Timothy's Thoughts

Labeling Books

2012-01-30T00:01:00.004-06:00

I’ve heard of people downloading free books and then leaving low star reviews because they were angry because they turned out to be Christian books. But I’ve also heard that similar things have happened to books in other genres after readers found out they were not what they were expecting. One idea is that books should be clearly labeled as Christian. I’m not sure that would help, since most Christian books are already labeled as Christian. It seems to me that readers are grabbing up free books as quickly as they can get them and they don’t bother to look at what they are until they already have them on their Kindle.

I wonder if maybe the solution isn’t in adding even more labeling but in providing a better means for people to voice their frustration. The only reason we authors find it upsetting when they leave low star reviews is because it makes our book look bad when it is really just a case where someone didn’t like the subject. I’m not sure how many people pay attention to the stars on Amazon.com. About the only thing I use them for is to jump to the reviews that will tell me what is wrong with a product. I mostly ignore 5 star reviews because they don’t tell me much. But I don’t trust the stars to tell me if the product is good or not. I’m about to convince myself that it doesn’t matter.

But people do need a place to vent. If they download a free book that they don’t like or worse, if they purchase a book and then discover they don’t like it, there’s really nothing wrong with them having a place to complain about the book. We authors want people to love our books, so we don’t like the idea that people would be giving us one star reviews for no good reason, but a lot of the bestselling books average about three stars. It turns out that when you have about the same number of people who hate you book as love your book, you end up selling more books because people won’t shut up about it. High emotions surrounding a book will cause it to sell. Well written books with very little emotional attachment don’t sell.

What are the Dragons in the Bible?

2012-01-27T00:01:00.001-06:00

I heard an interesting claim the other day. Dinosaurs are mentioned in the Bible and in other historical texts, but rather than using the term dinosaur, these texts use the word dragon. The claim does not seem to be without basis, since the word dinosaur wasn’t even coined until after the first translations of the Bible into English were complete. And we know that when Satan spoke to Eve, he appeared in the form of a serpent with legs.

There is opposition to this idea that dinosaurs and dragons are one and the same. Largely, this could be attributed to what we think we know about them. Dinosaurs are creatures that supposedly died out millions of years ago. Dragons are mythical creatures that breathe fire, work magic, and fly. But let’s suppose we could put a dinosaur and a dragon side by side. Let’s also suppose we get rid of the fire breathing and the magic. Now, they begin to look very similar. Both are reptiles. Both can grow to great sizes, though most dinosaurs were quite small. Both have very sharp teeth.

Fiction often has a basis in fact, so it isn’t unthinkable that the stories of dragons would begin with a real creature. Fire and magic might have been added to the stories to make them more entertaining. The problem then is that people believe dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. Trust me, there are a lot of scientists who aren’t going to give up on that idea. If they did, they would have to give up on the concept of evolution, which they have turned into a god.

I don’t care what they think. They have no way to prove that the Earth is billions of years old. And I don’t have any way of proving that dinosaurs are dragons, but there is evidence that indicates it could be true. But I find the concept fascinating. Think about it. As little as a few hundred years about dinosaurs might have still been around. Maybe they still are, if we knew where to look. What do you think? Do you think there be dragons?

Is Tate Publishing a Scam?

2012-01-26T00:01:00.001-06:00

Today, I want to take one more look at Tate Publishing and Enterprises LLC. In case you missed Tuesday’s post, Tate Publishing is a subsidy press that focuses on unpublished authors. They charge a $3,990 publicist setup fee, but they do appear to have sufficient staff to justify their claim that they have allocated $27,000 for each book. Today, I want to look less at promises and more at results. In the interest of showing rather than telling, take a look at the video below:

One of the services that Tate Publishing provides is that they create fifteen second spots like the one above and run them on cable networks. They promise 80,000 impressions. Or to state it another way, they promise that 80,000 people will see that commercial. Someone from Tate Publishing is welcome to correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they charge an additional fee for these commercials.

The way I would expect this to play out is that each commercial will air one time with about 80,000 people watching. They may have to run it more than once to reach the 80,000, so a few people might see it more than once. They may run these things in an infomercial, with several 15 second slots queued up between thirty second slots encouraging people to publish through Tate Publishing. I don’t know because I’ve never seen one of these Tate Publishing commercials running on any network that I’ve ever watched. To me, that is a terrible result.

On top of that, consider the content of the commercial. It has a voice over, which is a good thing, but it is poorly written. The language is far too formal and there’s nothing to convince me that I want to spend a few hours in the land of this story. While this is just one case, consider also the product descriptions for the books that Tate Publishing is trying to sell. To do that, go to a site like Amazon.com and on the Advanced Search page type in “Tate Publishing” in the publisher field. The following is the description from a book called Purchased Power:

John Moore is a successful and brilliant yacht designer living the good life outside of San Francisco. Life seems perfect, when without warning he discovers his wife is being unfaithful and plotting to take over his business. He quickly devises a plan to save his business and leave her for good. He soon finds himself in a world he did not know existed--a world of global political corruption and intrigue. Purchased Power is a story of human weakness, greed, and good people whose errors in judgment put their lives on perilous paths. Follow John Moore on an epic journey to some of the most exotic countries in the world as he tries desperately to save a good woman from the clutches of the corrupt.

This is one of the better ones and still it needs work. The author typically writes these things, but it’s still the editor’s responsibility to help clean them up. This is the first thing potential customers will see.

My point is that the results Tate Publishing are getting is more in line with what you would expect from a subsidy publisher charging a $3,990 entry fee rather that those of a high quality traditional publisher that is paying $27,000 per book. But let’s not jump to the conclusion that Tate Publishing is a scam. A more likely explanation is that they are not selective enough. The fact is, it is easier to produce a good book if the author knows what he’s doing. Combine with that fact that the editing budget is a little low and it is no surprise that their results are less than ideal. But if you happen to be an author who can’t get a contract from a traditional publisher, a subsidy press like Tate Publishing may be just what you’re looking for. As long as they aren’t telling you they will do one thing and they do another, they are not a scam.

One Word

2012-01-25T00:01:00.001-06:00

You don’t really think about the power of words unto you consider how the meaning of one word can influence our understanding of big important concepts. Let’s look at the word church. This word is interesting because we throw it around so loosely and most people don’t give much thought to what it means or where it comes from. We go to church. We meet in a church. We are members of a church. Three different sentences and the word has three different meanings, but there are more than three. When we consider that the Bible used the word church many times, we might start to realize that our whole concept of what a church is may be very different based on which definition we use.

If you say, “I went to church on Sunday,” you probably mean that you went to a worship service of some sort. There’s nothing particularly wrong with using church in that way, since it gets the point across. The problem is that if we use that definition when we reader where Jesus says, “Upon this rock I will build my church,” we might get the impression that he is saying, “Upon this rock I will design my worship service.” Of if we see church as a building, then it seems to make sense for Jesus to say, “Upon this rock I will build my building.” But we’ve all heard from our childhood that the church is the people, not the building. We’ve heard it, but can we prove it?

The word church comes from the Greek word kyriakon which meant “of the Lord” and was used in the form kyriakon doma, meaning “the Lord’s house”. So, in that sense, the word church more correctly refers to the building than the people who meet there. But the word is used in out English Bibles. How can that be? My best guess is that the people who met in the church buildings became so closely associated with the building that people began to use the term interchangeably. So rather than translate the word ekklesia with its original meaning, the translators used the word church. If you want to understand the Bible, everywhere you see the word church, you should remember that it is used in the place of the word ekklesia.

Back when Jesus was using the word, ekklesia already had a meaning. It isn’t a word that he coined, but rather a word he chose because it most closely resembled the organization he organized. In those days, the word ekklesia referred to an assembly. If there was a city council, ekklesia would have been a proper word to use to refer to that body. This is where start to see where our definition of the word church can influence our doctrine.

One common usage of the word church today is to refer to all of the Christians in all of the world. Obviously, it is not possible for all Christians in all of the world to assemble in one place, so it would not be proper to call that church an ekklesia, but we sometimes find that people try to take what the Bible says about the ekklesia and apply it all of the Christian in all of the world. This is sad. I’m no different from anyone else. I would love for the whole family of God to get along. What makes it sad is that when people see church as being all Christians it dilutes the power of what God has said to the individual churches. Look at I Corinthians 12:28, “and God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets,…” Taken out of context and with a large scale view of church, it would be easy to think this verse is talking about how that in the large body of all Christians there are different kinds of workers. While that is true, what it is actually saying is that God placed these people in the church at Corinth. We extrapolate from that that he pays just as much attention to our own local church. If that were not the case, it would be possible for there to be a church full of teachers and no one to do anything else.

How different our doctrines may be based on how we define one little word.

Tate Publishing

2012-01-24T00:01:00.001-06:00

On more than one occasion, I’ve been asked to give an opinion of Tate Publishing (legally, Tate Publishing and Enterprises, LLC). When I was originally asked, I had very little basis to form an opinion, other than from what I could find online and that left a bad taste in my mouth. According to their website, Tate Publishing claims to be a traditional publisher. This is interesting because authors who have used them mention a $4,000 fee. By definition, that fee makes them a subsidy press rather than a traditional publisher. I don’t like it when companies hide stuff.

I began to understand them a little better when I had the opportunity to look at the contract they ask their authors to sign. The $4,000 fee is actually a $3,990 fee that they classify as a publicist setup fee. Essentially, they require their authors to have a professional publicist. If they don’t, Tate Publishing will charge them $3,990 to use one of theirs. They claim that the publicist is valued at $20,000 per year, but they will absorb that cost. They also claim that they budget $27,000 for editing, production, marketing, etc.

Consider, if their claims are true, $3,990 is a very good deal. It is a little higher than most people are paying for a subsidy press to publish their book, but Tate Publishing functions more like a traditional publisher. Besides, once you sell 1,000 copies of your book, Tate Publishing will refund the $3,990. I may be coining a phrase, but I want to call that a reverse advance, since the author is paying the publisher with the option of getting it back once the publisher earns enough money from the book.

But the problem I see with Tate Publishing’s claims is we have no way to verify that they are accurate. First, the contract states that Tate Publishing is under no obligation to tell the author how the $27,000 allocated for the book is being spent. For all we know, the bulk of it could be allocated toward printing books as the orders come in. That would allow them to allocate the funds on paper, but it would be a very low risk because they wouldn’t spend it until the orders come in. That is just one possibility. It is also quite possible that they are actually spending that money.

Consider also the $20,000 annual publicist fee. This appears to be going to another company called Key Marketing Group. According to the Tate Publishing website, Key Marketing Group is providing six people. Three and a half of these people have the title of “Publicist”. For good or ill, that appears to be the smallest department Tate Publishing has. Their editing department does appear to be quite large, which speaks well for at least part of the $27,000 going toward editing. But Tate Publishing says they absorb the $20,000. My question would be, where do they get the $20,000 from. Are they getting the $20,000 from the $27,000, in which case only $7,000 would go toward everything else? Are they actually allocating $47,000 per book (which would put them more in line with traditional publishers)? Is the $20,000 the result of creative accounting? It isn’t clear.

But consider this: a search for books published by Tate Publishing yields 8,131 results on Amazon.com. Let’s assume that Key Marketing Group is charging Tate Publishing $100,000 per man-year. With six employees allocated to Tate Publishing, that works out to $600,000. Divide that by 8,131 and you are looking at about $75 per book per year for publicists. Those are rough figures, but they are enough to tell us that they don’t have the staffing level required to do what they claim they are doing. It isn’t proof of anything, but it smells a little off.

So let’s look at editing. Traditional publishers budget around $5,000 for editing. Tate Publishing has 32 editors (not including acquisitions editors). These are in-house people, so let’s assume a rate of $50 per hour (salary, benefits, LOE, etc.). Amazon.com indicates that Tate Publishing published 1,496 paperbacks last year. There are approximately 2,000 working hours in a year so 64,000 hours for the editorial staff. So on average, each book published was allocated 40 hours of editorial time. Or approximately $2,000. It would appear then, that Tate Publishing is providing editing, but it is still along the lines of what you would expect from a subsidy press rather than a traditional publisher.

Let’s look at it another way. Tate Publishing as about 165 employees. At $50 per hour, that means their staff costs them about $16.5 million per year. That works out to be about $11,030 per book they publish each year. By the time you throw in equipment cost and other overhead, I could see them making the claim that they are allocating $27,000 per book. I think the $20,000 publicist fee is bogus and I don’t really care whether the $3,990 goes directly to Key Marketing Group or if it helps pay down the $27,000.

While Tate Publishing is a subsidy press and is less selective than most traditional publishers, it appears that their structure forces them to function somewhat like what we would expect from a traditional publisher. The amount authors are subsidizing them will not cover their expenses, so they must rely on the income from book sales to stay in business. Whatever problems Tate Publishing might have, the need to sell books in order to make a profit is a good thing for the authors who choose to use them. I still feel that they are less honest than a self-proclaimed Christian publisher should be and I fear that some of the books they are selling are not what a Christian publisher should be publishing, but I imagine that authors who are willing to spend $4,000 to get their book published could do a lot worse.

Poverty

2012-01-23T00:01:00.002-06:00

I’ve read that 53% of the world lives on less than $2 a day. In the USA, poverty is defined as a family of four with an annual income of less than $22,350 or $10,890 for an individual. That works out to be $30 a day for an individual. That is about 15 times what most people in the world are living on. Only 15% of Americans fall below that line. It is no wonder that so much of the world sees us a rich. It also explains why so many people come to America in order to work and send money back home to their families. Imagine if there were a place where you could go and even the lowest paying jobs would earn you $150,000 a year. If you were struggling here, would it not be attractive to leave your family for a while to earn some money to pay off your debts? That is how much of the world looks at us.

But what does it really mean? The thing is, though we are rich, $2 in the USA doesn’t go as far as it does in some parts of the world. In areas where they are living on $2 a day, you can hire a workman to do some work for you for $2, but here no one would come out for $2. A day’s wages is closer to $200.

Just because a man has to live on $2 a day doesn’t mean that he needs our help. Besides which, there is no way for us to bring all people out of poverty by giving them money. I don’t think God ever intended for us to blindly give people money just because they have less than we do. I thought it was funny when I heard about one religion and its requirement for people to give to the poor. A worshipper can go in to pray and do whatever is required of him, then he can walk out of the place of worship and into this place that is selling things he can give to the poor. After making his purchase, he can walk out and there in rows are several beggars. But rather than giving his gift to them, the shop owner tells some number of them (however many he bought for) of the purchase. They move to the back of the line and the next set are ready for someone to give to them. The worshipper goes on his way, feeling good that he has fulfilled the requirements of his religion.

The Bible makes it very clear that if we don’t work we have to right to eat. It also seems that God wants a more personal touch. There is no reason to think that we must help someone we don’t know. If our intention is to help people on the other side of the world, then it would be better to funnel our money through people we do know on that side of the world, so that they can use it to help people over there. And here, it is better to help a Christian friend in need when we know their need isn’t from laziness than it is to just hand people money and hope they put it to good use. It is better to pay someone to help us with something than it is to just hand them money with no expectation that they will do anything in return.

The Decline of the Male Role Model

2012-01-20T00:01:00.001-06:00

I’m concerned. I look around and I see a decline in good male role models. I don’t just mean in the world. I don’t expect the world to provide much in the way of role models. The world is so confused that they don’t know which way is up; you can’t expect them to know how men ought to act. No, my concern is male role models among the saints. We still have a few good male role models, but I’m concerned about some of the things I’m seeing.

One thing I’m concerned about is men going to church because their wives want them to go to church. There’s nothing wrong with these men going to church, but their role is messed up. In everything the Bible has to say about the relationship between men and women, it makes it very clear that the men are to lead. Ideally, it should be the case that a family gets up on Sunday morning and they know they are going to go to church because that’s what they always do on Sunday. But let’s suppose that isn’t the case. It should be the man who turns to his wife at the breakfast table and says, “Honey, I’m going to church today.” Actually, if things are the way they ought to be, the man would say, “Honey, we’re going to church today,” and his wife and the kids would do as he said.

Children expect their fathers to teach them the difference between right and wrong. Mothers are free to be a little more relaxed about things without it messing the kids up too bad, but what Daddy says is the law. Unfortunately, fathers are often portrayed as just wanting to have fun with their kids, but what Momma says goes.

One of the things I’ve noticed in Christian fiction is a tendency to measure the value of a many by how attractive he is and his willingness to get involved in the things women are doing around the house. I’m sure women don’t mind having extra hands to help them mop the floor and wash the dishes. There’s nothing wrong with a man doing those things, but his true value should be measured in how he leads and make the tough decisions. His value should be measured in his willingness to do the hard things and to set the example for his family.

Extending Art of Illusion Examples Demonstrated

2012-01-19T23:53:00.000-06:00

I thought I'd given up on book videos, but then I came up with this one. The main reason I put this video together is because some of the examples in Extending Art of Illusion can't be fully appreciated without seeing them in action. I had a lot of fun developing the Tracker plugin. I spent more time than I care to admit just setting up trackers and moving a sphere around the scene with my mouse so that I could watch the pointers follow it through the scene. You can see some of that in this video.

SOPA/PIPA and Why Wikipedia Doesn't Agree With CNN

2012-01-19T06:00:00.001-06:00

By now, you’ve probably heard of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). On January 18, 2012, several of the popular websites including Wikipedia and Google protested the act, bringing it into the public awareness. But you may have also noticed that the news organizations who were reported about the event, such as CBS and CNN, included statements in their reports saying that their parent companies were in support of SOPA. So what’s going on here? We know that the news organizations are liberal, so is this just a liberal versus conservative thing? No, I don’t think so.

This is about money. What else would it be about? The divide between those who support SOPA and those who oppose it is generally the same line that exists between those who make money by creating content and those who make money by using content. The goal of SOPA is to shut down websites that are using pirated information. In concept, if a copyright owner finds a website that is using his intellectual property without permission, he would first contact the website and ask them to take it down or pay for the content within a reasonable amount of time. If they failed to do so, he could then turn the matter over to authorities and their revenue stream from ads and Paypal would be cut off.

I think you can see why Wikipedia would be opposed to the act. Because anyone can edit their pages, I doubt they know how much of their content is illegally copied. Google is one of the major online ad services, so it is also understandable that they would be opposed to SOPA and PIPA (Protect IP Act. More or less the Senate version of SOPA). If there is a law in place that requires them to quit paying for clicks from a website that is using pirated information, it won’t be long before the illegal websites will drop Google. They will still try to make money from ads, but it will not be through companies that are trying to obey the law. That could mean a big loss in revenue for Google.

The parent companies of CBS and CNN, however, are content creators. They actually pay people to carry cameras around and film stuff. They pay writers to sit in front of a computer and write. While they also make money from ads, their ads don’t appear on websites that contain pirated intellectual property. But more than that, because they are paying people to create content, they are the victims when people use pirated information to attract people to their websites.

I don’t know if the bills as they are currently written are ideal, but I do know that I’m opposed to piracy. It seems to me that people should not be allowed to profit from intellectual property they have obtained illegally. Moreover, hosting a website in a foreign country should not shield these people from justice. Though Wikipedia and others claim that their protest is about free speech, I don’t see how they can support that claim. The purpose of free speech is to allow anyone to state his opinion without fear of prosecution. We should not take it to mean that we can use other people’s intellectual property without their permission. No, this is all about money. Those who are profiting from using other people’s intellectual property have no desire to protect those who are profiting by creating intellectual property.

What is Love?

2012-01-19T00:01:00.001-06:00

What is love? Let’s not confuse the issue too much. Let’s focus on agape. The others are fairly clear. The KJV translates it as charity. It gets interesting when we look at 1 Corinthians 13:3. “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor…and have not charity, it profited me nothing.” It is interesting because we are commanded to have charity. In reference to the love a man has for a woman, it is intentional love. But here, it appears that we can give our goods to the poor and still not have it.

Fortunately, Paul defines it for us. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” It is still intentional. You have the choice of being long-suffering or not. You have the choice to be kind or not. You have the choice to do all of these things or not. And if you choose charity, it will be natural for you to also give to the poor, but giving to the poor is one way that people can fake it, much like a husband and fake love for his wife by showering her with gifts.

True charity is a choice to put one’s self lower than another person. It is not a feeling, but it may require us to put aside our feelings. None of us are perfect at it, but we willingly put aside our desire for superiority for the good of the other person.

What if God Kills Babies?

2012-01-18T00:01:00.001-06:00

Some people make the claim that if God has ever willed the death of an innocent child then he is not worthy of a Christian’s worship. What? Where do they get that?

You may not like to hear this, but God kills people. And yes, he has killed babies who, as far as we can tell, never did anything wrong. David’s son with Bathsheba, is just one example. That’s the facts, plain and simple. He willingly let Satan kill Job’s whole family and Job was a just man who offered sacrifice for his children. Innocent in all points of the law. That’s the facts. God kills people and makes no apology for it.

If, as they claim, a god like that isn’t worthy of our worship then God is not worthy of our worship. But that’s not what God says. God says that he is worthy of our worship. Are Christians worshiping the wrong God? Or are the people who have made that claim idiots?

The thing is, we don’t get to pick and choose. There is one living God, he is what he is, and he demands our worship. We may not like what he is, but that isn’t up to us. Sure we could carve out an idol and define it however we want, but God is God.

Can God Do the "Impossible"?

2012-01-17T00:01:00.001-06:00

Yesterday, I mentioned the omnipotence of God and how it is not open for debate. But though all things are possible with God, that doesn’t mean that he will do all things or that he does not allow us to have freewill. Since all things are possible, one of the “all things” that he can allow is for us to make our own choices about many things, including whether to accept or reject his Son. We know that it isn’t his will that any perish. We know that he could force us to accept his Son. But he doesn’t. Why doesn’t he? I don’t know, but he doesn’t.

One of the questions people ask is whether God could create a rock that he could not push. Yes, I’m sure he could, but I don’t think he is going to. What we see instead is an even bigger problem. God created man. God wanted a relationship with us, but he gave us the ability to sin. God cannot have a relationship with sinful beings. That makes it seem like there truly is a rock that God can’t push. So God got creative. Instead of writing us off or going back on what he said (the wages of sin is death), he got around the problem by becoming a man and dying on the cross for our sins.

So let me put it this way. God is omnipotent, so he could create a rock that he could not push. Let’s suppose then that God decides to do that. God is more than capable of creating something that meets all of the constraints we might put on it and still come up with a means that our minds can’t think of to do whatever he needs to do with it. How silly and arrogant people are to imagine that they can create a challenge that the God who created the Universe can’t master.

What Is Debatable?

