I read a blog entry by an outstanding singer/guitarist/dude named Shaun Groves where in the comments he mentioned the reason Compassion International usually takes only women on their blogger trips is because the men have to work. As a result, it’s rare you see a male blogger writing about the problems around the world that various groups like Compassion are trying to fight.
It had me thinking about my current situation. READ MORE »
A month into job hunting and it hasn’t been good.
I haven’t had a single call back from any of the hundreds of applications making their way around the greater Nashville area.
Yes, it’s been frustrating.
However, one of the frustrating things is knowing that READ MORE »
Some friends of mine have done something called “Five Minute Fridays” for quite a while. It’s “sponsored” in the blog sense by a woman named Lisa-Jo who gives a writing prompt and then you write whatever comes to mind in five minutes. Normally, I don’t do these kinds of things but when I saw today’s prompt on Jenny and Melissa‘s pages it resonated with me. I don’t know why.
But I’m going to give it a shot.
If you met me…
Chances are you would have trouble starting up a conversation with me. It’s not that I don’t like to talk to people and it’s not that I don’t want to get to know you. It’s that I’m incredibly introverted most of the time.
Of course, that makes the fact I was on the radio for twenty years and did improv comedy seem completely out of the scope of what you would expect me to have done. But in those cases, I knew when it was “show time” and I could turn it on. I could let loose the guy inside me who’s buried beneath the scar tissue of years bullied and teased as a teen and layers of pain from one failure after another in his adult life.
If you broke through that shell, you’d see a guy with incredible dreams. Vivid stories that spring from his head right and left. Stories that when told sound like a great book or a great movie. A spring of ideas that flow and flow into a pool where they stay because he has no real creative outlet to put those ideas to use.
You’ll then find that he doesn’t put them to use because he’s so wrapped up in the idea that his life has to make a difference. He can’t justify to himself spending six months writing a book if he knows that it’s not going to be published and no one’s going to read it. Sure, he may enjoy writing it but if the finished product is going in a drawer it seems like a waste of time to him.
Besides, no one’s lining up to give him a publishing contract.
You’d also find a guy who’s desperate to find a job. A guy who continually seeks God despite the fact many times it seems God’s on vacation. A guy who’s faced all kinds of trials and is still standing.
And you’d realize you can’t figure him out in a five minute conversation.
I watch the “reboot” of Hawaii Five-O when I have some time to kill unwinding after work. I’ve been rather impressed with the way the show has been reworked to bring something new out of something that has been long since dormant.
And Scott Caan is just awesome as Dan-o.
But I’m not here to write about a TV show based on an island where I’ll only visit if God somehow moves in mighty ways. The reboot of the show, while good, can’t match God rebooting something. He decided to do that with me. READ MORE »
As a writer and blogger myself, I like to read and encourage other writers and bloggers. I have a host of blogs in my Google Reader and I try to go through them all each day. I won’t say I read every post from every person but I probably read 90% of them. I try to leave comments to encourage folks to keep going and to help add to the conversations they’re trying to lead.
Now, because I did a top 5 of Pete Wilson’s sermons in my last post, I deliberately left him off this list to give someone else a chance to be in the spotlight. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check out Pete’s blog if you have an opportunity.
I tried to think of the most fair way to do this list and decided the only really solid basis I could use that couldn’t be disputed would be total visits to the site. (It’s a nice added bonus to having software that tracks websites you visit.) If you look at my links page you’ll see more than those listed here and a few “newcomers” who might be on this list next year!
10. Angela Luck – Randomness of Luck
A family friend and fellow writer. Makes a mean shredded chicken and gravy sandwich. Knows Swedish Fish is a perfect gift for every occasion.
9. Morgan McGavin – Reflections of a Thankful Heart
We came to know Morgan (pictured right) this year when she started attending Cross Point church. She’s become a family friend and Amy & I have been blessed to be able to pour into her. She’s a young Christian who has had to face some stern challenges.
If you want to see someone who knows how to encourage writers AND has a wicked sense of humor, you need to check out Kat. (She’s also hilarious on twitter so you should follow her there even if you don’t read her blog.)
For most people, stepping out in faith means you spend an afternoon painting the walls at the church or perhaps giving someone a tract at the airport. For Jenni and her family (left), it involves picking up and moving from their home in the Pacific Northwest to a church plant in El Paso, Texas where Jenni will lead worship. With no paying jobs. Depending on people to support them as the Lord leads them to give. We support her. You should too.
