Q&A with Pamela Sonnenmoser

Tell us a little about your background and how you got into the ministry.

“My parents were evangelists and from the time I was a little girl, I thought I wanted to go into some kind of ministry. As I grew up, dreams of reaching people for God took a back seat to reaching for happiness and peace in everything the world had to offer. For six years I wandered in the wilderness of worldly pleasure. When I finally came back to the Lord, I thought he would never be able to use me because I had done too many horrible things. In 1996, God spoke to my heart in such a way that I knew He wanted me to surrender that prideful thinking and submit to His calling on my life. I finally realized it didn’t matter what I’d done before. It only mattered that I gave my life completely to the Lord.”

What was your inspiration for Praise & Paraphrase?

“I have always loved object lessons. I think having parents in ministry helped me to find examples of God’s truth in things we see every day. It seems like no matter what I am doing, the Lord uses the normal things in my life to show me what He is trying to teach me.  When I speak, I use a lot of these stories and object lessons. People kept asking me to repeat the stories, so I decided to make them into devotionals. Eventually, Praise & Paraphrase was born.” 

Now that Praise & Paraphrase is out in bookstores, do you have any projects that you're currently working on?

“It seems like I am always working on something new. I love it. Right now I am excited about the release of Pamela’s Healthy Pantry at the beginning of March; but this summer the book that is closest to my heart is being released by Beacon Hill. It’s called Beside the Empty Cradle. It’s such a personal book for me, because it’s our story of battling with infertility and the process to becoming content with God’s plan for our lives, even when it wasn’t our plan.” 

An excerpt from Praise & Paraphrase:

Baked Potatoes

All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.- Hebrews 12:11

I love baked potatoes. Not nuked potatoes, but baked in the oven at 350 degrees, for an hour - BAKED potatoes. If you only bake them for 10 minutes they will still be hard. The potato cannot yield to the heat of the oven in just a few minutes. It needs the full baking time to be perfectly done - crispy skin, fluffy on the inside.

Sometimes as Christians we don’t want to stay in the heat very long. We want God to perfect our faith with a microwave instead of the fire. But there is something different about a Christian that tries to take a short cut around the fire. Just like those microwaved potatoes aren’t the same as a REAL baked potato.

What I really love is a great twice-baked potato.  To be twice baked the potato spends an hour in the heat, then it is taken out, cut open, its insides are scraped out and crushed. Good things are added to it and finally everything is put back into the shell. That potato has to go back into the oven at that point; back into the heat. Finally it is perfected and ready to serve.

 I want to be like a twice-baked potato; perfected by the process God requires, having all of myself removed and having the extra things that come from the Holy Spirit added. I want to be yielded by His refining fire again and again. I long to be ready to serve the glory of God. 

Where can readers find your book?

“Praise & Paraphrase can be ordered directly from me at www.freshcupministries.com or on Amazon, and from your local bookstores.”

Head on over to Pamela's blog to enter the drawing for not only copies of Pamela's book, but also a larger prize pack. Just click the Fresh Cup Ministries link above.