Growing up in the comfort of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Elizabeth Vann might have embraced the charmed life of a small-town southern belle. But instead she chose to remain open to God’s call. And God clearly had other plans for her, which became evident when she married Worth Hobbs, a U. S. Naval Academy graduate who rose quickly in the military and later in the corporate world. In the span of nearly fifty years, Elizabeth would move twenty-nine times, and to such faraway places as Suriname, South America, where she and her husband endured three coup attempts.
Wherever she has lived, doors have opened to her—problems have been solved and challenges met; friends, old and new, and opportunities have always appeared at the right moment. Are these mere coincidences? Elizabeth long ago recognized them as evidence of God’s plan for her life, as examples of what she calls "God-incidences." Always an Open Door is no ordinary memoir, for it is a moving testament to the ways in which God works through us when we are willing to be obedient members of His household. Drawing abundantly from the Bible and from the Book of Common Prayer, Elizabeth uses her life story to illustrate the blessings, the glimpses of the Kingdom, that await all those who learn to recognize God’s call and who respond with a joyful and willing heart.
"I am but one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. What I can do, I ought to do. What I ought to do, by the Grace of God I will do. Lord, what will you have me do?"
— Motto of the Daughters of the King, a Holy Order in the Episcopal Church