6. Jamie (Wright) The Very Worst Missionary
Jamie is not for the faint of heart. She doesn’t water her words down to make them sanitized for your reading comfort. She doesn’t pretend to be so holy she doesn’t poo. She talks about the adventures of being a missionary in ways most missionaries wouldn’t think about doing. I love her transparency.
5. Kaye Dacus
The head of the Middle Tennessee Christian Writers. We share a mutual love of Castle. She’s also been really helpful in my development as a writer. Published three books in 2010. Yeah, she’s got skillz.
4. Jenny Rain (Schmitz) – Rainmakers and Stormchasers
Jenny (right) has been a great encouragement of my blogging and writing and I greatly appreciate her support. Her passion for Africa is astounding and you need to see some of the great pictures that she had taken during her last visit.
3. Matt Appling – The Church of No People
I know a lot of folks who say “who?” when I mention Matt’s name but they know The Church of No People. Matt had such a great concept for a blog…”what sermon would a pastor preach if no one showed up to church?” You might be surprised! (Although I know people virtually “show” for his “church” quite often!)
2. Jared Wilson – Gospel Driven Church
Jared and I line up quite a bit on theological issues and he never fails to challenge me both intellectually and theologically. All he needs to do now is get his podcasts of sermons up and running again!
Michael (left) is a world unto his own. He routinely posts hand-written blog posts. He loves his wife, loves his kid and isn’t afraid to post a picture of himself in a horrible sweater. He also has a real heart after the Lord. He’s worth your time.
There are more I could put on this list and I encourage you to check out all the folks on my links page.
“Oh, man. I don’t want to do that.”
“But what if this is what God wants you do?”
As always, my wife verbalizes the question I don’t want to admit has usually been running through my head before she opened her mouth.
We were driving home from spending the afternoon with some friends and talking about the changes God’s been making in our life. I shared with her how I had some ideas for writing stories but that I didn’t like the overall genre the stories seemed to fall into…
They seemed to be romance novels.
Yeah. I had the same reaction that you likely had reading that.
You see, I hate the romance novel genre. Even moreso the Christian romance novel genre. Over the last year plus I’ve listened to many different Christian romance novelists who lament the “rules” of the genre and I’ve seen more than a few of them get zapped in writing contests because they didn’t fit the “conventions” of the genre like the man and woman have to meet before the end of the first chapter.
And forget even being remotely realistic about the characters. If someone wrote Song of Solomon today and tried to get it published as a Christian romance, they’d be run out of the business. You need to keep everyone so clean that a nun would look like Hugh Hefner in comparison.
To paraphrase the great philosopher Happy Gilmore, if I wrote something like that I’d have to kick my own butt.
Yet the story ideas that keep coming into my head have romantic factors underlying the story. Amy spotted them right away while we were talking and challenged me on the fact I had such a problem with it.
“You have problems with happy endings?” she asked me.
“No,” I said, “just happy endings that too impossibly clean to be anything close to real. And contrary to the conventions of the genre, in the real world the guy and girl don’t always get together in the end.”
That’s when Amy dropped the hammer that had been swinging around me.
“What if this is what God wants you to write?” she asked. ”What if God answered your prayer about writing by having you write these stories that keep coming to you?”
I’d like to say that I said I’d just do what God wants and went home and started writing these stories in my brain. In reality, I’ve written this blog and prayed that if this was God pushing those stories in my head to let this cup pass and bring me one that’s more to my personal taste! Something with a good murder mystery and need for the CSI techs to show up.
You can write snappier dialogue that way.
After all, catch phrases like “book ‘em, Dan-o” didn’t come out of romance novels. Then again, “you complete me” from Jerry Maguire did fairly well making it into the common lexicon.
So, I’m resisting what I’m feeling and thinking it might not be God. Or I’m telling myself that so I don’t have to do what I feel like I should be doing.
Have you ever found yourself looking for reasons not to do something that seems to be clearing coming into focus in front of you?
I didn’t expect the response I had from yesterday’s post.
God loves to surprise us.
If you missed yesterday’s post, I ended with this challenge:
do you have a situation in your life similar to mine where you need to go toe to toe with that demon and take ground back?
I had hoped someone reading the entry might be tempted to take up the challenge but I wasn’t even remotely expecting the person who sent me a message a short time after publication.