2012-01-16T00:01:00.001-06:00

What is debatable? Some people seem to think that pretty much anything is debatable. Recently, a literary agent invited me and all of her other acquaintances to get involved in a debate on a client’s blog about whether God is omnipotent. How is that debatable? Jesus declared in Matthew 19:26, “with God all things are possible.” That sounds pretty omnipotent to me. So people who would debate this subject have rejected the Bible and the words of Jesus as the foundation of truth. That is a problem because it is the Bible that tells us what God is like. If all we have to go on is what we see around us, then we would conclude that he is very powerful, but we would have no way of knowing if he is all powerful because we can’t see far enough to know. Our telescopes can’t even see the end of what he has created, so how could we possibly know whether there is something out there that he doesn’t have power over. Simply put, it is not debatable.

Paul seemed to think that even less was debatable. Romans 8:28 states that we know that all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. But the basis of his argument is that those he foreknew he predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son. Paul doesn’t see it as debatable, but a known fact that God predestined those he knew would accept Christ.

The thing is, some arguments are not worth getting into. When people start arguing about things that the Bible states as fact, it is very much like arguing with a sign post. If they aren’t willing to accept that a stop sign says, “stop” then no amount of arguing will convince them. If they are unwilling to accept that the Bible says what it says is fact, then no amount of arguing will change that. There are better uses of my time.

Killing Jack

2012-01-13T00:01:00.001-06:00

A critic once wrote, “the hero must triumph over his enemies, as surely as Jack must kill the giant in the nursery tale. If the giant kills Jack, we have missed the whole point of the story.” (The Times, 13 September 1968) Why is this? Why must the hero triumph?

Stories are about encouraging people to understand and to do what is right. When we look at a story like Jack and the Beanstalk, we see a good for nothing character who turns his life around by accomplishing something amazing. That is what we want to encourage men and boys to do. We want them to strive to be the hero. We want them to strive to overcome their imperfections. If the giant had killed Jack, then we wouldn’t be encouraging boys to try but we would be causing them to fear to make the effort.

I believe the exception to that is in a call to arms story. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the bad guys won. In other words, the giant killed Jack, but what makes it different is that it was clear that the mostly white readership of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the giant rather than being Jack. The call was for people to realize that unless people took action, the giant would continue to kill Jack. But in most stories we want the character the readers identify with to accomplish what we want to encourage our readers to accomplish.

I Like Happy Endings

2012-01-12T00:01:00.001-06:00

Though I will never promise to end all of my stories without tragedy, I’m a big fan of happy endings. People like to reach the end of the story and feel glad that things turned out the way they did. We need sad endings too. Books like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold have their place. Part of the reason I know sad endings have their place is because some of the stories in the Bible have sad endings. What could be more sad than a man achieving a great victory in war and then coming home and sacrificing his daughter? We need those to remind us that not everything works out the way we would like.

But happy endings give us hope. I am so much a fan of happy endings that I’m convinced that unless an author has something that can only be said through a sad ending, he should plan on a happy ending. Take Uncle Tom’s Cabin for example. It is about a black slave who is trying to make the best of a bad situation. But in the end he dies a terrible death. The ending is somewhat happy because he does go back to the good master, but it is sad because he dies a senseless death. But it needed to be sad for people to see the impact slavery was having on people.

I see no point in making a story sad just to make people cry. People have enough things in life to make them cry and to make them angry. There’s no reason why stories have to do the same. Of course, I’m only talking about endings. In the middle, of course people should experience sadness and anger, but the end should bring them joy.

Deborah

2012-01-11T00:01:00.001-06:00

Deborah is an interesting character in the Bible. We don’t actually know much about her, other than she had a lot of spunk. But I’ve got a couple of theories. Actually, they are more like suppositions than theories. One is that the reason she was a judge was because the men weren’t doing their jobs. That’s not to say that she was wrong to do what she did, but Judges is written about a time when the Jews had turned away from God. They weren’t doing what they were supposed to do. They weren’t worshiping God like they should have been. They weren’t following the leaders they were supposed to follow. I suspect there was a man who God had called to be a judge but was not doing his job.

That leads me into the next supposition. Deborah was a prophetess because her husband was a prophet, not because she was called to be a prophet. Consider the wife of Isaiah. She was called a prophetess because she was his wife, not because she was getting messages from God. So it could be that Deborah’s husband was supposed to be doing what she was doing, but he wasn’t for some reason. Any message she got from God might have come to him first.

Not Starting

2012-01-10T00:01:00.001-06:00

A new year, a new story. Last year, I wrote two books, and published three, but none were novels. This year, I intend to write at least one novel. I found a story in the Bible that I would like to retell in a modern setting. It’s a great story, but I’ve been having trouble figuring out where to begin. The basic outline is there, but I’ve been having trouble figuring out where the main character is coming from. I know what has to happen, but why? The Bible account is a little vague on that point. It states the facts of the situation, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what is going through people’s heads at the time.

Besides that, the Bible account takes up only two chapters, with the second chapter saying much of the same thing the first chapter did. Essentially, I have to take three pages of information and expand them into 300 pages. But after struggling with how to begin, I decided not to begin. Instead, I wrote the final chapter first. I began with the final event and detailed what happened. That worked so well, that I think I will step backwards a bit and write about the event that caused the situation that triggered that final event. If that works, I’ll step back even farther and detail the events leading up to those events. Eventually, I may reach the point at which the story begins. It will be a point at which the good guys are dying a slow death. By that point, I’ll have a better understanding of what it is that is killing these guys.

Endings

2012-01-08T20:55:00.001-06:00

In life, it doesn’t matter how you start as much as it does how you finish. You may begin in poverty or in wealth, but the real question is what you do with your life. Endings are so much more important than beginnings. Think about what you see in the Bible. As great as the beginning is, God always had his eye on the end. In the end, he wanted a relationship with us. In the beginning, he gave us the freedom to choose, but without seeing the relationship he wanted to have with us, none of that mattered.

Lots of Love

2012-01-06T06:54:00.000-06:00

Have you noticed that nearly every movie that Hollywood produces has a love story? Stratch that. Have you noticed that nearly every movie Hollywood produces has a romance? There are exceptions, but even a real guy's movie, like Die Hard, has a romance. There's a reason for that. I'm sure I'll take some heat from the romance authors out there, but the fact is that romances are easy to write and easy to sell. At least, they're easier to sell than stories without a romantic element. I believe the reason is that we all have this natural desire to hook up with someone and live happily ever after. But desire and reality are often very different. First there is the struggle to find someone. Then there is problem that marriage turns out to be a lot more work than most people imagined. So we like stories that let us imagine that we can storm a tower, kill a bunch of bad guys, rescue the girl, and walk off into the sunset with her.

But just because they're easier to sell doesn't mean we shouldn't consider writing different kinds of stories. Ultimately, a story has to be about communication. There's only so much that we can communicate through a romantic story. Yeah, I realize that romance authors have in their heads that any story can be rewritten as a romance and perhaps they're right, but that doesn't mean it is the best way to tell every story. Stories used to be about valor. Who cares if the guy got the girl, if the guy was able to do something that others had tried and failed, then it was worth telling a story about. Now it seems that people think accomplishments are worth talking about, only if it impresses some woman. Real men don't measure their self worth in terms of the approval of women.

Story Struggles

2012-01-05T08:40:00.000-06:00

I've been struggling with a story lately. I have a rough outline done but some of the finer points are difficult. The story involves a woman killing someone, but the story isn't about her, it is about another man. The strange thing about this story is that the man she kills needs to be killed, but I need it to be the case that the reader feels that the man the story is about should have been the one to kill this man. I'm also struggling because the story takes place in a modern setting, so it is hard to see this as justice if it doesn't first go through a court of law.

What's Wrong with Christian Romance Novels

2012-01-04T00:01:00.000-06:00

Romance novels make up the bulk of the Christian fiction market. Harlequin’s Love Inspired is pumping out six a month. Then there are suspense novels, many of which are also romances. Harlequin’s Love Inspired Suspense is pumping out four of those a month. And that’s just a portion of what one publisher is putting out. It seems that the theory of Christian publishers is that there is not story that cannot be rewritten as a romance.

I’ve been giving this subject some thought ever since Tamela Hancock Murray brought it up on Steve Laube’s blog ([1], [2]). Tamela is a literary agent and a romance novelist, so that should give you some idea of her view on the subject. But the thing I’m really struggling with is the concept of love that we find in Christian romance novels. I’m not going to tell you that they aren’t clean. I’m not going to tell you that they are poorly written. I could give examples, but most are clean enough that pastors’ wives read them and the readers aren’t complaining about the writing. But the one thing I’ve found to be consistent throughout Christian romance novels that I’ve read is the concept of love. (Yes, I have read Christian romance novels, so don’t bother leaving a comment saying I don’t know what I’m talking about because I don’t read them.)

Inevitably in a romance novel you will find this concept of being “in love”. Often, the struggle in the book is this question of whether two people love each other. By this, the author mean, are they “in love” with each other. In other words, does this person make the character feel all fuzzy inside? Is this person the one she daydreams about? Does she imagine what her kids would look like if they had this man’s eyes and nose? Of course, it is never as simple as that because there is usually something that keeps the characters from wanting to be “in love” with the other, such as some past argument. But once they get past that and admit to each other that they are in love with each other, they eagerly put aside their differences and live happily ever after.

That kind of love is great. I’m all for it and I truly believe it is a blessing from God as long as we don’t abuse it. The problem I see with so many romance novels is that the basis for determining whether two people should be together is whether they are “in love” or not. My apologies to my friend Colleen Coble, but consider her recent novel Lonestar Angel. In this book, the two lead characters are separated and one of them thought they were divorced, but the her husband shows up as she is considering marriage to another man to tell her that he knows where their daughter is and needs her help to get her back. Throughout the book, we see that he still loves his wife, but is reluctant to tell her this and that he wants them to be together. We also see that she still has feeling for him and she also is reluctant to tell him. As for the other guy, he was just a friend anyway, so there never was a question of whether she was “in love” with him. All the right people get together in the end and they live happily ever after.

While that sounds great, what does that say about real life? While being “in love” with one’s spouse doesn’t hurt anything and we might find it difficult to decide to marry someone with whom we are not “in love”, it is dangerous to portray that as the basis for a successful relationship. The problem is that a man may wake up one morning and realize the old romance has gotten stale. He looks at his wife and she isn’t as attractive as she once was. She doesn’t take the time to get dressed up for him, like she once did. Their conversations are about things like what’s for supper and who will pick up the kids from school. And they can’t agree because she wants to buy a new pair of shoes when he knows they need to save money. Is it now okay for a man to leave his wife or a wife her husband because the feeling is gone? If the unthinkable should happen, and they get divorced, should the return of the “in love” feeling be the basis for them to get back together?

As great as that feeling is, no, that is not what the Bible says. Husbands, love your wives. Do it intentionally. Even if you don’t feel like it, love your wives. Even if you wonder if it was a mistake to marry her, love your wives. And wives, respect your husbands. Even if you don’t feel attracted to him, respect him. Listen to what he has to say. Even if you know he’s making a bad decision, respect him. Let him make mistakes and stick by him and support him as he learns from his mistake. That’s what the Bible says, but I have yet to see it in a romance novel.

Linking to Sites Randomly

2012-01-03T00:01:00.004-06:00

T he other day, I was involved in a discussion about providing links to more than just Amazon.com. The claim was that Barnes & Noble checks to see if authors are linking to them or not and they will stop selling the author’s books if they don’t find links to their site. I don’t know if that is true or if it is just an urban legend. It seems to me that Barnes & Noble has better things to do than to pay someone to see how many links there are from the author’s website. Besides which, Barnes & Noble makes money from selling books, not from links. But it’s one of those things that sounds almost believable because Barnes & Noble has a history of refusing to sell some books. But this post isn’t about that.

In the discussion, one of the things mentioned was that with so many booksellers out there, having more than one link results in a big long list. I suggested that rather than having a list of links, people could just have their website or blog randomly choose which link to provide. One person might visit the site and see a link to Amazon.com while someone else would see a link to Barnes & Noble or one of the other booksellers. The person I said that to said that it was it was beyond his capability. It is actually very simple and I have provided the code below. Instead of the normal links you would put in, this code would go in its place:


<script type="text/javascript">
var numberOfLinks = 2;
var randNum = Math.floor(Math.random()*numberOfLinks);

var linkStr0 = "http://www.amazon.com/Extending-Art-Illusion-Reference-Creating/dp/1612950027";
var linkStr1 = "http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/extending-art-of-illusion-timothy-fish/1037325198?ean=9781612950020&itm=1&usri=extending+art+of+illusion";

switch (randNum){
  case 0: 
    document.write("<a href=\""+linkStr0+"\">Buy on Amazon.com</a>"); 
    break;
  case 1: 
    document.write("<a href=\""+linkStr1+"\">Buy on BN.com</a>"); 
    break;
  default:
    document.write("<a href=\""+linkStr0+"\">Buy My Book</a>"); 
    break;
}
</script>

I have put in bold the things that you would need to change for your own website. You may also need to add cases, if you want to link to more than two sites. The link below is the result of this script:

Any questions?

Happy "Last" Year of the World

2012-01-02T00:01:00.002-06:00

Happy New Year. This is the year the world ends, or so say the people who are putting faith in the Mayan calendar. But you may recall, the world was supposed to end last year—twice. But some people think that the world is going to end December 21, 2012, all because of a Mayan calendar. Most people are acting like they believe it will end then, but I do think there are people who are afraid that “it just might be true.”

The sad thing is that people are more willing to put their faith in Mayans who are dead than they are in people who are living. They are more willing to put their faith in a piece of ceramic with no evidence to support it than they are in the Bible, which has a preponderance of evidence to show that it is true. Why would you believe a calendar that has no proven claims over a book that has hundreds of proven claims and no disproven claims? That doesn’t make sense to me.

One thing I know is that the world is not going to come to an end on December 21, 2012. I cannot say whether the rapture will take place in 2012 or not, no one but God knows that, but I do know that the world will not end this year. I know that because the Bible tells us that there are seven years of tribulation that must take place. If we assume that those seven years take place immediately after the rapture, then we know that the world has at least seven years. But there is more. The end of the world doesn’t happen at the end of seven years because that is when Jesus will stand upon the Mount of Olives and establish his kingdom here on earth. There will be an addition 1,000 years in which Satan will be bound. And then Satan will be loosed for a while. How long that lasts, I don’t know. With the way God looks at time, it could be several years, and then the end will come. The world as we know it will be burned up and there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

There is no way to put an exact date on the end of the world, but it will be here for more than 1007 years more. When December 21, 3019 rolls around, I’m confident that there will still be people here. We will have died by then, but I’m hoping that by that time I will have returned. Where will you be?

Why Are Men to Lead?

2011-12-30T00:01:00.002-06:00

Why did God choose men to lead? Actually, that is probably the wrong question. As I’m sure you will recall, Paul’s basis for saying that men are the head of the family is based on the fact that God created Adam first and then Eve. Though some people may see that as rather arbitrary because it seems like the luck of the draw whether a person will be either male or female, consider that what God did is not unlike what you would do if you were picking a team of workers. The first person you would pick would the team leader. You would decide what you need in a leader, look for a person who meets those qualifications, and once you found that person, you would pick a team who complimented that person’s style of leadership. God had an advantage over us. He was able to decide what he wanted in a leader and then build the guy to exacting standards. In choosing a helper, he looked first at the creatures that were already there, but when Adam didn’t find anything he liked, God made a helper who complimented Adam perfectly.

When we look at it that way, there is no room for debate over whether men should be the head of the family or not. The leaders of the family are men, by definition. The question that we might be asking is why God gave leaders the characteristics that he did. Some are obvious. If you were trying to make a leader, wouldn’t you want it to be taller and stronger than the rest of the group? And you wouldn’t want a leader who is prone to emotional outbursts. Others aren’t as obvious. Men talk less than women. Men are less nurturing. Men approach problems as an issue to conquer, while women see problems as an opportunity to deepen relationships through discussion. Men approach problems one at a time while women tend consider all at once, but that also leads to women being prone to becoming overwhelmed.

In looking for differences between men and women, I found one particular difference very interesting. In studies done in which groups of boys and groups of girls were tasked with finding their way out of a maze, the boys tended to form a hierarchical structure with a leader and scouts. Girls, on the other hand, tended to remain together, discussed the problem, and employed a “collective intelligence.” Part of why I find this interesting is because not only do boys naturally see the need for a leader, but they naturally look for ways to delegate.

The thing that makes this unpopular is that people have the idea that it is better to lead than it is to follow. So when we start talking about God making men the leaders, people think we’re saying that men are better than women. I don’t think God intended it to be that way. He made men and women to be a matched pair. They are equals, but different. Yes, the man is the head of the family, but he is not free to do whatever he wants. He has the responsibility lead the family where it should be going. Yes, the woman is to follow, but that doesn’t mean she will end up going where she doesn’t want to go because the family is going where we would hope she also would have chosen if it had been her decision. But it frees her to think more about the here and now, which is what women prefer to think about, knowing that the man is planning for the future.

Another Look at Love

2011-12-29T00:01:00.001-06:00

A recent discussion of Romance novels caused me to reexamine the Greek love words. These are storge, phileo, eros, and agape. There’s little question what some of these mean. storge appears to be a fondness for the people we know. You might have this for your co-workers. phileo goes farther than that. It is more like the love that David and Jonathan had for each other and apparently, it is the love Peter had for Jesus. It reminds me of old family friends that you may not see for months, but when you get together it is like you’ve never been apart. Then there is eros which is that natural sexual desire that we all have. It is good when a man has it for his wife, but he could also have it for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. We don’t have much control over it, but we do have the choice not to act on it. Lastly, there is agape, which I suspect is misunderstood by many people.

The reason I think this word is misunderstood is because people have equated agape with the unconditional love of God. We humans are not able to love like God loves, so people assume that we can never reach the level of agape love. Sounds good. The problem is that God command husbands to agapeo their wives.

Rather than looking at agape as unconditional love, as C. S. Lewis did, it seems like a better understanding is that agape is the intentional love. The other loves are built on hormones, chemistry, and chauvinism. But agape is a choice. You don’t have to like someone, or be sexual attracted to someone to be able to love someone with agape love. They may be mean and smell bad, but you can choose to love them anyway. By its nature, it is typically unconditional because a person has chosen to love someone for their own reason, rather than because of how the person looks or treats them.

Praise God, I'm Free at Last!

2011-12-28T00:01:00.001-06:00

I paid off my mortgage the other day. I’ve got to admit that it made me a little nervous. I’d been saving up the money for some time and it made me nervous because my bank account suddenly dropped by a significant amount. But I talked myself into hitting the button. The mortgage is gone. I am officially debt free!

It will take me a while to build up my savings to what it was before, but it is very freeing to know that there isn’t a bank out there who has a right to foreclose on my house or to repossess my car. And though life always has expenses, it is nice to know that if I were to suddenly lose my job that I would have a roof over my head for as long as it took to find a new one.

Ultimately, it is God who provides and in this case, I believe it is he who has given me the ability to pay off my house. He has blessed me well, though I frequently wonder why. I certainly don’t deserve all he has given me.

As I think about this, I can only say that the wealthiest people in the world are those who know how to live within their means. I work with people who make more money than me, but to hear some of them talk, they make hardly anything. I once watched a documentary on the wealthy and one person made the comment that he just didn’t see how someone could live on $6 million a year. And yet, I’ve seen people who made low five figure salaries who never lacked for anything. It doesn’t matter how much money a person makes as much as it matters what they do with it.

I’m at that point where I will have to give thought to what I’m going to do with that money that will no longer be going toward principle and interest. Much of it will go into savings, because there will be other major expenses in my lifetime, and I would rather not go into debt again. But where and how much? I must give that some thought, but I’m glad to be free.

Humbled by Winning

2011-12-27T00:01:00.001-06:00

A company I own stock in sent out an announcement about a new contract they had been awarded. In their statement they said, “we are humbled by this selection.” Suspect that companies say that as a way of recognizing the efforts of those who put effort into making the decision and it sounds better than singing We Are the Champions, no matter how much you might want to do that. One also doesn’t want to offend the selection committee while the paperwork is still being signed.

But it made me wonder. Is the statement correct? “We are humbled by this selection.” Is anyone ever humbled by winning? I suspect not. We can be humble when we win, but it is not winning that humbles us. Losses can humble us. If we’re expecting to win, but if someone we didn’t expect to win beats us, it will humble us. But what can humble us when we win?

To be humbled when we win requires that we look at the competition and see what they are capable of. We’re glad when we win that we came out on top, but the humble person knows that the competition put up a good fight. While we may have had the edge, we cannot afford to become complacent because the competition is worthy.

A Story for We

2011-12-26T00:01:00.001-06:00

People say that a writer should imagine he is writing to one person, much like he would if he were writing a letter. The idea is that by doing so he will avoid the problems caused by trying to say too many things to too many people. But I see something wrong with this idea. Imagine, if you will, that you have a mother-in-law that you can’t stand and you have chosen to write to her. So, in your story you begin to point out what is wrong with everything she does. When she reads the story, if the theme is obvious, she will take offense. That is probably why some people have the idea that we shouldn’t have an obvious theme.

Sometimes, we intend for people to be offended, and that’s okay, but just because we don’t want people offended doesn’t mean we must not have an obvious theme. Instead of writing your story to her, write it to we. Find a way to include yourself in your audience. Instead of venturing into areas you know nothing about, look for common ground. Don’t tell your mother-in-law what she should be doing, but find things both of you should be doing and write about those. People are much better about taking advice when they know you are talking about yourself too.

It's Christmas, of course you should go to church today.

2011-12-25T00:01:00.001-06:00

Merry Christmas. I hope you are attending church somewhere this Christmas, whether with your home church or at a church where you are vacationing. If you live in Fort Worth and are looking for a church with its doors open today, South Park Baptist Church will have preaching at ten o’clock this morning.

Now, on to other things. I thought the video below very fitting for a Christmas post:

Flash mobs like this interest me because they take art to the world. People who might not visit a concert hall, a church, or even the center court of a mall while a choir is singing, will stop and listen. Still more will pass these videos around on the Internet. In spite of what some church music directors believe, people still like choirs. So why aren’t people flocking to churches with talented choirs? Largely, I think it has to do with keeping up appearances or event the fear of death. Some people are afraid to say that they like choir music because they think their friends will think they are strange. Some people may see attending choir performances as something “old people” do, so they’re afraid that if they start going they are that much closer to dying.

Anyway flash mobs seem to get around that problem, for now. So have a Merry Christmas and I hope you prove wrong all the preachers who are saying people won’t go to church today.

On Marketing Books

2011-12-23T00:01:00.001-06:00

The saying is that you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. To me, it seems like marketing is like bringing horses to water. The more horses you bring, the more horses will drink, but not all will. If you are trying to sell a book, your job isn’t to make people buy the book. Your readers will decide whether they want to buy the book or not. What you are trying to do is to put the book in front of as many people as possible. The more people who know about the book, the more that will buy the book. You need not be concerned with those people who don’t buy the book. They weren’t thirsty enough to drink. And who knows, maybe they’ll be thirsty sometime later. So you just keep putting it out there.

