His Reading List

Fully Engaged: How to Do Less and Be More

2011-06-06T06:53:00.000-07:00

Fully Engaged
by
John Busacker

MY THOUGHTS:
In a world where a 'normal' week is a whirlwind, this book is a breath of fresh air.

First, it is a short, easy to read book, so you don't have to worry about finding time to fit it into your busy schedule! John Busacker has created short chapters filled with large print and lots of white space and he's carefully chosen his words and examples for maximum impact. The book is designed to read one chapter at a time so you can work on each concept and really let it sink in before moving on. There's even a nice ribbon attached so you don't have to worry about losing your place.

Second, the book is action oriented. Each chapter ends with a challenge to immediately apply the concept you've just learned by thinking it through and writing down how it applies to your life. Some chapters require more contemplation than others, such as defining life dreams, and the action of actually writing these down helps to get you motivated to move forward and take action.

Third, the text itself is motivating and action oriented. Busacker helps you to define priorities and focus on what is really important, which allows some of t he busy-ness to fall away (if you let it).

Like any self help book, this one only works if you don't leave it on the shelf. It's easy to read and put away, going back to life as you know it. But if I pulled only one important concept from the book (and there are MANY), it is to truly be involved in whatever I'm doing -- don't just mindlessly multitask and go through my day. Sounds simple and even simplistic, but it has made a big difference in my life so far.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Ever been lost in a car on the way to an important event? If so, then you know that people are the only animals that speed up when they’re lost or confused. It’s only as a last resort that we’ll finally hit the brakes, put the car in park, and set about the humbling task of asking for directions. The sad truth is that many of us live our lives the same way: lost, directionless, and never slowing down enough to find the real answers we need. Unfortunately, slowing down and doing less are foreign solutions for today’s problems. Envision a student notifying her parents that her goal is to slow down because she’s stressed out in school. Picture a husband suggesting that he wants to do less in his marriage. The very concept of doing less seems like sheer laziness, but it can actually be a very productive strategy for living.

For readers who are finally ready to stop speeding along and start slowing down enough to find some answers, John Busacker’s new book, Fully Engaged: How to Do Less and Be More, offers practical advice on how to do just that. In a world full of countless options and disorienting decisions, we have to allow our internal GPS to stop and recalculate the direction of our life. As we do so, we’ll find greater abundance, contentment, and peace of mind. Fully Engaged encourages and equips us to move beyond what Busacker calls an “air guitar life”—a life of furious motion and considerable energy, but in the end one with no sound and little lasting impact. In a culture of random noise and fury, Busacker offers a measured and wise strategy for living that is marked by three key components: 1) Awareness, 2) Alignment, and 3) Action.

· Living with Awareness means that, instead of piecing together random moments, you begin to live intentionally. By doing so, you no longer measure your life worth by your pay check, but by effectively blending all aspects of your life. It is understanding that the moments that make up your life contribute to the overarching story of your existence, and in order for that story to stay fresh, you must add to it regularly. A life of awareness is a life defined by the values that you hold dear rather than by the habits and routines that only lead to more monotony. In the end, awareness means that you stop sleepwalking through life and become fully engaged with the world around you.

· Living with Alignment ensures that what you have and what you do match what you really want out of life. It means that your job is not simply a means to make money, but a calling to be pursued with vigor. It is the realization that your dreams are meant to be lived out, and that your life is more than just showing up. When your life is marked by alignment, you don’t live one life at work, another life at church, and yet another life at home. Alignment patterns all aspects of your life around what you really want so that everything you value and do is interconnected with your dreams.

· Living with Action compels you to move in directions that propel you toward an exhilarating future. This means that you’re not afraid to fail and that setbacks are to be celebrated as progressive steps on the journey of success. It’s the understanding that you must pursue connection with others because community is a necessary component of fulfilled living. A life of action is a life of generosity, because giving back is the natural response to engagement. It is impossible to be fully engaged and be passive.

“You have gifts to give, family to love, and dreams to live,” writes Busacker. “You were created to learn and grow, not to replicate and repeat. What if you could not only live each day, but really live it—and love it?” Everyone desires to be this engaged—to feel connected, joyful, and alive. You’ll begin to thrive instead of survive, to act instead of react. If you’re burned out or rusted out, Fully Engaged can help you find a whole new layout for living!

About the Author:

John Busacker is president of The Inventure Group, a global leadership-consulting firm, and founder of Life-Worth, LLC, a life planning creative resource. He is a member of the Duke Corporate Education Global Learning Resource Network and is on the faculty of the University of Minnesota Carlson School’s Executive Development Center.

In 2009, Busacker released his first book, 8 Questions God Can’t Answer, which unlocks the profound power of Jesus’ timeless questions. He annually teaches in a variety of emerging faith communities and supports the development needs of leaders in Africa through PLI-International.

John is an avid explorer, occasional marathoner, and novice cyclist. He and his wife, Carol, live in Minneapolis and have two adult sons, Brett and Joshua.

You can purchase a copy of this book on Amazon HERE

Thanks to B&B Media Group for providing a copy of this book for review.

Handle With Prayer

2011-03-18T14:15:00.001-07:00

It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!

You never know when I might play a wild card on you!

Today's Wild Card author is:

Charles Stanley

and the book:

Handle with Prayer

David C. Cook; Reprint edition (March 1, 2011)

***Special thanks to Karen Davis, Assistant Media Specialist, The B&B Media Group for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Dr. Charles F. Stanley, senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta and founder of In Touch Ministries, demonstrates a keen awareness of people’s needs by providing practical Biblical truths for everyday life. His In Touch teaching program is broadcast worldwide in more than 50 languages. Dr. Stanley is also a New York Times best-selling author who has written more than 35 books, including: In Step with God, Landmines in the Path of the Believer, Living the Extraordinary Life, A Man’s Touch, Handle With Prayer, How to Listen to God, Eternal Security: Can You Be Sure?, The Gift of Forgiveness, How to Keep Your Kids on Your Team, The Wonderful Spirit-Filled Life, The Source of My Strength, How to Handle Adversity, The Blessing of Brokenness, Success God’s Way, The Handbook for Christian Living, Into His Presence, and When Tragedy Strikes.

Visit the author's website.

SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:

Originally released in 2000, this book has already sold over 250,000 copies and now it features new artwork, an enhanced study guide, and updated content to connect with today’s readers. Using stories from his own life, Dr. Stanley engages readers with his insight and truthfulness. According to Dr. Stanley, “Jesus encourages us to pray. He tells us to ask, seek, and knock. We ask for things, we seek understanding, and we knock on doors of opportunity that lie before us. The Lord is saying that in every area of life we can find what we are looking for by talking to the heavenly Father.”

Product Details:

List Price: $16.99
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: David C. Cook; Reprint edition (March 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0781404460
ISBN-13: 978-0781404464

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:

Unveiling the Hidden

Moreover the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah the second time, while he was yet shut up in the court of the prison, saying, Thus saith the LORD the maker thereof, the LORD that formed it, to establish it; the LORD is his name; Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not. —Jeremiah 33:1–3

As I was praying one afternoon in 1967, I began feeling as if God had something very specific to say to me. The more I prayed, the more the burden increased. I decided to take an early vacation and spend the time seeking God’s guidance. I went to the mountains of North Carolina for two weeks, intent on finding out what God was saying to me.

I spent the majority of the time fasting and praying. I waited, expecting God to follow up the burden with an answer. To my surprise, He pointed out areas in my life that needed correcting. The entire two weeks was a period of personal cleansing and preparation for what was to come.

I returned home excited, but still unsure. It was as if there were a veil that kept me from knowing the unknown. I felt that the answer was close, but it was still out of my grasp. Then one

afternoon soon afterward, I was on my face before the Lord, and the veil lifted. God wanted me to start a school. I hesitated to commit myself to such a task, but God made it clear to me that His instructions were to be obeyed, not just considered. He unveiled the hidden to me when I called on Him to do so, and He showed me the things I did not know. God was faithful—even to the point of preparing my heart for what He had to say.

God desires to make known the unknown to His children. He desires to unveil the hidden. Yet many times we are satisfied not knowing. Either we aren’t willing to take the time to wait, or

we aren’t sure God even wants us to know. But this command to Jeremiah speaks specifically to both of these problems. We are to call, we are to expect an answer, and we are to know the unknown. Let’s look at the background of this Scripture in Jeremiah (33:1–3).

The Babylonians are coming toward Jerusalem from the feast. They have already defeated the Assyrians, so the people off Jerusalem know they don’t stand much of a chance against their superior military strength. The leaders of Jerusalem believed they should align themselves with the Egyptians, which was the logical thing to do. But Jeremiah tells them, “God says you are going into captivity. What you really ought to do is go out there and surrender.” Well, this wasn’t at all what the leaders had in mind. They threw Jeremiah in prison and refused to listen to him.

Their reaction should not surprise us. What do you think the people in my congregation would do if I stood up next Sunday and said, “God says the Canadians are going to overthrow this nation. We might as well surrender now and save ourselves some trouble”? They would run me out of town! But this was exactly the situation Jeremiah found himself in. From his experience, he gives us a passage (33:1–3) that helps us understand how to talk with God.

Encouraged to Pray

We can obtain three prayer principles from Jeremiah 33:3 by listening to what God told Jeremiah. The first is that God encourages us to pray: “Call unto me.” Since Jeremiah was in prison, he had a long time to catch up on his prayer life. We may never be put behind bars, but God will put us in circumstances and situations in order to teach us how to talk with Him.

Most of the time we pray, “Get me out of here!” We want to avoid suffering and difficulty. When we do run into a trial or difficulty, we ask God to change our circumstances so we can serve Him better and love Him more.

But we cannot fool God or bribe Him with our promises. Jeremiah didn’t even ask God to get him out of prison. Rather, he waited to see what God would say to him. And what was God’s

reply? “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not” (Jer. 33:3). What God did for Jeremiah had a far greater impact than simply getting him out of prison.

But most of us aren’t that patient. We’re more intent on getting out of our circumstances than we are on finding out what great things God wants to show us. But the Father never allows

difficulty just for the sake of difficulty—there is always a higher purpose involved. The problem is we cannot always identify God’s higher purpose in the midst of our trials. That’s when we must exercise our faith by waiting on His word to us.

A good friend of mine who was a real estate broker experienced a seven-year period of financial failure. The loss of his security devastated him. It became the constant focus of his thoughts and prayers. “Why doesn’t God do something?” he would ask me. For a while, we were both puzzled.

