Author | Speaker | Life Purpose Advocate | Leader | Communication Specialist | Non-fiction Writer | Cross Functional Team Builder | Strategist
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, working nearly three decades within a global materials company before publishing her first book at an age when most people are slowing down. She simply disagrees with the conventional story. She sees every part of her journey as fulfilling the same purpose.
The Author Who Evolved from 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.Her online posts, tagged with #lunchwithlora, provide hope and encouragement to thousands. What defines her is the thread of purpose woven through it all: loving God and people. 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 a summa cum laude accounting degree from Indiana University Bloomington and a habit she had kept since childhood. She read constantly.
“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.”
She is grateful for the many opportunities the company provided her to step into new roles and challenges. From accounting to IT and back again several times, she took a deep dive into product costing as a global business process steward.
In 2012 she moved into service delivery management, helping set the stage for a new IT shared services model. She does not call this preparation for a writing career. She calls it the source of a necessary 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 to price a product, approach publishers, and build a business from nothing.
She retired from Dow Corning in 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 the ability to create a fun board game and picture book for kids.”
The Prayers Nobody Sees and the Book Everybody Can
The writing career 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. This children’s picture book 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 help their kids build a solid faith foundation they can use as an anchor throughout their lives. So she wrote this faith foundation as the object of a treasure hunt families can enjoy and use to engage in meaningful conversation. That book has been named the 2026 Children’s Picture Book of the Year by the Christian Market Book Awards.
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. She often 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. #lunchwithlora feeds it, running on a set weekly rhythm of self-leadership, Scripture, and Christian living. She has reworked the format as engagement shifted, including less of the long teaching posts, and moving to the more popular one-to-three sentences with a visual.
Her most recent additional position arrived unexpectedly. 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 most recent career dismantling that idea, in devotionals, in prayers typed for strangers, and in a picture book for children. She cautions others 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 in a corporate office; 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 Michigan. She writes devotionals for weary adults and picture books that help families talk with their children about purpose. To connect with Lora or learn more, visit https://loraavery.com.