Some time ago, I heard that on average, a person has to see a book seven times before he makes a decision. That implies that we should look for ways to put it in front of the same people seven times. The problem with that is that we may spend a lot of time putting it out there and no one is interested. On the other hand, there are some people who will see a book one time and make a purchase. A better approach is probably that we put the book in front of the people who are most likely to want or need the book. We don’t try putting it in front of them multiple times, but the people who are the most likely to buy the book will likely see it frequently anyway, because they will be looking in many of the places where we are mentioning the book.

What this means is that we keep looking for places to mention our book. That may be through paid advertising. That may be on a radio show. That may be on the Internet. We don’t have to spend a lot of time talking about it, but we do want to put it in front of as many of the right people as we can. Those who want it will gladly buy it. Those who don’t may think we’re pushing it too hard. That just means they aren’t thirsty yet.

Helping Those Who Sin

2011-12-22T00:01:00.000-06:00

People don’t care if someone is good or not, as long as they are nice. That is part of the reason why people change their attitude about sin, like adultery or homosexuality, when it involves a person who is part of the family. When we think of an adulterer as a bad person, it is easy to see it as wrong, but when someone we know and like is involved in adultery, we want to dismiss it rather than think of them as bad people. The same is true of homosexuality. As long as it only involves people who hang out at gay bars, or Catholic priests who are a little too familiar with the boys, it is easy to think of homosexuality as bad, but when it involves a family member or a friend, it looks very different.
The real problem is that we have the wrong idea about sin. Think of Jesus and the woman at the well. She was an outcast because of her sin. She had had many men and she had likely taken some of those away from their wives. She wasn’t a good person. I don’t know if she was a nice person or not, but Jesus didn’t treat her differently because of what she did or how she acted. Rather, he treated her like a person who needed help. Sure, she had caused her own problem, but she still needed help.
Sin is a bad thing, no matter who is involved or how nice a person happens to be. Our desire to help someone should not be influenced by whether we think they deserve it or not. Sure, we naturally want to help a child whose father drinks too much, but what about the father? He is as much a victim of his choices as the child is.

Marriage May Be Weak, But Not Forever

2011-12-21T00:01:00.001-06:00

Marriage is on the decline. People who do get married are getting married later in life. And many couples forego the legal ceremony and simply live together. Of course, once people start living together, they don’t really see the need for a ceremony because they are “essentially married.” It sounds bleak, and indeed it is, but I don’t think it will always be this way.

Life goes in cycles. Part of the reason why people don’t see a reason to get married these days is because they see marriage as something of a religious nature. It is religious people who see a problem with adultery, so when people reject God they also reject marriage. But in time, people will begin to see that marriage isn’t a matter of religion, but God instituted it for a reason. Let me give you a real life example, I’ll change the names to protect the guilty.

Jason and Rachel were high school sweethearts. They were so in love. One night, maybe even many nights, things got out of hand and they found themselves in bed together. That was okay, they thought. No one would find out and if they did, who cares? But then Rachel missed a period. A baby was on the way. She told Jason and though he was sorry he’d gotten her pregnant, he wasn’t ready to be a father and they broke up. The baby came and for several months it was just Rachel and her parents taking care of the baby. But then Jason decided that he wanted to be a part of his son’s life. So they worked out a deal where Rachel would keep the baby for a while and then Jason would keep the baby for a while.

All went well, until one day, Rachel and her parents went to pick up the baby and Jason wouldn’t open the door. “He’s sleeping.” He said, and wouldn’t let her take the baby. Then the calls began. Jason would call Rachel and tell her what a bad mother she was for not taking care of the baby, but when she would go to get the baby, he wouldn’t let her see him. One day, Rachel’s mother called Jason’s mother and asked, “Why won’t you let us see the baby?” Then came the reply, “We’re afraid you’ll take him and not bring him back.”

Though we might think Jason a bad person, Rachel didn’t think so when they were together. So what I think people will begin to see is that the commitment of marriage prevents nice people from turning into monsters. People can be driving to do almost anything when they fear their children will be taken away from them. Forget the religious side of it, marriage is an agreement between two people that they are going to stay together. People will begin to see that the people who have made that commitment and work to keep it are much better off than those who have not. When that happens, people will return to the desire for marriage.

Simple or Complex?

2011-12-20T00:01:00.002-06:00

I listened to the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts the other day. It is a beautiful hymn, but I really hadn’t paid attention to the words before. As I listened to the very talented singer singing those words, it struck me how much it worships simplicity. People worship so many things, but it is God that we ought to worship. People work at so many religious things. For the Shakers that thing appears to be simplicity. The claim of the hymn seems to be that if we can achieve simplicity then everything else will fall into place. But that isn’t what the Bible says. The Bible says that we are to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to us. As far as I know, God has never required anyone to be simple before they can approach him.

What God does require is that we be righteous, but it isn’t righteousness that we can work at and gain. It is okay to be complicated instead of simple. It is okay to have stuff as long as we don’t worship the stuff rather than the person who created the stuff. Likewise, if you really want to simplify your life and get rid of your stuff, that is okay too, as long as you are not doing that so you don’t have to rely on God to provide.

Christmas Time Is Really Here

2011-12-19T00:01:00.001-06:00

It’s the week before Christmas. If you have a job that, that probably means you are extra busy at work. Perhaps you have taken the week off or you are planning on taking time off next week. If you have kids, they will be home from school and you’ll be anxious for them to go back. There are parties to plan and presents to wrap. Think of all the kids who are anxious for Christmas to come. They have no idea just how busy Christmas is. I’m just glad it only comes once a year.

Of course, we’re all supposed to remember the reason for the season. I don’t think many of us forget. It is all the rest of it that is stressful. But trust me, it won’t be long and it will be over. In a couple of weeks, everything will be back to normal and our biggest concern will be whether the weather is going to shut the schools down or not.

A Book for Art of Illusion

2011-12-16T00:01:00.003-06:00

Today, I am pleased to announce that my latest book is available to purchase. Extending Art of Illusion is a book for people who would like to make the most of the open source tool Art of Illusion by writing their own plugins and scripts. Art of Illusion is a user-friendly 3D modeling tool developed by Peter Eastman.

I believe Extending Art of Illusion is needed because the current documentation on plugin development for Art of Illusion is inadequate. As far as I know, this book is the only book that is currently available for Art of Illusion. There is much information available online about Art of Illusion, but most of that is on how to use Art of Illusion as is. The person who would like to automate some of their frequent tasks in Art of Illusion may have difficulty finding the information they need to accomplish their goal. When I began writing plugins, most of the guidance I found online was so out of date that it would not work with the latest version of Art of Illusion. I spend hours trying to figure out why it wasn’t working, then even more time figuring out what I really needed from an example that did. My hope is that Extending Art of Illusion will help readers get past that problem without the same difficulties.

Extending Art of Illusion is broken up into two major sections. The first section provides guidance on how to start writing plugins and scripts for Art of Illusion. It begins with a simple “Hello World” plugin that demonstrates how to set up the work environment to develop plugins. The other examples build on that concept. The example plugins in Extending Art of Illusion include a plugin that will drop the selected object to the “floor” of the scene at the press of a keystroke, a plugin that will point one object (such as a camera) at another, a plugin that will place one object on top of another, and a plugin for creating a procedural texture. There is also a script for creating a walled room and a scripted object that draws axes in the scene. My desire in creating these examples was that, even if readers don’t spend a lot of time developing their own plugins, they will find the plugins in Extending Art of Illusion add value to Art of Illusion.

The second section of the book is a quick reference. It includes the “header file” information for both Art of Illusion and Buoy. This quick reference is to provide an overview of the classes and methods available to people who are writing Art of Illusion plugins or scripts. People who already know how to write code for Art of Illusion will likely find this section to the be the most useful section of the Extending Art of Illusion.

Extending Art of Illusion is currently available at Amazon.com for $44.95. It will be available from other booksellers soon. Extending Art of Illusion is 540 pages long. I hope that anyone who wants to develop their own plugins and scripts for Art of Illusion will find this book useful.

It's Not Just What You Say

2011-12-15T00:01:00.001-06:00

A frustrated author stated the other day that it isn’t about what you write but who you know. This particular author was frustrated about someone who had gotten a book deal because he knew someone in the publishing industry, while the author was still trying to find someone to publish his book. That got me thinking. Where is it written that it should be about what we write rather than who we know?

We want quality books, but consider the situation in which a publisher has a friend who has written a book. What makes us think that he should publish the book of a stranger instead of publishing the book of his friend? Maybe it is true that the stranger has written a better book than his friend, but that’s not the point. What kind of friends would we be if we weren’t willing to give our friends special consideration?

Also, consider that the importance of what a person says may be dependent on who that person is. When the President speaks, whether we see him as highly intelligent of the butt of jokes, people listen to what he has to say. What people say is important, but who they are is also important.

Using Kindle Prices as a Measure of Quality

2011-12-14T00:01:00.002-06:00

I’ve created a personal rule of thumb for when I buy books. If the Kindle version is priced at $2.99 or lower, I don’t buy it. I realize that is the opposite of the attitude that many Kindle owners have, since many of them bought Kindles hoping to get cheap books, but I have my reasons. If I want to keep the book, I’ll probably buy the paper version. But if the book is one that is normally printed on cheap newsprint paper anyway, I’ll purchase the Kindle version, even though it will cost me $8.

My thinking is that the people who are pricing their books at $2.99 and below are self-published authors who have the idea that lower prices will generate more sales. I’ve got nothing against self-published authors. In fact, I have several books in my library that I purchased for about $20 because that is what the subsidy press was charging for them. But here’s the thing, people who are willing to sell their work at very low prices don’t see their work as valuable. They price their work that low because they don’t think people are willing to pay more than that. That is quite possibly true, in which case, it isn’t of high enough quality for it to be worth my time.

I’m sure there are exceptions, but when you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, you have to have some way to eliminate the least likely places you’ll find a needle. You start by finding the genre you like. If you don’t typically like romances, you don’t go looking there. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some romances you would enjoy, but you’re more likely to find a book you like somewhere else. Since the traditional publishers generally charge more than $2.99, and the highest percentage of poorly written books is among the self-published stuff, if we eliminate anything under that then we’ve eliminated the bulk of the poorly written books.

Why It's Okay to Say Happy Holidays or Send an X-mas Card

2011-12-13T00:01:00.001-06:00

Why do we get upset about these things? The other day, I walked into church and someone had set out a bunch of buttons that said, “It’s okay to say Merry Christmas.” I suppose you’re suppose to wear them to the store and the clerk will know that you won’t be offended by the use of the word Christmas. For the past few years, people have been upset over the use of the phrase “Happy Holidays.” Before that, people were upset about the word, “X-mas.” The belief is that people are trying to take Christ out of Christmas. But I found the irony interesting when I watched a video on Merriam-Webster’s website. One of their editors was talking about where the word “X-mas” came from. It turns out that it is a printer’s abbreviation from back when every letter took a lot of time to produce. The X, in this case, is actually the first letter of a word that we would translate as Christ. Today, we might have written it as C-mas instead. So, people aren’t taking Christ out of Christmas, they’re just abbreviating it.

And what of “Happy Holidays”? Here too, people generally mean Christmas when they use it, but the phrase itself comes from “Happy Holy Days.” That has meaning if you see Christmas as a holy day. I’m Baptist and we don’t really have true Holy days. We also don’t observe mass. So why get upset about all of this? Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Merry X-mas are all saying the same thing, so that shouldn’t be reason enough to be upset. I almost want a button that says, “It’s okay to say ‘Happy X-mas’” just because I know it will upset a few people, but think about it. None of these terms are accurate. It isn’t a Holy day and it isn’t a mass. We might call it Christ’s Birthday, but we know it comes at the wrong time of year for that. It certainly isn’t worth fighting over.

So here’s what I propose. Instead of worrying about people taking Christ out of Christmas or making sure people say Merry Christmas, let’s just enjoy the season. Let’s go about our business, buying gifts for our family and friends, eating too much, and watching kids play sheep in the Christmas play. Let’s remember that there was a day about 2,000 years ago when a baby was born to a virgin and shepherds saw angels. Let’s remember that wise men traveled from the east to see him. And most importantly, let’s remember that he came to be the final sacrifice for our sins. Isn’t that much better than worrying about what to call the day?

How Much Should a Kindle Book Cost

2011-12-12T00:01:00.002-06:00

How much should a Kindle book cost? Some people have gotten the idea that Kindle books should cost less than print books because the publisher has lower costs. Personally, I think that books should be priced to match demand. This is because publishers work on an 80/20 rule in which 80% of the money comes from 20% of the books. It may even be a 90/10 in which 90% of the money comes from 10% of the books. The 10% are actually making up for losses in the 90%. But one person recently indicated that she didn’t like paying “high” prices for Kindle books because she thought the publishers were charging far above their expenses. She indicated she might be swayed by hard numbers. Publishers don’t reveal much, but I’ve put together as close to what she wanted as I could.
Here are the publishing prices Rachelle Gardner listed some time ago for a Trade Paperback:
Editorial: $5,000
Packaging (cover design & production): $3,500
Typeset & Interior layouts: $500
Printing & binding: $12,000
Marketing: $6,000
Warehousing: $3,000
Sales: $5,000
Total: $40,000 not including the advance

Assuming the publisher puts the same level of effort into an eBook, we can make the claim that the prices for a Kindle book are the same, with the exception that the publisher isn’t paying for Printing & binding or for Warehousing. To simplify the math, let’s assume that the publisher will either print the book or will make it available for Kindle, but not both. In many cases, the publisher will make both available, but the publisher must be concerned with the overall profitability of the book, not with which customer is paying for each of the listed items.

Total for Kindle book: $25,000

If the cover price is $13.99, the publisher receives approximately $6.30 for each trade paperback sold. To break even, the publisher must sell 6,349 books to break even. Some books sell more than this and some sell less, but on average, a successful publisher will sell more than this for the books in his catalogue.

Now, consider the Kindle book which is also set at a price of $13.99. For illustrative purposes, let’s say the author is receiving 8% of that price. So, after the royalties are paid, the publisher will get about $3.78. To break even, the publisher must sell 6,614 copies of the Kindle book, which you will notice is 265 more than what they needed to sell of the trade paperback.

Okay, so if we assume that the same number of customers will buy the Kindle book as would have bought the paperback, no matter what price we set, the breakeven point is 4% higher, so we need the price to be 4% higher. For the publisher to make the same amount of money, the Kindle book should be priced at $14.57. Sadly, very few Kindle owners want to see that.

Is Beauty and the Beast in the Bible?

2011-12-09T00:01:00.001-06:00

Is the story of Beauty and the Beast in the Bible? It has been said that every story that has ever been told is in the Bible. At a very high level, that may be true, but what about a lower level? In trying to find Beauty and the Beast in the Bible, I came across a website that made the claim that the story or Jephthah’s daughter is the story from which Beauty and the Beast came. I can see that in the parallel between Jephthah returning home after making a promise to sacrifice the first thing that came out of his house and his daughter coming out first, and the old man returning home after promising to give the beast the first thing that came out of his house.

But Beauty and the Beast is a very different story, other than how the girl was chosen. When one reads Beauty and the Beast, the thing that stands out is that this is a story about two very different people learning to love each other. It is a classic Buddy Love story and the story of Jephthah’s daughter is not. If anything, the story of Jephthah’s daughter shows us how messed up Israel was back in the time of the Judges.

Beauty and the Beast is also what we might call a Premature Marriage story. While Beauty hasn’t actually married the Beast, they are staying in the same house and she has made a commitment to stay, which is essentially what marriage is anyway. The question is, do we find a story in the Bible about two characters who are forced together in some way, even though they don’t want to be together, but they learn to like each other? We can look at it from a higher level, so it doesn’t have to be a man and a woman on their way to marriage.

The Bible has several arranged marriages, so that could be why there doesn’t seem to be a strong connection. People were used to the idea that a man and woman would get married before they knew each other very well. For us, it seems very strange. I suppose we might consider the story of Naaman, the Leper. The servant girl was not there by her choice, but she was had learned to appreciate Naaman enough that she wanted him to go see the prophet. Still, it is a very weak link.

A stronger link might actually be the story of Daniel and his friends. They were carried off to live in a foreign land, much like Beauty goes to the Beast’s castle. They do not want to be there, but they don’t offer strong resistance. They pick their fights and face difficulty, but eventually become trusted advisers to the king.

Hard Stuff

2011-12-08T00:01:00.001-06:00

One of the hardest things for a novelist is to put characters into a situation they can’t escape from. Think of all of the romance novels in which a woman marries a man because he needs someone to take care of his kids after he is widowed, but he we find out that he didn’t really love his first wife. I was reading one of the reviews of one of Colleen Coble’s books and the reviewer commented on how the character was about to become engaged, but her husband showed up, only it wasn’t a problem because the man she was to be engaged to was “just a friend.” Now, compare that to Cast Away. A man is stuck on an island for a long time. His wife moves on and marries another guy, so when he gets off the island, the love of his life is no longer available. We hate doing that to our characters, but it makes it so much more powerful. But much like in a romance novel, the writers of Cast Away made it okay by having the Tom Hanks character deliver a package to an attractive woman, implying that he’ll be alright anyway.

Personally, I hate situations like that. Here a man has remained faithful for all this time, but his wife didn’t. She thought he was dead, so you can’t really blame her and it isn’t the fault of the second guy either. You don’t want her to divorce him to go back to the first guy, but you want the first guy to have the love of his life. It is so tempting to make it okay by making someone evil or killing someone off. But I think we’re selling ourselves short when we do that. It is how a character handles the really hard stuff that let’s us see who he really is.

Wimps

2011-12-07T00:01:00.002-06:00

Several weeks ago, I was watching some of the episodes of the Dick Van Dyke Show on Netflix. In one particular episode, the theme was the decline of the American male. The discussion at work has to do with all of the examples of how the American male is declining, such as doing the dishes and helping with the kids’ bath, etc. Rob makes the claim that no that isn’t the case, but when he goes home, what does he do but do the dishes and help his son get ready for bed. Of course, that show was filmed in the 60’s. Now, some fifty years later, I look at where the American male stands and the things they indicated were signs of the decline back then look chauvinistic today. Back then, there was no question that Rob Petrie was the head of his home. Oh sure, there were gags where Laura appeared to have the say, but they were clearly meant to be gags. Today, the idea of a man being the head of his home is frowned upon, and yet there are still people out there pushing the idea that girls can do the same jobs as men.

To tell you the truth, I’m confused. Don’t get me wrong, if a girl wants to become an astronaut or a truck driver, that’s fine with me, but it seems like everywhere you look there is a big push for girls to take on jobs that have traditionally been considered men’s work. It is so much so that it seems like the writers of television shows want to discourage girls from taking on traditional female roles. And I don’t know what they want boys to do, but they clearly aren’t promoting the idea that boys should become leaders in their homes and communities. For the men on television shows see a woman as one of two types. Either she is someone who wants to do a man’s job or she is a trophy he wants in his bed. The women on these shows are no better. They either want to do a man’s job, or they want to be in the man’s bed. You don’t often see shows in which the male characters respect a woman for being a woman and female characters who have enough self-respect to slap the man when he encourages her to go to bed with him.

I realize it isn’t quite as bad in the real world. Yeah, there are people who can’t keep their pants on, but I also see homes in which men are men and women are women. I see homes where men love their wives and women respect their husbands. I see homes where the man is clearly the natural leader, even when his wife as a bossy spirit. But I worry about what young men are being taught these days. So many don’t know how men ought to act because they have no men in their lives. The only role models they have are the wimps on television. And yes, I do mean wimps because putting a character in a uniform doesn’t magically make him a man of courage. We see real strength in how a character handles his family. If what young men are learning is what they see on television, things will be bad for some time to come.

Churchy Rules

2011-12-06T00:01:00.002-06:00

Let’s talk about church etiquette. Growing up, there were certain rules that you were expected to follow when you were in the church building. Some of those rules seem to have changed since then and I’ve picked up a few more that I wasn’t taught, but let’s look at a few.

Don’t Run in the Church Building: This was a big one. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the risk of mowing some old person down. I don’t see quite as many people yelling this one down the halls these days, but it is still a good one to follow.
Don’t Chew Gum: This one probably got started after someone reached down and got her hand stuck gum. I just remember that Mom had trouble teaching us this one because the woman who sat behind us in church was usually chewing gum.
Don’t Crawl Under the Pews: I can understand it when the church service is going on, but my mother wouldn’t let me crawl under the pews even when we were the only people in the building.
Sit Still: The idea is that you’re supposes to listen to the sermon. At the very least, you shouldn’t disturb others.
Don’t Walk Around During Prayer: Unless you are preparing for a performance that begins right after the prayer, you have no reason to be moving around while prayer is going on. If you were on stage, you can leave the stage if you’re quiet about it, but don’t go very far while prayer is going on. This is to show respect to God.
Don’t Walk Around During a Special: It’s okay during the offertory, that’s part of the reason it exists. Especially when we’re talking about other musicians, it is a show of respect for the performer to wait until after they finish before moving around the building. If you are outside of the sanctuary, stay out until it is over. If you need to use the restroom, hold it.
Men, Stand Up When You Shake Hands: This is one I never learned as well as I should have, but it is a good rule, all the same. Women can remain seated, especially but men should show respect by standing up when they shake hands with someone.
Turn off Your Cell Phone: This one’s new from when I was a kid. Cell phones have a way of disrupting the services. You can go without a phone call or playing games for a while, so turn it off.

I’m sure there are probably more than that, but those are the ones I can think of right now.

Why People Don't Do It Theirself

2011-12-05T00:01:00.001-06:00

Why would anyone want to pay hundreds of dollars for someone to publish their book? (One vanity press has said that the average their customers pay is $1250.) For that matter, why would someone choose traditional publishing over self-publishing, when they get higher royalties from self-publishing and traditional publishers don’t do much to market a book anyway. Let me tell you what happened to me recently and see if you can’t answer that question.

I was nearly finished with typesetting the book when I decided that I wanted tabs on the edge so the reader could find key sections more easily. That requires the book be set up with bleed. So the ink goes to the edge of the page, the book has to be set up with the tabs extending past the trim line. When they trim the book, the knife will cut through the printed area, but since I’d set up the book without that, I had to resize the pages. The books contains both textboxes and images, so I had to go through the book page by page, repositioning the elements. The book is 540 pages long.

After getting it all set up, I sent it off to the printer, along with the cover art. The cover artwork requires two hours to render in Art of Illusion because it is so large. But then the printer kicked back the interior file. Somehow, I managed to set up the margins wrong. I won’t try to guess why; mistakes happen. In any case, I had to change the position of every element in the file again. This time, it wasn’t as simple as moving the elements to the right or left and adding a tab. This time, the text box got smaller, so not only did I have to move it, I had to resize it and then reposition the images to the right place with the text. The text was already small enough, but I was able to change the amount of indent. The other option would’ve been to add pages to the book, but with a two hour render time, I did not want to change the cover. I was able to keep most things in about the same location, but the reduced width made the lines in the examples shorter and I had to reformat them.