But after some intense soul searching, he realized that he had substituted financial security for God in his life. The Father wanted to be recognized as the Source of all things in my friend’s life. As he began renewing his mind spiritually and yielding his rights to the Lord, my friend gained a new freedom in his attitude toward finances. He started a new career and found greater financial blessing than ever before.

God had a great and mighty lesson to teach my friend—a lesson more important than keeping him comfortable. And God kept him uncomfortable until he took his eyes off his circumstances and sought God’s mind in the matter.

Waiting is not easy. We often turn away from seeking God’s counsel and seek guidance from friends and loved ones. We read books, attend seminars, and talk with others, trying to find out what God has to say to us. Usually, after we’ve exhausted all other possibilities, we turn back to the Lord and wait on Him. By doing this, it’s as if we are saying to God, “Now that I’ve tried everything else and failed, I’ve decided I need You after all.”

But God wants us to come to Him first. He wants us to stand in His counsel and wait for His word. He longs for us to come to Him as a son would to his father. But instead, we go to Him last, as if we don’t trust Him or consider His word of much value. Yet He is the only trustworthy Source of counsel we have. He is our most available and accessible Friend. He will never give us a busy signal—even if He frequently gets busy signals when He tries talking to us.

God entreats us to pray because He knows we are often caught in prisons of our own making; not prisons with bars and locks, but intellectual prisons, emotional prisons, and relational prisons. We must remember that the shortest distance between our problems and their solutions is the distance between our knees and the floor.

Answer Promised

Second, God told Jeremiah, “I will answer thee.” Sometimes we make commitments that we cannot keep. Though we may do this unintentionally, there are times when we disappoint those who are counting on us. But God never disappoints—when He says He will do something, it will be done.

God promises He will not only hear our prayers, but He will answer them. This brings up two interesting questions: Does God always answer our prayers? Or does He respond to certain kinds of prayer? Think about the requests you have made of God recently. Are they being answered? Do you really believe they will be? You see, the question is not Does God answer prayer? The real question is How does God answer prayer? Sometimes He answers yes. This is usually the only answer we hear. If God says, “Yes,” then we believe He answered. If He says, “No,” we think He ignored our request.

God’s Answers

When God answers our prayers, He either answers with yes, no, or wait. When He answers yes, we are prone to shout, “Praise the Lord!” We tell everyone what a great thing God has done for us.

But when God says no, we have a hard time finding reasons to praise Him. We look for the sin in our lives that kept Him from granting our requests, because surely if we had been living right He would have given us what we asked. But not one shred of scriptural evidence shows that God will say yes to all of our prayers just because we’re living right. God is sovereign. He has the right to say no according to His infinite wisdom, regardless of our goodness.

We try to manipulate God by our humanistic “if then” philosophy. If we live good, clean lives, then God must (we believe) grant our hearts’ desires. But such attempts to manipulate God defeat the whole purpose of Christianity, which is to glorify Him through our submissive obedience to His desires. Besides, if our goodness was the only factor God considered, where would His grace fit in? Many times His grace is what motivates Him to say no.

God only says no and wait when it is best for us (Rom. 8:28). He does it many times for our protection. Sometimes God wants to answer our prayers, but the timing is not right. For example, in the past, many couples wanting to marry came to me for counseling. Sometimes I would advise them to wait. Some would heed my advice, while others sought counsel from those who told them what they wanted to hear. You and I have the same choice over and over again. Will we wait on God for His perfect timing, or will we rush ahead?

We don’t like waiting around. Especially when it looks like a unique opportunity might slip away. We don’t like to hear God say, “No,” especially when everything in us says, “Yes, yes, yes!” We often try to find a Scripture verse and claim it while we continue our prayer, hoping somehow to change God’s mind. What we’re really saying is, “God, I didn’t like that answer. How about reconsidering my point of view?”

But deep in our hearts we really want God’s perfect will for our lives. And we must remember that God’s answer is always His ultimate best for us. Claiming Scripture will not change God’s mind because His Word cannot contradict His will. If He says no, then the answer is no. If He says wait, then we should wait. God is more interested in our character, our future, and our sanctification than He is in our momentary satisfaction. His answers are always an act of grace, motivated by His love.

Our Response

Our response to God’s answers reveals one of two things about us. It will reveal either a rebellious spirit or a submissive spirit. By accepting God’s answer, despite the fact that we may not understand, we express a submissive spirit. But by refusing His first answer and trying to get our way by manipulation, we express a rebellious spirit.

If we refuse God’s answers when they don’t fit in with our plans, then we are trying to use God for our purposes. But if we graciously accept His answers—no matter what they are—He will use us for His glory.

The Hidden Revealed

The third principle we can obtain from this verse comes from “I will … show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” All of us face decisions that leave us baffled. We are constantly bombarded with relational decisions, business decisions, household decisions, and financial decisions—and these all need immediate attention. In this verse, God promises to reveal the answer to all of life’s decisions. Yet many of God’s people spend their entire lives making decisions based on their knowledge, their understanding, and their experience—not realizing that some decisions must be based on divine wisdom and illumination from God.

Almost any preacher can prepare a sermon. He can write an outline, gather a few stories, and away he goes. But a preacher cannot get God’s message for a people until he waits in the Lord’s counsel, until he seeks God’s face, and until God gives him a word from heaven (Jer. 23:21–22).

This same principle applies to every Christian. We can pay the price required to find God’s mind on an issue, or we can make a decision based on what we think is right. Either way, a decision will eventually be made. But while one decision may have the approval of man, the other will have the eternal approval of God.

Sometimes we flip a coin (spiritually speaking) and say, “Lord, this is what I’m going to do. If it is of You, then bless it. If I’m wrong, then better luck next time.” Instead of waiting, we jump ahead and hope we have done the right thing. The point is this: As Christians, we never have to guess—we can know for sure what to do. God wants us to know His will about things, even more than we want to know it. But He cannot—and will not—bless anything we do that is not of Him.

So what does He mean when He says, “I will … show thee great and mighty things”? Every time we pray to God, seeking His will, there are two things He wants to show us: He wants to show us Himself (Phil. 3:7–8), and He wants to show us what He is able to do (John 15:16). Is there anything greater than seeking God and knowing His power?

We Are to Seek His Face

Because God wants to reveal Himself to us, and because our goal as Christians is to know Him, we should begin our time in prayer saying, “Lord, thank You that You are omnipotent. Thank You that You are omniscient and know everything I am about to tell You. Thank You that You are omnipresent, and You are not separated from me. As I come into Your presence, I humble myself before Your throne to thank You for Your holiness, Your forgiveness, and Your mercy. I acknowledge You as the great Creator, Sustainer, and Lover of mankind. Father, I am coming to You, recognizing Your greatness and Your holiness. I bow before You as Your child, knowing that You are more than sufficient to meet my needs.”

This is the spirit in which we should come into God’s presence. But instead, we come first with our needs and usually don’t have enough time for anything else. We never stop long enough to recognize that God wants to show us Himself when we pray.

He Shows Us His Power

God also wants to show us what He is able and willing to do for us. He does this through His Word. He reminds us of what He has done in the past. He gives us example after example in Scripture of how He met people’s needs and how He protected them. And the Father is willing to do the same thing for us, if we will only ask.

The word mighty in this passage means hidden things, things that are fenced in. This word is used when referring to fortified cities. God is showing us that as we pray, He will unveil insights for us that have previously been a mystery.

This also implies that some answers will be found only in prayer, not from other sources—not from books, friends, or counselors. Some things must come straight from God, who is the

Source of all wisdom. How many families would still be together today if they had sought God’s answers to their problems at home? How many sons and daughters would still be at home if their parents had taken their situation to the Lord? Too often we refuse to wait on God’s answers. We want quick solutions to our problems.

But God wants to do much more than just meet our needs and answer our questions. He wants our love. He wants our spirits— He wants our lives. Yes, He encourages us to bring our trials and our heartaches to Him in prayer, but only after we recognize who He is and what He can do. Only then do we believe He will answer our prayers. Only then are we seeking His face and not merely His hand.

As a pastor, many times I go to God for answers that can be found only in Him. Sometimes He shows me something for today, and sometimes He shows me something that will happen in the next week or month. But I’ve never been to God about anything that He did not willingly answer. He does not always answer my prayers according to my time schedule, but He always answers on time.

Back in 1969 when I was preaching a weeklong revival meeting in Virginia, I once again felt that God had something specific to say to me. Each night after the service I retired to my room early to pray. One evening, I pulled out a pad and drew a circle with five lines leading from it. At the end of each line, I wrote several things I thought God might desire to reveal to me. On the last line I drew a question mark, thinking maybe it was something I had not thought of.

The following night I came back to my room with the same burden. As I prayed and looked over the possibilities, God made it clear that He was going to move me. I asked Him when, and the month of September flashed into my mind. This happened in May of 1969, but I thought He meant September of 1970. A few months later, however, a pulpit committee from the First Baptist Church of Atlanta came to see me. On September 30, 1969, my family and I moved to Atlanta. God revealed this to me ahead of time in order to prepare my heart. He unveiled what was hidden when I called on Him to do so.

Regardless of what circumstances you are up against, there is no knowledge you will ever need that is not accessible before the throne of our living, loving, holy, righteous God. He has promised to show you the great, the hidden, and the unknown things that you will never be able to understand any other way. There are some things you will never be able to know (Deut. 29:29), but all the knowledge you will ever need is available to you if you ask God.

He desires to illuminate your mind and heart until you are conscious of Christ’s mind within you. He wants you to say no to the world on the basis of your faith in Him. It is then that you feel an extra sense of power when you share with others. You no longer depend entirely on circumstances for God to teach you lessons. Instead, you learn straight from Him through His Word. You have a new excitement in your relationship with God because you have learned to listen as He speaks to you.

Submission Required

You must be submissive to God to the point of absolute obedience— regardless of what He asks of you. Why? Because if our heavenly Father continues to answer our prayers, and we have certain conditions on which we obey, then He is nothing more than a giant Santa Claus. If He were to continue to bless us regardless of our rebellion, we would be using Him for our ends, not His. Submission is essential.

If you have been seeking God’s will for a long time and you seem to be getting nowhere, examine your heart. See if there is any area of your life that is not totally surrendered to Him. By settling this issue, you will put yourself in a position that will allow the Father to bless you. The quicker you move from your will to His will, the quicker God will show you what you need to know. Since God gives us His Word for obedience, not just consideration, He must be assured that you have submitted yourself completely before He will let you in on His secrets.

