How One Pennsylvania Word Search Became 50 Books

Here's a little backstory on how Abiding Line Publishing came to be.

After 21 years of full-time ministry, serving several churches, I felt an increasing call to evangelism. By that, I mean getting out on the road and taking the Gospel message to churches that would have my wife and me come and share. Both of us are ordained pastors, and we felt called to this traveling ministry.

So we stepped out of pastoral ministry and into evangelism.

However, in order to do that, we needed a fresh and new income stream.

And so, believe it or not, I became a truck driver.

I started hauling sand. I would haul 40,000 pounds of sand from a quarry to a glass factory where they produced bottles. It was a good job; I drove about 350 miles a day. I was home every night.

It was actually a wonderful time.

The thing about driving a big rig is that you have a lot of time to think, to ponder, and to pray. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And on the weekends, my wife and I were out preaching and sharing the Gospel all over the place.

But driving a truck gave me more time too. I was home every day by 5 PM, which was wonderful.

There were weekends when we weren't going anywhere, and I would sit down at the computer and start playing around with different ideas. I began writing and creating sermons and messages, which is something I've always loved to do.

Then I started making, of all things, an automotive journal.

It was a place where you could keep track of your mileage, service intervals, oil changes, radiator fluids, and all the other things that needed to be checked and serviced on your vehicle. It was a little project that you could stick in your glove box.

I had a blast creating those things.

I was learning to use the computer and some graphic design programs, and I really enjoyed putting the books together. We made a whole bunch of those little automotive maintenance journals and put them on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing.

And we hardly sold any of them.

I did the best I could, but nothing much happened.

Still, I kept playing around with it.

Then came the COVID lockdown in 2020.

I began working on something I'd always wanted to do. I wanted to create a crossword puzzle book, but I couldn't get it figured out. I had so much trouble building a crossword puzzle that I finally thought, There must be something else I can create.

That's when I created my first word search puzzle book.

I decided to make it about Pennsylvania. I thought, I live here. Why not compile all of the cities and towns in Pennsylvania? I wonder how many there are.

As it turns out, there are more than 3,000.

So I took all those names, sifted through them in an Excel spreadsheet, and began creating word search puzzles based on the cities and towns of Pennsylvania.

I created one book.

And wouldn't you know it?

That one book turned into all 50 states.

Today, we have word search puzzle books covering all 50 states, along with a growing catalog of other word search collections. And the people who use them seem to have a blast with them—which is pretty rewarding after remembering where this whole thing started.

A truck driver hauling sand.

A computer.

A lot of spare time.

And one Pennsylvania word search puzzle.

That's how Abiding Line Publishing got started.