Save My Dreams Publishing News

All About Love: Elizabeth’s Story is as much a story about The Salvation Army as it is about the author’s mother. Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Zeigler, was a Salvation Army officer, a captain serving in mostly farming communities between 1911 and 1919. He believed in strict Christianity, attainable holiness in thought, word, and deed, and in the importance of preaching the gospel of Salvation to the lost in every way possible.

One of Thomas’s favorite ministries was providing new shoes for children who worked on family farms in the Midwest:

“The Bible never says that we must feel love for each other, only that we must show love,” was a theme drilled into my mother’s mind growing up. In fact, her father was particularly proud of his ministry of love years earlier as a Salvation Army captain serving in poor farming communities in Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois. As proof of how he had showed love to the less fortunate, old Tom cherished a photograph of himself in full Salvation Army uniform holding a wooden post with old, worn-out, and tattered shoes nailed to it.

“See this photograph?” Tom would ask his three daughters. “I went out to the farms where children labored, many with bleeding feet, and wearing shoes with rotted out soles, and I traded brand new shoes for their old, worn-out shoes. That’s what the Bible teaches us to do, to show love by what we do for others, not by how we feel.”

In that photograph my mother saw her proud father with that big stick full of shoes holding it like a trophy, a visual testimony to his good deeds of love. But somehow something was missing; it didn’t really seem like love, at least not real love as she understood it.

The Salvation Army was an important part of Elizabeth’s life and it played a role in the life of her family. Many people only know The Army as a thrift store or drug rehab center, but Elizabeth’s Story shares what it was like to live and breathe in the Salvation Army from the inside out, the good and the bad, and how the Salvation Army influenced almost every decision in Elizabeth’s life.

All About Love: Elizabeth’s Story will be available at Amazon.com and other retailers on July 6, 2007. in early 2009.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2007 at 7:27 am and is filed under All About Love: Elizabeth's Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.