Are you facing a decision in your life that is too big for you to handle? Are you going through some difficulty that has left you confused and disheartened? God said, “Call unto me, and I will

answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” As you seek God’s face, understanding who He is and what He is willing and able to do, He will clear away all the mist that surrounds your circumstances. He will show you what to do. Are you willing to say yes to whatever He requires? If so, you have taken the first step in learning to talk with God.

Session 1

Unveiling the Hidden

Chapter 1

Session Goals

1. To assess our individual prayer lives to see if we really expect God to answer our prayers.

2. To take a long look at our ideas of what God is like, how He feels about people, and what He is willing to do for them.

3. To determine to say yes to whatever God requires of us.

Preparation

1. As you read Handle with Prayer, jot down the main kernels of truth in each chapter. Then study chapter 1.

2. Plan your session time carefully to include the Bible teaching about prayer, which should lead into the practicing of prayer in the session.

3. Assemble any teaching tools: whiteboard or chalkboard, markers or chalk.

Discussion

1. Help people get acquainted by asking each member to turn to the person next to him or her and to sum up his or her prayer philosophy in ten words or less. End with the question: “Do

you agree?” Partners respond with his or her own thinking on prayer. Don’t ask group members to aim for theological definitions, just responses from their personal experiences. Expect

negative as well as positive philosophies, since these sessions are expected to clear up misconceptions about prayer as well as give positive insights—all from the Word.

After this short exercise, point out that no matter what our present philosophies of prayer are, we all want to learn to pray effectively. But we won’t learn how unless we obey God’s instructions (as opposed to our own reactions, ideas, experiential knowledge) and respond to Him according to His will.

2. Ask the group to turn to Jeremiah 33:1–3. Explain: “The Babylonians were coming toward Jerusalem from the east. They had already defeated the Assyrians, so the people of Jerusalem

knew they didn’t stand much of a chance against such a superior military power. The leaders of Jerusalem believed they should align with the Egyptians. But Jeremiah told them, ‘God says you are going into captivity. What you really ought to do is believe God, go out, and surrender to the Babylonians.’”

The outraged leaders, thinking Jeremiah was a traitor, threw him in prison and refused to listen to his warning. Jeremiah probably wasn’t too surprised at the leaders’ reaction. But what would God say to him now? He had obeyed the Lord, and he

was in prison because of it—what next?

Why do you think God reaffirmed His identity to Jeremiah (v. 2)? What three prayer principles did He give Jeremiah (v. 3)?Discuss.

3. Explain that Jeremiah was in a real prison. We may be in figurative ones constructed out of circumstances or predicaments, but the bars are just as strong and the walls just as high.

When we are in our prisons, how do we usually pray? Discuss.

According to Scripture, Jeremiah didn’t ask God for anything. Rather, he waited to see what God had to say to him.

If we’re in our prisons because God needs to get our attention to teach us lessons, what is the quickest way to get out? Discuss.

Deliverance comes as we examine our hearts to find what God wants to teach us. When we learn our lessons, He will free us. Nothing is too hard for Him.

What should we do if we cannot identify God’s purpose in a particular trial? Why is waiting on God so difficult? Discuss.

4. Does God always answer our prayers? Discuss the three ways God answers: yes, no, or wait. Do you agree: “God will always answer yes, if we are living right”? God is sovereign. He answers depending on what He knows is best for us.

How do we sometimes try to manipulate Him into saying yes? Sometimes we think: If I do this, then God will do that. Or we plead a verse of Scripture that seems on target for our case and hope God will change His mind.

Why does God sometimes say no? Remind the group that the whole purpose of Christianity is to glorify God through our submissive obedience to His desires. He says no when it’s for

our best interest (Rom. 8:28). God is more interested in our character, future, and sanctification than in our momentary gratification.

When God says wait, what choice does He give us? What do our responses to God’s answers reveal about us?

5. What two things does God always want to show us when we seek to know His will? Refer to Philippians 3:7–8 and John 15:16. How does God show us what He is able and willing to

do? Answers might come through His Word, through our own experiences, and through the experiences of others.

What is the one condition God’s unveiling rests on? Why is submission necessary?

6. Explain: “If we hear these truths and don’t practice them, we become like the person who wants to learn to drive a car without ever sitting in the driver’s seat. The person reads the

training manual, learns all the rules of the road, but never actually sits behind the wheel.”

We want to move prayer into the reality of our present circumstances. During our times together, we will be using different prayer methods: silent prayers, group prayers, volunteer

prayers, written prayers, etc. Today because of the nature of the subject, we will use silent individual prayers.

7. If God has seemed silent to you about something you have prayed for a long time, examine your heart. Are you harboring unconfessed sin? If you will submit now, you will move quickly into the attitude in which God will unfold for you some of the things you need to know.

Are you facing a decision that is too big for you to handle? Have you gone through some difficulty that has left you confused and disheartened? Read Jeremiah 33:3 again. Seek God’s face, understand who He is, and believe He will clear away all the mist that surrounds your circumstances.

Are you willing to say yes to whatever He requires of you?

8. Spend time in silent prayer as individuals open up their hearts to God. Close with an appropriate prayer of submissive victory.

What's it Like to be Married to Me? GIVE AWAY!

2011-03-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

What's it Like to be Married to Me?
by
Linda Dillow

MY THOUGHTS:
Women can be habitual complainers, and this book brings to light that our complaints are most frequently about our husbands. That causes us to tear down our homes, not build them up as God calls us to do. Linda Dillow cuts through all of our excuses and gets to the heart of our marriages by having us ask questions of ourselves -- looking inward instead of placing blame.

Are we really placing our husbands above all other people on earth? Do our husbands feel loved and respected? How do we know? In addition to solid Biblical resources and research-based stories, the book includes a ten to twelve week Bible study that can be followed by a group or individually.

I highly recommend this book for women's Bible studies and for all women who want to enrich their marriages and be more Christ-like in their daily lives.

I have one copy of the book to give away! If you are interested, leave a comment below.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Women everywhere wonder if there is more to marriage than what they have. Best-Selling author Linda Dillow, helps women shape their marriage by design rather than letting circumstances shape it by default. What's It Like to Be Married to Me? And Other Dangerous Questions, is a book about knowing the difference between having a desire for a better marriage and setting the goal of having a better marriage—as women look in the mirror to see how they can change. Extremely intimate and honest, Dillow shares the best and worst things she has done in her nearly fifty years of marriage, guides women to make their own Marriage Purpose Statement, and leads them into God’s heart for what their marriage could be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Linda Dillow is no stranger to publishing and adventure. She's the author of Creative Counterpart, Calm My Anxious Heart, The Blessings Book, Satisfy My Thirsty Soul, and co-author of the Best-Selling book Intimate Issues. Linda and her husband Jody lived in Europe and Asia for 17 years training Christian leaders in closed countries with Biblical Education by Extension, during this time, Linda traveled extensively in Romania, Russia, Hungary, Poland and Asia. She taught women and helped them launch women's ministries. She is a mother of four children, as well as a grandmother.

Check out these sites to purchase the book on-line:

- www.Amazon.com <http://www.amazon.com/>

- www.ChristianBook.com <http://www.christianbook.com/>

- www.FamilyChristian.com <http://www.familychristian.com/>

The Me Project -- And a Prize Drawing!

2011-02-24T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Me Project - 21 Days to Living the Life You’ve Always Wanted
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers
ISBN-10: 0736929665, ISBN-13: 978-0736929660
Release Date: February 1, 2011
Paperback: 224 pages, Retail: $12.99

Book Summary

(San Jose, CA) Has that rush to make (and break) New Year’s resolutions already waned? According to Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, taking small steps every day will not only help you stay committed to your goal, but will also help you ultimately achieve that goal when obstacles come up. Author Kathi Lipp wants you and your friends to live out those dreams—and have some fun along the way.

As women, we forget the goals and dreams of our younger years. The busyness of everyday life gets in the way. To-do lists replace goals. The Me Project provides women with fun and creative ways to bring back the sense of purpose and vitality that comes with living out the plans and dreams God has planted in our hearts. Kathi Lipp’s warm tone and laugh-out-loud humor motivates women to take daily steps toward intentional goals. The end result? We get back our lives and enjoy living in the confidence of a purposeful life in spite of our chaotic schedules.

This handy guide coaches women to do one simple thing toward achieving our goals each day for three weeks. A woman experiencing the exhilaration of a rediscovered life offers more as a wife, mother, friend, volunteer, career woman.

Finding the balance between living day-to-day with purpose while pursuing the passions God has placed in our hearts is a delicate pursuit. In this refreshing, insightful book, Kathi lays out a doable plan that makes sense and helps make our God-given dreams a reality. Never stop dreaming, because women who dare to dream do make the world a better place.

—Jean Blackmer
author of MomSense: A Common Sense Guide to Confident Mothering
Publishing Manager, MOPS International www.MOPS.org

Author Bio

Kathi Lipp

Kathi Lipp is a busy conference and retreat speaker, currently speaking each year to thousands of women throughout the United States. She is the author of The Husband Project and The Marriage Project, serves as food writer for Nickelodeon, and has had articles published in several magazines, including Today’s Christian Woman and Discipleship Journal. Kathi and her husband, Roger, live in California and are the parents of four teenagers and young adults. For more information visit her website: www.kathilipp.com

Check out this article to Kick Start Living Your Dream!

And guess what...there's a contest! You could win this amazing basket

Grand Prize Giveaway:

Deluxe Starbucks Coffee Gift Basket

Three 2.5-oz. bags of Starbucks coffee
(Sumatra, House Blend, and French Roast)
Tazo black tea
Starbucks marshmallow cocoa
Almond roca
Almond roca buttercrunch toffee cookies
White chocolate and raspberry cookies
2 Starbucks mugs
Keepsake black bamboo basket

$62 value

Just comment on this post and your name will be entered in the drawing!

Flight Plan

2011-02-07T11:59:00.000-08:00

FLIGHT PLAN

Lee Burns and Braxton Brady

MY THOUGHTS:

I can only respond to this book as a mother of boys, not having been one, but I would HIGHLY recommend this book to the leader of any group of middle school or even high school boys. I plan to give my copy to the director of middle school activities at our church and I pray that he will develop a program for our boys to attend. If not, I will talk my husband into using the book to set up a small group for the neighborhood boys. This book is amazing.

The chapters cover all aspects of manhood and touch on every issue of concern to both teens and their parents in ways that are very boy-focused. Instead of just saying 'don't', the book goes into what godly men 'do', and how to avoid the common entrapments of youth. It is not preachy -- in fact it often tells why the pitfalls seem interesting to some. For instance, it tells why some kids get drawn into drinking and then takes boys beyond these initial enticements to explain the true reasons to avoid it. It also provides difficult role-play scenarios that offer an opportunity for boys to practice dealing with tough situations before they happen.

