Deborah Castille Shelton Shares 45 Years of Spiritual Insights in Her Book, Give God A Fair Chance.

TX, UNITED STATES, April 29, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- From the first page to the last, Give God A Fair Chance (GGAFC) offers readers an in-depth exploration of life’s most significant questions regarding God, His relationship with humanity, and humanity’s relationship with Him. Drawing from her own relationship with God, a journey that began in 1980, Shelton has learned that life is all about choice – free will. She explains that free will is humanity’s major superpower, which comes from God the Creator Himself.

“The one factor that makes us most like our Creator is His gift of free will,” she says.

“Without free will, what would we be? Puppets like Pinocchio? Robots like C3PO and R2D2? Daily life requires every human to make one decision after another, some of which are important but, at the same time, they are neither life-preserving nor life-threatening. For example, deciding what clothes to wear and what to eat are important, but they’re not the most important choices we’ll ever have to make in our lives. However, other choices are, indeed, critical to life – and to death.
Many people are unaware that free will is what allows humanity to choose life or to choose death. God meant for us to use our free will, not only to choose life instead of death, but to use it to choose Him as our God. That is the whole premise upon which Give God A Fair Chance is built.”

Through her narrative, Shelton invites the reader to accompany her on her forty-five-year journey of getting to know God for herself. In the book, by providing real-life examples, she makes it clear that many people don’t want anything to do with God and would rather leave Him completely out of their lives; some people would like to get to know God but don’t even know how to begin; and some people are just lukewarm about Him; they can take Him or leave Him as long as He doesn’t get too close or tell them what to do.

“This may surprise a lot of people,” Shelton says, “but God is the only one that doesn’t tell us what to do. He can’t tell us what to do because that would mean He would be overriding our free will, and He would never do that. He can’t give us free will, and, at the same time, take it away from us. That’s not who He is. Furthermore, He wants us to want Him for Himself and for who He is. Don’t we all just want to be wanted for who we are? God feels the same way. In fact, that’s another way that we are like Him. Has anyone ever told you that before?”

Shelton goes on to say, “God won’t take our free will away from us – not ever – but we can willingly give our will over to His will for us.” She explains this in depth in Chapters 1, 2, and 9.

In her “Personal Note”, the compass that sets the course for Give God A Fair Chance, Shelton tells the story of how important her mother was in her life and that she was terrified of ever being separated from her, especially through her mother’s death.

“Late one night, when I was about five years old, I went and stood beside my mom’s bed hoping that she was awake. Realizing that she wasn’t, I made a little coughing noise to wake her up. Then I whispered, “Mom?” Startled out of much-needed sleep, she asked, “Deborah? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t want you to die!” I blurted out, and, in tears, I hugged her as tightly as I could. She hugged me back and said, “Don’t be silly. I’m not going to die. Now go back to bed.”

I knew she was trying to make light of the situation, but I also knew about death. It was everywhere. I had always been sensitive to God, but when I thought about Him, I related Him more so to death than to life, and that was probably because I was alive and didn’t have to think about that. Death, however, always haunted me. I knew my mom would die one day, and that I would, too. From that very early age, I hurled silent comments and questions at God; I didn’t dare speak them out loud: Why do we have to die? That’s not fair, God! What good is life if it means we just end up dying?!

What good is life if it means we just end up dying?

That was a critical question for Deborah, and it seemed no matter where she looked and how she tried to find the answer, she remained perplexed until God revealed Himself to her in 1980 and has continued to do so on a daily basis for forty-five years.

“The title of the book is fairly well self-explanatory,” Deborah tells us. “God wants every human to give Him a fair chance, but what fair chance do I mean? He wants every human to give Him a fair chance just to hear Him out about matters of life, death, and life after this life. He wants us to know the options that are set before us and then to use our other superpower – reason – to make the most beneficial choices for our life and for our life after this one. Give God A Fair Chance is a collaborative work by God and me. What I have written in this book over the course of at least ten years is God’s answer to my question when I was five years old. ‘What good is life if we just end up dying?’ He’s the only one that could conclusively and satisfactorily give me the answer to that question, and I pass it on to others in ten chapters beginning with my introduction to the God I chose as my own and who I have come to know.”

Although Shelton is retired from the teaching and photography professions, she is presently doing what she’s always wanted to do, which is to write books and help others achieve their goals as writers and authors. She also continues doing photography projects of one sort or another.

Regarding Give God A Fair Chance, she comments: “My primary motivation for writing that book was not monetary but one of concern for others who don’t know God as I do. It was to introduce readers to my God and to encourage them to know Him through me so they can learn to meet Him for themselves, if they don’t already know Him. It’s about knowing Him and knowing His answers to the universal questions that knock at the door of every human heart – matters of life, death, and life after this life.”

A world traveler, Shelton calls herself “a wanderer and a wonderer”. By virtue of having been an Army wife for twenty-two years, she accompanied her husband, retired Colonel Bo Shelton, from one post to another, from one U.S. state to another, and from one overseas assignment to another.

“I was born with an adventurous spirit, and I always wanted to travel the globe. When I was a child growing up in a small town in gulf coast Louisiana, I could never have envisioned the opportunities that God had in store for me.”

She explains: “Each place I’ve lived, and there have been many, has offered me the opportunities to engage people of different ideas, different beliefs, and different cultures.”

Her degree in English Education came in handy when she and Bo and their young daughter, Casey, were stationed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where she taught three children of the Saudi royal family, and in Etajima, Japan, where she taught the midshipmen and First Service officers at the Japanese Naval Academy.

“I felt like Alice in Wonderland in those places. I was the wide-eyed wondering wanderer. Not only was I able to meet many different kinds of people and thinkers, but while living in those two places, in particular, I began my journey of knowing God for myself. One of my experiences with Him in Japan was particularly enlightening, and it will be a point of contention for many readers, but if they will take the book as a whole, they will understand why He told me what He did at a Shinto shrine in a forest in Nikko.
In the book, I tell of my spiritual experiences in both of those places, and in many other places that were formative in my spiritual growth. I hope my story will encourage others to allow God into their lives, which is what He wants for all humans. He wants a deep, abiding, and everlasting relationship with each of us, but not on our terms – on His. In Give God A Fair Chance, He and I explain what those terms are. Owing to our free will, we can accept them, or we can reject them. That’s how fair God is.”

Give God A Fair Chance is available on Amazon along with Shelton’s recently published, We Survived, a narrative of her 2001 odyssey to Acadie (Nova Scotia) to connect her Cajun roots with the roots of her Acadian ancestors. It answers the question that is asked by many people: “What is a Cajun?” Also available on Amazon are two other books that bear Shelton’s work, one for which she was the ghostwriter, editor, and publisher, and one for which she was the editor and publisher: Tales from the Inn-Side in collaboration with Linda Lundeen and Un-Clean! Un-Clean! Un-Clean! Until I Met the Master by author, Crystal Quebodeaux.

For more information, please visit https://deborahshelton.cc

Deborah welcomes comments and questions: givegodafairchance@gmail.com

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Deborah Castille Shelton on The Spotlight Network TV with Logan Crawford!