The long way around.

Frank Ball was born in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1945. The family moved to the Houston area in 1954 and to Fort Worth in 1962, which makes him — by his own description — a naturalized Texan rather than a native one. He has never seen a reason to leave.

Frank started working part-time at twelve and never really stopped. Before his career settled into offices and computer rooms, he had already collected an unusual résumé.

Frank spent four decades in business, most of it in and around technology, holding just about every title a growing company hands out. He liked the work. He was good at it. He expected to finish his career there.

Meanwhile, his nights and weekends belonged to something else entirely: biblical research, teaching, preaching and counseling. For years the two lives ran side by side without touching.

Frank had never wanted to write. Writing was the part of school he dreaded and the part of work he avoided. Then came a season of vivid dreams he could not shake, and the growing conviction that God was redirecting him away from the technology he loved and toward the writing he had hated.

He made the transition in 1992, began writing part-time in 1996, and went full-time about ten years after that. The first major result was Eyewitness: The Life of Christ Told in One Story — the Gospels woven into one continuous account so a reader could follow the life of Christ start to finish without losing the thread.

Since that turn, Frank has written and published books, edited and ghostwritten for other authors, coached writers one-on-one, taught workshops and conference sessions, spoken to churches and writers’ groups, and kept teaching Scripture wherever people would gather.

He has been part of The Writers’ View, North Texas Christian Writers, Story Help Groups, Roaring Writers and Roaring Lambs — organizations built on the simple idea that writers get better in the company of other writers. Alongside the books, he continues developing The Discussion Bible, a Scripture-in-story project designed for groups who want to read and talk rather than skim.

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Frank has been a widower since 2003, when Kay, his wife of thirty-seven years, died of primary pulmonary hypertension. He does not write around her absence; she is part of the story he tells.

He has three married sons and seven grandchildren. He lives in an upstairs apartment built in the huge attic of his oldest son’s house in a Fort Worth suburb — close enough to hear the grandchildren, far enough to get the writing done.

In 2024 Frank was diagnosed with prostate cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and stomach cancer. Treatment meant chemotherapy and forty-four radiation treatments. When it was finished, the scans showed no remaining signs of lymphoma or cancer.

Through all of it he kept writing, teaching, mentoring, and trusting God for each day. He treated hospitals, oncology clinics and treatment rooms as unexpected mission fields, giving away more than a hundred copies of Eyewitness to doctors, nurses, technicians and fellow patients.

Rather than halting his ministry, the experience enlarged it. It confirmed what he had been saying for years: every circumstance can become part of God’s story when we stay available for his purposes.

Frank is still writing, still publishing, still teaching, still mentoring writers, still in the text every day, and still building The Discussion Bible. He would tell you the most interesting chapter is usually the one being written now.