For the most part, it was tedious work. It was work that I would’ve been happy to let someone else do. While a novel doesn’t require the same level of effort, it does require work to setup any book. There are plenty of people who would rather just submit a manuscript and let someone else handle the details.

Interview With Amber

2011-12-02T00:01:00.001-06:00

Editor’s Note:It’s been a couple of years since I last did this, but Michael Hyatt recently posted about some of the things novelists can blog about and it rekindled my desire to interview a character from one of my books. I decided to sit down with Amber from Mother Not Wanted

Timothy Fish:: Amber, some of my readers may not have read your story. What would you tell someone who may be trying to decide whether to buy the book or not. What is it about your story that you think makes it special?
Amber:: You really know how to make a girl nervous, don’t you?
Timothy Fish:: I wasn’t trying to. Just tell us how it all started. The novel starts with you an Lizi on the train from St. Louis. Maybe you can tell us what was going on before that. What was it that convinced you to get on that train?
Amber:: I had to do something. I was at a point in my life where I couldn’t take care of Lizi properly. We’d recently gotten into church and our pastor was doing this series on the importance of men in a family. I kept thinking about how Lizi had a father out there somewhere and he she needed him.
Timothy Fish:: But you weren’t sure who he was.
Amber:: No, and I didn’t know if he could be trusted. You see, Lizi isn’t mine. I’ve raised her like she is, but I got her by default. Her mother died when Lizi was young. We were roommates, and I’d been taking care of Lizi a lot of the time anyway, so I went on doing it. If anyone knew that she wasn’t mine, I guess they didn’t care. Anyway, Lizi’s mother didn’t tell me very much about her family before she died and what she did, it wasn’t very clear. She was that way.
Timothy Fish:: And yet, it was enough for you to buy a couple of tickets to Fort Worth.
Amber:: Yeah, I was able to piece together enough information to find someone who knew Lizi’s mother. I knew that Fox was either Lizi’s grandfather, or he would know who was.
Timothy Fish:: But why the train? Why not call him up? Why not send him an e-mail or a letter?
Amber:: Is that what you would’ve done?
Timothy Fish:: Probably.
Amber:: That’s not the way I do things. I had to know she’d be okay. You don’t raise a kid from the time she was a baby and then just dump her off on strangers. And I had to know I could control the situation. If I’d called, they might have sent the authorities to take Lizi. I might have gone to jail and never met her father.
Timothy Fish:: But you didn’t have complete control. Any thoughts on why not?
Amber:: I got too close. When you’re trying to con someone, its never good when you have more to lose than they do.
Timothy Fish:: You were afraid you would lose Lizi.
Amber:: I think that goes without saying.
Timothy Fish:: What was your life like before you left St. Louis?
Amber:: Pretty normal. I worked in restaurants most of the time. But there’s not always work available.
Timothy Fish:: Do you have any regrets?
Amber:: You mean about leaving that life behind?
Timothy Fish:: That or about anything. Is there anything you would do different, if you could?
Amber:: Yeah, I wish I hadn’t messed with those silly birth certificates.
Timothy Fish:: Do you think things would’ve turned out different?
Amber:: Maybe.
Timothy Fish:: Thanks for stopping by.
Amber:: My pleasure.

Revile Not the Gods

2011-12-01T00:01:00.001-06:00

I came across a verse that I don’t remember taking much notice of before. I know I’ve read it, but I don’t recall doing more than that. “Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people.” (Exodus 22:28)

The last part of that verse is clear enough. For us in America, that means we should be careful about what we say about the President, the members of Congress, the judges throughout the land, the Governor, the Mayor or anyone else in such a position. We can certainly say that we disagree with them, but they are to be treated with respect and we aren’t to wish they were dead.

It is the first part that got me. “Thou shalt not revile the gods…” How does that fit with the statement, “thou shalt have no other gods before me?” When you look back at the Hebrew, it doesn’t help much. The word that is translated as “gods” is often translated as “God”. The verse would mean something very different if it were stated as “Thou shalt not revile God.” And does it mean “thou shalt not revile the gods” or does it mean “thou shalt not revile the gods of thy people?”

If we take it just as it is translated in the King James Version, what it seems to be saying is that we shouldn’t use abusive language concerning other people’s gods. But Elijah didn’t seem to see anything wrong with that when he challenged the prophets of Baal. But another way this word is translated is as “judges”. Given the context, that actually makes more sense.

We are not to be disrespectful to those who have the authority over us. As we approach an election year, we will encounter many people who speak with contempt for some of those who currently hold office. We should not participate in this talk, rather we should be an example to others. Though we may disagree with our leaders, we should show them respect, even as we make our case against their decisions.

The Theme of the Book of Ruth

2011-11-30T00:01:00.002-06:00

What is the theme of the Book of Ruth? I’ve heard that it is several different things. Some say that the theme of the Book of Ruth is that of the kinsman-redeemer. They base this on the doctrine of Jesus being our kinsman-redeemer. The concept of the kinsman-redeemer is one that comes from the old traditions and the basis on which Jesus could be our propitiation. Had Jesus not be a man, his sacrifice could not have been applied to our debt. Certainly, that is a very powerful and important doctrine that is discussed in the Book of Ruth, but is that the theme?

Some people refer to the faithfulness of Ruth to Naomi and say that faithfulness is the theme of the Book of Ruth. Some say that the theme of the Book of Ruth is the Lord’s provident protection of the faithful. Here, with Boaz a stand-in for the Lord, we do see the Lord providing protection, but is that the central theme of the Book of Ruth?

I would like to suggest that the primary theme of the Book of Ruth is something else. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with saying those others are the theme of the Book of Ruth, but I think that if we look at the Book of Ruth without preconceived notions of making it conform to the story of Jesus that the theme of the Book of Ruth looks very different.

First, even though it bears Ruth’s name, this is Naomi’s story. The Book of Ruth begins with Naomi and the Book of Ruth ends with Naomi. It is Naomi who suffers the greatest loss in the Book of Ruth and it is Naomi who has the greatest influence over the action in the Book of Ruth. It is Naomi’s husband and sons that die. It is Naomi who decides to go back home. It is Naomi who tells her daughter -in-laws to go back to their families and when Ruth refuses, it is Naomi who sends her out to glean from the field of Boaz.

Since Naomi is the primary character in the story, it is important for us to consider the change that she goes through and what she had to learn in order for that change to take place. At the beginning of the story, she is has nothing, her family is dead, and her line has ended. But at the end of the Book of Ruth, we see Naomi holding the child who will give rise to the line of kings.

Often, we have what we call the B-story. The B-story is usually the love story and it is in the B-story that the theme is discussed. Usually, it isn’t only discussed, but someone will come right out and tell us what the theme is. There’s actually two love stories in the Book of Ruth. The first is between Naomi and Ruth, but since that one is the one we start and end with, I’m going to say that the B-story of the Book of Ruth is that of Ruth and Boaz. The question then is what that story discusses and what the story tells us the theme is.

I see Ruth 2:8, 9 as being the theme statement of the Book of Ruth. To paraphrase Boaz’s statement, “Go not to glean in another field and I’ll provide for you.” It is very similar to the statement made in Proverbs 3:5, 6. Or that of Matthew 6:33. It all goes back to doctrine that there is only one way to God. So I would like to say that the theme of the Book of Ruth is “seek not another to provide.”

If I’m correct, then we should be able to see all of the events of the Book of Ruth either reinforcing or arguing against that statement. With Naomi off in Moab, she loses her family. It isn’t much of a stretch to say that this is symbolic of her being away from God and the things she is trusting in for her provision failed. She makes a step back toward God, by choosing to return home. When Ruth refuses leave her side, we see an example of what the theme is saying Naomi should be doing. Ruth will stick firm. They reach their homeland and Naomi sends Ruth to glean in the fields. The law of Moses provided for those in need by reserving the corners of the fields.

This is where the B-story kicks up and we see the benefits someone doing what the theme claims should be done. When Boaz learns that Ruth is someone he is supposed to be providing for, he instructs his workers to leave even more for Ruth. From this, Naomi seems to have learned her lesson. She instructs Ruth to continue to glean from his fields and then sends Ruth to request that Boaz marry her (through a tradition that seems strange to us in the western world). It is at this point that we see an argument against the theme. Boaz is willing to provide for Ruth and Naomi in this way, but there is a problem, another kinsman is nearer to her than Boaz. So Boaz goes to the kinsman and tells him that there is land that he can redeem. The man is willing to redeem the land, but when he learns he’ll have to marry Ruth to get it, he backs away. He is unable to provide, but . This demonstrates the concept that only the Lord is able to provide.

And the Lord provided for Naomi, giving her a son by way of her daughter-in-law. The person telling this story, who was probably writing during the time of King David, gave us the generations from Pharez to this child, Obed, to King David. Pharez, you may remember is one of the children born to Tamar after she disguised herself as a prostitute and had a child by her father-in-law, Judah, after he failed in his promise arrange for one of his sons to provide her with an heir after the death of her husband.

To me, this connection with Tamar just adds to the idea that he theme of the Book of Ruth is “seek not another to provide” because the story of Tamar is such a sad story in which Tamar is trying to do what is right but the men around her are doing the wrong thing. She ends up taking matters into her own hands to get it done, but she is an example of not gleaning from another’s field. In the Book of Ruth, we see not only the provision of God for Naomi when she had no children, but we see God’s provision for Tamar and it was because they continued to seek provision from one source.

Christianese: Not as Bad as All That

2011-11-29T00:01:00.002-06:00

Recently, KTVT ran a segment on Christianese. What they seemed to be saying was that Christianese is a bad thing because people outside of Christianity. Christianese is a type of jargon that Christians speak. Part of it comes from the Bible, while other parts of it come from the way Christians do things or from music they sing.

KTVT is the first to say something against its use. Those who have criticized it range from Atheists who are making fun of Christians to pastors who are speaking from the pulpit. There are even some videos on YouTube that make fun of it. It is easy enough to criticize it because non-Christians don’t understand it, but as I started putting together a list of Christianese terms, it occurred to me that it is pointless to try to eliminate it completely. I suppose that is always the case with jargon. Consider the statement, “My WIP is up to 80,000, but it’ll go up because it has a lot of telling.” If you’re a writer, you know exactly what I’m saying, but if you aren’t then you’re probably clueless. I could rewrite it as “The novel I’m currently working is up to 80,000 word, but I expect that number to go up because I have a lot of paragraphs that just make statements about the way things are instead of being a sequence of actions the characters are doing.” But by the time you expand jargon into its definitions, the meaning gets lost in the abundance of words.

The following is a list of a few Christianese terms:
On my heart - the feeling that something is of great importance
Witness - to tell others about what Jesus did
tithing - to give 10% of one’s income to God
Amen - from a term meaning “God’s will be done”, but usually spoken to indicate agreement with a someone, or to indicate the end of a prayer
Sin - anything that violates the law of God
Prayer - the means by which one speaks to God
Blessed - the Lord has brought good things into a person’s life

Does it really hurt to use these terms around someone who doesn’t know what they mean? If you were to say in a meeting of co-workers, “It’s on my heart that we should finish Project X before we go too far with Project Y,” they’ll understand what you mean. Or if a co-worker gets walked out the door for some impropriety and you say, “be sure your sin will find you out,” people may not know you’re quoting from the Bible, but they’ll understand what you mean. So while Christianese may cause a few people to scratch their heads, I doubt it will confuse people so much that they can’t figure it out after looking up one or two words.

Envy

2011-11-28T00:01:00.001-06:00

Jesus said that the whole law rests on the first two commandments, namely, to love God and to love each other. If people would obey those two commandments, they wouldn’t do the things they do to each other. Think about envy or if you prefer, covetousness. Why do we become green with envy? It doesn’t take much to show that envy is a result of us not loving our neighbor.

Consider this: Your brother goes out and buys a new car. He brings it over and shows it off. You tell him how nice it is, but all the while you’re thinking, “I wish I could buy a new car.” But what if we really loved our neighbor as ourselves? Suppose you’ve saved up some money and you have enough to buy a car. The one you’re driving still runs, but you would like a new one. But you know your brother needs a car and he can’t afford one. Perhaps you buy a new car and give him your old one. That seems like a nice thing to do. But maybe you keep the old one and give him the new one. Most of us would do the first over the second. However, if we truly loved our neighbor as ourselves, we would see little difference between the two. Our question would be which person needed the new vehicle more.

The Carrot

2011-11-25T00:01:00.001-06:00

When a friend found out just how little I make from writing books he asked why I would put so much time into writing a book when I make so little from it. I sometimes wonder the same thing and yet I find myself at the computer typing away on that next book.

I’m sure the answer is different for everyone. I frequently hear of people who have lost a job and have decided that they’re going to write for a living. Anyone who knows much about the publishing industry knows this is an unrealistic goal for most people, but I think I understand it. Writing is one of those jobs that people feel they can do and they don’t have a boss to report to. So it gives them the feeling of control over their situation. But that’s not the reason I write.

Writing is a form of communication. When I write, I hope to communicate, but I see many indications that that is not my primary goal. If it were, I would do more to give my books away. You can’t communicate if you don’t get the book into people’s hands, so it would make sense to get them into people’s hands, even if it required spending a lot of money to do it.

I believe the thing that drives me to write is the challenge. Just the effort required to fill 300+ pages with text isn’t easy. It takes approximate ½ million key presses to write a novel. Even more if you have to edit a lot. Imagine sitting at a computer and hitting a key ½ million times. That is hard enough, but we want to give meaning to those ½ million key presses, forming them into words and sentences. But the real challenge is to shape all of those into a work that is far more than just the sum of its parts. It isn’t an easy task. It is one thing to see the story in your head, but you have to find a way to convey that story to the reader.

The challenge is to show the reader the images you carry in your head, without bogging the reader down with too much description. You want to tell the reader what is going on, but in such a way that the reader discovers it for himself. That challenge, though hanging just out of reach like a carrot before a plow horse, is enough to drive you on, even when few people take interest in your work.

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T00:01:00.001-06:00

It's Thanksgiving. What are you doing here?

Comments From Would You Read On

2011-11-23T00:01:00.003-06:00

A week ago, some of my work was on another site and today is the day that people should find out that it was my work and they may be clicking through to this site, so I thought I’d use this space to respond to some of their comments.

The general response seems to be that it piqued their interest, but they thought it drug on too much without going anywhere. I thought it was interesting that one person said it was realistic and another person thought I should do more research to find out how a security guard would actually respond in this situation. I have worked for more than one large company that has had guards posted at the front gate. I even did a small amount of work for the security department of the company I worked for in college. I cannot with any certainty say that this is the response you would get if you tried this at any one of the companies I’ve worked for, but I see this response as plausible at some company.

The problem may be that the scene is too realistic. Most security guards are nice people. They have a job to do, but they’d rather not ruin someone’s day. As one person noted, the guy approaching the guard is not a mastermind. It is more likely that he is a few bricks short of a load. He must be denied entry, obviously, but he might not be a threat, just someone so focused on getting inside that he isn’t thinking about how the guard might see it. But one person suggested that a bomb should go off inside. Sometimes, I think people watch way too much television. That is plausible, but it really doesn’t happen all that often.

While it may have fallen apart a little at the end, I think the comments show that I accomplished what I set out to accomplish. What I hoped to show was that a person could drop the reader into a simple everyday scene and with a slight increase in conflict turn it into something that interests the reader. What I expect the reader to be asking at this point is “what’s wrong with this guy?”

There are so many books these days that begin with something catastrophic. I’ve seen books begin with a tornado. Several books I’ve read begin with an automobile accident. But when I think of my favorite books, so many of them begin without gimmicks. Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming begins with a woman asking her kids to stay in the car while she goes into the mall. Nothing is more ordinary than that. Parents do it all the time, once their kids are old enough. The only thing that adds conflict to this scene is that the kids don’t know why they stopped. It takes us several pages to realize that this is the last time these kids will see their mother. A car wreck simply cannot match the power of a scene like that.

More Rainbows, Please

2011-11-22T00:01:00.001-06:00

On my way home from work the other day, I saw a rainbow. I was traveling East along I-20 and there it was, a double bow. One half was on one side of the road and the other half on the other. Science tells us how they are formed, but you’ve got to read the Bible to know why they exist. The Bible tells us that God put a rainbow in the cloud as a sign of his promise that he would never destroy the earth by flood again.

Science tells us that rainbows are formed by light. There are two reflections and refraction. But when I was a kid, it was easy to think of a rainbow as an object you could find. Back then, there was a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. I miss those rainbows.

But I like that the Bible says that God put a rainbow in the cloud. God put it in the language that we can all understand. If he were to tell us what it takes to put a rainbow in a cloud when there wasn’t one before, even our greatest scientists would seem like idiots. Sure, they know how to shine light on a water vapor and produce a rainbow, but they don’ t know how to change the nature of the Universe so that is possible.

I think we need to see more rainbows and fewer water droplets. So often, we get so focused on details that we can’t see the beauty of the things that are happening. Something bad happens today. Something good happens tomorrow. We make our plans and then we’re disappointed when they don’t happen. But to God, those are all like water droplets. If we could see through his eyes, we would see that all of those things are coming together and forming something beautiful, like a rainbow in the cloud.

Humility

2011-11-21T00:01:00.001-06:00

It’s so hard to be humble, when you’re perfect in every way or so the saying goes. Humility is a strange thing. It is prized by God. The Bible says we are to humble ourselves. But I question whether we understand what humility is. By “we”, I really mean me.

Someone once said that humility isn’t about us. In other words, humility doesn’t mean you have to go around telling people what a worm you are, but it is seeing the greatness of others. If you’ve accomplished something in life or if you have some special ability, you don’ t have to go through life playing it down like it is unimportant. That would be dishonest. The humble person simply doesn’t spend a great deal of time talking about that stuff. If he has won an award, he may talk about it if it comes up, but what really distinguishes the humble person is that he is quick to talk about the accomplishments of others. When someone is better than he is at something, he says something about it.

In our relationship with God, what that means is that we talk about the greatness of God. Of course, compared to God, we really do look like worms. We don’t have to play down our abilities, we simply need to highlight the greatness of God and we’ll see ourselves as plenty low. Even in talking to others, we may talk about the things we’ve tried and by themselves, they may seem great things to try, but once we talk about what God did, even the greatest of our attempts seem like nothing.

So I think a person can talk about his accomplishments and still be humble, but not if that’s all he talks about. If he view his accomplishments without the proper context of what others are doing, he is a braggart, and not humble.

How Much Should a Book Cost?

2011-11-18T00:01:00.005-06:00

How much should a book cost? Some people get upset if a Kindle book costs more than $2.99. Some hardbacks cost $25.99. I’ve paid $100 for a text book that was smaller than most novels. I remember some romance novels Mom had with a price of 69¢. Today, those same books would bring about $6. I saw somewhere that the production cost of a hardback is only 50¢. The same source said the production of an e-book is $4.05. But e-books typically go for less than a hardback. Are publishers overcharging us for hardbacks? Are we paying too little for e-books? How can we figure this out.

First, production and delivery costs shouldn’t matter to the consumer. There are a lot of people out there who think Kindle books should be priced very low because the publisher doesn’t have to pay to print them. In truth, printing is not the major drive on book pricing and there are plenty of costs for e-books that publishers must consider, but as a consumer, I have no reason to be concerned with that. The real question is, am I willing to pay that price? I’ve seen a lot of assisted self-publishing books priced at $20. I’ve bought a few of those, but it makes me hesitant. And yet, if there is a computer book I really want, I’ll pay the $45.95 asking price. It is about how much I want the book, not how much someone else had to pay to produce it.

Second, publishers should be looking to maximize their profit. Publishers are in the business of making money, so their investors are happy and so they can publish more books. Consumers may prefer to get books free, but publishers are looking for ways to make as much money as they can. Aren’t we all that way? If our boss offers to give us more money, not many people would turn it down. But maximizing profit isn’t as easy as increasing the price of a book. The lowest sellers can go is one penny over the cost, if they want a profit. The highest they can go and make a profit isn’t as easy to figure out. There is a price at which the number of books sold will not be high enough to cover the cost of producing the books. So publishers’ profits are also dependent on how much the consumer is willing to pay.

In the drawing, A represents the point at which a publisher can first sell a book and make money. That could be as low as $1 and it could be as high as $100,000+. We’ll assume it is something like $5. The consumer line shows the willingness of the consumer to buy the book. There are some people who will “buy” a free book just because it is free, so we expect that the lower the price the more people are willing to buy it. As the price goes up, the number of books sold goes down. At point B, the number of books the consumers are willing to purchase crosses the line showing how many books the publisher is able to print for that price. That is the price at which the publisher will make the highest profit. If the Consumer line were to cross the publisher line before point A, then the publisher will never make a profit, no matter what price he sets it at. On the other hand, through promotion activities, the publisher may be able to push the Consumer line to the right, resulting in an increase in profits.

What Makes Writing Difficult

2011-11-17T00:01:00.001-06:00

After years of writing books and never understanding why people say writing is hard, I’ve decided that if writing isn’t hard, you aren’t doing it right. Now, that’s not to say that we should make writing difficult, just so we have to suffer for our art. And it’s not to say that everyone who finds writing difficult is a good writer. But no one achieves greatness by doing what is easy.

This is true in any field. Imagine the great concert pianist. He is performing in Carnegie Hall. He walks out on stage. All eyes are on him as he sits down at the piano. He rests his hands on the keys. They raise ever so slightly as he prepares to hit the first note. Then with one finger he plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

You don’t get to Carnegie Hall by being the best at playing easy stuff that any five-year-old can play. The same is true of writing. When you consider that there are millions of would be authors out there who are willing to write the easy stuff, no matter how well you write easy stuff, you won’t stand out. If you want to stand out as a writer, you’ve got to write stuff that other people aren’t writing.

In music, there are a couple of reasons why performers won’t play a piece. One is that it doesn’t sound very good. The other is that it is difficult to play. The performer who stands out is the one who is able to perform a beautiful piece of music that no one else is playing because it is too difficult. For writers, the writers who stand out are those who write things that people want to read, but other writers find too difficult to write. So let’s look at some of the things that make writing difficult.

Lack of Knowledge

One reason people turn to books is to gain knowledge about a subject. What makes that difficult for writers is that they have to gain the knowledge before they can write about it. If the subject is already covered well in books and online, it is easy to gain the knowledge, but people are less likely to buy the book. The author must turn to other sources for that knowledge. It may be life experience from the school of hard knocks, which difficult enough as it is. It may be that the author has to work through the problem people want to know how to solve. Through trial and error, he finds a solution and writes it down so that other people will have an easier time coming to the solution.

Tedious Writing

In a book that I’m working on right now, there are hundreds of classes in a software package that I need to document for the appendix of the book. From my use of other similar books, I know that this part of the book could become one of the most useful to my readers, but it is tedious work. But when it is done, it will make the book worth owning.

