Who is Jonathan?

Jonathan Moy always dreamt of being a writer, stretching back to his early high school days writing poems based on cheesy Amy Grant songs. With dreams of grandeur, he graduated from the University of Washington with a B.A. in English Exposition and a Minor in Communications. Working in the insurance industry for the past ten years or so, Jonathan wrote his first novel "The Rose's Thorn" on and off until it was finally released as an e-book on Smashwords.com on June 20, 2013.

Jonathan's hobbies vary from going to music concerts, watching football and basketball, playing video games, commenting on popular culture, spending time at his church, Living Hope Bible Church among other things. The list of things he does not like is too long to be posted here.

Jonathan's Testimony:

I've always grown up in the church, thanks to the insistence of my mom and dad, so I know all the Sunday School Bible stories by heart and probably was a bit of a smarty-pants because of all the things I knew about the Bible and such. I couldn't tell you exactly when I put my faith in Jesus Christ, but it was early on.

One of the silliest things I believed when I was a kid was that I had to "reaccept" Christ into my heart every time I did something bad, little knowing that this wasn't the way God's mercy and grace actually worked. By the time I was a teenager, I became much more serious in my faith and in my commitment to Christ and was baptized when I was 16. I grew to understand fully that we need God's mercy (we are spared what we deserve) in our life because what we deserve is eternal separation from God because our sin, no matter how small or insignificant. In His eyes, in any single moment you fail at God's standard of perfection, we deserve death. No matter how much we try, we cannot please God with our good works or good nature. The only just punishment for sin is death. It is only God's mercy that saves us from that death, and that is good news.

But even better news is the fact that God has given us grace (given something we don't deserve). What has God's grace given us? It's a spot in His family -- not as a servant, but as His child with an inheritance and a Promise. How much would you pay for a spot in God's family? A million dollars? Fifty years of good works? Your life? Strangely enough, it is a gift that is both free and costly. It is only by believing that God so loved the world that He gave His only Son to take away the punishment of death from sin, and that by place all your hopes and faith in Jesus Christ can we be saved. He saves, and only He saves.

The gift is free, but as I mentioned, it is costly because from the moment we trust in Christ, our lives are His ... for His purpose, and that is the lesson I am still struggling with. In my college years, my trust was in myself and my writing acumen. My trust was in the plan to be married and have my first child by 25. Slowly and surely, God has tested me in these areas -- humbling me in concerns to my hope for a family and letting me know that the trust I put in my writing needs to be put in Him first. They are hard lessons to learn, but I have faith, like Abraham, that no matter how long it takes for God to keep His promises -- He keeps His promises, and the timing is always right. So this book, "The Rose's Thorn," is in God's timing though it was not in my perfect timing. Praise be to God because He saves us.......not only from sin but from the broken and limited dreams we have. We can be saved to eternal life and saved to a future of a life He has promised us that will be mighty for him.