If you have the chance to lead a group of pre-teen or early teen boys, this book would be an excellent tool for helping them become the men God created them to be.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Teenage boys are faced with navigating the turbulent journey to manhood, often without an inkling of what that really means or any direction of how to get there. Flight Plan: Your Mission to Become a Man offers a vision of godly manhood and a complete and honest guide into the adventures ahead. Written by Lee Burns and Braxton Brady, Flight Plan is a natural evolution of their original program, Building Boys, Making Men, a curriculum created by the authors for the 630 boys who attend Presbyterian Day School (PDS) in Memphis, Tennessee.

Q&A with Braxton Brady Co-Author of Flight Plan

Q: What is Flight Plan, the book?

A: Flight Plan offers boys and young men a definition and vision of manhood that can help them to make wise choices during their teenage years and beyond. It frankly and authentically discusses a number of issues they will face and teaches boys a definition of manhood (“A real man glorifies God by seeking an adventuresome life of purpose and passion as he protects and serves others.”) and seven virtues of manhood. It focuses on the question of what it means to be a man and includes in depth teaching on many of the changes, challenges, and temptations they will be facing as teenagers.

Q: Flight Plan is co-written by you and your colleague, Lee Burns. What inspired you both to write this book?

A: Lee is the headmaster at Presbyterian Day School, an independent school for boys in Memphis, Tennessee. I am the chaplain. Together, we work with more than 600 boys at the school, and I personally teach about 250 of them. Candidly, we felt that dads were dropping the ball, whether because their other demands didn’t afford them meaningful time with their children, or they just didn’t know how. So we created Building Boys, Making Men, a year long curriculum and class for boys at PDS. And the response has been great. Over the years, we’ve had requests from parents, churches, and youth pastors to expand the program beyond PDS. Flight Plan was our response to these requests and our way of sharing what PDS has learned about boys and men over the years.

Q: For whom was Flight Plan written?

A: The Building Boys, Making Men program at PDS was created by me and Lee for sixth grade boys. Drawing on a collective 60 years of research and experience with teaching boys, we felt that was the critical age when they start to be faced with many of the decisions that will go on to define the kind of men they become. At the time we were writing this, my son was twelve. As I was writing I kept him in mind, conscious of what he would relate to, how he would like to be communicated to, and what would resonate with him and also keep him engaged.

Q: Do you think pre-teen and teenage boys are facing different challenges than perhaps their parents faced?

A: Boys have many outside influences that we didn’t have growing up. Today, everything is a click away. They have easy access to everything. Parents think that they can protect their children and create a bubble around them. But when boys get to a certain age, that becomes impossible.

Q: Do parents face greater challenges today in bringing up boys than perhaps your parents faced?

A: One of the greatest challenges I think parents face today is that boys and girls don’t know how to have face-to-face conversations. They live in a virtual reality world. I read a statistic that teenagers send 100 text messages a day! It’s so critical to have a relationship with your children, for fathers to have relationships with their sons, to communicate, and to create quality face-to-face, in-person time together without the distraction of phone calls or texting.

Q: In your experience with teaching boys, what are some of the strongest influences that define who they become?

A: Certainly boys today are bombarded by messages from television, movies, video games, and music. But one of the strongest influences boys face is from their friends and peer pressure. Who they choose as their friends then becomes critical in defining the framework for the life they will create. How to choose good friends, how to identify positive influences is one of the key issues we address in Flight Plan. We also speak candidly and openly about the messages in media. For example, we deal honestly with sex and tell them that most everything they learn about sex from television and movies is not the way it really is.

Q: In Flight Plan you focus candidly on eight areas that boys will face. What are those areas where you think they will be challenged?

A: We deal openly with key areas or issues of decision making boys will face as they become teenagers and even in the pre-teen years: friendship and peer pressure, drugs, drinking, girls and sex, and relationships with school and family. We discuss these issues frankly so that they can anticipate what is coming, then make wise choices in their teenage years and even beyond.

Q: The book talks also about what is not a man, taking readers through six myths about what a man is not before laying out a vision for what true manhood is. What are some of those myths?

A: Yes, in chapter two we first tackle one-by-one some of the common myths largely learned through our culture about what manhood is. First, that men don’t show emotion and then that men should define themselves by their outward achievements and successes. Others include that men should only pursue certain cool hobbies and interests, men must give up great adventures, boys and girls/men and women are really no different from one another, and lastly that you have to do certain things to become a man.

Q: How do you go about casting a vision or plan for what manhood should be?

A: Flight Plan teaches the definition of manhood, that a real man glorifies God by seeking an adventuresome life of purpose and passion as he protects and serves others. This definition of manhood, along with seven biblically-based virtues, serve as the foundation for a vision of godly manhood. We take readers through each virtue: the true friend, the humble hero, the servant leader, the moral motivator, the bold adventurer, the noble knight, and finally, the heart patient.

Q: What do you hope will be the takeaway for boys who read Flight Plan?

A: We know that these boys are about to take the journey of a lifetime. There will be forks in the road and they will have to make choices. Often there will be many others going down one path, though it may not be the right path. Lee and I created Flight Plan to shine a light on what will lie ahead in the journey so that, when faced with those choices, boys will know which way to go. Flight Plan is a map, and much like a map, if you keep in mind where you are headed, you are far more likely to get there. Our prayer for each reader of Flight Plan is that in knowing what it means to be a man, they will be far more likely to get there and arrive safely in a way that is rewarding. And really the issues, the virtues laid out in Flight Plan, are for men well into adulthood too. If these boys can stay on the right path in their teenage years, it will carry them long into their lives as adults.

Braxton Brady and Lee Burns are available for speaking engagements. For more information, contact Ellen Lewis of The Barnabas Agency (elewis@tbbmedia.com or 800-927-0517 x110).

Flight Plan: Your Mission to Become a Man by Lee Burns and Braxton Brady

PDS Publishing/November 2010/194 pages/ISBN 978-0-615-38061-2/$14.99

www.theflightplanbook.com ~ Watch an interview with Braxton Brady at www.vimeo.com/15998729.

Thank you to B & B Media Group for providing a copy of this book for review.

Hero's Tribute

2010-12-02T05:46:00.000-08:00

Hero's Tribute
by
Graham Garrison

MY THOUGHTS:

This is one of the best books I have ever read.

Graham has taken a fresh approach to eulogies -- having a reporter who knows only the 'buzz' around the town hero dig into the past to present the true picture of his life. Who is a person really? No one is who he or she seems. We are each a hero or villain to different people in our lives, but no one can see all aspects of us except God. What drives us to do what we do?

This book is easy to read, the characters are designed so the reader cares about them, and the story line is provocative. But if you let this book touch your heart, it will have you looking differently at the people you meet, and yourself, for the rest of your life.

You can buy a copy of the book on Amazon (but hurry -- as of today there are only two copies left!)

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Michael Gavin was a local hero, admired for his skill as a quarterback, his service in the military, and his work in the community. Stricken with cancer and on his death bed, Michael takes a leap of faith and entrusts his legacy to Wes Watkins, a reporter he’d never met, by asking him to deliver his eulogy.

Wes accepts this unconventional offer, hoping to at least get a good story out of the situation. A good story will draw the attention of big-city newspapers and get him out of his small-town sports beat. But as Wes digs deeper into Michael’s background, everything changes. Secrets come to light, and soon Wes sees the hometown hero as he really is. As Wes tries to find the words to describe Michael, he is also forced to examine his own life and decide what will define him.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Graham Garrison is the author of two published books – “Hero’s Tribute” and “Groomed: From Proposal To Vows, Wedding Planning And An Engagement From A Groom’s Point of View.” He is currently the managing editor for three magazines published by a healthcare communications company and is also a writer/editor for two other publications. He’s written for almost a half dozen newspapers and two dozen magazines, including America’s Civil War, Boating World, Georgia Physician and Repertoire.

Graham has lived in almost a dozen towns, five states (Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and Washington) and one army base (Fort Bragg, N.C.). He’s grown roots in Johns Creek, Ga., with his wife Katie, sons Nicholas and Nolan, and Baxter the Beagle. He and his family worship at Mount Pisgah United Methodist Church. He is a Florida Gator by birth, but a Georgia Bulldog by the grace of God.

AN INTERVIEW WITH GRAHAM:

What was your favorite book as a child?

As a kid I didn’t read all that much – was into sports and toys and comics. But I do remember getting into Indian in the Cupboard – reading all of those books in a pretty short period of time.

What values from your favorite childhood book do you see played out in your life today?

Well if anything it highlighted just how active of an imagination I have, and more importantly, to think of that as a strength and not a weakness. Indian in the Cupboard really preached empathy and understanding for others, considering their story, and hey – maybe that snuck into Hero’s Tribute!

Many people want to write a book. What drove you to go beyond that 'Gee, I think I could' stage and got you to the point of being a published author?

I had some advantages working for me. I got my start in newspapers, writing every day, and my full-time job now is editing for magazines. So I’m constantly writing/editing/reworking articles. Plus, it’s almost a sort of release to get the ideas down on paper, so they weren’t bugging me in the back of my mind.

Were there any surprises for you in the book writing/publishing process? If so, what were they?

Writing a book felt like building a house – then when you want to sell it, you have no idea if anyone would be interested. From start to finish it was a four-year journey. Patience was important. And after the book is published, it’s a whole new world of learning that you need to try and connect with potential readers, get your idea out there.

This book causes us to look beyond our impressions of others, good or bad, and try to understand a theme behind their actions. If someone were to write a eulogy of your life, what theme would he or she uncover?

I would hope it would be the ability to forgive, and understand my need for forgiveness. But that was something I wanted to address with the “stranger gives eulogy” twist – we can’t control what others think of us, so what would they see?

Last question -- maybe the toughest! What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

Double Fudge Chocolate Brownie. And if there was a triple fudge, I’d probably like that a little bit more.

You can read more about Graham at his website.

Finding the Light of Jesus

2010-11-29T05:22:00.000-08:00

Finding the Light of Jesus
by
Cindy Tuttle

MY THOUGHTS:

This book is written in two parts. The first half consists of specific chapters that compare the world's culture to the light and love of Jesus, helping the reader focus on the eternal truth instead of the temporary situation. Chapters begin with a prayer or devotion and end with a tangible action that truly moves the reader from a place of stagnation to taking steps closer to the the love of Christ.

