Chapter One                            What a Novel Idea!       “A cup of tea, fine food, and thee, my friend, with              a good book wrapped up in conversation.”                                (Jean Chapman)           The concept of a Novel Tea evolved in a very serendipitous manner. My friend Marla and I were eating lunch at a lovely outdoor restaurant on a harbor in Newport Beach. Several weeks before, I had given her a copy of Anne Lamott’s book, Traveling Mercies.         “Read it,” I urged her, “and then we’ll have lunch and discuss the book. Let me know what you think about this author’s spiritual pilgrimage.”         Now here we were on a balmy Southern California day, engaged in a lively conversation about Lamott and her sometimes tentative, sometimes tenacious quest in her search for God. Marla took one point of view about Lamott’s journey, and I took an opposing view. The book had definitely provoked a choleric response in each of us. We took turns reading different portions of the chapters out loud to support our opinions as we probed the depths of the best-selling work. Soon we were sharing our own                                             14 individual stories of discovering God at points and places in our lives. It was one of the most mentally stimulating exchanges I had experienced in a long time. . .                                    Chapter Eight                                 Angel of Hope          “A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a      clay pot. It has to go through the white heat of the                         furnace to become porcelain.”                            (Mildred Witte Stouven)         Let me tell you, dear reader, about our Novel Tea in December of 2002. It became a memory day that inscribed itself on my heart. Instead of meeting in one of our homes that month, we made reservations at a tea house located at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California. The sun sparkling off the dancing waves in the distance, and the palm trees swaying with a lazy indolence in a light breeze belied the reality that it was winter.         For this particular Novel Tea, we read Richard Paul Evans’ books, The Christmas Box and The Timepiece. We entered the rarified ambiance of the tea room clutching our books and the gifts we’d brought to give each other. We made ourselves comfortable and cozy as the server took our orders for tea. She brought a triple tier laden                                             92 with a variety of dainty sandwiches, scones, and chocolate cups filled with lemon custard. It was delectable fare! As we sipped our tea and nibbled scones, we opened up the novels we’d read that month.         Richard Paul Evans had touched our hearts with his simple novels. The themes of love and death and forgiveness and redemption were replete in the story of a little girl named Andrea and a mother who loved her daughter dearly. When Andrea died tragically, each one of us wept along with Mary Ann, the brokenhearted mother. We crept with her to a grave each day as she mourned under the shadow of an Angel of Hope statue. When Andrea’s mother offered forgiveness to the person who had caused her daughter’s death, we stood on a hypothetical precipice and wondered if we would have the largeness of soul to forgive so freely. Reading portions of the book out loud, we shed tears at the poignant rendering of human experience.         As we continued discussing the two novels, . . .