Longtime ‘Guideposts’ Author and Editor ‘Tib’ Sherrill Dies at age 95
She was the co-author of Corrie Ten Boom’s WWII book ‘The Hiding Place.’
Elizabeth (“Tib”) Sherrill, a writer and editor for Guideposts Magazine for 65 years and the author or co-author of more than 30 books, including Corrie Ten Boom’s “The Hiding Place,” died May 20 in Hingham, Massachusetts, at the age of 95.
Tib Sherill was born Elizabeth Schindler on Feb. 14, 1928, in Los Angeles and grew up in Scarsdale, New York. She and her husband John met aboard the ship Queen Elizabeth on a 1947 trip to Europe—she was on her way to study at the University of Geneva—and were married three months later. They were married for 70 years.
When John was hired as an editor for Guideposts in 1951, he tapped Tib to write inspirational stories for the fledgling publication, starting out as a ghostwriter for such notables as Alfred Hitchcock, per Christianity Today.
She went on to write more than 2,000 articles for Guideposts, and wrote hundreds of devotions for Daily Guideposts, now Walking in Grace.
She also went on to run most of the publication’s writer’s workshops, teaching authors like Sue Monk Kidd, Marion Bond West and Roberta Messner, according to Rick Hamlin, former executive editor at Guideposts, in a post on the magazine’s website.
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Sherrill co-wrote books such as “The Hiding Place,” a memoir about Corrie Ten Boom’s experiences fighting with the Dutch underground when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in World War II, as well as “The Cross and the Switchblade,” ”God’s Smuggler” and ”They Speak With Other Tongues.”
John and Tib Sherrill also founded Chosen Books, a publishing company dedicated to developing new Christian writers.
“Modest in the extreme, self-effacing and glad to cede the limelight to others, she found a perfect calling at this little magazine in coaxing stories out of others and then helping them share their highly personal accounts of God at work in their lives for an audience of millions,” said Hamlin. “She brought empathy and spiritual depth to what otherwise might have remained commonplace testimony. She never forgot the needs of the reader.”
John Sherrill died in 2017. Tib is survived by a sister and brother as well as three children, eight grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.
Main photo: Photo by Shawn G. Henry / Courtesy of Guideposts
