Returning to Amanda

By: Shirley Corder

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Amanda “Mandy” Kirkpatrick was once a rising star in the art world. But when she fell in love with pastor Owen Douglas, she put her dreams on hold and her paints to one side. Mandy focused all her energies on supporting her husband and creating for their children the loving, stable home-life she herself had lacked. She planned to return to her career when the kids started school, but as the years passed her brushes remained dry. Then came a move that changed everything.

Owen’s new congregation has rigid ideas of how their pastor and wife should behave. He throws himself into the work and expects the same of Mandy. The congregants swamp her with expectations beyond her abilities or desires. With a precocious teenager, two mischievous twins, a workaholic husband, and an interfering elderly neighbor, life becomes progressively stressful.

As a pandemic begins to advance around the globe, relationships come to a head, and Mandy makes a life-changing decision that will affect not only herself but her husband, the children, and the congregation. She tries to talk things through with Owen, but he is too fixed in his ideas of needing her by his side as a committed pastor's wife. Is there any hope for her to return to her painting? Or is she destined to remain struggling to be someone she doesn't feel equipped to be?