To The Best of My Recollection.: my memoir Hardcover – April 27, 2024

Award-winning master storyteller Randy Willis.Randy Willis...novels and biographies about adventure, family, and faith.Merriam-Webster dictionary defines happenstance as “circumstance especially that is due to chance.”My late friend, Texas Longhorn Football Coach Darrell K Royal, said, “Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.”One of my favorite writers, literary scholar C. S. Lewis, wrote, “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” That quote inspired my trilogy, Destiny.I was thirteen on November 22, 1963. Around 1:00 that afternoon, I walked from my art classroom under the Angleton Junior High football stadium. A very excited classmate, Robert Munson, stopped me between the cafeteria and gym and asked, “Have you heard the president has been shot?”Darrell Royal was hand-picked to greet President John F. Kennedy when Air Force One touched down at Bergstrom Air Force Base, seven miles from Austin, at 3:15 pm on November 22, 1963. Coach Royal was tying his tie and then heading to the airport when he heard the tragic news on the radio that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.On that same day, C.S Lewis died. Only two news outlets contacted his family about the details of the Christian author’s death. The New York Times announced Lewis’s death two days later, on November 24, 1963.Our choices and the undeserved favor of the Lord, not luck, determine our destiny.If there is a verse in the Book that would put my biography on a bumper sticker, it would be found in Joshua 24:13: “I have given you a land for which you did not labor, and cities which you did not build, and you dwell in them; you eat of the vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant.”Thank the Lord for His undeserved—unearned—unmerited favor called grace, for I have made many wrong choices.My life is a story of triumph over tragedy and victory over adversity. And what to do when your whole world crumbles around you.***** Randy Willis is as much at home in the saddle as he is in front of the computer, where he composes his family sagas. Drawing on his family heritage of explorers, settlers, soldiers, cowboys, and pastors, Randy carries on the tradition of loving the outdoors and sharing it in the adventures he creates for readers of his novels. He is the author of Destiny, Beckoning Candle, Twice a Slave, Three Winds Blowing, Carolinas Wind, Louisiana Wind, The Apostle to the Opelousas, The Story of Joseph Willis, and many other articles.This book is written for and dedicated to nine people: my three sons and six grandchildren. They are the joy of my life. Anyone else who would care to listen in is welcome.Vaya con Dios,Randy Willis Read more