The second half of the book is full of prayers, poems, and devotions designed to focus the reader on the big picture of God's love, reminding him that God is indeed in control despite the way it might feel in the midst of stress or crisis.

This book would be helpful for anyone who feels overwhelmed by life!

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Whether we deal with daily mild irritations like spilled milk, traffic jams, or extreme problems like the death of a loved one, divorce, or job loss, each of these events -- as well as those that fall in between these opposite ends of the scale -- cause anxiety, worry, and even ill physical health.

Finding the Light of Jesus provides reflections and revelations which allow us to step back from our problems, reflect on what is most important in the present moment, and rely on spiritual healing - the Light - to experience inner peace and calm in the midst of trouble.

You can purchase this book on Amazon and at Crosslink International.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
For more than twenty-five years, Cindy Tuttle has worked with adults having severe mental illness. She has served on the Mental Health Advisory Board and has twice been named as Advocate of the year in Mental Health for Sacramento County, California. She will coon appear in an HBO cable television documentary on mental health.

Cindy is an accomplished writer. Her work has been published in Eternal Inc., Keys of Living, and Whatever is Pure, Leaves, the Gem, Word A Flame, Christian Journal, Christian devotionals, Halo Magazine, Cola Bears and Sharing. Cindy's book Finding the LIght of Jesus will be released in November 2010 by CrossLink Publishing.

You can find out more about Cindy and her other publications at her website.

The Reluctant Entertainer

2010-09-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

The Reluctant Entertainer
by Sandy Coughlin

MY THOUGHTS

This is a beautiful book that is everything it promises --a true guide to simple and gracious hospitality. It is a hardcover book with glossy pages and gorgeous pictures that motivate you to get up and simply invite people in! Sandy doesn't pretend to be Martha Stewart and doesn't expect her readers to be, either. She is open and honest about her burnt piecrusts, uncooperative children, and grumpy days.

But by understanding our true motivations, laughing at our mistakes, and understanding when good enough is truly 'good enough', she shows us how to simply entertain in a way that makes others feel truly special.

Sandy goes several steps further, though, and provides amazingly simple and delicious recipes , LOTS of them, and tells us how to stock our pantries so we are always ready for drop in company. This is a book that won't be read once and then become a dust collector. I'll be using this book often as a reminder of how to simply love others, both in my home and outside of it, to show Christ's love in a hospitable way.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Real entertaining for real people.

Faced with feelings of inadequacy or unrealistic expectations, most women never experience the joy of inviting others into their homes. But no more. Speaking candidly about her entertaining highs and lows, popular blogger and author Sandy Coughlin offers apprehensive hostesses genuine encouragement and practical tips for simple yet savvy entertaining.

Hospitality is not about perfection or complicated, expensive meals. It's about connecting deeply with others--all you need is an open door and an open heart.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sandy Coughlin writes the inspiring blog Reluctant Entertainer and is a frequent contributor to Crosswalk.com. She loves blessing other people's lives by entertaining in her home. A busy mom of three, Sandy is active in various volunteer organizations. She's married to Paul, and their family practices hospitality in their hometown of Medford, Oregon.

It's No Secret

2010-09-24T08:41:00.000-07:00

Today's Wild Card author is:

Rachel Olsen

and the book:

It’s No Secret: Revealing Divine Truths Every Woman Should Know

David C. Cook; New edition (September 1, 2010)

***Special thanks to Karen Davis, Assistant Media Specialist, The B&B Media Groupfor sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rachel Olsen is a writer, editor, and speaker on staff with Proverbs 31 Ministries. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of their online devotions, “Encouragement for Today,” with a readership of more than 375,000. She also writes for and serves on the editorial board of the P31 Woman magazine. Olsen is a national women’s speaker who enjoys interacting with audiences at women’s retreats and conferences from coast to coast.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

List Price: $14.99
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: David C. Cook; New edition (September 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1434765377
ISBN-13: 978-1434765376

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:

Always RSVP

Revealing the Secret to Responding to God

Everyone has a story. Everyone chooses to ignore God, (re)define God, or search for God and respond to Him as He truly is. I’ve done all three.

When I was growing up, my family attended church in a brown brick building with stained-glass windows and bright red carpet. The sanctuary smelled faintly of wood. I’m surprised I remember the smell; we weren’t there often—a few times a year.

I don’t remember much about going to church other than feeling embarrassed by my mother’s singing. We rarely went, but each time we did Mom sat us front and center, and then she sang as loudly as she could. She sang with passion, but she couldn’t carry a tune with a U-Haul. Being from the South I’m required to follow that criticism with “bless her heart.” (So let it be noted here that I blessed my momma’s can’t-sing-a-lick heart.)26 It’s No Secret

I listened to the pastor’s sermons, but I didn’t understand much about the subject matter. From what I could gather, God was good and He didn’t do bad things. So I concluded that if I wanted God to like me I, too, needed to be good and not do anything bad. Being a proper Southern girl, I very much wanted God to like me.

I thought believing in God and trying to do the right thing was what church was all about. I didn’t realize that—because Jesus lived, died, and rose—I could have a dynamic relationship with the God of the universe and He would delight in empowering me to live well. Instead, I assumed it took willpower. Like a diet or a marathon.

Glimpses of Revelation

When I was twelve, my mother called me into her room and patted the edge of the bed. I sat down beside her. With an unsettled look on her face, she revealed she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. The room started to spin, splintering my carefree world within its centrifugal force.

She explained something about cells and masts. Then she braced me for the likelihood that the treatments would cause her hair to fall out. That did it. I ran from the room crying inconsolably. My momma, sick, without her pretty auburn hair? It was too much for a tweenager to take in. I might have been only twelve at the time, but I understood the importance of big hair to Southern women.

During the months of cancer treatments that followed we went to church more often. About this time our church employed a new minister, and I really liked him. I understood more of his sermons, perhaps because I was desperate, or maybe because I was growing Always RSVP 27

up. All I know is I sensed something stirring in a dormant chamber of my heart.

I asked Mom to buy me a Bible; she did. I sat on the floor one Saturday, sunlight streaming through my window, and read through Genesis. (OK, I might have skimmed a little bit.) Then I skipped to the middle—because I’d never read a book this long—and read through Matthew, Mark, and part of Luke. Then I skipped to Revelation to find out how the book ended.

I don’t know if you’ve spent much time in Revelation, but it isn’t exactly light reading material. Challenging concepts make it difficult to grasp, especially for a clueless tween with no decoder ring. I closed the book, remembering the stories about Jesus. He lived doing good, which reconfirmed my notion that I had to be good and do good to make heaven’s invitation list. I’d finally made a Jesus-sighting, but I was still missing His point. I didn’t hear His message of mercy.

I set out to be and do good. I unloaded the dishwasher without being asked. I invited less-popular kids to sit at my lunch table. I even said “yes ma’am,” and “no sir” to my teachers. But inevitably something would happen to throw me off my good game. Someone would insult me, something would depress me, or some boy would pass a note my way.

After a year or so of mastectomy recovery and radiation treatments, my mother’s cancer went into remission. Things returned to normal around our home. Sadly, the preacher I liked so well left to pastor another church, and my interest in the things of God faded as my interest in the things of my peers grew. I didn’t give God much thought during my high school years, preferring to focus on fashion, sports, boys, and music.28 It’s No Secret

Halfway through my freshman year of college, my brother called to tell me Mom had again been diagnosed with cancer. This time, it was a brain tumor. His words sank into my own brain, creating a mass of stress and fret.

One night, I lay alone in my dorm room trying to sleep when I thought I saw Jesus standing in the corner. He didn’t say anything; He just looked at me, His arms extended toward me. He looked just as He did in the statues you see in old churches—long brown hair and white flowing robe. I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or hallucinating, but I decided it meant that my mom was going to be OK.

Turned out, the tumor was inoperable. The doctors resorted to chemotherapy and radiation, but I could tell they didn’t think it’d work. I spent my spring semester driving the two hours back and forth between college and home. By exam week I was sick with a sinus infection, probably stress-induced. I’d take an exam, drag myself back to my room and sleep, then stagger—coughing and sniffling—to the next test. At the end of the week, I lugged myself home.

Hope Deferred

That Sunday, Mother’s Day, I visited Mom at the cancer center, determined to keep a smile on my face and do my best to cheer her up. I didn’t want her worrying about me. I purchased a sweet card and wrote, “Thank you for being my mom.” When I arrived, the nurse told me I couldn’t enter her room because I was sick.

I still remember the sterile feeling of the cold, hard floor in the hall outside her room, where I sat and cried. But it’s Mother’s Day, my mind protested between sobs, but she’s dying anyway…. Even today, the memory stings my eyes with tears.Always RSVP 29

A few days later I was better, but Mom had worsened. She came home from the cancer center with hospice care. A couple days after that, she couldn’t respond to me beyond raising her eyebrows at the sound of my voice. Panic set in as I realized I was losing contact. She was sliding away, and I was powerless to stop the inevitable.

Later that evening, my dad and I went out to grab dinner, leaving Mom under my grandmother’s watch. As we returned, I spotted a police car parked out front—and I knew. I ran to the bedroom to find my beautiful, vibrant mom lying lifeless.

She was gone. I was seventeen.

That night my life passed before me. Not my history with my mom, but my future without her. Where my prospects once looked promisingly bright, I now saw a haze of uncertainty.

I cried on the shoulder of a family friend. Gasping for breath and wiping away tears, I questioned, “What will I do when it comes time to graduate and my mom isn’t there to pin on my cap and clap? Or when I set out on my own and I don’t have my mom to advise me? What happens when I get married, and have babies, and I don’t have a mom to help me?”

Placing her hands on my trembling shoulders, she stared into my moist eyes. “When those times come, Rachel, God will make sure you are taken care of.” She spoke the words with enough certainty that I resolved to believe her.

Filing that promise away in my heart, I held on to the hope that God would somehow become a mother to me. I had nothing else to cling to. My dad and brothers argued over Mom’s will, then went their separate ways. I didn’t just lose my mom; I lost my whole family that May.30 It’s No Secret

Coming Undone

In the fall I headed back to college, where I majored in journalism. I spent weekends trying to drown my sorrows at fraternity parties. I recall stumbling home one evening and walking into my closet, where I caught sight of one of my mom’s sweaters. My knees buckled beneath me as heavy sobs ensued. I realized the party life wasn’t fixing anything; it was an insufficient distraction. But I didn’t know how else to find relief.