Solving the Unsolvable

For this one, I’m thinking more in terms of fiction, but it can apply to non-fiction as well. It is easy when you write a story and everything falls into place, but if we’re pushing the bar with our writing, we’ll encounter situations where our characters have no way out. It is difficult for us because we don’t know how to solve the problem when we get there. It is interesting to our readers because they don’t know how to solve it either. Maybe we never find a solution, but if we can, the writing that results is so much better.

What are some other things that make writing hard?

Which is Better?

2011-11-16T00:01:00.001-06:00

Now here’s another one. Suppose someone offered to give you all of those pennies ($10,737,418.23) or they will give you only those things you need in any given day. After having been burned by the pennies, I’m sure you will assume the second is the better choice, but you may not know why. Without having been burned, you would likely choose the money. With money, you are in control. You get to choose what you buy. You don’t have to rely on the other person knowing what you need.

The thing is, as we go through a day, there are relatively few things that we use at any given time. Look around your house and think about how many things you have that you haven’t touched today. Other than the joy of knowing you have it. You could have gone through the day without it. Tomorrow, you might need it, but not today. Look at the food in your pantry. How much of that will you eat today? What about your car? You drive it for maybe an hour or two and the rest of the time it is parked. If we looked at a person with a small amount of food and who rides on public transportation. We would assume he is poor and yet, he has all the same things you actually used today.

The person who always has what he needs just in time for him to use it is no worse off than the person who has stockpiled so much that he never runs out. $10,737,418.23 is a large amount of money, but it isn’t enough to guarantee that you will never run out of the things you need. No amount of money can. God didn’t tell us that he would give us a lot of money. Instead, he told us that he would supply our need. That, my friend, makes us the wealthiest people in the world.

I Just Love It When a Theme Comes Together!

2011-11-15T00:01:00.001-06:00

“I just love it when a plan comes together!” Hannibal Smith used to say as the A-team brought victory from the jaws of defeat. Well, I’m at the point where I want to say, “I just love it when a story comes together.”

I’ve been fighting this thing for several months. It started out as a simple logline. It sort of flashed into my mind, but once I thought of it, I knew I had to try to do something with it. I’m not ready to reveal what it is in a wide public forum, but I will say that what fascinated me about it is that it takes one of the worst situations you can imagine and then implies that the solution makes it even worse. Not this, but something along the lines of “She thought their divorce was the worst thing that could ever happen, but then they reconciled.”

After thinking about it for a while, I went ahead and started the story. I had an idea of what might be worse than the worst thing, so I headed in that direction. But then it didn’t work. The story involved a couple of parents and an adult child. The man is the lead character. I tried thinking it through with the wife as the villain, with the child as the villain, with the child male, with the child female. No matter how I thought about it, I just could not come up with something that was worse than what they had already faced together.

Weeks went by and nothing, but then, it started to fall into place. You might say that the lead character made lemonade out of lemons, but when the lemons went away, so did the ability to make lemonade. To overcome the loss of lemonade, the character must overcome a problem like what his daughter was trying to overcome when she caused life to hand him lemons.

As I looked at the solution, it just worked. Eventually, I’ll provide you with more detail, but I didn’t have to make any of the three villains, though the story is such that as we near the end, the lead character realizes that he has not only caused the problem for others, but it has caused him to have the same problem in his life.

Looking at the elegance of the solution, it all goes back to theme. The theme is what we have to say to the reader. It is our one and only message. In the story in question, the theme is along the lines of “don’t try to turn force someone into being something they are not.” Doing that with his daughter caused the problem and put him in a situation where others are doing that to him. It is killing him, but he doesn’t know it yet. Like his daughter, he must be true to himself in order to resolve the situation.

I’m excited about the story again. I’ve got a theme that will run throughout the story and I know the major events that will drive the story forward. I don’t see a gap that I don’t know how to fill.

What All Writing Is About

2011-11-14T00:01:00.001-06:00

What one word sums up everything that every successful writer has ever written? What one word tells us what every reader it is looking for? Think you can’t do it? Think you can’t come up with just one work? I think you can, because that one word is hope. Hope is what it is all about.

Take the bestselling book Heaven is for Real as an example. It has turned into a chase cow for Thomas Nelson. But why? What is it that people expect to find in its pages? Hope. Many people are fearful that maybe heaven isn’t real. They’re fearful that the Bible isn’t true. So they are turning to a little boy named Colton Burpo to give them hope. If he went to heaven and saw it, then it must be there. My fear is that he’ll let them down. I fear he’ll revise his statement later and say, “I made up most of that because I thought my parents wanted to hear it.” Read the book and tell me you don’t see that coming.

What about a novel, like Harry Potter. Don’t we look to characters like Harry with hope, wishing we too could wave a wand and change the world? Of course we would change it for the better and we would avoid the problems he faces, but wouldn’t it be nice?

Or what of a romance novel. Aren’t women looking to those characters for hope? They wish they’re husbands would treat them the same way the man in the story treats the woman.

What then of computer books? Surely, we can’t say they offer hope. And yet, they do. A reader picks up the book having reached the point that he knows he has a problem he isn’t sure how to solve. He hopes that the author of the book will solve the problem for him, so he doesn’t have to do all of the work required to solve the problem.

It really is all about hope.

A Successful Book Video

2011-11-11T00:01:00.001-06:00

Here is a book trailer that works. Let’s look at why.

1. It entertains - Even if you never intend to prepare a sermon, this video is fun to watch. Who can’t imagine what must be going through the poor assistant pastor’s head when he receives an e-mail saying he’d better be ready to preach on Sunday. And then to look at all the things he tried, before typing in the phrase “How Sermons Work.” It’s kind of funny to think that a man would do that, and yet we’re all guilty of doing something similar.

2. It shows why you need the book - It first shows us a problem and then it shows us that the book is the solution. But if you look closer, you’ll see that it follows the outline of a story. There is a problem, which the character tries to solve. The solution isn’t what he hope. He tries again (with the book) and all is well.

3. It is simple - A video like this shouldn’t burden us with all of the reasons we should buy the book, but it should give us one very specific reason. If the viewer is looking for a book to solve that particular problem, he’ll buy the book, not matter what other problems it might also solve.

I’m still not sure how to apply the same principle to fiction, but this video makes me think I might should try my hand at making another book video.

The Color of Redeeming Love: Environment in a Nutshell

2011-11-10T00:01:00.004-06:00

Yesterday, I mentioned a discussion I had with someone about the color or Francine Rivers’ novel Redeeming Love. I also described For the Love of a Devil as being green and moving into the territory of forest green or even black at points. There is another book that I’ve been working on some and I think of it as a brown. Not a dark brown, but it had definite earth tones to it, with a tinge of yellow that brightens it.

Why are we able to think of stories in terms of color? Some are a fiery red. Some are as black as night. Some are a cold blue. Some are a soothing green. Some a relaxing teal. Some are a cheery yellow. Some are soft and tender pastels. What is it that allows us to say that?

Color moves us emotionally. So does music, but music is active. Color is more static. Color tells us the state of the environment. The gray of a cloudy sky gives us the impression that it is a dreary day. The black of night hints at dangers lurking in the darkness. Blue is a color of authority. Yellow reminds us of a sunny day. Teal reminds us of the ocean. It isn’t the action that takes place, but the setting in which it happens.

But setting doesn’t have to be constant. It could even be used to outline a story. Let’s go back and look at Redeeming Love. The book begins with the innocence of youth. Even with what her mother is doing, this is actually a bright spot for the point of view character, so I’m going to paint that period with a light yellow. The story of Redeeming Love continues and Momma dies. This is actually the darkest part of Redeeming Love, so I’ll go ahead and paint it black. Then we kind of get off into a dark red period, as she struggles to make her way. But then it gets brighter. Even though she’s in what should be an undesirable situation, she is a successful prostitute, in demand by all the men of the area. Then Redeeming Love turns pink. A man shows up who wants to marry her and he is willing to pay the price to take her home with him. Redeeming Love has occasional dark spots after that, but mostly it is what I would call pink because the only real struggle is with her trying to convince herself not to fall for the guy she married. Off in the background, he is still there, looking for romance. There are others who want her to return to her old ways, but it is pretty much clear that she has left that life behind and won’t be going back. Blend it all together and here’s the color outline of Redeeming Love.

I don’t know how many people will find it to be helpful, but my thought is that when people are looking for an environment in which to escape, color provides a way to convey what the environment of a book is without the need to explain everything in the book.

What Color is Redeeming Love?

2011-11-09T00:01:00.003-06:00

I love when people disagree with me, especially when they stick around long enough to have a good discussion. The other day, I got into a discussion with a woman about the color of a novel. It started with a literary agent asking me what kinds of books I thought were missing in Christian literature. I answered that it seems like most of what is out there is either pastel, as is the case with romance and other forms of women’s fiction, or it is the dark browns and black of stories about demonic forces taking over the world. There isn’t much in between. In another part of the discussion, another commenter said something about Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love. I said that I had read the book and I saw it as being primarily aimed at women and it is more pastel. The woman disagreed, so I thought she was disagreeing about Redeeming Love being aimed at women. I went into some detail about how Francine Rivers’ had fashioned Redeeming Love in such a way that the woman had the primary lead and the man, aside from rescuing her from prostitution in the beginning, does little to influence the outcome of the story. It is only after she silences her demons that she returns to him. I said that when I read the story of Hosea, what intrigues me is the man’s role in the story. Here is a man who loves his wife, but she leaves him and the kids anyway because she thinks her lovers have more money. Here is a man who is willing to let her lovers take the credit for the things he’s doing for her, because he loves her. Here is a man who, even after all she’s done to hurt him, even after she’s reached the point where other men don’t want her, is willing to walk into the slave market and pay the price to get her back, when she was rightfully already his. He’s the kind of man that guys should want to be like, and that’s the image that we see in the book For the Love of a Devil.

Okay, so after I said all of that, it turns out that the woman wasn’t disagreeing with that, she was disagreeing with the statement that Redeeming Love is pastel. It intrigued me to think that we could disagree over something like what color the story of Redeeming Love is. After giving it some thought, I think she might be right. Redeeming Love isn’t pastel. Redeeming Love is more of a pink covered with burgundy lace. But isn’t it strange that we can talk about the color of a story like Redeeming Love and we know what each other is talking about?

The color for the cover of For the Love of a Devil was decided long before the book was written, but I think green is a fitting color. As for shading, I think it turns dark in places. As we move toward the end of the book, that bright green becomes more and more of a forest green and eventually you find yourself in a forest so dark that you wonder if you will get out. It is not unlike how the shading on the cover is. On the front, it is a bright green, but as you turn the book over, it grows darker and darker. But then morning comes. I imagine that last chapter as being an antique white, with white curtains blowing in the breeze.

I’ve got so much more to say about this. We’ll have to pick it up again some other time.

How to Describe the Beauty of a Woman

2011-11-08T00:01:00.001-06:00

How do you describe a woman’s beauty? In part, a woman’s beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A man in Africa is likely to see beauty where a man in Japan does not. If you were to ask the man in Japan to describe the beauty of a woman, he would probably describe something very different than a man in India. And look at what they say is beauty on television. Apparently, a woman isn’t beautiful unless she has nothing covering her long thin legs and her breast are the size of melons. If that is what you’re thinking of when you’re asking how to describe a woman’s beauty, that isn’t hard. Just talk about legs and breasts and cleavage and people will know what you’re talking about. But is that true beauty? A woman like that has made herself a slave to the men she is trying to impress.

If you find that when you are trying to describe the beauty of a woman, your mind’s eye focuses on those things that are below the neckline, you aren’t focusing on the true beauty of a woman. There’s nothing that says that a woman of true beauty can’t be attractive below the neck, but our description changes. Her dress was long and flowing. Her shoes highlighted her elegant feet. Instead of our focus being on the skin she is showing down there, our focus turns to her attire. But it doesn’t stay there long because talking about her clothes doesn’t completely describe the beauty of a woman.

Our gaze turns upward. Her eyes sparkled behind the oval shaped glasses. They were the color of a clear blue sky. I wondered how long I could stare into them without her thinking me strange. Her nose was upturned, ever so slightly. Her smile was gentle and sweet. Her hair was like corn silk and I wanted to reach out and touch it, to see how it felt in my hand.

Notice how very differently we describe the beauty of this woman than what we did for the first. Our gaze is almost completely on her face and head. If we were to continue to describe the beauty of this woman, we would turn our attention to what she did and said. We would describe how she treats other people. We would describe her kindness and her love.

How we describe the beauty of a woman has as much to do with our attitude toward the woman as it does her appearance. If we see the woman as having a head only to keep her legs and chest from looking funny then that’s the way we will describe her. But if we see her as someone to be respected as a person, our attention will turn upward and our focus will be above the neckline.

A Key to a Successful Marriage

2011-11-07T00:01:00.001-06:00

As you may know, I'm not married nor have I ever been, so I'm not the ideal person to offer marriage advice. But Christian novelist Colleen Coble recently celebrated forty years of marriage and one piece of advice she offered recently is "Appreciate all the things your spouse does for you. Verbalize it in front of others too." And then she said, "Focus on your spouse's good qualities." Good advice.

When was the last time you said something in public about something you like that your spouse does? Some people are so quick to tear criticize their spouses in public. I'll probably get in trouble for this, but it seems to me that women are the worst offenders. If nothing else, you can hear it in the tone of their voice when their husband does something they think is childish or silly. You don't see many men who will say something like, "You'll never guess what my wife did this week. She went out and bought a purse to match her shoes. Then she decided she didn't like the shoes." Some will, but good Christian men don't do that. The wife is to be protected. No matter how silly she may act, you don't go around laughing about it.

I always loved open house when I was in school. Both of my parents always went. What I liked best was when the teacher would talk to them and tell them how good I was doing at one thing or another. It made me stand a little straighter. There's just something about hearing someone praise us in front of other people. And though I've never been married, I'm sure the principle works the same for couples. Men, if you want your wife to feel loved, the next time you and your wife are out with other people, talk about how much you enjoyed that casserole your wife fixed the other night. Or talk about how well she does with the kids. Or tell them how you enjoy coming home to a clean house. Women, if you want your husband to feel respected, tell people how you like seeing him take the leadership role in your home. Tell them how much you appreciate the time he spends at work. Tell them about the work he’s been doing to fix up the house or keep the cars in running order. That’s what we’re all looking for. We long for someone to love us and appreciate us. That love and appreciation should primarily come from one’s spouse.

And another thing, make a commitment that you won’t criticize your spouse in public. There is never a reason for you to criticize your spouse in public. Never. Maybe they did something you don’t think they should have done. Save it until you’re in the car or until you get home, but don’t do it in public. Resentment comes quickly when a person is publically ridiculed. Don’t do it.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? I think I should add one more thing. Offer praise at every opportunity and never publically criticize your spouse, even if your spouse does. I think one of the problems couples have is that one half of the couple is willing to do the right thing, but only as long as the other person is doing it too. When the other person hurts them, they take that as permission to hurt the other person back. That will only result in disaster. Instead, praise your spouse in public anyway and it is very likely that your spouse will soon be returning the favor.

Fixing Authors Who Can't Write

2011-11-04T00:01:00.000-05:00

One of the popular things for literary agents to do on their blogs is to post first pages (with the author’s permission) and then provide comments and/or allow their readers to provide comments about what works and doesn’t work with the piece. The concept is that since agents typically see nothing more than the first page before rejecting a novel, the first page is very important. I’ve participated in these and have enjoyed doing so, but there’s a point where it isn’t fun.

The other day, an author submitted a first page and it was brutal. You can usually find something good to say, but this was a case that I felt like I was lying to the author by mentioning the good parts. There wasn’t much hope in saving it. All of the people who responded were nice about it, but I couldn’t help but thing that if I were the author reading those comments I would cry.

But then I looked at the author’s website. This particular author has a few books out, is a public speaker, and she gives writing classes. What a classic case of getting the cart before the horse, but I fear many authors are doing the same thing. So many authors are doing all the right things to sell books, but they can’t write.

Sadly, I think we’re doing the wrong thing by patting them on the back and saying, “Don’t worry, you’ll get there.” It is impossible to improve if you don’t know you need to. Encouragement is fine, but we shouldn’t encourage the wrong behavior. But at the same time, there is a point at which it is painful to give an honest critique.

Have you ever submitted a first page for critique? Did you find it helpful? Why or why not?

Reveal The Story

2011-11-03T00:01:00.001-05:00

Writers are often admonished to Show, Don’t Tell. My roots are in the Show Me State, so I’m all for showing, but I think there’s enough confusion about the topic that some writers just don’t get it. I don’t know if it will help anyone else, but when I think about this topic I think in terms of revealing, rather than showing. That may be confusing also, since you can reveal something by simply telling someone, but I imagine that there is something hidden behind a curtain. While the curtain is closed, I can’t help but wonder what is back there. Someone pulls back the curtain a little ways and I can see something. There is a table back there and something is on it, but I’m still not sure what it is. Then they open the current all the way and I can see, that a magician’s top hat is on the table and he is about to pull a rabbit from the hat.

In a story, it isn’t just about action versus narrative. Narrative has a way of slowing down the story because it stops the clock, but the real question is whether the reader has a sense of discovery. We tend to get that sense of discovery with action because the things the character interacts with and how he does it reveals something about the story and the character that the reader discovers by reading between the lines. With narrative, the tendency is for us to give the reader the stuff we think they need to know.

Let’s look at an example:

While the video played, Robert adjusted the microphone hanging from his ear one more time. He pulled the transmitter from his belt and looked for the little red light then reattached it to his belt. The video reached the half-way point as he checked his appearance in the mirror. His polo shirt was buttoned. The sleeve weren’t turned up funny. His hair was combed and his teeth were white. He heard the words, “We were on the verge of losing our house” from the backstage monitor. Without looking at the screen, he knew it showed a man and his wife sitting on a sun lit porch. Ten seconds to go. He began his walk to the stage. The lights came up. He walked across the stage. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I know you’ve all seen plans for you to make money at home before…”

Now, compare that to:

Robert is trying to sell his latest money making scheme.

Clearly, the first example provides a better sense of discovery because the reader is allowed to figure out who this guy is, rather than us telling him. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t provide a sense of discovery with narrative.

Robert is in the business of promoting money making schemes. He is bankrupt.

This is narrative and some may call it telling, but it has revealed something about Robert that the reader might not have expected.

A Little Research

2011-11-02T00:01:00.001-05:00

Research isn’t always good thing. I’ve seen some authors talking about all the research they did when they wrote their books. You open up the book and there it all is. One author was talking about visiting a farm and talking to the owner about all the stuff he did in a day. She rattled off a list of stuff he told her. In the book, it was pretty much all there.

The problem is that when you’ve never lived in that environment, you might place high importance on something that the person you are interviewing sees as unimportant. You might assume that something he mentions is common when he is actually telling you about it because it is rare. And the truly ordinary stuff—the stuff novels are made of—may go unmentioned because it is so ordinary that he didn’t think you would want to hear about it.

One reason people like reading novels is because they give us a view of what other people consider ordinary. It isn’t ordinary to us, because we don’t live in that environment, but it is for our characters. No matter how fascinating we may find something, we don’t want our characters to be fascinated by something they find ordinary. We don’t want to put great emphasis on something that our characters would do without thought.

So, a little research is a dangerous thing. There’s a reason why we should write what we know. If we haven’t lived in the environment of the story, we may do more harm than good.

The Worst Pain

2011-11-01T00:01:00.002-05:00

Is divorce worse than losing a spouse through death? Unless you’ve experienced both, I don’t think you can compare the two. Even if you have, it is likely that your experience may be different than someone else’s. I’ve never been married, so I’m in no position to say. But what about that saying, “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all?” Perhaps that isn’t true. I can tell you straight up that I would rather spend my whole life single than to go through a divorce. As for whether divorce is worse than the grief from losing a spouse through death, logic tells us that it is. The widowed person has the memories of the good times to look back on. The divorced person is unable to enjoy those memories as much as he should. He can’t look back a the times his wife did something nice for him without wondering if she really did it because she loved him or if she was just going through the motions.

But here’s the thing: It really doesn’t matter. The person whose spouse has died doesn’t care whether her grief is less painful than that of a divorced person. It hurts. That's all he knows. As a single person, I know that I’m better off having never married than to have married and then divorced. But when I start feeling sorry for myself, that has no solace for me. To put it another way, your pain has less meaning to me than my pain. When someone is going through pain, it does them no good for someone to belittle it. For all we know, the pain they are experiencing is the very worst pain they can possible handle. Our own pain may come from a worse experience, but our ability to handle it may be greater.

At some point, I think we have to conclude that grief is grief, no matter where that grief comes from. That doesn’t mean that we can tell someone who has been widowed that we understand because we lost a dog when we were five, but we should never belittle another person’s grief because we don’t see it as being as bad as something we went through. To that person, whatever they are going through is far worse than anything we have been through, because they haven’t experienced our grief any more than we can experience theirs.

HarperCollins to Buy Thomas Nelson

2011-10-31T15:59:00.002-05:00

Sad news. Today, HarperCollins announced that HarperCollins will acquire Thomas Nelson by year’s end. It isn’t really surprising. It wasn’t long ago that another company took over Thomas Nelson in order to whip it into shape so that it would be more attractive to investors. It appears that HarperCollins took the bait. I don’t really have any idea what this will mean to readers or authors. HarperCollins already owns Zondervan, another Christian book publisher. For the company as a whole, it is probably a good thing, since bigger companies have more power.

All the same, it saddens me. I hate seeing so many Christian publishing companies merging with companies whose focus is on things other than Christian publishing. Granted, it isn’t like Thomas Nelson is a church, but it is kind of like so many colleges that started out as Christian colleges but now don’t even resemble a Christian college. I fear that too many people worship the dollar and the power it suggests and have lost sight of what is important.

That isn’t to say that HarperCollins is a bad company, but it seems like we’re trying to take Christianity, put it in nice manageable packages and sell it off to the highest bidder. Your company wants television shows, there’s a module you can plugin. Your company wants textbooks, there’s a module you can plugin. Your company wants to have Christian books, there’s a module for that. Christianity shouldn’t be a module that we can use and then put aside until we want it again. Faith should so permeate our lives that it overflows. It is sad that Thomas Nelson is a module instead of having such an influence that HarperCollins and News Corporation wouldn’t be able to plug it in without having to remove the more unsavory stuff they publish and televise.

As I said, it is sad news.

What Should Be on a First Page

2011-10-31T00:01:00.002-05:00

Last week, I mentioned that I sometimes participate in first page critiques. Today, I want to give some of my thoughts on what makes a good first page.

Begin with a Problem

Every good book begins with a problem. It doesn’t have to be in the first sentence, but it should come close. Consider how the ultimate Good Book begins. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void.” That’s our hook. God created, but what he created wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t finished. That’s a problem.

