In a word, Lori Hatcher was bored.

Most regrettably for a Christian writer and women’s ministry speaker, she was bored with the daily devotionals she was reading.

So she did what she always does when she hits a snag: She prayed about it.

She prayed specifically for “fresh eyes” to see things she hadn’t seen before in the Bible, which she’s read from beginning to end each year since 2005.

The result of her search emerged in April when Our Daily Bread Publishing released her 3rd book, Refresh Your Faith: Uncommon Devotions from Every Book of the Bible.

“I was approaching my devotion time more out of duty than of delight, and I knew it shouldn’t be that way,” says Hatcher, a Lexington County resident who has contributed to Today’s Christian Living and edits the Christian Reach Out, Columbia magazine.

“Devotionals have a place in our lives, but there has to be more than the time-worn passages and stories. So I went on a treasure hunt. I knew there were treasures buried in God’s Word, and I knew we had to get beyond the familiar.”

Take Mordecai, Queen Esther’s adoptive father. Mordecai is courageous, loving, and wise. But he’s “one of the book’s often-overlooked supporting characters,” Hatcher writes.

In “Raising the Next Generation,” her devotion on the book of Esther, she describes how Mordecai’s “godly counsel” to Esther influenced a positive outcome for the Jewish people.

There’s also Obed-Edom. In “Disaster on Your Doorstep,” Hatcher studies chapter 13 of 1 Chronicles, about how a quiet man living a quiet life deals with the dangerous ark of the covenant arriving at his home.

“So many times the events of our lives surprise us,” Hatcher says. “We don’t have a choice in them, but we do have the choice of how to respond. We can whine and gripe and complain, which is what my default setting often is, or we can accept and figure out how God wants us to respond and what He wants us to learn, what character lesson is there.”

A dental hygienist by education and trade, Hatcher says disaster has landed on her doorstep several times.

She and her husband David, a bi-vocational minister, have weathered the challenges of unemployment twice in their married life. Their first daughter was born in a time of unexpected financial difficulty.

Though they had carefully saved for the birth, the Hatchers’ car required expensive repairs, wiping out their savings. And there have been other tribulations – the murder of her uncle, the loss of siblings and friends, and her Portuguese/ Italian propensity to yell. She covers these and more in Refresh Your Faith.

“I start with uncommon verses and connect them with modern-day stories,” Hatcher explains. “It’s more of a parable approach, like Jesus did so effectively. I’m just borrowing a page from God’s book, literally.”

Because there are 66 books in the standard protestant Bible, Refresh Your Faith has 66 chapters, or devotions. Each concludes with an “Uncommon Thought” to ponder and an “Unusual Faith” step to apply.

For those who want to dig deeper, she offers an additional reading selection. “I want to be able to provide spiritual nutrition for women, something they could chew on all day long, but packaged in a quicker format. And I want to energize people’s excitement about God’s Word.”

Hatcher’s nutrition-inshort-bites format continues from her 2nd book, Hungry for God … Starving for Time: Five-Minute Devotions for Busy Women. Published by Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas, Hungry for God was named the 2016 Christian Small Publisher Book of the Year.

Her 1st book, Joy in the Journey: Encouragement for Homeschooling Moms, includes devotions for every week in the school year.

While Hatcher’s books are written from a woman’s perspective, she says she has many men following her Hungry for God blog. Men should also find her new book interesting.

“This is Biblical truth that applies to everyone,” she says. “If they can get past the lavender on the cover, they’ll find a great reward on the pages.”

Find her book on Amazon at https://tinyurl.com/ y6vwbdv4 .