Meeting Inspiring Authors: Lynn Byk

Christian Women Living Magazine recently conducted an interview with an author who has been seem many times at various book signings. She is best known for her memoir about Mr. B. Meet this week’s Author who Inspires, Lynn Byk,

Cyndi Kay: Please give us a brief introduction.
Lynn Byk: I’m a retired paralegal who always wanted to write a book, but never felt that I had a story riveting enough to offer to readers. I don’t have children so my husband and I started a hospitality house for missionaries and seminary students we could mentor, and the pinch points then became a story worth writing about. However, while I was in the middle of drafting that manuscript, my mother-in-law passed away leaving her 91-year-old husband alone. After five years of visiting him, we could see that he was becoming too lonely to care about anything. His house was shot, and his memory was following. He was refusing to move into our home, and we had already promised him not to put him into a nursing home. He wouldn’t allow strangers into his domain, and circumstances being what they were, we decided to move in with him to care for him.

CK: Give us a summary on your journey with Christ — from the time you accepted Christ, to
how you started in ministry.
LB: I became a Christian when I was four years old because the Sunday School teachers were talking about the resurrection of Christ and the angels at his birth and the angels at his tomb and the angels welcoming him back to heaven. They asked us if we wanted to live forever with Jesus and the angels in heaven. Of course, I raised my hand and I prayed that prayer to ask Jesus into my life. I didn’t get baptized until I was in sixth grade, though. I had become increasingly convicted about letting Christ be the Lord of my life. I stopped reading racy romance novels and drawing sexy mermaid pictures, and then I decided to make this conviction public in baptism.
Adult Christians input was very important in my growth. In Junior high, I was allowed to put on a musical production and the church pianist helped me pull it off with all of children’s church participating. I was encouraged to work at a Christian camp where I cleaned bathrooms, helped prepare meals and set tables and cleaned up after meals. The camaraderie with other Christian kids and adults firmed up my faith, especially since we were trained to go off into nature and read scripture alone, pray about things with the Lord and then come back and have a devotional together. That emphasis was never neglected no matter what adventures were planned for the rest of the day. I began writing and journaling and sharing what I wrote with others. I became a camp counselor and continued writing through Bible college. After college, I helped form a writer’s group, and eventually was asked to facilitate it.

One day, long after being married, I attended a retreat where I met a wonderful spiritual leader, Tonya Blessing. She was the speaker, and she was a woman of insight, generosity, and good counsel. I discovered that she and her husband had a Christian retreat home very similar to what my husband and I were doing. She and I began to pray for one another, but I felt that she was much further along spiritually because she was a seasoned retreat teacher, and my house was being slowly and painfully dismantled by disgruntled neighbors and their friends in city management. All I felt at the time was confusion and shame and failure for dragging Christ’s name through the mud and filth.

On my 50th birthday, some of my best friends and I drove out to the boonies to stay overnight at her retreat house. While visiting, I mentioned that some of us knew each other through our writers’ group. “Oh, I write too!” she said. Quite embarrassed that she would want to hobnob with us, I ventured an invite for her to drive into the city and join us for our writer’s group. It was really a critique group where hopeful, would-be authors would bring a few pages to share with each other and we would pull out our pens and make praises or suggestions on our copies.

Just after Tonya joined our group, my husband and I abandoned our ministry house and moved in with his father to care for him and to lick our wounds. For six months, my lips were sealed. I felt I had nothing to offer anyone, and that at this stage in my life, I would be caring for an old man, and then it would be our turn. Nothing seemed to make sense.

But, my father-in-law began to tell stories and to say regularly, “I appreciate ya, Sweetpea.” How could I not be charmed? Besides, I’d always liked his gentlemanly way of bringing flowers from his garden to me every time we hosted a holiday meal. I’d always liked his stories. Now, I had the time to write them down. I became his cook and chauffeur, and we became best buddies, doing most everything together.

It didn’t take Tonya very long to suggest that our writer’s group was an untapped resource for the world. “The world?” we said. “Yes! We are a group of talented editors and why don’t we just start our own publishing company?” She suggested that we could incorporate, train other writers at writers’ retreats, and publish each other’s books. Laura Bartnick said that since the whole publishing industry was dying back and Amazon self-publishing was splitting the seams of the traditional publishing system, why not.

We looked at each other and we voted to put the company together. Laura Bartnick took the management position.

I was already writing my book called Mister B: Living with a 98-Year-Old Rocket Scientist, and so my book, Tonya’s book, and L. L. Larkins’ first book of Psalm Hymns were the first three books to anchor Capture Books. A memoir, a women’s historical fiction book, and a reference book for Biblical worship seemed like a pretty good tripod on which to build our novice publishing company.

