Born: October 17, 1950, Port Angeles, Washington. Died: July 23, 2004, Peralta, New Mexico. |
Susan was the second of two girls in the family. Her father worked for the National Park Service, so Susan enjoyed growing up in National Parks and Historic Sites across America.
She did her undergraduate work at Stanford University and earned a BS in mathematics in 1972. The next year she took a one-year graduate program at Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon, and received a Certificate of Bible upon completion.
She decided not to pursue a career in computer science, as she had originally intended, instead embarking on a series of jobs in which she honed her office skills and gained some missions experience. She spent 1976 in Tanzania under the Africa Inland Mission. Upon her return, she settled in Portland, Oregon, where she learned word processing and did editing and proofreading.
In 1990, Susan decided to go back to school to learn how to work with visually impaired and blind adults. She received her MA in rehabilitation teaching of the blind from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1991. She then moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, where she worked as an editor and desktop publishing technician for 10 years and did volunteer rehabilitation teaching in her spare time. Much of Susan’s editing and desktop publishing work was on books produced by the Missions Commission of World Evangelical Alliance, including Working Your Way to the Nations, Too Valuable to Lose, Send Me!, Global Missiology for the 21st Century, and Doing Member Care Well. She also worked part time for Emergency World, a company that produced training materials for emergency response personnel. Susan moved back to Oregon in 2002, where she continued the same work she did Colorado.
For several years, Susan worked with Wycliffe Associates as part of a team that helped keyboard Bibles and New Testaments that were printed before the age of computers and that needed to be put into electronic format, so that they could be updated or adapted for other languages.
Susan’s career as a hymn writer began in 1997, when she set a goal of writing 100 hymns. Her method was to select a passage of Scripture for each song and then find a hymn tune that seemed to fit the passage. She thus combined the enduring Word of God with melodies that have stood the test of time. Her songs were a blessing to her, and she was pleased to be able to share them with others.
Hymns
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