Focus on the Family Magazine - August/September 2023

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Mom’s
Robin and her daughter, Rachel, age 11
must-have guide
14
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Here’s Mom’s
mentoring to help you
begin an ongoing conversation
with must-have
your pre-teen daughter
about puberty and sexuality
and make it a fun, bonding
guide
experience that brings you
closer than ever. From the
author of the Christy Miller
series for teens.
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Refining her passion
Robin asked the girls in the middlegrade
Sunday school class she taught
to pray for her. She told them stories
of her imagined future, painting with
words the adventure of sharing God’s
love with Kenyan women and children
while washing clothes alongside
a wide river—the African savannah
spread out before her.
But that long-awaited envelope
revealed that the mission agency had
denied her application.
“I felt like, if I can’t even wash clothes
for Jesus in Africa,” Robin recalls, “then
what good am I in service of our King?”
The teenage girls in her Sunday
school class saw more clearly how God
had gifted their teacher. Relieved at the
news, they said they preferred her to
stay with them and share more stories
that displayed God’s love and grace.
She told stories well, they said.
Only later would she realize how
right they were. During the past 35 years,
Robin has shared countless stories of
God’s love and grace, publishing more
than 100 fiction and nonfiction books
and selling 6 million copies worldwide.
“Those books,” Robin says, “became
missionaries that have gone out by the
millions all over the world, [to] places
I will never go. That’s how God accomplishes
His purposes for our lives, never
in the way we think it’s going to be.”
Becoming a writer
Robin’s knack for storytelling showed
itself long before her missionary
passion did. When she was in kindergarten,
her teacher wrote on a report
card: “Robin has not yet grasped her
basic math skills, but she does keep
the entire class entertained at rug time
with her stories.”
Then again, outside of rug time,
stories can be a problem.
“Growing up,” Robin wrote in her
memoir, Victim of Grace: When God’s
Goodness Prevails, “I got in trouble for
telling stories. Teachers called it ‘lying.’
My sister called it ‘exaggerating—again.’ ”
So when the girls in her Sunday
school class suggested she had a gift for
storytelling, she balked. Never would
she spend her life as a writer. Instead
she decided to work on her math
skills—taking a job at the local bank.
She soon met and married Ross,
now her husband of 45 years, who
served at the time as a youth minister.
He, too, saw her gift for storytelling,
urging her to take writing classes at the
community college and to read books
about the craft.
“He even signed me up for a writers
conference at Mount Hermon in
California,” Robin says. “I was shy,
intimidated, not a writer. He paid
money so that I could go sit in front
of people and prove I was an imposter.”
But within a few hours of arriving at
the conference, she says, “I had found
my tribe.”
The conference sparked her desire
to write. During the next few years
she penned articles, devotionals and
children’s picture books. The Upper
Room magazine offered her $10 for
her first devotion.
“I was elated,” Robin recalls. The
magazine sent a contract that
requested her pen name. As soon as
her father saw it, he reminded her that
she had been a Jones much longer
than she had been a Gunn.
So she became Robin Jones Gunn,
professional writer.
PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBIN JONES GUNN