My junior year I met a corduroy-clad young professor with uncommon wisdom and peace. He taught two of my classes, scheduled back-to-back. As the weather turned cool and leaves crunched underfoot, we’d walk across campus together from one class to the other. I learned he was a Christian. He felt like a safe place. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt that way around anybody.

I found myself telling him about my mom, my fractured family, and my uneasiness about the future. I asked him questions about his faith. He answered convincingly, and when the semester ended, he invited me to his church.

Inside that prefab metal building I witnessed vibrancy. Those people possessed hope, joy, and peace, all of which I coveted. I learned about Jesus and how His shed blood washes away my sin and unites me with God—even though I don’t deserve such kindness.

I discovered God doesn’t just want me to be good, He wants me to be in Him—hand in hand, heart to heart. I realized it isn’t just a matter of willpower and proper performance He’s after, but a growing relationship through which He’ll shoulder most of the burden to make me vibrant. Yahweh so desires that I bear His image, I learned, He will transform me into His likeness through His Spirit. He can Always RSVP 31

make the most tarnished Southern belle glorious. In fact, in Him my purpose is found and fulfilled. In coming to Him I’d become a daughter, a sister, a friend, and a bride. All in Him, and all to Him.

After attending church two Sundays, I responded to this divine truth. I walked to the front, acknowledged my need for Jesus, and handed Him the jumbled mess of my broken heart. I asked Him to forgive me, clear the haze, and untangle my knotted-up hopes and dreams.

Inside a priceless decoder ring, God inscribed my initials with an eternal beam of light. In the instant I responded to Christ’s call, I became a beloved daughter of the Most High God and a member of His Yahweh Sisterhood.

The Favor of a Reply Is Requested

You and I need a jeweler’s loupe of sorts to see the secrets Yahweh wants to reveal to us—indeed to see Yahweh Himself. Our basic eyesight needs some spiritual amplification. We need a divine ointment to anoint our eyes for the task.

Remember that Greek word musterion, meaning a sacred secret revealed by God? Its root word is muo, which means locked up or shut, as in eyes that are closed. In Revelation 3:17–18 Jesus told the people of the church at Laodicea that, although they didn’t realize it, they were spiritually blind. Their eyes were locked shut and could not see God. They were neither seeing nor responding. Jesus counseled them, “Buy from me … salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see” (v. 18 ESV). Jesus affords us the ability to see, hear, understand, and respond to God. Only Jesus can provide that divine salve we need.32 It’s No Secret

In Matthew 5, we find Jesus perched on the side of a mountain near the ancient city of Capernaum to preach. Massive crowds gathered to watch and hear what He had to say. Some in the crowd followed Jesus; they had already opened themselves to His teaching. Others desperately sought a miracle or healing. A few counted themselves Jesus’ enemies. Others showed up out of curiosity. They’d heard the rumors and came to decide for themselves if Jesus was a fake, a prophet, or a Savior.

Jesus gazed across the mountainside at the congregation of people. Many eyed Him skeptically, wondering if they would see something that proved a connection to God. He told them, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matt. 5:8 NIV). A pure heart; an authentic heart; a humble, believing heart open to Jesus’ teaching—that’s the currency that buys the salve to allow our eyes to see God. That’s what enables us to respond to God. Lacking it, many heard Jesus’ words without understanding Him or watched His moves without realizing they were staring into the face of Yahweh.

God’s gals understand that only Jesus can open the eyes of a woman’s heart, cleansing them pure enough to see and respond to Yahweh. Jesus says in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.” Did you catch the secret Jesus reveals here? He said He’s the only way to God, the full embodiment of truth, and the only source of vibrant, lasting life. Jesus is the way we want to go, the truth we need to know, and the eternal life that we crave. You just can’t get to God without going through Jesus. Jesus is our way to God, and God’s way to us.

Jesus is who God wants us to respond to.Always RSVP 33

All religions do not lead to heaven, despite popular opinion (John 3:3). God is wise beyond wise and has a purpose for everything He does, and He designed salvation in such a way that believing in God is not sufficient. We must also believe in His Son, who ushers us to Yahweh and shows us how to live His way.

So our membership in the Yahweh Sisterhood—our becoming a daughter of God—happens at Christ’s invitation to follow Him. You cannot buy, earn, or bluff your way in. You must be invited—and you have been. God’s own hand addressed your invitation some two thousand years ago, at the desk of the cross, on the parchment of Christ’s body, in the ink of His blood.

Have you RSVP’d?

A year of high school French enables me to inform you RSVP stands for “répondez s’il vous plaît.” It means “please respond” … don’t put it off … don’t wait and see … say you’ll join me!

If you’ve never responded to Jesus’ invitation to come to God through Him, now is the time. Don’t wait for tomorrow. Don’t put it off until you get your act together—RSVP right now through prayer. Receive the gift of forgiveness offered through Jesus, and ask God to take charge of your life and future. Receive your divine decoder ring. Tomorrow may be too late. Be Jesus’ guest today.

Guest List

In Jesus’ day, a person throwing a soiree sent out servants to issue invitations to the guests and gather their responses. Invitations noted the day of the gathering but not the hour. The hour depended on when everything was ready. 34 It’s No Secret

Once everything was ready on party day, servants again went out to call in the guests. Those who’d said they’d come were expected to be dressed, ready, and waiting that day. When the servant knocked on their door, they were to head immediately for the banquet room.

This scenario mirrors what happens in the spiritual realm. God sent His Son and Servant Jesus to issue our invitation on the cross. Those who accept are born anew spiritually—then expected and empowered to live in such a way that they are ready for the day Jesus will return, calling us to God’s heavenly banqueting table.

Though we don’t know the day or the hour, we will be ushered to a great wedding feast, the marriage banquet for Jesus and His bride. Jesus’ bride is the church, meaning you and me—all who have RSVP’d to His invitation.

I read about this feast in the book of Revelation that day in my room. What I couldn’t grasp fully back then now sets my heart aflutter in a way that nothing else can. I am loved, chosen, adopted, prepared, and betrothed—to the King of Glory. You are too! The wildest thing about this Yahweh Sisterhood? We’re all engaged to the same Man—Jesus—yet no one seems to mind.

You and I must RSVP and ready ourselves for our heavenly wedding day. The rest of the divine secrets in this book will purify and prepare us to take our Groom’s hand as He replaces our decoder ring with a wedding band. I don’t want to miss it. Nor do I want to get there and find myself underdressed and unprepared.

Understanding and responding to the twelve divine secrets that follow—internalizing and enacting them—will keep us dressed Always RSVP 35

and ready for the future party. While simply responding to the cross secures our seat at the grand banqueting table, keeping these secrets assures us that our heavenly Groom will look on us with utter delight.

My fellow belles, have you saved the date? Because a wedding feast looms on the celestial calendar. It’s part of your story. And savvy Yahweh Sisters are always dressed and ready for a party!

A Garden Wedding

Twenty days after I graduated college, I had my own wedding feast. I married that young professor, Southern style, in a garden surrounded by azalea bushes in full bloom, three-hundred-year-old oaks dripping with Spanish moss, and swans swimming on the lake behind. It was gorgeous.

God not only adopted this lonely girl into His heavenly family, He placed me into Rick’s earthly family. He presented me with three sisters-in-law and countless Sisters-in-Christ. I learned the truthful relevance of Psalm 68; it became the story of my life:

Sing praises to God and to his name!Sing loud praises to him who rides the clouds.His name is the LORD—rejoice in his presence!

Father to the fatherless, defender of widows—this is God, whose dwelling is holy.

God places the lonely in families;he sets the prisoners free and gives them joy. (Ps. 68:4–6) 36 It’s No Secret

He’s a Father to the fatherless, and I can testify He’s a mother to the motherless as well. God has guided me, protected me, comforted me, taught me, and provided for me. He also untangled my hopes and fears and brought me the joyful desires of my heart.

So now you’ll find me in church each week, singing praises to Yahweh and His great name. Oh, and I sing rather quietly when I praise Him in public. It’s not that I’m not extremely thankful—I am. It’s not that I don’t like to sing—I do. And it has nothing to do with embarrassing memories from my church past in that brown brick building with the red carpet.

Truth is, I sing every stinkin’ bit as off-key as my momma did.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone. Sisters stick together, right?

But you can go ahead and bless my heart over that vocal deficit. I need all the help I can get.

BIBLE STUDY

1. Check out this parable Jesus told about a man throwing a feast:

A man sitting at the table with Jesus exclaimed, “What a blessing it will be to attend a banquet in the Kingdom of God!”

Jesus replied with this illustration: “A man prepared a great feast and sent out many invitations. When all was ready, Always RSVP 37

he sent his servant around to notify the guests that it was time for them to come. But they all began making excuses. One said he had just bought a field and wanted to inspect it, so he asked to be excused. Another said he had just bought five pair of oxen and wanted to try them out. Another had just been married, so he said he couldn’t come.

“The servant returned and told his master what they had said. His master was angry and said, ‘Go quickly into the streets and alleys of the city and invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.’ After the servant had done this, he reported, ‘There is still room for more.’ So his master said, ‘Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full. For none of those I invited first will get even the smallest taste of what I had prepared for them.’” (Luke 14:15–24)

What struck you when the people in Jesus’ story made excuses for not being prepared to attend? List the things that preoccupied them.38 It’s No Secret

What excuses do you make for not responding to Christ, or not living “dressed and ready”?

2. Read about the coming wedding feast in Revelation 19:6–10. What does it say about the bride (you) and her wedding dress?

3. Next time you throw a bash at your plantation, Jesus offers this advice for planning the guest list:

Then he turned to his host. “When you put on a luncheon or a banquet,” he said, “don’t invite your friends, brothers, relatives, and rich neighbors. For they will invite you back, and that will be your only reward. Instead, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Then at the resurrection of the righteous, God will reward you for inviting those who could not repay you.” (Luke 14:12–14)

That’s precisely what God did when He created the Yahweh Sisterhood. He sent out invitations welcoming every one of us to His supper club. The glass slipper fits each gal here. Everyone gets the rose. The King of Glory doesn’t require Always RSVP 39

designer gowns or shiny black limos for us to dine with Him. What a relief!

In the space below, write a thank-you note to your King.

