I’m always honoured to feature the lovely Carla Laureano on the blog. Carla pens intelligent contemporary romance novels that are equally entertaining, thought-provoking, and romantic, delving into real life issues and emotions.

Her new standalone – PROVENANCE – releases today, so we are celebrating with this feature from Carla and a giveaway, thanks to Tyndale House Publishers.

Over to you, Carla…

A Higher Authority

As children, we often see the adults in our lives as larger than life, arbiters of matters of justice and faith, and at least for a while, as infallible humans. If we’re lucky, those adults in whom we put our faith are worthy of our trust: they have our best interests in mind and they model God’s love for us. But the best of humans frequently fall short of perfection on their best of days, and they act in ways that are downright harmful on their worst. And whether or not we realize it at the time, our childhood experiences with authority figures carry over into our relationship with God, the ultimate authority figure.

I was fortunate to have a pretty good relationship with my parents. Even so, my father could be authoritarian and critical in his discipline, and I learned quickly that the best way to avoid scolding or criticism was to do everything I was told, perform at a high level in everything I attempted, and generally make my parents proud of me. It was a mark of pride that my parents said they had only one child because they’d gotten it right the first time!

You can imagine, then, what happened once I made my way into the real world and learned that not only was it impossible to please everyone, sometimes “the right thing” was a moving target, especially when dealing with people who didn’t have my best interests at heart. That spun me off into decades of perfectionist striving, where I attempted to make everyone happy, to avoid being called out about anything in my work and personal life, to be the model daughter and employee. Then that unconscious desire for perfection carried over to my relationship with the Lord. If I fell short in any way, I avoided prayer and my Bible, feeling that I wasn’t worthy to come into His presence. To be fair, this feeling of unworthiness was helped along by a series of churches that prized appearance over authenticity. I struggled for years with guilt over the smallest infractions, even ones for which I’d repented and been forgiven.

On the other hand, I have a number of friends who have had the opposite experience: parents who were absent or completely self-involved. Rather than having the innate desire to please authority figures, they automatically suspect them—and that carries over into their relationship with God. In their eyes, the Almighty is just like their absent physical fathers: out there somewhere, capable of interceding for them, but utterly uninterested in their lives. Every hardship seems to reinforce that belief: because they have no experience with authority bringing them anything but disappointment and rejection, they learn to keep their pain and their struggles to themselves, even as they wrestle with deep feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

It’s this kind of parental relationship that characterizes the protagonist of my new novel, Provenance. Having been abandoned by her mother at a young age and never having known her father, her only experience with authority is a series of deeply flawed foster homes. By the time she lands with a loving, supportive family, the damage has been done: she is deeply hurt and distrustful, which carries over to her view on God. Like those absent parents, He seems distant, unloving, and uncaring—He could have stepped into her life at any time to intervene in the terrible things that happened to her, but He chose not to. It’s only as she begins to learn the truth about her past that she can actually see how God has been working in her life all along.

All of us, no matter the type or degree of our experiences with authority, carry preconceptions and wounds into our relationship with God. But when we open our hearts and minds to understand that the only person capable of perfection is God Himself—He is the one who will not leave us or forsake us, who provided salvation in His Son so we did not have to suffer His condemnation for our own mistakes—we can truly experience the kind of close and loving relationship of which our earthly relationships so often fall short. And only by recognizing that our views on God are flawed because they’re seen through the prism of our own bad experiences or our own learned tendencies can we leave those experiences behind and put our trust in the only one who will never fail us.

Los Angeles interior designer and former foster kid Kendall Green is in high demand, both for her impeccable eye and for her uncanny ability to uncover the provenance of any piece. But for all her success, skyrocketing costs have put her California home and her business in jeopardy. Then an unexpected inheritance provides a timely solution: a grandmother she never knew has left her a group of historic properties in a tiny Colorado town on the edge of ruin.

To young, untried mayor Gabriel Brandt, Jasper Lake is more than another small town―it’s the place that saved his life. Now, seeing the town slowly wither and die, he’s desperate to restore it to its former glory. Unfortunately, his vision is at odds with a local developer who wants to see the town razed and rebuilt as a summer resort. He’s sure that he can enlist the granddaughter of one of its most prominent former citizens to his cause―until he meets Kendall and realizes that not only does she know nothing of her own history, she has no interest in reviving a place that once abandoned her.

In order to save his beloved town, Gabe must first help Kendall unravel the truth of her own provenance―and Kendall must learn that in order to embrace the future, sometimes you have to start with the past.

Carla Laureano is the two-time RITA Award–winning author of Five Days in Skye, London Tides, and the Saturday Night Supper Club series. She is also the author of the Celtic fantasy series The Song of Seare (as C. E. Laureano). A graduate of Pepperdine University, she worked as a sales and marketing executive for nearly a decade before leaving corporate life behind to write fiction full-time. She currently lives in Denver with her husband and two sons.

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Buy at Amazon: Provenance or Koorong