About the Author

Cindy Murray Hamblen grew up in Midwest Ohio. The third of four children, she enjoyed a loving home. Early in life the children were introduced to God and taken to church. The beautiful pipe organ music, stained glass windows, and candlelight services all drew her heart towards Christ and the love He represented.

However, Cindy never clearly heard how to appropriate Christ’s death for forgiveness of sin to herself personally. She longed to know that she was on good terms with God, despite the fact that, as she tried to be good, she “blew it” so often.

Finally, she wrote God a letter and put it up in her bedroom window—as close to Heaven as she could reach. After a few days, she retrieved that letter hoping to find beautiful golden handwriting—God’s answer to her. However, there was nothing there. Disappointed and a little dumbfounded, she never-the-less knew that God had read her letter. After all, He is God! She learned that day that God does not necessarily answer our prayers in the manner we want Him to.

Years later she would look back and see how the Lord rewarded her childlike faith and revealed Himself to her lovingly, gently over her formative years until a day when she understood clearly how to accept Christ’s death for her own sin. She bowed her head in humility and invited Christ into her heart to take over and guide her through life.

Eventually, Cindy earned a B.S. degree in Family and Consumer Science. After marriage to her high school sweetheart Steve, she joined him in a Christian day school ministry where she taught for four years. Years later, her husband’s job change led their young family to Greenville, SC, where they raised their two sons.

At one point, Cindy and Steve made the decision to remove their sons from private school and put them into the public school system. Their world opened up in new ways, and they saw the many needs among the diverse student body. Finding and joining with other believers who had children in that same school led to watching God do incredible things in answer to their joint prayers.

Over a ten year span, Cindy and a Moms-in-Touch prayer group she was part of saw the Christian Learning Center begin a Released Time Bible study for their middle school at a church next to the campus. They saw a youth pastor start a morning Bible study in a pizza shop across the street from their high school and then saw a Fellowship of Christian Athletes program take root.

They prayed for God to send more Christian teachers to their school, and He did. One of them ministered to “at risk” boys—another prayer answered. The prayers continued as the school began a search for a new principal. They prayed for a man of character and discipline. God graciously gave such a man who came, took up where a great interim principal had begun working, and turned the school in the right direction. Today this school has a waiting list for those outside the school’s zone who want their children to attend there.

These experiences deepened Cindy’s understanding of the power of prayer and of the beauty of Christian community as she and other believers volunteered together in the PTA, sporting events, clubs, and other areas of need in the school.

God has used all these experiences in Cindy’s life journey to grow a desire to encourage kids in the Faith—especially those who come from non-Christian homes or nominal ones and are faced with the many pressures of today’s world to “un-Christianize” them in their thinking and behavior. It’s not about religious ritual, or following a set of rules but about knowing Him and accepting His invitation for a relationship which enables one to live for Christ. Of this, she learned first hand in her own life, and now she wants to encourage kids to that end along with the freedom and joy that abiding in Christ brings.