact on me outside of God’s Word itself was all those old-time jungle missionaries I grew up around, including my own parents. They had steel in their backbone.
BL: When did you feel a call to begin writing Christian books?
Windle: I have always written and always had my nose buried in a book since I was a small child, as anyone who knew me then will testify.
I wrote one story for publication in college, then became a missionary and pastor’s wife and never really thought again about writing for publication until I was stuck down in a small town in southern Bolivia with three preschoolers, no transport, phone, radio or TV, and my husband gone for two weeks at a time to the Bolivian jungle and mountain churches.
By the time I’d read my few English books until I had them memorized, I was so bored I wrote my first book in the evenings after the babies were asleep. That became Kathy and the Redhead, a children’s novel based on my growing-up years at an American missionary kid boarding school in the Andes Mountains of Venezuela.
BL: I noticed in some author information that foreign governments have contacted you to find out how you know what you know. Can you elaborate on that?
Windle: Not foreign governments, but the American government (none of those foreign governments would have ever considered the information in question to be classified!). Yes, I have been questioned by government personnel as to where I got research and information theoretically 'classified' in several of my books, and have had feedback from U. S. government personnel ranging from DEA, State Department, SouthCom, military intelligence, law enforcement and others. Because I keep meticulous notes, I’ve always been able to satisfy any questions. Bottom line, what is considered ‘classified’ in the U.S. is often common knowledge on the ground in another country, and missionaries and missionary kids are among those who know reality only too often better than the info briefs of our intelligence community. Because I’ve always been careful to be accurate and fair, the end result has often been very positive, even opening further contacts and doors of research to me.
BL: What authors have influenced you over the years?
Windle: There are so many I can hardly think where to start. As to inspirational writers, the beautiful prose of Max Lucado and Philip Yancy and the meditative profundity of A. W. Tozer, Andrew Murray, Brother Laurence. Chaim Potok (The Chosen, The Promise) is a novelist who impacted me in sharing his passion for El Shaddai, Torah and his Jewish heritage in mainstream fiction as Christians so often hesitate to do. Fredrick Forsyth (Hunt for the Jackal, Odessa Files) and Leon Uris (Exodus, Armageddon) whetted my appetite for tight suspense interwoven with thorough political research.
My bookstand is generally piled high with non-fiction titles on the latest country of which I’m writing, currently Afghanistan.
BL: What are some of your personal interests besides writing?
Windle: The last year or so has been busy with setting up a media department and magazine for Bible Centered Missions International (BCM International), the ministry of which my husband is president. But my greatest delight in ministry continues to be teaching writers' conferences and mentoring indigenous Christian writers in more than a dozen different countries from Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Brazil, Spain, to Croatia and the Philippines, as well as in the U. S. in both English and Spanish. I also speak at women’s events and retreats and missions training seminars as time permits.
As to leisure time, I have to admit that my greatest hobby remains reading, and all I meet who knew me as a child have memories of myself and siblings curled up with a book. I still squeeze in a few pages at least before bed. Also, the plus side of constant travel is passing through a lot of God’s most beautiful creation.
As a family, we’ve always tried to work in the tourist spots of each area in which we’ve ministered from Inca ruins and Caribbean beaches to Yellowstone and Mt. Rushmore. Currently we’re enjoying exploring all the American history available living in the Philadelphia/D.C. area.
Jeanette Windle and her husband, Marty, live in Lancaster, Pa., and are members of a SBC church. Marty is the president of Bible Centered Missions International. The couple has four children, three grown sons and a teenage daughter who lives at home. For more information, go to www.windlemission.org.
