Join us at Henry’s Books in Spearfish for a signing with South Dakota Author Kate Meadows on Saturday November 2 from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM.

Kate Meadows is a creative nonfiction writer, editor and book coach with an MFA in Professional Writing. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, Chicken Soup for the Soul and elsewhere. She lives in Rapid City with her husband and two sons.

Faith to Follow:

While her husband pursued a four-year Master of Divinity degree from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Kate Meadows wondered how she fit into the process of her husband becoming a pastor. In the Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod, only men can be ordained as pastors. The men who come to the seminary have a well paved road ahead of them. The women who come with those men don’t. As women, we ask ourselves, “Who am I in this process?” and “Where do I fit?”

Kate never envisioned herself as a pastor’s wife; in fact, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be one. Yet, if God was leading her husband into the ministry, who was she to say “No?”

And what was it about that term “pastor’s wife,” that made her uneasy, anyway? What did it even mean to be a pastor’s wife in the modern day?

At the seminary, Kate started talking to other women who had faithfully followed their husbands on the path to ministry. Through a series of more than fifty interviews, she learned that the journey of becoming a pastor’s wife is rich with questions, discovery, and joy.

Faith to Follow chronicles the woman’s experience of preparing to become a pastor’s wife. It also may be a springboard for dialogue within churches across America, about the importance of encouraging and cultivating future church leaders and raising up strong families in the Christian faith.

Tough Love:

The extremes of life in rural Wyoming can be a challenge when dogged preparation for harsh winters can mean the difference between life and death, and where glorious summers seem to reward the survivors. For Kate Meadows it was a conundrum. Growing up in a small town, surrounded by magnificent mountains and trout filled rivers and streams may sound like heaven to many, but if the concept of “wild” frightens you, it can be a struggle to fit into that landscape. Some children would have been delighted by the sight of a moose scratching his antlers on the signpost at the corner of their yard on a cold winter night. Kate was frightened. She never took to hunting or horses. The outdoors and its wild creatures, which were at the core of her family and the generations before her, at once fascinated her and provided the means to overcome her fears while instilling in her a hearty respect for a raw and sometimes merciless landscape.

So what’s a girl to do when she’s torn between the desire to escape to “civilization,” yet so tightly bound by the invisible but unbreakable chains of love?