The message came in via Facebook from a woman who attended high school with me back in the olden days (a.k.a. the late 80s.) She said that she had read my blog post and wanted to take me up on the challenge. She said when she received a friend request from me last year (the 20 year reunion had “friend recommendations” flying) she almost didn’t accept it because of something that happened when we were in school together. She shared, I shared and within a few messages long held wounds began surprisingly quick healing. (Well, quick on my wounds, I can’t speak for her.) That’s why yesterday I said on twitter about God allowing more ground to be taken back.
Later, as I shared the exchange with my wife, something jumped out in my mind. It was something that my friend shared in her second message to me…
You seemed wrapped up with things on the dark side and it scared the crap out of me.
I wasn’t Christian back then, so my being “on the dark side” may not seem as shocking as it would otherwise, but it made me think about what happened on September 19th when my family & I were cruising down the Natchez Trace Parkway. If you didn’t read that entry, God spoke to me through my wife that I had been investing too much of my time in things that were dark. Horror movies. Crime novels. Supernatural stories. Demons, darkness…
I titled the post “Here comes the paradigm shift.” I thought the removal of those things from my life was the shift. No, the shift happened last night after the words of my friend really sank into my heart.
You seemed wrapped up with things on the dark side and it scared the crap out of me.
I had never really moved past being that boy who scared her. Sure, I was older, a little more mature, a follower of Christ…but I still had that darkness within me that I not only continued to permit but fed and grew. I may have covered it up with “light filled” language but the darkness still maintained my focus. I was still enamored with serial killers and the “dark” characters the world had to offer instead of the “light” characters and good guys that stopped them.
And that’s why God shut down my ability to write fiction.
My writings…my entire first novel…came from a place of writing the story to make the serial killer the driving force and the “good guys” were secondary creations put in place to not make the story seem so dark. The entire focus of that novel was 180 degrees off where it should have been…and God couldn’t allow that. It wasn’t that crime fiction was bad; it wasn’t that the story itself was bad; it was that the focus was wrong. The killer shouldn’t be seen as a hero. However, because of the grounding of my youth toward “dark” things, it naturally came out of me to make the killer (and thus, the evil) the focus of the story.
That’s not fiction from a Christian perspective. Coming from a Christian perspective, the evil has to be…well…evil. The dark has to be and remain dark. Sure, it’s possible you could have what seems to the world to be valid reason for an “evil” character’s actions but to glorify that would be secular fiction without a Christian worldview. It would be something that I didn’t want to write and I don’t think is the reason God gave me the gift of writing.
And so another wall falls.
And for some reason, I think that my preferred genre of writing might even be coming back only from a different point of view. I’ll have to spend some more time in prayer over this one.
I’ve also noticed the spiritual warfare around me working in a new direction…but I’ll touch on that in tomorrow’s video blog.
It’s starting to reach the point that I’m dreading the weekend! God sure seems to love to pop into my Saturdays and shake things up a little bit.
Although, to be fair, today just brought the culmination of something God’s been doing over the last few weeks. He answered a prayer with yes that I really had hoped He wouldn’t answer that way. However, I felt like I needed to put something completely on the altar in front of God and see what He would do.
So now, I’m not writing fiction.
In the future? Who knows.
I wrote a few weeks ago about the shift that God brought into my life in terms of the things I was putting into my head. Movies, books, TV shows about the paranormal and serial killers, gone. I had no idea what God wanted to put in it’s place but it threw a wrench in my writing. I’d already been struggling with writer’s block but now I had the added level of the genre I had been working in taken away from me.
I started to work on some other stories in other genres and nothing came together. To say it was bad would be insulting to bad work. I found myself getting more and more frustrated with it until I had a thought that I didn’t like…[more]what if God didn’t want me writing fiction right now, period? So one night after I came home from another failed writing outing, I prayed and said if God didn’t want me writing fiction to take the gifts away from me.
Well…He answered that prayer. (Of all the ones I’ve been praying, He picked THAT one to answer?) I went from bad attempts at fiction to not being able to write at all. A feeling that I was supposed to lay it down and stop trying to force something to happen. I couldn’t even write just for the joy of writing and that had never happened to me before. Some wise counsel, some more prayer and it was obvious…hang it up.
To be honest, it kind of ticks me off a little bit. I’m tired of God taking stuff. I mean, it was bad enough that he takes all my favorite books, movies and TV shows. Now, He takes away what I really had thought would be something He would develop and use. It’s leaving me feeling more than a little beaten down. Sure, I know that He COULD give it back to me now that I’ve surrendered the whole enchilada. I’m not going to think it, though. The blog writing ideas haven’t gone away and I don’t feel led to stop this so at least I have some writing outlet.
