“I fancy I still hear the call to prayer from the mosque beside the U.S. embassy compound, though I’m a grown woman now.”

So begins the week that will change the life of nine-year-old Kaitlin Sadler in A Sense of Mission. So far, it is the only novel I have written that came to me in first person.

Kaitlin was not me. I did not experience her type of childhood. I certainly didn’t lose my parents at the age of nine in a terrorist attack.

I think her story came to me while I tried to deal with the realization that good times, like all times in this life, will end. We are, so they say, the only creatures who know we will die.

Joshua, a family friend, asks the teenage Kaitlin, “Is it because of your parents that you always expect bad news?”

“Good times never last,” Kaitlin says.

The friend replies, “True. Neither do bad times.”

Kaitlin explains that enjoying the good times is like feasting at a banquet when some monster from Lord of the Rings stares at you through a half open door.” She asks, “You think it takes faith to enjoy good times?”

Joshua considers and replies in the affirmative “especially for those who’ve gone through suffering.”

When we suffer, we decide which road to take. If we decide to enter life again, to open ourselves to the possibility of joy, it remains a faith thing until we find our way in better times.