Book Writing

I do not know very much about Luisa Jeter Walker. She is just a friend of my mother's who sometimes visited Miami to work on projects for them and might have been at our house once or twice. I only remember my mother saying that she was a single woman missionary to South America, maybe Peru or Ecuador, who married a widower missionary and became instant stepmother to his six children. I do not know anything about the Walker family. These are not people who I would know anything about or who would have anything to say to me. My mother is the one who knows all this stuff. All I know is that one time while visiting Springfield my mother took me with her to visit her at her retirement villa where she showed us her home office where she was writing a book, a history of the Assemblies of God in Latin America. The voluminous work, an encyclopedia of sorts, has long since been published by GPH (Gospel Publishing House), the Assemblies of God publishing company. So that's nice. An in-house reference book that will sit on the shelves of reference libraries is always a good thing. Lots of people can use it to write term papers and that sort of thing. Someone had to do it and who better than a missionary independently financed by supporters and able to devote the time to sorting through all of that data. That is not a book that I would ever want to contemplate writing. I do not have the missionary standing nor the financing to justify all of the time spent writing a bunch of stuff even if it may or may not be of historical value to some. No person working a 9-5 job has the time to devote to sorting through all of this stuff and anyway the potential reward is not that great for an in-house reference book that nobody wants to read, that only cut-and-pastes one point of view and fails to explore the full implications of the tragi-comic situation. And anyway, how is the book going to reach bookstores? Who is going to buy the movie rights? These limitations make the drudgery of academic writing a thankless task. Nevertheless, somebody has to do it. I could volunteer to do it but I would need the money. Money makes the world go round, as the song goes.