But notice that it isn’t a big problem. It would be for us, but for God it isn’t. There’s nothing particularly emotional about the problem. It doesn’t make you cry. It doesn’t make you angry. It is just a simple problem that needs fixing. As is the case with Moby Dick. You undoubtedly remember that the first sentence is “Call me Ishmael.” There are college professors who can talk about that sentence for hours on end. Personally, I find the second sentence more interesting. “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” The guy was broke, but he wasn’t particularly emotional about it because that was his way of life. Still, it is a problem that needs fixing.

Put the Audience on Hold

It takes time and words to fully introduce the main problem in a story. It is unlikely that you can do much more than hint at the problem on the first page or even in the first chapter. So the goal on the first page should be to give the reader a reason to stick around until we’ve had time to get them fully engaged in the main problem. In Moby Dick, the initial problem is a lack of money, but that turns into a problem of boredom, both of which is reason enough for a man to get into a boat and go to sea. Neither of which are significant enough to justify a novel. But Herman Melville uses that to hold the reader’s attention long enough to introduce the bigger problems of the story, namely, Ahab’s quest for revenge.

Begin with Action

Explanation is boring. In real life, I have very close friends who have siblings that I know nothing about. One of my friends may ask for my help in doing something that will eventually help his siblings. I can give them help without knowing why they need my help. In a book, we don’t have to know a character’s complete life story to understand the character’s actions. Actually, it is completely the opposite. If we know too much of a character’s story, we may question whether that life story would cause him to act the way we say he acts.

What we should do instead is to put the guy into action and let the reader figure out what might cause him to act that way. We can and should give the reader hints along the way but it is much more believable if we don’t psychoanalyze the character too much. Leave that to the college professors. We can say that a character is a certain way, but if his actions don’t match what we say then the reader won’t believe us. On the other hand, if we say nothing about what the character is like and we let his actions reveal who he is, then the reader has nothing to question.

What do you like to see in a first page?

I've Been Censored

2011-10-28T00:01:00.006-05:00

wog - (noun) : chiefly British usually disparaging
: a dark-skinned foreigner; especially: one from the Middle East or Far East

I got censored yesterday. No, not because I used the word above, but because I asked about its use. A literary agent listed the books his clients have coming out, one of which is a Bible for teens with the title WogBook. To say the least, I was surprised to see the term used on the cover of a Christian book. So I looked it up. There is actually a second definition for the word. It is short for polliwog and refers to a US Navy sailor who hasn’t crossed the equator.

I assume the name isn’t using the first definition. I suppose some people might call Jesus a wog since his lived in the Middle East, but this is a book that is being published by a Christian publisher. That leaves the second definition. I suppose someone might compare teenagers to polliwogs, but I think most teenagers would find it offensive for someone to call them a polliwog.

So, I asked about it in the comments, saying that I wouldn’t give a teenager such a book for fear of how they would take it and I expressed how I was surprised that a publisher would go for that title. My comment stayed up for several hours and then it disappeared without comment.

Here is where it gets interesting. I did a little checking and what I found was that the publishing company is owned by the man who created the book. Essentially, it is a self-published book, but the publisher also publishes some other others. That sort of explains the title. The author probably picked the title, for whatever reason, and there was no one to say, “that isn’t such a good idea.” Perhaps he is trying to gain sales from the controversy.

Now I’ve got more questions than ever. I’m not that far removed from the position that author is in. I have published my own books and I have published books by other authors. But I don’t have an agent. That doesn’t make sense. The whole reason for an agent is to shop your work to publishers. When you are the publisher, having an agent just eats into the profits. I may be scratching my head over this one for quite a while. In the mean time, I’ve probably gotten yet another agent upset with me.

Connecting or Disconnecting With Your Audience

2011-10-27T00:01:00.001-05:00

When you write a book, or do anything creative, you have this idea that your readers will “get it”. Then the reviews come in and they aren’t what you expected. It isn’t going to be the next bestseller. The people you thought would read it aren’t reading it and those who are don’t have anything good to say.

I figure there are two reasons for this type of situation. One is that you failed in your job as an author. Your writing is terrible, but you aren’t willing to admit it. If that is the problem, there’s nothing I can do for you. No one can help you.

The other reason is that you connected with the wrong audience. I’ve noticed this with free Kindle books. People will download the book because it is free, but then they’ll complain because it isn’t a book that they want to read. They’ll claim the author can’t write, but in fact it is more likely that the author just wasn’t writing for them. As an example, consider the Dick and Jane books. They were great material if you were trying to teach a child to read, but if you were expecting a novel, you would think the author was unskilled.

To make it more realistic, if a mystery reader picks up a romance, he is likely to be disappointed, even if it is a well written romance. When something like that happens, ask yourself why a mystery reader is reading a romance. Perhaps it is the title. Perhaps it is listed in the wrong genre. Perhaps you’re hanging out with the wrong readers.

One way to fix the problem is to find a way to connect with the right readers. Or you can go the other way and try to write a book that the people who didn’t like your previous book will like. Why would you do that? Because they are your platform or as Seth Godin describes it, your “tribe”. You may not even know why these people connected with you, but they did.

What advantages/disadvantages do you see to each approach?

Problems

2011-10-26T00:01:00.001-05:00

I haven't been writing lately. I published a book near the end of last year and then one in January of this year. I thought that would take the (self-impossed) pressure off, since I already had one done so early this year, but I really thought I would complete another or two. But here we are near the end of the year and I'm not sure I'll be able to complete another this year. I've got a non-fiction book well under way, but it needs a lot of work. I have a novel started, but after having let it set, I've decided that my approach is all wrong. I love the concept and the one sentence description is one that would make me want to pick it up and read it, but I've struggled with it for a number of reasons.

One reason may be that I've attempted to make the wrong person the point of view character. Making the events that occur problematic for the character I chose may make him unlikeable. It might look like he is choosing his job over his daughter. I believe I can correct that by having a point of view character who observes and examines the events from some distance. This character would be free to observe the evils of the world without stooping to the level of it.

Another reason is that I don't want to hurt my characters. In this case, I don't want to turn my main character's daughter into the villain, nor do I want the main character to be the villain. But I think changing the point of view character will help with that too. Once I do that, I can distance myself from the villains and I don't have to explain the motives so completely. Who is to say why some people do what they do? But we know people do strange things, even if we wouldn't do it ourselves.

Securing a Church Website

2011-10-25T00:01:00.001-05:00

When I wrote Church Website Design: A step-by-step approach, one of the topics I didn't cover was that of a secure website. Since my primary focus was people who were new to church website development, I tried to walk the straighter path. Most churches don't need a secure website because most churches are providing nothing but publicly available information. When all you are doing is providing information like when your church meets, what programs you have, what events are on the calendar, etc. it doesn't make sense to pay the extra money required for a secure website. But that's not to say that no church ever needs a secure website. I am currently in the process of implementing a secure website for our church.

You may be wondering why a church needs a secure website. I our case, it is because we want a means for our Awana staff to access certain information about our clubbers through the Internet. None of it is financial in nature and it is doubtful that anything would happen other than a few families would get more junk mail and SPAM if the information got in the wrong hands, but since children are involved, we don't want to assume anything. We want to keep the information out of the hands of all but people we trust. And by that, I mean our Awana staff, who we know because they are members of our church and because they all go through a background check before we allow them to take on that responsibility. If someone unsavory does gain access to that information, we don't want it to be from our lack of effort.

Once we've identified each person who is to have access to the data, the data is protected by an SSL certificate. That works like this: A trusted person sits down at his browser and attempts to access the website. With some handshaking, the browser determines if it trusts the server. Essentially, it verifies that the server IP address matches the certificate. Once that is done, the server and the browser communicate via encrypted messages. The certificate provides the server's public key.

None of this is of any importance unless your website requires the user login. Anyone can access a "secure" website that doesn't have a password, so the fact that the messages between the sites can't be decoded is of little importance. To secure the website, you need to redirect attempts to access the website through HTTP to the HTTPS connection. And you need a login form as the first screen of the HTTPS site. Because that screen is part of the secure site, the data sent from the form will be encrypted. From a practical standpoint, what this means is that when the server authenticates the password, we can assume that it came from the browser that initiated the session. Because the browser was able to provide a valid userid and password, someone who had knowledge of the userid and password had to type it into the form.

All of that is dependent on us implementing the website without inadvertantly creating a backdoor. That means that every trusted page must check for a valid userid and password, either by making the check each time or by means of a session flag that is set by the page that follows the login screen. It also means that we don't allow the user to enter a password into an unsecured form. Another thing to avoid is allowing the unsecured portion of the site to access any of the secured portion other than a link to the secured login screen. The simpliest of coding mistakes could provide access to more data than we intended.

Most churches will never need a secure website because they are trying to share more information, not hide it away. But when personal information is involved, a secure website may be needed.

How Can We Reach the Lost With Novels?

2011-10-24T00:01:00.001-05:00

Some Christian authors have the idea that they should be trying to win the lost with their novels. There are other views that I believe are equally valid, but I want to focus on this one view today. The reason I want to focus on it is because even though this is a noble view, this is an area in which Christian authors tend to fail. I've heard authors tell of people who came to know Christ after reading one of their books. I'm glad that happens once in a while, but it quite rare. And when we look at the number of Amish books in the Christian Fiction market these days, I can't help but think it is more rare than ever. Even though the Amish are distant cousins of the Baptists, in that they come from that line in church history that was never part of the Catholic church, they left their roots and teach works for salvation. I question the ability of books that glorify the lifestyle of the Amish to point people to the truth. But I could be wrong. The Bible does say that the Law is our schoolmaster. Perhaps people will see how impossible it is to keep the Amish law and even more so the Law of God.

If the goal is to reach the lost with a novel, what do we need to do in that novel to accomplish that goal? Some authors have the idea that what they need to do is put the plan of salvation in the book somewhere. That's not a bad idea, but it often seems like an afterthought. In Lori Wick's The Princess, there is a young boy (appearantly the only lost person around) that I am convinced was placed in that book just so the main characters would have someone to share the gospel with. That is not the way to reach the lost with a novel.

We make a mistake when we assume that what we need to do as soul winners is to tell people how to be saved. That is important, but we're putting the cart before the horse. The first thing that must happen is that we must bring people to the point of realizing that they need a saviour. You have to get a man lost before you can save him. If we want to see more people saved as a result of novels, our writing has to focus on getting the reader lost.

Granted, most of that responsibility rests on the Holy Spirit, who convicts men of sin, but if we want him to use our book to do it, we'd better give him something to work with. One of the classic questions we ask kids to encourage them to see themselves as sinners is, "Have you ever taken a cookie from the cookie jar when your mother told you not to?" I'm not sure that's the best question to ask, but what we hope to accomplish with that question is to bring the concept of sin down to the level of the sinner. All people see themselves as good people. In a movie script you might get by with a character asking the villain, "Why did you decide to become a bad guy?" To which the villain might reply, "It's more fun than being good." But in real life, we don't think that way. We spend a lot of time justifying ourselves. It's okay that I didn't tell the store clerk she didn't charge me for this; I'm sure she's overcharged me before. It's okay that I passed that guy on the shoulder; he shouldn't have been driving that slow. It's okay that I copied that music without permission; it isn't like I'm going to sell it and I know the song writer would want me to use it. It's okay for people to live together before they're married; you wouldn't even buy a car without test driving it first.

The author who hopes to accomplish soul winning with a novel needs to focus on bringing his readers to the point that they question the validity of their argument that they are good people. Most people are willing to accept that murderers should go to hell (though even murderers find a way to justify themselves). There aren't many murderers who will read our books. So while the soulwinning author might start with a murderer, he needs to twist the story until it points right back at the reader. Sure, he's a murderer, but you don't love your wife. How can you possibly claim you're living up to God's standard? Sure, he's a child molester, but you don't respect your husband. You're not that great either.

How do we do that? That's where the fun begins. What I mean to say is that there isn't an easy answer. It's that kind of challenge that makes writing fun. Generally, I think it happens like this: We start with a basic problem, such as a registered sex offender moving into a neighborhood. Our main character, soccer mom extrodinair, goes to work moblizing the neighborhood to send this guy packing. But that's just what's on the surface. As the story unfolds, we see that the real problem is back at home. Out in the neighborhood, we can have other characters lay the groundwork to establish that the registered sex offender is worthy of the fires of hell. But we slowly begin to reveal that even though the soccer mom has what seems to be good reasons for how she treats her husband (reasons that the average woman would have) her home life checks off all the same checkboxes we had for why the registered sex offender is going to hell. We bring the surface problem to a resolution in some way, but it would be good to leave the home problem unresolved. What we would to do is cause the reader to think along the lines of "Sure, that seems right for the registered sex offender, but what about people like me?"

Our Gideon Fleece

2011-10-21T00:01:00.001-05:00

Some people are critical of Gideon for laying out the fleece. After all, the Lord had already told Gideon that he'd delivered Israel's enemies into his hand. They say that Gideon should have believed the Lord when the Angel of the Lord caused fire to come from the rock and consume the meal Gideon had prepared. Perhaps Gideon did doubt the Lord more than he should have, but it seems interesting to me that Gideon waited until after he had called 32,000 men to battle before he laid out the fleece. I don't know about you, but I know I wouldn't call 32,000 men to battle against a people without number if I didn't have some faith.

I don't think the fleece was about a lack of confidence in God as much as Gideon lacked confidence in himself. He was ready to go fight, but he wasn't sure that he was the right man to be leading these men. The Lord assured Gideon of that by giving Gideon the sign he asked for. The Lord never told Gideon he shouldn't have asked for that sign.But then the Lord did something even more amazing. You don't think you can lead 32,000 men? Let's make it 10,000. Still too many? Let's make it 300. Some churches are larger than that. Using God's plan, Gideon was able to defeat the enemy with just 300 men.

Now once the enemy was on the run, Gideon called for the 32,000 to go after them, but the Lord gave Gideon a managable group to work with. I see a couple of things here. One is that God able to use us even when we're not confident. When we think we have no ability or we're too small, God proves that he is able to deliver us.

Another thing is that I think we need to have more confidence in our ability to do the right thing. I've often heard people talk about how it is wrong to make decisions without consulting God. They're usually talking about things like buying a car or a house, getting married, etc. I think that if we're consistently walking with the Lord, we'll know his will, even if we don't specifically pray about them. It may be that the Lord will let us go on with what we want to do, or it could be that like he did with Gideon, he will show us a better plan. Gideon, after the fleece, was ready to go to battle with 32,000 men. Gideon never asked if that was the right plan. The Lord gave him a different plan, even though Gideon didn't ask. When we know we're moving toward what the Lord wants us to do, there's nothing wrong with going by our own plan until the Lord shows us a better one.

The Decline of the Church Among Christians

2011-10-20T00:01:00.001-05:00

I fear the importance of the church is in decline among Christians. As I was writing yesterday's post, I began to think about why there are so many people who want to call things that are not done as the agent of their local church ministry. I think that part of it has to do with people putting so little value on the church. Many people see the church as all Christians, even though the word that is translated as church in the Bible means "an assembly". This thinking, I believe, makes many people view the church much like what they view Wal-mart. People will typically go to the same Wal-mart every week or so. They may have special ties to the people who work there, but they understand that their local Wal-mart is owned by a much larger company based in Arkansas. If they happen to be running around town and see another Wal-mart, they might stop there instead. As far as they are concerned Wal-mart is Wal-mart. Every Wal-mart provides similar products and services. That's how many people view the church. They'll attend one church because it is closest or because they like the worship service, but if they find another church that has a children's program they like better, they'll start going there instead.

Think about this. There are people who are doing things they want to call ministry who have no real ties to a church. They're all writing their book or working in a parachurch organization and if they decide to drop out of one church and go to another they don't have to change anything about their "ministry". They're free to move from church to church as much as they want. They might find the church that has the most interesting series of sermons going on. They might become southern gospel groupies and follow their favorite group around. But they're still doing "ministry."

Some of you may question what is wrong with that. The primary thing that's wrong with that is that isn't the way Jesus designed the church to operate. The church isn't just an organization that provides services. A church is a body of believers who know each other and are accountable to each other. Because of that, when one member faulters, the others are there to pick him up.

Another thing is the issue of doctrine. In real ministry, the organization the person is a minister of has the authority to discipline that person. If that person, as an agent of the church, writes something that is inconsistent with the church's beliefs, the church has the authority to remove that writing and exercise discipline in other ways. When a novelist is writing independently from the church, that authority doesn't exist.

We need to get back to the understanding that the church (a local visible body of baptized believers) is central to our ministry. It's fine for us to go off an write novels an such, but that isn't ministry. Ministry requires us to work within our church. We need to be actively involved within our church. So much so that if we were to change churches that it would require us to change much in how we are serving the Lord.

When is Writing Ministry?

2011-10-19T00:01:00.001-05:00

Here's an interesting question: Is Christian writing a ministry?

I've heard people talk about writing as a ministry, though I've never thought of my books in that way. I've been involved in other things that I thought were ministry, including our church's website, which involves a great deal of writing, but I've never seen my novels in that way. Nor do I consider this blog a ministry, though I often write about some of the same things I write about for the church website. For a while, it didn't make sense. I began to question whether it was a matter of opinion. But it turns out that it isn't. It turns out that the distinction I made between this blog and the church website is correct, even though they are similar.

In the course of responding to the topic on another blog, I looked up the term ministry and minister. Though many authors call their writing ministry because they see it as something they are doing for God, that is an incorrect understanding of the term. Before we get into that, let me ask you, when you put your offering in the plate at church, is that ministry? We expect that the money will be used for ministry, but is the act of putting your money in the plate ministry? Most people would say that it is not, even though that act is being done for God. Therefore, not every act done for God is ministry. Ministry requires something more.

When we consider the definition of ministry, a minister is a person who acts as an agent of either a governmental or religous body. The Prime Minister of a country is the agent of the state. He may report to the parliment, the king, or even the people, but he is an agent of someone. When we look at ministries within a church, what we see is that those who minister are hired by or elected by the church. The church body has the authority to overule the minister. In some cases, the minister is an agent of an association or a denomination. The thing that makes one's work a ministry is that it is being done on behalf of another.

Looking specifically at writing, when is writing a ministry and when is it not? Suppose a person is writing Sunday school literature for a church or for the publication department of an association or denomination. Because he is doing that as an agent of a religious organization, it is ministry. But if he writes a devotional book and sends it off to a publisher, it isn't ministry because he is doing it on his own and not as an agent of a religious body.

I'm sorry if some of you novelists find this upsetting because you want to call what you do a ministry, but unless your church has elected you to write novels, your writing is not ministry. Just because what you do isn't ministry doesn't mean that it isn't important or that you aren't serving the Lord by doing it; it just isn't ministry.

I Should Be Better Than This

2011-10-18T00:01:00.001-05:00

I wish I were more like my parents. Not in every way, but certainly in this. If you've met my parents, they're your friends. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are their friend or that you even remember them, but they're your friends. It doesn't matter who you are. You could be a waiter at a restaraunt, a visitor at their church, or someone they were standing in line with at Target. They're your friends.

Now, I do have a little of that in me. Enough to realize it has its problems. There are people I think of as friends who don't remember who I am. Unlike my parents, I'm not as quick to assume that people will remember me. I don't walk up to some people and start talking to them like they're old friends, even though that is often the way I feel about them.

But what really bothers me about me is that there are some people I just don't like. It isn't that I hate them, but they rub me the wrong way. I'm not even sure I can put into words why that is, but I've noticed with some of the people I encounter online that just seeing their name is enough to make me cringe. I find that I've rejected what they have to say, even before they say it. There is one particular person that for some reason I've gotten the idea that she thinks too highly of herself. For some reason, I've gotten the impression that she cares more about selling her books and services more than she cares about people. It could be envy on my part, since somehow in her do whatever it takes to sell books approach she has made friends with some influential people in the publishing industry. All the same, I avoid her as much as possible, so I won't say something I'll regret.

I'll probably meet her in heaven some day and we'll have a good laugh about it. But I can see that there are things about me that aren't what they should be.

Bad Copy

2011-10-17T00:01:00.001-05:00

The text you put on the back cover of a book can make or break the book sales more than any other element. I wish I could say I’m an expert at writing back cover copy (BCC). I can’t, but I’ve seen some examples that are sure to kill the book sales. I don’t want to name names, so I’ll provide an example that I’ve modified to protect the guilty.

Gail has just accepted a dream job working for fashion designer Heather Long’s company. Unfortunately, she learns her ex-fiance, Dave, is working for the same organization. On her first day, Gail finds her new boss strangled with a bolt of wool fabric. Gail now questions whether this is what God intended.

Gail and Dave quickly realize their love is stronger than ever. But with Dave the prime suspect in the murder, Gail must discover the truth before they can begin a life together.

Last season’s fabrics, many unforgettable characters, a dog name butch, and Uncle Fred who has found his second adolescene make this a fast-paced romance and a page turning mystery.

It actually starts out well. It follows the pattern “on the way to success, something prevents it.” In this case, on the way to the dream job, Gail runs into her ex-fiance. If it had stopped there, this would be great. There’s got to be a lot of conflict between Gail and Dave, or so you would think. Unfortunately, the second paragraph kills the tension. Gail and Dave realize they are still in love. So now, all of the conflict rests on the murder and Gail must solve the mystery because Dave looks guilty.

What I would like to see happen here is that instead of quickly discovering that they still love each other, they accuse each other of the crime. In the process of their bickering they bring out their old argument. Of course, by the end of the book, they will have resolved the old argument and found the murderer, but we don’t need to mention that on the back cover. But as it is, the book seems very boring because there simply isn’t enough conflict in the storyline.

Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?

2011-10-14T00:01:00.001-05:00

Weither you like it or not (and I’m sure you don’t) bad things happen. That has led many people to ask the question Why do bad things happen to good people? Imagine this scenario: your saintly mother has always been eager to help those in need. She has given countless hours of her time in the church where she is a member. Her kindness is renowned. Then the day come when she calls you on the phone and says, “the doctor says I have cancer.” Why do bad things happen to good people?

I have a friend who emigrated from India. He believes in karma. The concept of karma is that if you do good to others then karma will draw good things to you, and if you do bad to others then karma will draw bad things to you. People who have a belief like that are certainly going to ask, Why do bad things happen to good people? But let’s rephrase the question and ask, Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? Unlike with karma, which people seem to think is just the way the world operates, this new question recognizes that there is a being behind the events that some people have interpreted as karma. It isn’t karma that brings good things to people, but God. If that is true, then we can also say that it isn’t karma that brings bad things to people. Nothing happens without God’s permission. Nothing bad happens but what God knew it would happen and chose either to bring it on a person or chose to allow it to take place. That tells us who is controlling these things, but it doesn’t answer the question Why do bad things happen to good people?

It Is the Nature of the World

Ever since Adam sinned, the world has been cursed. That curse changed the nature of the world in such a way that bad things happen. If we forget the concept of good and bad people for a moment and just consider the person who is living in this world, that person is going to face problems. Many of the problems of this world have nothing to do with whether a person is good or bad, they just are. If a river floods and takes out a town, it will destroy the houses of both the bad people and the good people.