CK: Tell us about Mr. B and how he inspired your book.
LB: Right from the start, I’d listen to him explaining about world governments, the history of their politics with each other, how he viewed life, and of course, how he helped to put space ships and rockets and airplanes into space, defying gravity. He would repeat himself, but in doing so, he’d disclose more and more detail. I’d always have a pen and paper ready at breakfast or dinner, and I’d pry out the exact equations or the exact names or coordinates or what actually happened in a certain battle or in the cold war. He’d rattle off the details like a tape-recorded message. Pretty soon, I put some stories on my Facebook feed, and people began asking for more and wondering whether I’d write a book about him.
He’d talk politics and science and I’d talk philosophy and biblical faith. I assumed that God had put me into his life to witness to him, that he’d eventually commit his soul to Jesus Christ for salvation.
But, the more our time went on, year after year, I realized that Mister B’s heart was very hard. So, the contour of my book changed because then, I had to center on my own character arc rather than his. I had plenty of stories to fill up the pages of a book, but I had to become very introspective as to why the Lord had put me inside Mister B’s home, what His purpose was for me. At that point, I thought that Christians wouldn’t want to read a book where no conversion story took place, but I just decided to tell the truth from my own point of view, and how caring for a needy parent became my life’s work, much more so than hosting missionaries and seminary students in our home had been.

CK: What was the most amusing story from Mr. B?
LB: Well, I’ll tell you one that happened after the book was finished, so it isn’t included in the book, Mister B, but it is included in our Capture Books manager, Laura Bartnick’s book, Welcome to the Shivoo! Creatives Mimicking the Creator.

“Last night, Paul and I were quite frustrated with Mister B’s anxiety over a new nurse coming to bathe him. He shouted at the nurse, ‘Go away! Leave me alone!’ He insisted, ‘I can take care of myself.’ He’s 102 years old.
‘Okay, then, Mister B. We’ll just close the door and let you do it. We’ll be right here if you need us.’ Ten minutes later when there is no sound of water or movement, I peek in the door. He is sitting on the edge of his bed fully dressed.

“‘Mister B, you said you were taking a shower! You are stinky, you can’t come downstairs without one.’
“‘I’m not sick. I didn’t say I would take a shower. I want the freedom to make my own choices, and live the way I want to live, stinky or not!’

“I tried to cajole him, reason with him that he needs help, but he moaned that he’d rather die than have a nurse watching him bathe naked. He turned back into bed and laid down.
“The nurse left.

“All day, Mister B preferred to stay in bed and ignore the world rather than to get cleaned up. Finally, coming out of his shell for dinner, he ate a good full plate of food, and just when we were getting comfy in our respective after-dinner chairs, he requested a shower from Paul. ‘Would you have the time to give me a shower tonight and get that out of the way?’ he said.

“Paul, so good-hearted and more compassionate than his frustrated wife, did just that. Up the stairs, they went, ‘Good-night.’ ‘Good-night.’
“Down the stairs came Paul fifteen minutes later to have a moment in the back-yard garden with me and his cigar.
“‘YOU are a good man, honey,’ I said.
“‘It’s nothing,’ he said. But, I know that my husband is quite something! It’s so much more work for him to come home from the hospital only to do a bath for his dad when he was fully prepared to relax in his easy chair after dinner.
“After Paul’s smoke curls up into the sky and evaporates with the day, we head up to an early bedtime ourselves. He peeks into Mister B’s bedroom. His dad is reaching up to the ceiling with an arm and waving it back and forth.
“‘Whatcha doing, Chief?’ Paul asks.
“‘I’m just feeling the freedom of exercising my arm.’”

CK: Tell us about a time that God directly answered a prayer.
LB: I prayed desperately to be vindicated for what we had gone through in our hospitality house situation with the city. God didn’t allow us to go bankrupt, but had the judge determine that we would not have to pay the six years of the City’s costs and fees. He also gave us a house free and clear when we inherited it from Mister B, rather than having the debilitating weight of a mortgage hanging around our shoulders from the fancy hospitality house that we had built. Our friends remained our friends, and finally, we sold the house, after it was on the market for a year. We kept praying that God would use it for ministry, that it was His house, because we’d dedicated it to Him, and we wanted Him to keep it, even if we couldn’t.
So, the people who moved in were on staff with Cru. They train people for ministry in that house, host many people for kingdom purposes, and are using the house just as we intended, even after we fully disclosed what we had gone through. They cried when they put in the offer for buying it and they wrote us a letter that we had built the house just for them. The neighbors have either been warned to lay off, or everyone has learned a lesson that lawsuits don’t really fix a problem. I’ll never forget that feeling of God redeeming a horrifying situation for His glory, and for our good as well as for the good of the couple who purchased it, and for the good of continued kingdom operations.

CK: Can you recall a time when you know that God was the only way you had a provision
through a certain situation?
LB: See your question just above. Additionally, many, many times when we were completely empty in pocket, God would bring along helpers to perform miracles of construction for us or offer other kinds of help. They were our ministering angels in this life. One man put in windows in a blizzard. He also spent hours leveling out a sloping floor. When we were building our shower, the pan was 5 x 4, and the contractor just laughed and said we’d never find a shower pan that size in a day. I went to a Christian distribution center and found one. They were able to finish tiling the shower the next day on schedule. The Lord gave me dreams of protection, and a husband who continually provided for our needs and gave me Daily Bread devotions that seemed pertinent to our legal fight and my despair. He knitted our marriage together instead of allowing us to fall apart, which was my deepest fear during those years.

