Emily Graves spoke with authors Betsy Duffey and Laurie Myers

Emily: Did you feel that there was an element of responsibility in writing a book on such a famous psalm?

Betsy: It really was a little bit intimidating because we'd known the psalm since we were children. We learned it in the King James Version where he restoreth and he leadeth and so it was hard - it almost made it more difficult to take a piece of scripture that people know so well and to make it fresh and to bring something new to it. And so that for us was a challenge.

Emily: So without giving too much of the storyline away, can you tell us what it's all about?

Laurie: It begins with a woman who is struggling with significance - and don't we all do that: we want our lives to count. She has a wayward son and she has written out Psalm 23 for him but he's not interested and he sticks it in his coat pocket. She drops off the dry cleaning and on the way home she's in a terrible car accident. As she's losing consciousness she prays: "God, please let my life count". And from that moment, her copy of Psalm 23 which was left at the dry cleaners, begins its journey around the world and each person who reads it is forever changed by a different line of the psalm.

Emily: I think that's the thing, isn't it? When you do read Scripture, God will bring whichever verse to life to us at the point that we are at.

Laurie: And God takes the small things. Kate, the main character, was struggling with significance and we tend to think our significance needs to be something big. But it doesn't. A small thing like writing out a piece of Scripture for someone: God takes that and makes it big.

Emily: So which characters do you both relate with the most?

Betsy: I think I related the most to Kate, just because I'm at the point in life where I've raised my children, I've had a career and my roles keep changing. I think that's true for a lot of women, that as we grow older our roles change in life and we have to begin to look for significance - not just from this world and not just from this life. That's the way I see Kate: it's a woman like me who wants answers in life.

Laurie: And it's hard to pick an individual character out of the book because it's like picking one of your children as your favourites: each one is something special to us.

Emily: How long did it take you to write the book together?

Laurie: It was amazingly fast. We had the idea for it and the very morning that we'd had that idea we started brainstorming some of the stories - the olive grower whose brother has betrayed him; the art restorer. We started brainstorming and we knew what some of the outlines of the stories would be. We have a document that we work on up in a cloud and we both have access to that, so we'd go up there and start typing. We immediately both started typing and typing and the stories just came together, some quicker than others - but maybe six months, total.

Betsy: I think it's interesting that God uses both of our strengths in the writing as we come together, especially as sisters. If you can imagine writing with a sister or a brother, that it takes God, with us, to make it work. But he uses our strengths: Laurie's a great researcher, so when we were doing the story of He Restores My Soul, we began to think of art restoration and to use a story about an art restorer - and Laurie began to research what that would look like and what they would do. I bring in my counselling experience to look at the man who had lost his wife, in the elements of grief and how God restores us in our grief. And so together we add different layers to the stories.

Emily: One of the themes that's in the book - and you've touched on it briefly there - is about the fact that it's a story of second chances. Why are second chances so important?

Laurie: Well, we have a Shepherd who gives not just second chances but third and fourth chances - and we need that because we are human and sin is a part of our lives and we stray just like the sheep. It was so interesting when we were writing and researching the book, not just reading books on Psalm 23 as research - but we went to a sheep farm. So we began to see how much we were like sheep and that is a fascinating experience. We need those second chances because we're like sheep: we're straying down the same wrong path. You don't see sheep in circuses because they don't learn tricks, they don't learn anything! They keep doing the same thing, over and over and so we need those second and third chances.