My dear friends in the Lord, I’d like to share with you how this book – STAR SONG – came about . When I was seventeen years old at Harding College in 1958 I wrote some of which you will read in this book. When I showed it to some of my girlfriends, they said I should write the entire life of Christ. I told them I was not old enough and had not experienced enough of life yet. But I promised I would write it when I was sixty.

Through the years, I added things and changed things, first on my portable Royal typewriter, then an electric typewriter, and finally my “amazing” Selectric typewriter. And the pages had smudges where I had erased and replaced words here and there and became aged and brittle. Much of what you will read now of Mary’s conversations with Gabriel, her family, and Elizabeth I wrote when I was seventeen. Also, most of what you will read from the time Jesus left the fortress with his cross to his last breath I wrote when I was seventeen.

Throughout the years, my growing number of pages were stored in closets, bottom drawers, and, finally, file cabinets as I moved through life from one place to another.  I even sometimes separated parts of them into inspirational pamphlets which I printed with those ditto machines with their purple ink and later on mimeograph machines, getting ink all over my hands and clothes. Yet, all through those forty-three years, I remembered my promise made in my dormitory room so long ago when we were all so young.

Then, when I was fifty-nine, having lived and experienced far more during those years than I had really desired, I sat down to finish writing my entire life of Christ. I cannot recall whether it was during the summer or winter months when I finished it, but it was in the year 2000. I had kept my promise.