CK: Tell us about a time you had a measurable impact on someone through your personal
ministry or through your organized ministry.
LB: There was a young man from S. Korea, who became a believer after many long talks at our hospitality house. There was a missionary who rested for three years until he was able to go back to being a teacher in rural Africa. Several others who lived with us during the construction finish and the lawsuit that followed, were able to see the Lord in us and asked us to be their official mentors.

What was your biggest challenge when getting a book published in the Christian genre? Traditionally published authors usually come from a place of notoriety or fame or significant influence. That is how their book initially takes off. Others know someone of great influence who is willing to endorse their book. I had none of that. I was coming from a very vulnerable place emotionally and in reputation because of having to defend ourselves against a City’s legal onslaughts. I didn’t yet know what our vindication looked like. I had only a handful of guests whose lives had been changed through Christ’s influence in our home. None of them were famous. In fact, I saw a verse in Psalm 107 that talked about God hiding His people in cities and giving them secret passageways to safety. That’s where I was coming from, not notoriety, so my book, when published was a very serious book about honoring my father-in-law and the redemption of God for me and my husband, but at the time I was writing it, I thought the only good hook was the good humor of our lives together, and so that is what I focused on in telling the story.

CK: What are some of the biggest challenges facing women today — and women ministries?
LB: I think that women can be either very catty and critical and therefore become their own worst enemies, or they can create enemies of others by being this way kind of operating out of a fear of poverty, spiritual poverty or resource poverty, and that can lead to competition and envy and complaint. It’s an awful road.
Or they can take on too much work and not provide themselves walls, rests, and emotional boundaries. Either way, I think this problem can cause the voice of the Holy Spirit to stop speaking into their workspaces and private lives, and they suffer unnecessarily. I think women need to repent more and rest more and enjoy the hours of accomplishment for a time after they work so hard. I also think that women need other people, both women and men as true friends and supporters. We need to say thank you to our friends and honor them for their help.

CK: I believe that God is a remarkably interesting and creative God! Tell me about a time when you were uncertain or unaware of a provision from God but later realized that it was all a part of His plan.
LB: Yes. Indeed. Moving into Mister B’s run-down house after living in my own dream home that I’d designed and built made me feel like death warmed over. The house had that old man smell, and his dishes were cracked. I would often ball up in my bed and sleep off my new reality. I would lay in bed staring at the ceiling with tears running down my cheeks, but the good humor in that house, both God-my-Savior’s, and Mister B’s and even my husband who is very silly and funny, all of that wooed me into hope, and hope turned into trying in faith, and trying in faith turned into miracles of finally getting a book finished, of being transformed by the experience of helping Mister B, and being helped in return, and just the peace and beauty of life that came to be.

CK: What inspires you? Sunrises and sunsets. Good humor. Good books. Good one-liners in movies.
LB: What has been the most interesting book that you have read as an adult? As a child? The Education of Little Tree remains a phenomenon in my reading history and the truth behind the author. It shows me that mysteries abound in the publishing world. Corrie Ten Boom’s the Hiding Place let me know that God walks with His people through their darkest years and forgiveness can be had. I read great classics because of my book club, so I have many favorites, both secular and Christian.
Do you have any projects in the works for a new book? Well, after this interview, I’m thinking that I may have to go back to my first manuscript that I abandoned about the hospitality house and finish that story.

CK: How do unwind after a busy day?
LB: I love going out to eat with my hubster, but we don’t get to do that every day. We often just sit and talk together or watch TV or take a walk or ride bikes around the lake.

CK: What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
LB: Don’t question in the darkness what God has shown you in the light. Also, God will never take you where His grace cannot keep you. Also, if you look through the Bible, you’ll see that miracles often happened in the darkness. Moon and stars light up our skies, we’re given the rejuvenation of sleep, God smote the firstborn Egyptians at night defeating them, the angel of death passed over the Israelite homes with the lamb’s blood on the thresholds at night, the Lord provided the pillar of fire to guide them through the wilderness at night, Nicodemus went to ask questions of Jesus at night, Paul and Silas were released at midnight, the angels announced the birth of Jesus, God With Us, to the shepherds at night and to the magi in the night sky. The veil in the temple was torn when darkness fell at Jesus’ crucifixion, Paul preached until midnight. Psalms 119:62 says, “At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee because of thy righteous judgments.”

CK: Is there anything else you would like to say?
LB: I don’t really have a ministry right now since Mister B has passed on, but we are renovating our house for future hospitality and writer’s retreats and coaching opportunities. You can find my book on Amazon by typing in Mister B Rocket and the book will come up. Please check out our publishers’ site, www.CaptureMeBooks.com for some extraordinary reading and devotionals. God bless you, Cyndi, and thank you for this opportunity.