The Plumb Line Press
A quiet place in a noisy world.
I was working the audio board Sunday morning while Pastor Robbie Bailey preached.
For a moment, my attention wandered from Robbie to the congregation below.
I smiled.
I knew those heads.
Not every one of them, of course, but so many were familiar to me. And with some of them, I knew the story that went with the head.
And suddenly, I was filled with such affection for them.
I love these people.
I sat there for a moment, almost breathless.
It wasn’t the first time love had surprised me like that.
I attend a Bible study by phone on Wednesday nights. A few weeks earlier, while listening to those familiar voices, I realized I had fallen in love with them, too.
I had never seen their faces. Never sat beside them. Yet week after week, we had opened Scripture together, prayed together, and come to know one another by the sound of a voice over the phone.
Somewhere along the way, affection had found its way in.
I remember marveling at the beauty of that kind of love.
And now, sitting in the audio booth on Sunday morning, looking at those familiar heads, I felt it again.
My attention returned to Robbie. Dr. Wayne had hijacked my job at the board for the day, leaving me free to simply listen.
Robbie’s sermon was about the underdog. Somewhere in the middle of it, he said something about Jesus placing a longing within us.
I don’t remember his exact words, but I was overwhelmed by the enormity of them.
Ecclesiastes 3:11
“He has also set eternity in the human heart…”
The longing.
There are billions of us in this world.
People I will never meet, living lives I will never see, speaking languages I will never understand. And yet, for as far back as we can look, human beings have searched for God.
Maybe that is part of why I wanted The Plumb Line Press to exist.
The past can feel terribly far away.
We open a Bible and read about people who lived thousands of years ago in places most of us will never see. Sometimes it is easy to forget they were people at all—people who loved, worried, waited, made mistakes, asked questions, and wondered what tomorrow would bring.
A while back, I was getting my hair cut when the woman cutting my hair told me she didn’t think the Old Testament meant anything anymore.
I told her I thought it meant everything.
Without the Old Testament, we cannot fully understand the New.
She stopped for a moment.
“That was all I needed to know,” she said.
I have thought about that conversation many times.
There are wonderful biblical scholars and gifted preachers who have devoted their lives to teaching Scripture. Libraries are filled with what has been learned about the ancient world.
But sometimes a person isn’t looking for a library.
Sometimes we have twenty minutes.
Sometimes we simply need one connection we had never made before.
That is what I wanted to make room for here.
A story that lets us step into another time and recognize a little of ourselves there. Then the Scripture itself. And then, a look at the world surrounding those words—what came before, what followed, and what we have learned in all the years between their world and ours.
Because when the past no longer feels quite so distant, Scripture can become very close.
The people who walked through its pages lived long ago.
But they worried about tomorrow, too.
And here we are, thousands of years later, asking many of the same questions.
You may have five minutes today or you may stay for an hour. You may have known God most of your life, or perhaps you are still wondering about Him.
Either way, you are welcome here.
The Plumb Line Press was created as a place to slow down for a little while, open Scripture, step into its stories, and discover the world surrounding them.
The Plumb Line Press
A quiet place in a noisy world.
About Anise Horvath
Anise Horvath is a Christian novelist and copywriter. Her debut novella, Call Me to the River, is the first in the Daughters of Zion series. Its sequel, Where Violets Grow, is planned for release early next year.
She is also developing a series for pre-teens and working on another novel—a rather riveting one, if you ask her.
What is it about?
She isn’t letting that out of the bag just yet.