Dear Jesus,

_____________________________________________

Leading From the Lion's Den

2010-09-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

Today's Wild Card author is:

Tom Harper

and the book:

Leading from the Lion’s Den: Leadership Principles from Every Book of the Bible

B&H Books (September 1, 2010)

***Special thanks to Blythe Daniel of The Blythe Daniel Agency, Inc. for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tom Harper is president of the online church leadership community Church Central as well as Net World Alliance, a leading business-to-business media communications company. He lives with his wife and children in Louisville, Kentucky.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

List Price: $12.99
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: B&H Books (September 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805444424
ISBN-13: 978-0805444421

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:

Introduction:
Lionhearted Leaders

A king’s rage is like a lion’s roar;
but his favor is like dew on the grass.

—Proverbs 19:12

All successful leaders are lion tamers. Over time they learn how to calm the roaring beasts, and in those rare instances when a pride attacks or a big cat goes berserk, they find a way to survive.

Have you ever found yourself suddenly surrounded by carnivorous critics, competitors, or coworkers materializing from the bushes? Perhaps a snide remark in a meeting or a biting e-mail ruined your day.

This book is a leadership manual on how to deal with the lions in your life, and how to successfully lead in this unpredictable world. When people don’t say what they mean and things aren’t what they seem, we have to rely on leadership principles that never change.

In these pages, you will discover sixty-six powerful leadership concepts from every book of the Bible. The ancient Scriptures speak of conflict management, motivation, planning, psychology, persuasion, passion, relationship-building, training, and sacrifice—a myriad of skills every leader needs in his or her toolbox.

These biblical leadership techniques have worked for thousands of years—but sadly, many leaders ignore them today. Maybe that’s because they’re not quick roads to power, fame, or wealth. Instead, they lead to a life well lived, to true success. And to less pain along the way.

If you master them, you will master your lions.

Lion imagery appears everywhere in the Bible. Even the Lord says of Himself, “He will roar like a lion. When He roars, His children will come trembling from the west” (Hos. 11:10). Jesus is called the lion of the tribe of Judah. He said, “Don’t assume that I came to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt. 10:34).

As leaders, we must become like lions ourselves—roaring when necessary, feared by our followers, yet calm and gentle in the heat of the day. And when our people fall into their own lions’ dens, we need to go in and get them out.

The Gems in This Book

Over the past few years, I’ve read each book of the Bible in search of fresh lessons for leaders. This has led me to some amazing discoveries.

For example, I thought the twelve books of the Minor Prophets primarily contained prophetic messages of doom. Little did I know they held secrets to motivating people, turning our careers around, business planning, fighting superior force, and customer research.

When I got to the Gospels, I didn’t think I’d find anything new there, either. I thought everything about Jesus’ leadership tactics had been written. But fresh insights emerged: Matthew demonstrated how to connect with my people the way Jesus did. Luke taught how to discover someone’s true character with three tests. In John, I found three tactics to raise my leadership profile among my peers and followers.

I’ve sought to discover the freshest, most pertinent leadership lesson in every book. When strung together, these sixty-six concepts reveal a meta-narrative about how to lead people. While human research and wisdom are fallible and change depending on time and culture, a plethora of modern research supports the Bible’s forty authors, who themselves were separated by centuries and cultures.

I don’t pretend to have found every divine leadership principle. Many didn’t make it into my manuscript, since the goal was to choose only one from each book. Doubtless some of them won’t be new to you and others will go against the advice of well-known authors. You’ll find many more if you do your own digging.

Perhaps the most significant revelation I found was echoed by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “All of my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.”

The Conclusion of History

Throughout the millennia, non-Christian writers have offered valuable wisdom, like Sun Tzu in The Art of War, the famous sixth-century BC Chinese treatise on battlefield prowess. Many modern military institutions require their students to read it. Though it’s one of the oldest known books on military strategy, thousands of leaders have successfully applied it to the tech-accelerated marketplace of today.

The Bible, of course, is even more ancient. It has provided guidance and wisdom for countless leaders throughout history:1

Robert E. Lee—“In all my perplexities and distresses, the Bible has never failed to give me light and strength.”

Theodore Roosevelt—“A thorough understanding of the Bible is better than a college education.”

Woodrow Wilson—“I am sorry for men who do not read the Bible every day. I wonder why they deprive themselves of the strength and pleasure.”

Abraham Lincoln—“I believe the Bible is the best gift God has ever given to man.”

Napoleon Bonaparte—“The Bible is no mere book, but it’s a living creature with a power that conquers all who oppose it.”

George Washington—“It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”

Andrew Jackson—“That Book is the rock on which our Republic rests.”

Sir Isaac Newton—“I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by men who were inspired. I study the Bible daily.”

Charles Dickens—“The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.”

Well-known marketplace leaders like S. Truett Cathy, founder and CEO of Chick-fil-A, and David Novak, CEO of Yum! and author of The Education of an Accidental CEO (Crown Business, 2007), build their lives and work on a biblical foundation. Author Zig Ziglar credits the Bible with making him who he is today. Ditto John Maxwell, the prolific leadership guru, author of more than thirty books, and former pastor. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great (HarperCollins), found that his so-called “level 5 leader” matched the description of Jesus Christ.

Whatever your vocation, whether you teach, manage, protect, heal, serve the elderly, volunteer, pilot a plane, clean, compete, coach, preach, or parent, it is my hope that the concepts throughout this book will hone your leadership skills and help you find true success in work and life.

And the next time you find yourself in a lion’s den, may the sharpest teeth be your own.

1

Spark Creativity One Brain at a Time—Genesis

“Creativity is to think more efficiently.”

—Pierre Reverdy, French poet

W

hen I was a kid, a man who worked with my dad called him the most creative businessman he’d ever known. But Dad could barely draw a stick man. Though he never professed or demonstrated what I considered creativity, he had a knack for artfully solving business and people problems.

Most people don’t think their abilities resemble creativity, either. But I’ve seen a financial executive present bland financial data in the form of a compelling story. I’ve watched in awe as a sales exec adjusted his language to lead a prospect from arms-folded resistance to acceptance.

What does creativity mean to you? Many people think artistry. Others think innovation. Still others go a level deeper. Alberto Alessi, CEO of the Alessi product design firm, said, “We consider our core activity to be mediating between, on one side, the best possible expressions of product design from all over the world and, on the other side, the final customer’s dreams.”2 Another example of creative innovation is NineSigma.com, which connects companies with inventors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and students through an online match-making service. These ad hoc teams create groundbreaking new products and solutions. Many organizations foster creative teamwork through collaborative instant messaging, chat windows, discussion boards, and project groups.

Though online cooperation might appear to be a new kind of brainstorming, it’s actually based on an ancient model of creativity. The concept is simple: the best creative thinking is done when individuals have a chance to think before they collaborate. Not everyone thinks well in groups. Especially introverts like me. We need time to cogitate and organize our thoughts before verbalizing them.

The original act of divine creativity in Genesis was executed by one mind (notwithstanding the Trinity). God didn’t wait to ask us what we wanted. His vision was clear. Later, humans had their chance to invent and originate, but not until the Lord had completed His foundational work.

Throughout the Bible, as you will see, God and His handpicked people model different aspects of leadership. In Genesis, He also models the perfect work and rest ethic. Why shouldn’t He be our model for creativity, too?

We can infer from God’s method of creativity that teams shouldn’t necessarily be exalted over individuals. For example, when most executives are faced with significant problems, they resort to group brainstorming sessions. The problem with these, say social researchers, is brainstorming in a group setting rarely enhances the quantity or quality of ideas. One reason is the fear of peer evaluation. Plus, listening to other ideas can cause us to forget our own. Sometimes people simply don’t have enough time to think of anything.

Another reason group creativity doesn’t work is “social loafing,” when some in the group go silent because they think their contributions aren’t valued, or because they can’t compete with the bolder group members. As a result, the quieter people’s ideas go unspoken. A simple solution is to collect everyone’s thoughts before the meeting, freeing them to think without distractions, anxiety, or time constraints. The leader collects the ideas and e-mails the anonymous list to the group. After refinement, the team meets in person to expand or combine the top-voted ideas.

When you need a creative solution, remember the Genesis model. First analyze the issue without group influence. You’ll then be able to lead your team through the creative process at maximum efficiency, with all the best ideas on the table. If you rally the troops too early for collaborative thinking, too many dysfunctional dynamics and distractions will neuter the creativity, especially with larger groups.

You as the leader are the genesis of creativity in your organization. By encouraging individual thought among your people, groupthink will never have a chance to birth mediocrity.

Leadership Principle #1 (Genesis)

Creative leaders coax the best thinking out of individuals before calling a brainstorming session to combine the minds.

“In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth.” (Gen. 1:1)

Nudge

2010-08-20T15:15:00.000-07:00

Today's Wild Card author is:

Leonard Sweet

and the book:

Nudge

David C. Cook; New edition (August 1, 2010)

***Special thanks to Audra Jennings, Senior Media Specialist, The B&B Media Group for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Currently the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew University, Madison, NJ, and a Visiting Distinguished Professor at George Fox University, Portland, Oregon, Leonard Sweet has been Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Theological School at Drew University for five years. Author of more than two hundred articles, over twelve hundred published sermons, and dozens of books, Sweet is the primary contributor (along with his wife Karen Elizabeth Rennie) to the web-based preaching resource sermons.com. Sweet has held distinguished lectureships at various colleges, universities, and seminaries and has presented academic papers before major professional societies. The founder and president of SpiritVenture Ministries, Sweet is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences, state conventions, pastors’ schools, and retreats.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

List Price: $19.99
Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: David C. Cook; New edition (August 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1434764745
ISBN-13: 978-1434764744

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:

PAY ATTENTION:

EVERY BUSH IS BURNING

Pay attention.1

—Jesus

Brace yourself. This book is set to revolutionize your understanding of evangelism. Revolution—from the Latin revolvere—means “a fundamental change.” This revolution stands to shake the very roots of your faith, rattle the range of your mission, and roll the very limits of your freedom.

Wait a minute, you say! There’s a lot about me in that paragraph; I thought evangelism is about reaching out to others.

Remember “a fundamental change.” I think evangelism changes me as much as anybody.

A friar returned to his monastery after an Ignatian thirty-day retreat. Over granola the next morning, he was interrogated by a grumpy old member of the community who complained, “We’ve been working like slaves while you’ve been swanning around doing nothing! And look at you! You don’t look any different.”

“You’re quite right, I probably don’t,” was the reply. “But you do.”

Jesus’ last words in the gospel of Luke are these: “Go out and proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins.”2 But a biblical understanding of repentance is not red-faced anger at other people’s sins but red-faced embarrassment at my own brokenness and complicity in the evils and injustices of the world. Proclaiming repentance is as much about reminding me of my waywardness as it is about setting other people straight.

