Only forty days until they left for Israel. That is how long thirteen-year-old Lydia had after her father’s announcement turned her world inside out. By faith, Abraham went out, not knowing where he was going. He was a stranger in Canaan, he was a stranger in Egypt, and he was a stranger in the very land God had promised him. Lydia was about to learn the same road. She was a stranger in Jerusalem, in an Israeli high school in the Upper Galilee, and on the ice rinks of Northern Israel under the shadow of rockets from Lebanon. Even when she went back to the USA, to the Ozarks, to Grandma, she was a stranger there too. She could not outrun it because it had been written into her. This is how she discovered that in being a stranger, she had someone pursuing her through every foreign room, one who had been a stranger himself.

Lydia takes you on a journey to Jerusalem, living in a Jewish neighborhood, attending an Arab school in East Jerusalem, then moving to the Israeli-Lebanese border. She joins a hockey team and a speed skating team. Rockets fly overhead while her father works in South Lebanon with Christian radio. As the only believer in Jesus among her friends, she grapples with how to live set apart for God. But as tensions build, she runs away to the Ozarks to live with her Grandma and experience a normal American high school life. During that time, she comes face to face with her dreams and the deeper calling placed on her life.

This is the raw testimony of a girl and how she began to see how heaven and hell fought over her. As one who has moved between many places, she discovers a single constant: the mystical presence of God. He opens to her the language of the Song of Songs and reveals that He wants her for a Bride, drawing her into deeper intimacy through poetry and Divine love. This is the true story of a teenager who begins her journey and slowly finds the Lover of her soul.

Lydia wrote in her diary as a teenager. She wrote this book as an adult who never forgot what it cost. Her story and poetry speak to anyone who has ever felt like a stranger at any age: anyone walking this journey of life and searching for meaning and purpose.

Between the Holy Land and the Ozarks, one reluctant pilgrim discovers you cannot outrun a love written before there was time.