Communication | Continuous Improvement | Leadership | Analytical Skills | Christian Living
The convention is familiar. You do the practical work first, and then, if you are fortunate, you get to do the meaningful work later. Lora Avery followed that sequence almost exactly, giving nearly three decades to a global materials company before publishing her first book at an age when most people are slowing down. She simply disagrees with the story everyone wants to tell about it.
The Author Who Kept the Accountant
Lora Avery is an award-winning author, speaker, and acquisitions team member at Abundance Books, working from mid-Michigan after 29 years at Dow Corning. Her books reach weary adults and curious children, and her weekly online gathering, #lunchwithlora, has run for years with no sales pitch attached to it. What defines her is a refusal: she will not divide her life into the practical part and the sacred part.
From Product Costing to Picture Books, by Way of a Playroom
She arrived at Dow Corning in 1987 with an accounting degree from Indiana University Bloomington and a habit she had kept since childhood. She read constantly, and she counts that as the first professional decision she ever made.
“A writer’s linguistic skills can be significantly improved through diverse reading. Even from a young age, my hobby was setting the stage for a future career.”
The company kept moving her into rooms where the problem had not been solved yet. Accountant in US marketing control. Programmer and analyst in finance and control systems by 1989. Corporate consolidations coordinator, then unit accountant, then twelve years as global business process steward for product costing, responsible for how a global manufacturer understood what its own products cost to make.
In 2012 she moved into service delivery management. By 2015 she was global service line leader for application development and maintenance, helping stand up a new IT shared services model across the company. Operating level agreements, incident standardization, process mapping. The unglamorous plumbing that decides whether a global business functions on a Tuesday morning.
She does not call any of that preparation for a writing career. She calls it the source of a specific competency.
“Learning to develop new processes for a large corporation built my core competency of risk evaluation and acceptance. This increased my confidence in my ability to move forward in unknown situations.”
Risk tolerance is what later allowed a first-time author with no salary underneath her to price a product, approach publishers, and build a business from nothing.
She retired from Dow Corning in October 2016 and spent the following years caring full time for her grandchildren. Most résumés would call that a gap. Hers produced inventory.
“Creativity needed when engaging in play and caregiving for my grandchildren translated into ability to create a fun board game and picture book for kids.”
The Prayers Nobody Sees and the Book Everybody Can
The writing began in earnest in November 2023 with Wilderness Paths and Desert Streams: 40 Devotions to Encourage Parched and Weary Souls, published by Free Methodist Books and later award-winning. A seven-day e-book, In Our WEEKness God Is STRONG, followed. Then came the project that reveals the most about her: The Biggest WHY: Finding the Real Treasure is Loving God and People, a children’s picture book that sends three characters, including a bird named Lemon, on a treasure hunt through clues from Scripture.
She built it against a gap she had watched widen. Parents who want to raise their children in faith often feel unequipped to start the conversation, so she wrote the conversation into a treasure hunt families can return to.
The public work is only half of it. The half that produces the strongest response is the part almost nobody sees.
“Typically, my first interaction with a new connection includes an offer to pray for any concerns they are willing to share.”
Some accept immediately. Some decline politely, then circle back weeks later and ask. She writes those prayers out in full rather than sending a line of sympathy, and the responses have told her something about what people are missing.
“Response to these written prayers has been overwhelmingly positive. Some print the prayer, allowing them to read it repeatedly.”
A prayer someone prints and keeps is a durable outcome, and it is the closest thing this business has to a retention metric. #lunchwithlora feeds it, running on a set weekly rhythm of self-leadership, Scripture, and Christian living. She has reworked the format as engagement shifted, moving from long teaching posts to one to three sentences with a visual, because that is what people stop for now.
The most recent addition arrived unannounced. Her publisher, Abundance Books, offered her a role in acquisitions, and she applied a single filter to the decision.
“I considered whether this role would increase my ability to love God and people or diminish it. I felt a ‘green light’ to move forward.”
She took it, and she now helps other authors get their work into the world. Behind all of it sits a self-leadership model she built several years ago from her own biblical research, designed to run a life the way a chief executive runs a business. It is currently recruiting beta testers, and it is the reason she can explain, precisely, why the accounting years and the picture book belong to the same body of work.
Every Moment Is Meant to Be Sacred
The convention says the corporate decades were the part before. Lora Avery has spent her second career dismantling that idea, in devotionals, in prayers typed for strangers, and in a picture book for children. She is blunt about the cost of accepting someone else’s ruling on what fits your purpose, because that ruling is almost always too small. She does not claim to meet her own standard cleanly.
“I succeed at times, and I fail at times … every day.”
She did not find her purpose after twenty-nine years of numbers; she simply learned to name what she had been practicing all along.
Lora Avery is an award-winning author, speaker, and acquisitions team member at Abundance Books, based in the Greater Saginaw-Midland-Bay City area of Michigan. She writes devotionals for weary adults and picture books that help families talk with their children about purpose, and she hosts the #lunchwithlora community online. To connect with Lora or learn more, visit loraavery.com.