God has Bigger Plans

But isn’t God in control of the flood? You might ask. Couldn’t he have spared the houses of the good people? Why do bad things happen to good people? Yes, he could have spared the houses of the good people, and sometimes he does. But more often than not, God uses the bad things that come into our lives to prepare us for things that will come later. Most of what we learn comes from those things we experience. Think of the elderly couple who have put away enough money to last them the rest of their lives and to provide their children with an inheritance. If you ask them, you may discover that in their youth they had a time when their expenses exceeded their income and no one would help them. Or consider the child who turns 18 and demonstrates that he is prepared to take on the responsibility of adulthood, rather than staying under his parents roof for another ten years. It is likely that his parents expected him to sort through many of his own problems, rather than stepping in at every turn. In a similar way, God allows bad things to happen to good people because he wants us to grow to maturity.

God Wants Us to Recognize That He is in Control

Why do bad things happen to good people? Because they cause us to recognize our own weakness. Imagine a father is mowing the yard on lawn tractor and he has his son sitting in his lap. His son has his hands on the wheel. “Look at me, Mommy! I’m driving!” It isn’t until the father turns loose of the wheel that the son realizes that he wasn’t doing as much as he thought he was. The same is true for us and our heavenly Father. As long as life is going well, we don’t understand how much God is doing for us and how much he is protecting us from. But when he allows bad things to come into our lives, we begin to see that we need his help.

I think it is interesting that when Jesus allowed Peter to walk on the water, he did it while the storm was still going on. He knew that Peter would see those waves coming and falter. He knew that Peter would cry out for help. On another occasion, Jesus and the disciples set out in a ship and Jesus went to sleep. A storm came up while Jesus was asleep. Have you thought about why Jesus would go to sleep when he knew a storm was coming? He could have kept them from sailing into a storm. Instead, he went to sleep. That forced them to face the storm alone, until they came and got him.

Or why did he allow Lazarus to die? He could have gone sooner. He could have healed Lazarus from where he was, as he did on other occasions. Instead, he waited until Lazarus died. He allowed a family he loved to suffer grief. Why do bad things happen to good people? Jesus allowed this bad thing to happen so that he could show them that he is the resurrection and the life.

What to Do When Bad Things Happen to Good People

Look for the Good When Bad Happens

We don’t like bad things to happen. We question why things are the way they are, but God doesn’t allow bad things in our lives without a purpose. Look for that purpose and it will help you to accept what has come your way.

Show God Your Heart

So often, we feel that we shouldn’t complain about what God is doing in our lives. God knows that some of the things he allows in our lives is painful. There’s no reason to try to hide that from him. Instead, tell him about it. Tell him of your anguish. At the very least, expressing your feelings to God will help to relieve the hurt you feel. But it may do more than that. It could be that God is waiting for you to ask for help before he shows you why you are experiencing what you are. It could also be that God is waiting for you to put your burden on him before he handles it for you.

It is very likely that whatever you are facing will last a while. It may be months or years for you to get through it, but express your pain openly to God and he will be there to see you through it.

Is It God Who Answered That Prayer?

2011-10-13T00:01:00.001-05:00

How do we know that it is God who answers prayer? I don't mean that there might be someone else who is listening to prayer, but when we receive something we've been praying for, how do we know that it has come by the will of God and not by some other means? In a recent discussion on this blog, one of the readers mentioned a particular person receiving something she had been praying for the next day after she asked her friends to pray about it. The reader seems to think this proved that God had given this thing, but how can we possibly know if it was from God or if the act of asking her friends for prayer informed her friends of her desire and that is why her friend did what he did? We want to credit God with using our friends to answer our prayers, but we can't say that everything our friends do is the will of God. And if we receive something we ask for, can we take that as validation of the thing we intend to use it for?

There are many times that there is no clear answer. If you ask a friend to pray for you and then the friend provides the thing you want, there doesn't appear to be proof that it is also an act of God. People who believe in God won't take much convincing to believe that God used your friend to provide for your needs. Someone who is skeptical of prayer will say that the friend heard of the need and wanted to help . No matter which one you side with, it all hinges on what you believe.

Hide in the Closet

If you want to know that it is God who has answered your prayer, don't tell anyone else what you are praying for. Matthew 6:6 says that when you pray you should go into your closet and shut the door. "And they Father which seeth in secret shall reward you openly." Though there is nothing wrong with people asking other people to pray for them, but if we want to be sure that it is God who has answered our prayer and not someone else, he should be the only person we tell. Then, when a friend who has no idea that we've been praying for a thing comes to us and gives us the thing for which we've been asking, there is no doubt but that God heard and answered our prayer through the friend.

Ask For Something Only God Can Give

When you use a credit card or write a check at the store, you are required to sign your name. By doing so, you are telling your bank that you are the one requesting that they give the store the given amount, rather than someone else. The reason you are asked to sign your name is because you sign your name differently than anyone else. It is difficult for someone to match it, but it is a very simple thing for you. If you want to verify that your prayer has been answered by God, ask him for something that only he can provide.

Be Specific

It is tempting to pray a generic pray that is rather vague about what we need. Then we might end it by telling God "not my will but yours." That may sound spiritual because that's what Jesus said, but it does nothing for us when we're trying to see God's power to answer prayer. Jesus had a very different situation than we do. Being God, he could have at any time stopped on his journey to the cross and said, "that's it, I'm done, I'm not going any farther." He qualified his request in the garden by saying, "If it be possible." If his prayer had been simply "take this cup from me" it would have been over, but he completed the journey. We aren't in that same situation. We aren't God. If we ask for something outside his will, he isn't obligated to give it to us. But when we're specific in our prayers and God gives us exactly what we've asked for, it gives us evidence that he hears our prayers and he blesses us.

That's not to say that we should say something like, "Lord, show me that you answer prayer by giving me $1,234,567.89 tomorrow at 10:11AM." It isn't that God isn't able to do exactly that, but we shouldn't try to manipulate God. Rather, when we find ourselves in a position that we're praying for something anyway, let's be specific in our request so that we can see that it is God who answered our prayer. It is still up to God whether to answer our prayer or not and in the way we ask or not, but when he answers it in the specific way we ask we are able to see that he is strong on our behalf.

Let's Not Be Christian Psychics

2011-10-12T00:01:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I wrote about how psychics may be able to believe that they are telling people the truth. I also told you about some techniques that you could use if you wanted to do the same thing. Given the idea that anything any random occurrence that appears to have a pattern must have an external influence, these techniques will always work to “reveal” psychic phenomena. But we don’t want to become psychics. Personally, I see them all as performers, some of whom believe their own press. But the bigger danger is that we may attempt to apply these same techniques to Christianity.

Some atheists would tell us that the logic of Christianity is just as flawed as that of the psychic. Allow me to demonstrate. Ten people are diagnosis with a disease that we know has a mortality rate of 60%. In other words, we would typically expect six of the ten to drop dead from the disease. But we start praying. After we’ve prayed, it is discovered that one was misdiagnosed and he doesn’t have the disease. Five of the patients survive the disease and four drop dead. It must be God, right? Well, it could be, but no statistician would even blink if you told him those results. But usually it involves an even smaller sample. One person is diagnosed and the church prays about it. If the person finds out he was misdiagnosed, we attribute that to God answering our prayer. If the person drops dead, we say that God chose not to answer our prayer. If we aren’t careful, our thinking concerning God looks very much like the thinking of a psychic concerning ghosts.

If our only argument for Christ is based on answered prayer in the midst of unanswered prayer, we don’t have much of an argument. Before we can look at that situation, we first need to know that the assumption that God is and God is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him is acceptable. The proof of that is all around us. The atheist would have us believe that the Universe formed from completely random events. In this, they are similar to the psychic. The psychic says that no pattern is ever random. The atheist says that everything, even patterns that look like they have an outside influence, is random. Neither extreme has any basis in fact. A better understanding is that order exists because someone put it there, but not everything we perceive as being ordered as significance. The fact that we have plants and animals should be enough to tell us that God put them here, but a cloud that looks like a rabbit probably isn’t a sign from God.

Once we can take God as a given, we can then look at how he answers prayer. Given how powerful he is, it is reasonable to accept that God knows every prayer. If he answers prayer at a rate that is right in line with what is typical, it tells us something about God, but it is no longer a basis for saying God doesn’t exist. Whereas, if all we have is the rate at which prayer is answer then it would have to come into play. But it becomes an interesting question as to why God would answer prayer at a statistically insignificant rate. In one study, people actually did worse in the group that had people praying for them. It could be that God didn’t want to dignify the study with a response.

Whatever the case, we don’t have to rely on randomness to prove God. We see God in the order of the Universe, not the randomness. The order is so abundant that is can’t be attributed to randomness. Let’s not be like the psychics and draw upon whatever comes to mind, but let’s do as the scripture says and test the spirits to see if they are from God.

How Psychics Sleep At Night

2011-10-11T00:01:00.001-05:00

Recently, I’ve been giving thought to psychic phenomena and paranormal events. By that, I mean what people often attribute to things like the ghosts of the dearly departed. There are people who claim to be able to serve as a medium by which a person can communicate with their dear loved ones. There are a couple of things that interest me about these things, one is the technique by which people think they can achieve results and two is that they are attributing their results to something without having a means to verify it.

Let’s look at the second one first. Let’s suppose a person walks into a house and sees a rocking chair moving on its own. As he is watching the chair, suppose the front door swings shut without him touching it. What is the cause of these things? It could be the wind, but let’s suppose it isn’t. Let’s suppose it isn’t anything we would normally check for. Can we now say that it must be a ghost? Some people would say we can, but there’s a problem with that. Until we have some means of knowing the abilities of a ghost, we can’t accept that as more than a theory. It could just as easily be a time traveler who went back where he came from when he heard the door open. Or it could be something we’ve never thought of. The lack of evidence for it to be something else is not proof of the existence of ghosts.

The first one gets even more interesting. I’ve watched videos of psychics on talkshows and such. They are either very good liars and performers, or they really believe what they are saying. Most of them don’t seem demon possessed, which is what some of the psychics in the Bible were (not that I would recognize demon possession if I saw it). How can it be that these people believe what they say? The answer is in the technique. Psychics seem to base their operation on one simple, but flawed, assumption; any event that seems to have a pattern where one isn’t expected must be caused by an external force.

One technique that is used is the use of white noise generators. A noisy fan is turned on, presumably because ghosts are able to manipulate existing noise, but they can’t actually speak. A person then records that white noise, listening for anything that sounds like words. When words are found, they are enhanced to make it easier to understand what is being said. These words are then interpreted to mean something. In this case, rather than following Occam’s Razor and accepting that these words are probably from the random combination of sound, the psychic attributes them to a ghost who is struggling to communicate. From that point of view, I think I can understand why they have convinced themselves that it is true.

But can we apply the same to mediums? Why do they believe? The way mediums work is that they begin say words and phrases that come to mind. “I’m seeing the color blue. This may have been a favorite color or it may have been something this person wore. I’m also hearing a letter. It could be the letter G or maybe J. And there’s something about the chest. Could this person have died from a heart attack or maybe had lung cancer?” Before long, the person who has asked for help is thinking about a friend or relative who liked the color blue, was named Jim, and smoked all his life. On the surface, it looks like simple flimflam, but these mediums seem to think they are helping people. If we assume they are sincere, I think we have to consider that these psychics believe that what seems to us to be random words actually came through from the other side. They believe this because those words had some connection to the person for whom they were doing a reading. They know that a ghost may not come through every time (who can control a ghost?), so a failed reading doesn’t bother them any more than a missed sale bothers a salesman. But when the words that come to mind have meaning to someone in the room, they call it a success.

So how do we know they aren’t right? Actually, we don’t have proof that they aren’t right, though the evidence seems to make it highly probable that they aren’t right. Either they are wrong or anyone can talk to the dead. The real problem with their thinking is that it is circular logic; ghosts can communicate through the first thing that comes to mind, therefore when I throw out those things that come to mind and it seems to be communication, it must be a ghost that is doing it. While I can see how mediums can follow that logic and be able to sleep at night, circular logic never proves anything.

Not What You Would Expect

2011-10-10T00:01:00.001-05:00

I’ve watched some of these British cooking shows that look into the inner workings of restaurants and I kept hearing about Michelin stars. I thought, “that’s odd, in the UK Michelin is some rating organization for restaurants, but over here it is a tire company. Imagine my surprise when I looked up the Michelin Guide and discovered the tire man that is the Michelin tire company’s trademark. It made me wonder, how does a tire company become the symbol of excellence for restaurants.

Michelin guides were started as a means to provide travelers with information about the area they were traveling through and I’m sure they were also meant to keep the Michelin name in front of the owners of automobiles. Michelin’s goal was to sell tires by placing an advertisement in every car. To keep that advertisement in cars, they had to turn their guide into a trusted resource. The only way to do that is to be very selective in which restaurants they recommended. It wasn’t enough to just list the restaurants in the area, they began placing stars beside the names of those of higher quality.

I look at the publishing industry today and I see a lot of books being published. There’s over a million in the US each year. The publishers would like us to believe that their books are better than the self-published stuff, and yet, the publishers are just trying to sell their own books. I can’t help but wonder if what will eventually come out of this is that someone who doesn’t appear to be connected to the publishing industry will develop some kind of guide that will help us weed through all of these books. Amazon.com has done that to some extent, but it is in their best interest to encourage the sale of all books. There may be someone out there who will benefit not from the sale of books but by providing an accurate listing of the best books.

I also think about how it is that credibility doesn’t come from what we say we are but what we do. Who would have thought that a tire company could judge restaurants, but they do. We may tell people that we know what we’re talking about. We might have several English degrees. We might think that gives us the ability to judge books. But when we look at results, maybe it isn’t someone like that who will have a proven track record of finding the best books. Maybe it is a company that we wouldn’t expect.

Get Real (Photos That Is)

2011-10-07T00:01:00.001-05:00

One of the things I do is Church Website Design. If we can say there are rules to follow, the number one rule is probably, Content is Key. But the second rule should be something like, Use Pictures of Your Own People. And if I might go a step farther, use pictures of you own people participating in the activities of the church. How often I have looked at church websites and seen images of people that I knew the web designer had pulled off of a stock photo website somewhere. They are nice pictures with high quality and a lot of smiling faces, but they look like stock photos.

I know what these designers are doing. They either don’t have access to photos of the church or they don’t like the photos of the church. When you look at the church and you see a bunch of old white ladies and what you would like to see in the church is a mix of many races, you don’t like the photos of the church. So a web designer will find a picture of some people who look like what you want the church to be, not what it is. So you see photos of people with many different shades of skin color, but you don’t see very many people who are older than their twenties and thirties.

But there’s something real about a church when you can look at the website and see people who are actually part of the church rather than people from who knows where. Someone who has never been to that church can look at the pictures and get an idea of what to expect. Those pictures will give them an idea of the size of the congregation. They will give them an idea of what ministries the church has. They will give them an idea of what clothes people typically wear. It can be uncomfortable if a visitor walks in wearing a suit and he is the only one. So, use photos of real people doing real things.

Below the Surface

2011-10-06T00:01:00.001-05:00

Shirley Jackson’s classic short-story The Lottery is memorable, to say the least. It is also a good example of why authors shouldn’t pay attention to bad reviews. When The Lottery was published in 1948, most reviews were negative and many readers canceled their subscription to the magazine that published it. But it is also an example of how fiction can be used to present a message.

As soon as we say a story has a message, the tendency is for people to think we’re talking about preachy writing, but the whole purpose of fiction is to present some kind of theme. Unlike non-fiction, in which the message is right there on the surface, the best place to put the message in fiction is below the surface. We do that by having a surface problem that we’re willing to talk about and a subsurface problem that is only spoken of in whispers. In The Lottery, the surface problem is this traditional gathering. Some people don’t see it as being so important. Some people are late, for one reason or another. The wooden markers have been replaced with paper. People just don’t see traditional things as important as they once did. We can all identify with that because we see traditions of the past falling by the wayside and we may wonder if anything will last.

If Shirley Jackson had wanted to preach to us, she could have said a lot about dying traditions, but that wasn’t the message of The Lottery. It takes us a while, but as we near the end of the story we come to realize that this lottery isn’t the kind of tradition we want to be a part of. This lottery is an annual sacrifice that is believed to help with crop production. The message isn’t encouragement to hold onto the old traditions. Shirley Jackson said:

Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

As she presents that message, Shirley Jackson doesn’t bring the story to a complete solution, but she points the reader to the first step to making it stop. The victim of The Lottery, as she faces her own death, takes that step by expressing how unfair she thinks it is. It appears that the lottery will continue, unless someone else is willing to take a stand against it.

That is what we should hope to find in a story. We don’t want it to preach to us about how to solve the surface problem. The characters may even fail at solving that problem, but the characters need to demonstrate that they have changed by taking that first step toward solving the deeper subsurface problem.

Who Sends People To Hell?

2011-10-05T00:01:00.001-05:00

Who sends people to hell? Is it God or Satan?” That’s the question I heard one of the kids at church asking another adult. It’s a question that I think many people are afraid to answer. Oddly enough, I don’t remember ever asking that question when I was growing up. Back then, my theology was simple; trust Jesus and go to heaven or reject him and you’ll go to hell. I had enough information to know the answer back then, but I don’t know that I really stopped to think about it. What I do remember is seeing the tracts showing angels throwing people over a cliff into a flaming pit.

Revelation 20:12-15 makes it very clear. The dead, small and great, stand before God and are judged according to their works. “Whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” There’s no question; God is the judge. It is God who condemns. It is God who commands that they be cast into the lake of fire.

Matthew 10:28: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both body and soul and body in hell.”

I think part of the reason that some people don’t like to answer this question is because they don’t like the way it makes God look. They want show him to be a loving God who will harm no one, but here he is—in the New Testament, mind you—throwing people into a lake of fire. I’ve heard people question why we should fear God and they try to redefine the word fear. Sadly, I think they’re failing to see the big picture. God isn’t a pussy cat, he’s a lion. His word isn’t a stick pin, it is a sword. He isn’t just good, he is perfect. Think of the glory of the sun and how dangerous it would be if you were to be close to it. Now consider that God’s glory far exceeds that of the sun. The brightness of this glory is brighter than the noonday sun. Though it is not God’s desire for people to go to hell, sinful people cannot stand in the presence of a holy God, but they have to go somewhere. God has prepared a place that is outside of his presence. He prepared it for the Devil and his angels, but people who reject Jesus will go there also.

For me, it is comforting to know that it is God who sends people to hell and not Satan or even Peter. God doesn’t make mistakes. After the judgments are done, people aren’t going to look around heaven and see people who shouldn’t be there and they aren’t going to look for someone who should and discover they got thrown into the lake of fire. It is comforting because I know God doesn’t want to send people there. He has delayed his coming because he wants more people to go to heaven. I don’t know how much longer he will delay. He may delay for many years or he may come today. All the same, he wants many people to be saved.

Have no doubt, it is God and God only who sends people to hell, but that is a good thing.

Christian Believing Strange Things

2011-10-04T00:01:00.001-05:00

One of my friends believes in ghosts. He claims to have seen things like doors closing unexpectedly, etc. I’ve seen things like that too, but I’ve never attributed it to a ghost. I figure there was enough of a change in the airflow to cause the door to close. It really don’t take much with some doors. What would be interesting is to see a locked door come unbolted and open all by itself. I still wouldn’t attribute that to a ghost, but it would be interesting.

The sad thing is that this friend of mine is a church member and he’s ready to attribute a door closing to the working of some undeparted dead person. There is no logical reason to believe that. The Bible does say that spirits exist, but it makes it clear that when we die we go to one of two places—heaven or hell. There aren’t human beings waiting around because they have unfinished business. If there are spirits haunting a house, those spirits would have to be from among the angelic beings—either those who follow God or those who follow Satan. But can a spirit cause a door to move? Apparently not. When he rose from the dead, one of the ways he proved he was not a spirit was that he ate with them. Although, I don’t know that it really matters.

It fascinates me that so many Christians are quick to believe the absurd. It’s almost like they turn off the absurdity filter in their mind. Atheists would tell us that we’ve all done that, but there’s a big difference in believing in Jesus, for whom there is a ton of evidence, and believing in the Locke Ness monster, for whom there are some pictures of a stick. It is almost as if people think one belief is as good as another. That is why it is so important that we do more than ask people to believe in Jesus just because we say they should, but to point them to the evidence. Encourage them to be skeptical and then overcome the skepticism with the evidence.

The Suspension of Belief

2011-10-03T00:01:00.001-05:00

No doubt, you’ve heard of the Suspension of Disbelief which is the concept of a reader willingly accepting during the space of a story something that we know to be absurd or extremely unlikely. A superhero who can blow a building down with his breath, for example. But what if we turn that around? Is there such a thing as the Suspension of Belief?

I think it’s interesting that we discuss the Suspension of Disbelief but not the Suspension of Belief. On the surface, they seem like similar concepts—perhaps even the same. If a reader can be caused to suspend his disbelief in a superhero, could he not be caused to suspend his belief in something like God? If you believe in God, I’ve already raised your hackles. Weird, isn’t it?

And it isn’t just belief in God. The same could be said of one’s politics or one’s commitment to their favorite sports team. Even within the space of a story, it is easier for a person who believes in God to believe that the Easter Bunny exists than it is to believe that God doesn’t exist. I find that very interesting and something worth our attention.

I think that part of it is that when we attempt to remove something the reader knows to be true, such as God or his position on a hot topic like abortion or the definition of marriage, the author appears to be taking an argumentative position. The reader knows God exists, so any author who says otherwise is probably an atheist promoting his own agenda. The reader would be understandably upset, but why would that same reader be able to read a story about Zeus or one of the other pagan gods and willingly suspend his disbelief? Why would he be able to read a story about Santa Claus?

For one thing, while the Greeks and Romans worshipped those gods as the highest beings, people who serve God know that God is above those gods. We can treat them like all other fictional characters and if they did exist, God would still be above them. Another reason is that it is easy for us to accept that there are things about our Universe that we don’t know. Christians readily accept that there are angels and demons, even though most of us have never seen them. Atheists may reject the notion of angels and demons simply because they are spoken of in the Bible, but many atheists are willing to accept the possibility of highly intelligent aliens, even though we’ve never seen them.

To give you a practical example of what I’m talking about, I was watching a television show in which one of the characters is supposed to be able to communicate with the dead. (Yeah, I know that’s not a very Christian thing to be watching.) I don’t believe people are able to communicate with the dead. I realize that the Witch of Endor talked to Samuel, but she seemed more surprised than anyone about that and God made a special allowance for that. If the mediums are actually communicating with anyone, I think they are communicating with evil spirits who are claiming to be the spirit of the deceased person. But I digress. The thing is, I was willing to suspend my disbelief and for the sake of the story accept that this person could see whatever message the dead person was sending her, but when the actor said something along the lines of “I talk to the dead and I’ve seen a lot of things, but demons don’t exist,” that disturbed me. While I could suspend my disbelief in her ability to talk to the dead, I could not suspend my belief that what God has told us about the existence of demons is true.