All of this as the backdrop, my wife suggsted that I take some time and get away from everything either by going to lunch somewhere or by taking a walk or going to a park. I had a great lunch at Sopapilla’s (love their blue corn chicken tacos) and I thought I would check out Radnor Lake. It was a nice, mid-80s day with no clouds in the sky. Find a seat along the water, throw some music on the MP3 player and just try to unplug and see if I can get some peace.
A quick in-and-out at Walgreens for an Arnold Palmer and I was on my way. I called up a map of the park on my Blackberry and saw the “lake trail” had a few places where it was likely I could just sit, watch the water and relax. Little did I know that what would happen is an eerie lesson from God. A reminder? Well, I don’t know…
I confirmed at the welcome center there was a deck area where I could sit and I happily walked the little way to where I had been told there was a deck area. I didn’t want to hike today…I wanted to sit, relax and try not to think about things for a little while. (Normally, I love a good hike, especially where I haven’t hiked in the past.)
I forced a few smiles at the people I passed on the trail. I didn’t feel like being very friendly but you can’t help but return friendly smiles and nods. After walking a little farther than I thought I would need to walk, I crested the top of a little hill and saw the observation deck area.
And…it was occupied.
And…I became rather irritated.
I know it sounds a little childish…perhaps a lot childish…but I just wanted to have that time to sit and unplug and process. I probably could have just set up camp there and made those who had previous squatters rights uncomfortable until they left…but I couldn’t do it. So I kept walking. I figured eventually there had to be another spot on the “lake trail” where you could sit and look at the aforementioned “lake.” The trail had benches along it but they were so far from the lake itself that you couldn’t really get a good look at the lake.
I kept walking…and walking…and at a few points couldn’t even really see the lake! I saw a guy walking toward me with a Bible and a notebook in his hand so I thought I’d ask him if he saw a place to sit near the water.
“Um…no,” he said. “There’s a few benches but nothing near the water. This trail just goes on and on until you reach the paved road.”
And the funk went funkier.
I kept trudging up the trail, pits becoming more than mildly moist reminding me I’d forgotten anti-perspirant this morning, and grumbling a little bit about how this trail was reminding me of the way my life and spiritual life has been going over the last few years.
Think about it…I thought I knew where I was going. I started out on the path I thought was the one I was supposed to walk with enthusiasm because I knew where it was going. Then I would see someone else get what it is that I thought I would be receiving and my mood would start to sour. Then I’d keep on walking forward…trusting in God that if that first moment wasn’t right…that He would have something else. Something better.
But nooooooooooooo…not me. I just keep walking forward going deeper and deeper into the woods with no idea where the trail was going to end and if at some point during that trail I would get something that I wanted from my heart.
The deeper I went into the trail…the deeper the woods. At one point, I honestly couldn’t even see the lake through the trees. I could have been walking anywhere other than at Radnor Lake! But I kept praying that God would speak to me…and received silence.
And then…I saw the paved road ahead of me. There was a long wooden bridge with a few bench areas that I guess would cover some streams should there have been rain in the recent past…instead it was just a bridge over land. No lake to be seen. I hopped on twitter and tweeted that coming to Radnor Lake was a bad idea.
So I walked to the paved road and my stress level was higher than it was before I took my wife’s advice to get some time alone to lower my stress.
I stood on the road toward the parking area. I looked ahead and saw no benches or places to sit although I could at least see the lake! I figured i could look at it as I passed. I’d given up on getting what I’d wanted even though it seemed so incredibly simple.
I walked a few hundred yards and noticed this…(and let me apologize that the photos aren’t as clear as I normally post…I had to use the Blackberry.)
It’s certainly not a bench but it’s a place you could sit and look at the water. So I stopped. And then I looked up:
Absolutely beautiful. And a much better view than I would have had if the original location I thought I would be sitting was available to me. So because my plan A didn’t come to pass…and I had to take a hike I didn’t want to take…God ended up bringing me to a place where I could see beauty like this:
And yes, the allegory here is not lost on me at all.
So I don’t know what I’m going to be coming up with next but right now I have this blog and pretty much nothing else. (Other than family, of course, but I’m assuming you know I’m not giving up my family!) God’s been taking and taking and taking and taking and taking. It’s allowed me to spend more time focused on Him but still…I get tired of the take sometimes.
So…your prayers for the next step would be appreciated. And if I can pray for you, let me know.
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