As storytellers, we need to be aware of that. We can add the impossible to our stories, but we cannot remove the proven.

How to Believe the Absurd

2011-09-30T00:01:00.002-05:00

Have you ever thought of a story that you wanted to tell, but the concept was absurd beyond belief? For me, premature marriage stories are that way, but I enjoy reading them. The simple truth is that people simply don’t get married without realizing they are getting married or to whom they are getting married. It is absurd. So stories like this typically end up in historical novels or science fiction. How often have we seen the captain of a spacecraft visit a planet, enjoy the hospitality, and only later realize that he had participated in a marriage ceremony. But we enjoy these stories because of the high conflict as one or both people are trying to get out of the marriage and it doesn’t happen easily.

One way to handle this absurd situation is to make it a marriage of convenience, but that isn’t the same as a person getting married without knowing it. But here’s a really cool thing about the suspension of disbelief: the less you try to explain the absurd, the more readers are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story. Just look at Animal Farm. It has talking animals and it is no children’s book. Look at Dracula or Frankenstein. They are absurd beyond belief, but readers willingly suspend disbelief. The thing they have in common is that the writers never tried to explain how these things could be in real life, they simply put them out there as if they are and told the story.

I fear that I spend too much time trying to find an explanation for the absurd. There are many things in life that don’t have an easy explanation. Gravity, no one really understands how it works, but that doesn’t mean we don’t accept that it works. When dealing with the absurd in a story, the best approach is to not explain it at all. Do we really care how a warp drive folds space? Do we really care how a time traveler gets from one time to another? What we really want to know is what they do when they get there.

Rather than trying to avoid the absurd, we should embrace it. Rather than trying to explain it, we should treat it as an assumption. When the author and the characters in the book treat the absurd like it needs no explanation, the reader can more easily suspend disbelief. For the space of time in which the reader finds himself in the world of the story, he will accept that the absurd is true in that world because the characters believe it to be true, but when the characters try to explain it, they show that they don’t believe it either. If they are questioning it, then it must not be true because it is simply too absurd to be true.

Mountain Moving Faith

2011-09-29T00:01:00.001-05:00

A few years ago, I suffered what I considered to be a great loss. Suffice it to say that because of that loss many of the hopes and dreams I had for the future vanished. For weeks, I questioned God about why he had allowed this to happen. Even now, I question why it had to be, though God’s will on the matter has long since been revealed. You know, people say that when God says no it is because he has something better planned. If that’s true, I haven’t seen it, but I will say I learned something about faith.

Many people have the idea that if you ask God for something and have the faith to believe it will happen that it will happen. It’s kind of like the umbrella thing. People have the idea that if you pray for rain and believe it will rain then you’d better start walking around with an umbrella. Well, I can say that I prayed about it. I asked God to give me the thing. I even got to the point where I was convinced that he would give it to me, so much so that for a time I felt better about it. Obviously, he didn’t grant my request or I wouldn’t be writing this post.

The thing is, God knows the future, but he never promised to tell us what it is. Me being convinced that what I wanted would happen—that was all me. Jesus said that if we have just a small amount of faith that we could say to a mountain to be cast into the sea and it would be and yet, I haven’t seen anyone pull that off. The point isn’t that if you have enough faith you can move mountains, but that we’ve already got all the faith we need. The reason we haven’t been able to use that faith to move mountains is because God didn’t want the maintain moved. If God were to tell you that he wanted the mountain moved and then you walked up to it and told it to move, that would be totally different.

Faith is about believing what God says. Much of what God says is in the Bible. When it says he will take care of us, you can bank on it. When he promises a heavenly home, you can bank on it. When it says that he is able to do exceeding abundantly above what we ask and think, you can count on that too. But it never says that he will give us what we ask for just because we believe he will. If he actually tells us that he will give it to us, he most certainly will, but much of the time we’re left in the dark.

There are times when he tells us which direction he wants us to go. There are times that he leaves us with no other choice. But most of the time, we’re left to make the choice that we think best represents the one the Lord would have us make and we trust that he’ll help us straighten it out if we make a bad choice. We have no promise of tomorrow. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring.

I don’t know why God doesn’t reveal more about what he has planned for us than he does. If I had to guess, I would say that it is because he wants us to trust him rather than putting our trust in the future. I think of those authors who are so convinced that God has given them a message to write down on paper, but when they send it off to an agent it is summarily rejected. But there are other authors who are much more humble and though they never imagined their writing was much better than their peers, God has used it to touch many lives. If God had told them how many people would read their writing, perhaps they would have grown lazy in their writing. I don’t know why God hasn’t seen fit to answer my prayer. I don’t know if he ever will, but I think what he wants from me is to trust him to work it out for the best.

No More Pure Entertainment

2011-09-28T00:01:00.001-05:00

Often, we think of novels as a form of entertainment. In fact, people may tell us that the reason they read novels is for pure entertainment and not to learn something. “If I wanted to be preached to, I would have bought a non-fiction book,” one blogger recently stated. So, if entertainment is such an important thing when it comes to writing novels, it might be helpful to consider what entertainment is.

Merriam-Webster defines entertainment as “something diverting or engaging.” What we must ask is what it takes to provide a diversion or to engage someone. Recently, it seems that people have gotten the idea that entertainment has no educational value. Therefore, novels shouldn’t attempt to present the reader with a message. But is that a valid assumption?

In a word, no. Thinking of those things that you wouldn’t classify as entertainment, what things can you think of that “divert or engage.” When you go to church, you wouldn’t normally think of the sermon as entertainment, but it diverts and engages the listeners. At least, you hope it does. Hobbies also divert and engage. A man may spend hours doing a woodworking project. A pianist may spend hours at the piano. These things are entertaining, certainly, but we can’t say they have no educational value or cognitive challenge. It is quite the opposite, in fact. I would like to suggest that it is the cognitive challenge that makes these things entertaining.

Moving back to so-called pure entertainment, I believe that much of what makes it entertaining is the cognitive challenge. Just consider the basic structure of the story. We begin with a problem, to which we find a solution, but that solution is challenged, and resolution is only found by overcoming the challenge. As we follow a character through the story, we readers are thinking about how we would handle a similar situation. This is similar to what we do when we what a friend go through a problematic situation. We question if there is something we can do to help, what we can advise them to do, and what the right thing to do is.

With that in mind, the challenge for the author is to present a story that causes the reader to think. What you don’t want to do is present a problem and then just tell the reader what the best solution is. For example, Betty’s son is on drugs, Betty tries to get her son to stop, her son runs away from home, Betty turns the problem over to God and it all works out. Good solution, bad story because it pretty much goes the way we would expect. It because a challenge for the reader when it causes the reader to reevaluate his view of the world. It isn’t our job to educate him, but we are to present the reader with a mirror and to encourage him to ask himself if he likes what he sees.

Another thing that an author can do to provide cognitive challenge is to show the reader what it is like to live in an environment the reader may never experience. A reader of science fiction, for example, might want to imagine what it would be like to live aboard a starship. The story becomes a framework by which we can allow that to play out. Readers of Christian fiction apparently have a desire to know what it is like to live among the Amish. It isn’t they actually want that lifestyle, as it would force them to give up many good things, but they find it interesting to see what it is like for other people. And not everyone who reads a crime novel wants to be a cop, but the story allows them to imagine what it would be like if they were.

An author isn’t forced to provide entertainment without having something to say. Readers are actually looking for the author to have something to say, but consider what the message is and which form of writing presents it better. Some things are best presented as non-fiction, telling the reader the facts and moving on. But fiction is ideal for encouraging the reader to do some self examination. When the right form is used, the author’s message will be understood, when the wrong form is used, the author will be accused of preaching or of having no substance in his writing.

It Just Can't Be

2011-09-27T00:01:00.001-05:00

I wrote yesterday about how a Christian book should allow a Christian reader to learn from the failures of the characters so that the Christian will know how to stand when his faith is tried. I can’t help but think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. That book showed us some very great failures that were happening in America. Uncle Tom was a Christian—a Baptist, if I recall—but he was a slave. He had a good master, but his master had to sell him. Throughout the book, Tom moved from plantation to plantation, sometimes treated well, but frequently mistreated. He eventually made it back to the good master, but it was too late and he died from mistreatment. People who read that book were able to learn from the mistakes that were made and it helped to bring an end to legal slavery in America.

Some of the slave owners back then were not bad people. Some treated their slaves well. Though we remember the mistreatment of the slaves, many of the people of that day saw nothing wrong with what they were doing. It took a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin to help people see that even though they thought they were doing okay, they could do better. Just because some masters treated their slaves well didn’t mean that obedient Christian slaves like Tom wouldn’t die under the yoke of slavery.

We need novels like that. We need novels that work like a mirror to show us things about ourselves that are uncomfortable for us to admit. The beauty of fiction is that it doesn’t come right out and tell us how the author thinks we ought to be, but it shows us characters who are copies of ourselves and through their lives it shows us the problems we may face if we continue on the path we are on. It may be a warning to turn around and go back or it may encourage us to continue in the way we are going.
Someone said that a novel must have something that just can’t be. When the thing that just can’t be in the character’s life is something that is in our life or will be if we’re not careful, fiction can show us how to fix that thing in our own life and world.

What Makes a Book Christian?

2011-09-26T00:01:00.001-05:00

What makes a book Christian? In my way of thinking, what makes a book Christian is that it elevates the name of Jesus. Forget all this “Christian worldview” stuff. The real question is, does this book lift up the name of Jesus and promote the preaching of the gospel of the virgin born sinless Jesus crucified, buried, and resurrected the third day for the salvation of the world? Does it promote the mission of the churches, which is to preach the gospel, bring those who accept it into the fellowship, and then teach them what Jesus taught? If a book doesn’t do that, it isn’t Christian.

Obviously, not everyone agrees with that. As far as non-fiction goes, they might, since most of the non-fiction Christian stuff deals with doctrine, church related stuff, or how to grow in the Lord, but when it comes to fiction we see a lot of stuff that doesn’t fit. The typical Christian novel is a romance novel, though some throw suspense into the mix. If you really want the whole shebang, look for an Amish romantic suspense novel. But just because there’s a bonnet on the front doesn’t mean it is Christian by my definition.

A lot of books have the obligatory conversion scene in them. One of the characters, whether a primary character or a secondary character, realizes he is a sinner and prays to accept Jesus. In some books, they don’t even do that much, the author just mentions that they had a change or heart or something. To me, the conversion scene doesn’t a Christian book make and for that matter, I don’t see it as a requirement for a Christian book. For the book to fulfill the definition I gave, the conversion, if there is one, needs to be an integral part of the book. If I could delete the scene without having to rewrite the book, the scene itself can easily be ignored by the read, so it is just a tack-on to a secular book. That’s okay; we need some good secular books.

But likewise, a book doesn’t have to be consumed with a person coming to know Christ to be Christian. As the writer of Hebrews said, “therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God.” (Hebrews 6:1) If you’re writing for Christians, there’s not much point in telling them how to be saved, since they’re already saved. What that audience needs is a book that will lead them toward perfection. In other words, it should help them improve their walk with the Lord.

Is that too much to expect of a novel? I think not, but how can we do that? I believe the best way to do that is to show realistic Christian characters who face the same struggles that most Christians face. Perhaps a character who has a basic understanding of how Christian ought to act, but whose faith hasn’t been tested. For example, what about the guy who knows he is supposed to be faithful to his wife, but then he falls in love with a co-worker? What about the guy who is trying to be the man he ought to be, but his wife leaves him for another man? What about the guy who is a new Christian, has become active in the church, and then the pastor runs off with the church’s money? What about the pastor who has built a fast growing church, but then realizes he isn’t saved? And I could go on. The whole point of these types of stories is that the reader is able to examine how he might respond in a similar situation, without having to experience it firsthand. If a reader can learn from a fictional character’s failures, the reader will know how to stand when his faith is tested.

When God Doesn't Answer

2011-09-23T00:01:00.000-05:00

Have you ever asked God for something and he didn’t give it to you? Of course, you have. I encounter many authors. Most have been praying for years that God would help them get a publishing contract. There are couples who have been praying to have children. There are singles who long to meet the love of their life. There are people who pray for healing that doesn’t come. Whatever the need, they’ve prayed and questioned why God hasn’t met that need. Can’t he see how much pain it is causing? They’ve listened to the sermons on why God doesn’t answer and questioned whether they are asking for the wrong reason or if it is because of sin in their lives. They’ve knelt at the altar. They’ve cried themselves to sleep. They’ve spent hours in prayer and read their Bibles from cover to cover to find an answer. How long?

While asking out of lust or asking for something when our relationship with God isn’t where it should be can prevent us from receiving the fullness of God’s blessing, I highly doubt that is the reason God hasn’t answered in the situations I’ve described. Surely, if a person has spent this long asking God for something, God has had plenty of time to point out anything that might be preventing him from answering the person’s prayer or to tell the person that he is asking for something he shouldn’t be asking for. Even though people like to explain unanswered prayer away by saying that prayer is more about changing the petitioner than it is about persuading God, there comes a time when the petitioner doesn’t need to make changes in his life and yet God still doesn’t answer. That’s frustrating (believe me, I know), but it’s true all the same. Just look at Hannah. It wasn’t sin in her life that prevented her from having children and there was nothing wrong with her desire for children.

God looks on the heart, while man looks at the outward appearance. (I Samuel 16:7) We often think of that in terms of how we treat others or in our airs of goodness versus what God knows of us, but it is true of other things as well. Often, when we pray, we have this picture in our head of what life will be like when God grants us our request. That picture is based on what we believe about who we are and what we want to be. God looks at who he knows us to be and what he wants us to become. His picture looks very different. I would imagine that Hannah just wanted to be a mother. The Lord had bigger plans for her and her son. Samuel became God’s mouthpiece and anointed both King Saul and King David. Mothers are a dime a dozen. You can’t throw a stone without hitting one (and some of them need to be), but mothers like Hannah are very rare.

Unfortunately, Samuels are rare also. Just because God hasn’t given you a child yet doesn’t mean he is waiting to raise up a Samuel. It may be that he looks at you and knows that if he were to give you the thing you asked for you wouldn’t handle it well. Look at the number of people who get divorced. Approximately one-third (1/3) of the people who get married end up getting divorced. While the odds are pretty good that if you get married you’ll stay married, that figure tells us that 33% of the people who get married wished they’d never gotten married. Or to put it another way, 33% of the people who once thought they’d found the love of their life have decided that they were wrong. As painful as it is for a single person to go through life alone, such a person is better off than the person who goes through a divorce. By not giving a person what he asks for, God may be protecting that person from pain that he would experience if God gave him what he asked.

But it’s hardly as simple as that. God has the ability to change things. If we aren’t the kind of people who can handle what we’re asking for or if what we’re asking involves people who aren’t prepared, God has the ability to change them into the people they need to be. And that’s what we hope he is doing, but it takes time. God seldom reveals his time clock, but he knows when the time is right. His timing is perfect.

So what are we to do? If you’ve been asking the Lord for something for a long time and he has been silent, keep asking. Until he clearly tells you that he isn’t going to give you what you ask, keep asking. You recall how that David fasted before his son died, but afterward he went on about his business. But if the Lord has made it clear to you that he isn’t going to give you what you ask, give up. Whatever you do, don’t get ahead of the Lord. It may be that he will eventually give you what you ask, but wait for his timing or it may end in failure.

Why Pray When God Knows Our Needs?

2011-09-22T00:01:00.001-05:00

If God already knows our need, why do we need to pray? Some people have said that our prayers unleash the power of God, but consider Isaiah 65:24, “And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” That day isn’t here yet, but it doesn’t look like our prayers are necessary to unleash God’s power. God’s power isn’t on a leash. He can answer our prayers before we pray. God knows our prayers before we do. God wants the best for us. What then is the purpose of prayer, since we aren’t telling God something he doesn’t already know and we aren’t asking for something he doesn’t already want to give us (assuming we’re praying a prayer he will answer)?

It all goes back to the Garden. When Adam sinned, he decided he didn’t need God. Ever since, our natural thought is that we can get by without God. If God were to give us everything we needed and/or desired without us asking for it, we would think we were God. Think about it. If you decided you wanted an ice cream cone and one appeared in front of you, you would think that it was something you had done. People in the psychic community would call this apportation. But how many of them would attribute it to God? No, they would attribute it to something the mind is able to do or to some spirit, perhaps that of a dead ancestor.

When you want to receive credit for something, wait until people realize they can’t do it without you and ask for your help. God doesn’t want us taking credit for the things that he has done. Effective prayer requires us to recognize that God has the ability to solve our problems when we do not. Though he sometimes blesses us anyway, we’re more likely to receive what we ask when we have reached the point where we will praise him for the blessing he gives us.

Praising God When We're Crying

2011-09-21T00:01:00.001-05:00

How do you praise God when life is tough? That was our discussion in Sunday school last Sunday. Our adult Sunday school classes are studying the book of Job and last Sunday we looked at the passage in which four servants came one after the other to tell him of the loss of his livestock, his servants, and his children, but we’re told that he worshiped God and didn’t charge God foolishly. It is here that we see that well known statement, “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (Job 1:21)

I think a lot of people get the wrong idea when we talk about praising God in the hard times. People look at 1 Thessalonians 5:18 and conclude that we should thank God for whatever happens to us, even the bad things. That may be easy enough to do with some things. “Thank you Lord for my car not starting this morning; I could’ve been in a wreck.” But how do you thank God for taking away your financial wealth and for killing your children?

First, let me point out that there is always something to thank God for. God sent his Son to die for our sins. Whatever happens to us during this life, we can thank God for that. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to be happy about God allowing hardships in our lives. And let’s stay away from this hogwash about how God doesn’t cause our hardships, but he allows them to happen. Do we really care whether God did something himself or just chose not to prevent it? The result is the same; we are suffering and God could have prevented it. As Job said, “the Lord hath taken away.”

What we see in Job’s reaction is that even though he mourned the losses he suffered, he recognized the sovereignty of God. In other words, he recognized that God had the authority to do with his life as he pleased. Job also did not make foolish assumptions about why God had done what he did. Job didn’t say that God was just being cruel.

But just because we recognize that God has authority over our lives doesn’t mean we have to like what he does. Sometimes, I think that is the whole point. In the good times, it is so easy to forget that it is God who provides for us, but when life is so hard that the tears won’t stop, we fall to our knees and cry out to God. Think of Peter walking on the water. He walked a ways and began to sink, but he turned back to the Lord and they walked together to the ship.

God doesn’t take pleasure in our tears, but our tears may serve a greater purpose. We shouldn’t, however, assume that because God has a greater purpose for our suffering that he wants us to ignore it or to put on a happy face about it. As someone said, how would we know that God could solve our problems if we didn’t have problems? When we’re hurting, I think he wants us to go to him with tears in our eyes and ask him to fix it. It think he wants us to ask him why he allowed it to happen. He may not give us an answer, but he wants to be the one we turn to in hard times. He wants us to realize that he’s the only one who can fix the problem.

When a couple loses a child, they aren’t going to thank God for taking their child. That is unrealistic and it doesn’t fit with scripture. Scripture has so many examples of people who are unhappy with their situation. The question is, when you’re unhappy with your situation, do you take it to God and are you willing to accept whatever answer he gives you or do you take the attitude that God is either mean, or weak and then try to do something on your own?

There are so many examples in scripture where God was doing something or told someone that he planned to do something, but at the request of a righteous man he stayed his hand. At the request of Abraham, for example, the Lord spared one of the smaller cities in the plain of Sodom and Gomorrah. At the request of Moses, the Lord didn’t destroy Israel and start over. We don’t have to be happy about what God is doing. We don’t have to hold our tongue about what God is doing. But we do need to remember that God is God and he does as he pleases.

Sanctuary Cities Bill

2011-09-20T12:04:00.002-05:00

Is it just me or is the so called Sanctuary Cities Bill misnamed? My understanding of the bill is that it found prevent Texas State money from going to cities that prohibit officers from asking detainees about their immigration status. From the name, you would think that the bill attempts to establish Sanctuary Cities, but it actually does the opposite.

To be honest, I don’t like the idea of cities trying to get around state and federal law by telling their police officers not to ask about immigration status. But I’m not so sure that I’m opposed to the concept of Sanctuary Cities. In the Bible, Sanctuary Cities were established for people who accidentally killed someone, so that they would be protected from the avenger of blood. Today, that kind of sanctuary isn’t needed because all people who kill someone are given a day in court to see whether it was murder or not. But the immigration issue is not so cut and dried. By the letter of the law, an alien who is in the country without the proper paperwork shouldn’t be here, but when you look at the individuals involved you hear stories of people who are having trouble obtaining the proper paperwork for one reason or another and yet they have family members who are citizens of the USA. It’s hard not to feel for these people, even though we know they are breaking the law.

So, why not have Sanctuary Cities? I suppose it would have to be done at the national level. Instead of having some cities that tell their officers not to check the immigration status, what if we followed the example from the Bible and set up a number of cities where illegal aliens would be allowed to live while they are making their way through the red tape. As long as they remain in that city and don’t commit any major crimes, the status of their immigration would not be an issue, but if they were to leave that city without the proper paperwork, they could be detained and sent back to their country of origin.

I can understand the desire to have police officers enforce all the law, not just part of it, but I think we also need to balance that with compassion.

Is God Love? How Do We Know?

2011-09-20T00:01:00.001-05:00

The atheist who stopped by my blog to tell me that “God is not love” got me thinking. In writing, we talk about how we should show, don’t just tell. That’s nothing new. God knew that a long time before we did and yet, we have this statement in the Bible that says, “God is love.” I thought it might do us good to take a closer look at that.

The statement appears not once but twice in First John 4. It is in verse 8 and again in verse 16. In verse 8 is says, “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” In verse 16 it says, “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

In context, what we see here is that John isn’t trying to tell us that God is love. John writes this in such a way that we see that he took the statement “God is love” as a known fact. It is similar to someone saying, a green leaf is not the sky because the sky is blue. What John is saying is that we know that those without love are not saved because we know that God is love. On the other hand, a person can’t dwell in love without dwelling in God because God is love.

When we extend the context farther, we see that John doesn’t leave us without evidence to support his assumption that God is love. Look at First John 4:9, 10. “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son [to be] the propitiation for our sins.” If you have any doubts about God being love, put that in your pipe and smoke it. How many fathers do you know who would ask their only child to die the death of the cross (even knowing he would rise from the dead) in order to save the life of a murderer facing the death penalty? Most people would say, “he did the crime, he should pay the price,” and they wouldn’t be wrong in saying that.

Even more than us, God recognizes that those who commit the crime must pay the price. God’s glory is so great that no sinful man can stand before God and live. Just to look at him would kill us, but he wants a relationship with us. He wants us to be able to see him face to face. He wants that so much that he sent Jesus to be the propitiation for our sins. Literally, Jesus took on our sins, as if he had committed those sins, and died for them, so that we could take on his righteousness. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.