When I am engaging with people of other religious faiths, I find myself unable to commit to their conclusions or agree with their assessments. Yet at the same time I come away encouraged by the spiritual truths found in their traditions, thrilled by new insights into my own faith, and more passionate than ever about being a disciple of Jesus. The truth is illuminated and elongated in my mind, and my presuppositions and myopic perspectives are challenged and corrected in the process. Anything less would not be a conversation and would imply that truth is a proposition and not Christ.

To be a real agent of God, to connect with the neighbor … each

of us needs to know the truth about himself or herself.3

—Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams

I believe the lifeblood of evangelism is not propositions, but prepositions. For God to do something through us, God must be doing something in us. If we are not always evangelizing ourselves, we have no business evangelizing others. In fact, it is usually as God’s grace courses through us to someone else that we become aware of God’s love in and for us. Evangelism is an invitation for broken people together to meet the Christ who loves broken people. We all are damaged but loved, crushed but cherished, with a divine embrace. When love is the motivation for evangelism, nudging is love in action. And the cracks in our broken vases are where Jesus leaks out first.

Evangelism Jesus-style

I define evangelism as “nudge” and evangelists as “nudgers.” Evangelism is awakening each other to the God who is already there. Evangelism is nudging people to pay attention to the mission of God in their lives and to the necessity of responding to that initiative in ways that birth new realities and the new birth.

God only asks that we do what we do best, which is nudge; God takes it from there. The nudging act—the human contact, the meeting of eyes, the sharing of space, the entanglement of words, the sense of bodily interaction—is to the soul what blood is to the body. Without nudging, the body cannot reproduce.

Every person who crosses your threshold today is ripe for nudging. A nudge happens in proximity. Even the nudges across the Internet or by phone take place in a proximity of relationships. The integrity of a nudge requires that it be welcomed and that it be reciprocal. The purpose of a nudge is to manifest Christ in a moment of mutual knowing, which benefits both the person being nudged and the nudger. Nudging is not best driven by fear or by some need within the nudger. Nudges are not contrived but are the natural consequence of being with someone in a moment and wishing them to join you in recognizing a God-moment. The best nudges culminate in a grunt of mutual recognition. God nudges me because God likes me. I nudge others because I like them. There is an implied caring that comes with nudging.

So there you have it. Nudge—gently pushing people off their seats more than it is sitting people down or driving them to their knees. Nudging is more about sowing than reaping. To be clear, nudging encompasses the full range of gardening—from dropping a tiny seed into the ground, to loosening the dirt, watering, weeding, fertilizing, protecting from predators, picking the fruit, and even helping, in Jesus’ words, “the birds of the air … nest under its shade.”4 But every encounter is aimed not to “bring in the sheaves.” Nudging aims to bring people less to a decision than to an impression: not just to an hour of decision but a lifetime impression of God’s presence and the nearness of God’s kingdom. In fact, isn’t this the essence of sanctified living: to make our whole life a Un Oui Vivant,5 a “Living Yes” to the living Christ?

This is exactly the opposite of ignoring the need for a decision. Rather, it is respecting and reverencing the process, if one looks back on it, by which each of us came to that place of decision. When an impression leads to a decision, it’s “Hallelujah!” (or in my preferred way of stating it, “Javalujah!”) time. But the ultimate answer to that question “Who do you say that I am?” is best forthcoming from another question: “What’s up?” Or when translated theologically, “What’s the I AM up to in your life?” We find the living One in the midst of living.

Images exist not to be believed but to be interrogated.6

—Andy Grundberg

Don McCullin is a British photojournalist who specializes in capturing images of the downtrodden and forgotten and making these moments of forsakenness universal. McCullin is also one of the greatest war photographers of all time. He says this about the role of a professional photographer: “If you take one good picture a year for each year of your career, you are doing well.”7

If, for every year of your life, one person honestly relates that God nudged them through you, and that your nudge had kingdom significance to them, you are a master evangelist; well done! Of course, we ought always to be hoping and praying for what I call these ushering nudges. Always be closing. Even with a gentle nudge, or a God-wink nudge, always be closing in prayer and desire. But remember that every Jesus nudge, whether it leads someone to an altaring moment or not, is part of an answer to a two-thousand-year-old prayer in Matthew 9:38: a prayer Jesus prayed and taught his disciples to pray, when he asked the “Lord of the Harvest” to send out workers for the harvest. Sometimes a nudge will lead to conversion, but most often it will lead to a conversation, a confession, a connection, maybe a germination, but always a blessing.

Businesspeople who become entrepreneurs often learn the hard way that constantly chasing home runs will exhaust and bankrupt them. Good business strategists live on base hits. They are ready for a homer should it present itself but are not drawn into the delusive and elusive hunt for the home run. Evangelism is like that; too much emphasis on an evangelistic home run from a nudge is not only unlikely, but also prone to being motivated by impure and selfish motives.

Evangelists always nudge. They travel the Emmaus and Jericho Roads as often as the Damascus and Roman Roads.8 They end up praying, “God is great, God is good” as often as “The Sinner’s Prayer.”9 Their words when spoken are not so much “You are lost in sin” as “You belong to God.” Their attitude is less “Look at what you’re doing! What are you thinking?” than “Look at what God is already doing in you!” Nudgers give attendance more than they take attendance or count attendance. They less tuck people in than rustle them out of their sleeping quarters to awaken to more interesting, more humorous, more unique ways of being. Nudgers leave more tracks than tracts.

All your words were one word: Wakeup.10

—Spanish poet Antonio Machado referencing Jesus

Nudging is more about dialogue than monologue, more Facebooking than blogging. Acts of evangelism intentionally scooch and shimmy people in the direction of truth without the need for knee-bending, beat-my-back altar calls.11 Evangelists nudge the Jesus in people to sit up and take notice. Evangelists are nudgers, not shovers. Whereas evangelism has been known to violate others’ dignity,12 which I call the reproach approach,13 nudgers are not smudgers of the divine in people.

For the past century, evangelism has been built on this one question:

“If you died today, do you know without any doubt that you would wake up in heaven?”

This is supposedly an updating of the evangelism of the eighteenth-century Wesleyan revival, which was mistakenly seen to have been built around:

“Do you desire to escape from the wrath that is to come?”

For the twenty-first century, evangelism will be built on nudges that have more to do with life before death than death and the afterlife, that focus more on the love of Christ than the wrath of God, that worry less about dying than about never having lived.14 Some parts of the church have been slow to speak against the turn-burn evangelism of WOGS (Wrath of God Syndrome), which my friend Vern Hyndman calls “the bad news about the good news.” James chapter 3 is quite clear here: This should not be so. If truth be told, love has always been paramount. In the definitive Wesley hymnbook, of the 525 hymns, only 1 is about hell.15

If you came alive today, would you think you had died and gone to heaven?

If you were offered to live forever, would you want to?

If you really woke up today, could you catch up to what God was doing in your life?

Why the focus more on life than death? The basic biblical distinction is not between “mind” and “matter” or “soul” and “body” but between “spirit” and “flesh.” In one of the most helpful insights into recovering the mind of the Bible I have ever read, Cambridge theologian Nicholas Lash reminds us that when the Bible talks about living systems, it distinguishes “between things coming alive, and things crumbling into dust; between not-life, or life-gone-wrong, and life: true life, real life, God’s life and all creation’s life in God.” That’s why the metaphor of wind, or the breath of life, is so important. Only the breath of God can neutralize the closed system of death, also known as the second law of thermodynamics, with the open system of life and the theodynamics of grace.

Whether sent forth from God, breathing all creatures into being, renewing the Earth and filling it with good things; whether whispering gently to Elijah, or making “the oaks to whirl, and [stripping] the forests bare”; or breathing peace on the disciples for the forgiveness of sins—it is one wind, one spirit, which “blows where it wills and we do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” To confess God as Spirit is to tell the story of the world as something, from its beginning to ends end, given to come alive.16

Evangelists nudge people to life. Evangelists nudge people to take deep breaths. Evangelists blow breath into people. I often wonder how the literary career of French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre might have been different if he had been nudged at a time when his faith was trying to take root. But I will let him speak for himself:

I have just related the story of a missed vocation. I needed God. He was given to me. I received Him without realizing that I was seeking Him. Failing to take root in my heart, He vegetated in me for a while then He died. Whenever anyone speaks to me about Him today, I say, with the amusement of an old beau who meets a former belle: “Fifty years ago, had it not been for that misunderstanding, that mistake, the accident that separated us, there might have been something between us.”17

Life and death are sometimes in the power of the nudge.

“Nudge evangelism” is based on the following three revolutionary notions (okay, some not so much “revolutionary” as hibernating—but when these “notions” cease logging zzz’s, they will have revolutionary consequences). We will explore these more in depth a little later. But let’s lay them out in full now:

Jesus is alive and active in our world.

Followers of Jesus “know” Jesus well enough to recognize where he is alive and moving in our day.

Evangelists nudge the world to wake up to the alive and acting Jesus and nudge others in the ways God is alive and moving (I call these nudges “small saves”).

I was late to nudging. MSN Messenger first introduced the nudge decades ago, but it was not until I entered the Twitterverse in late 2008 and Facebook in 2009, that I was introduced to the “nudge” and “poke.” The nudge has now even achieved elevated status in the leadership literature with a book by a Harvard law professor and a University of Chicago economist who argue that nudges are a form of “libertarian paternalism” designed to alter “people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”18 In their opinion a nudge is not coercive, but cajoling.19

Even though I hold the E. Stanley Jones Chair of Evangelism at Drew University, I waited to write up my perspectives on evangelism until I had finished two other projects on “default systems.” It’s amazing the unintended messages we send, and defaults are some of the biggest “unintended” nudges in existence. Humans tend to live on autopilot, both as persons and as communities, which is why worshippers tend to sit in the same pew, and students in the same seat.

I am reminded of the mightiness of that default setting every time I approach a toll plaza on the New Jersey turnpike. A lane’s white lines are like the strings of a corset, keeping the car in that configuration even though it would be faster and easier to turn the wheel, cross the line, and get in another lane. There may be twenty cars ahead of you in your lane, but you will sit where you are, ignoring the toll booths with only two or three cars in waiting, because of that mighty default setting.

If we don’t set the correct defaults to faith, our evangelism will be full of sound and fury, but futile. Hence my books on the default interface that connects with a Google world (the EPIC interface)20 and the default operating system that God designed for life and the church (the MRI default).21 We often forget that Satan is an evangelist too. The forces of darkness want nothing more than to recruit people to the ethics of evil and the aesthetics of hell. And the pandemics of terrorism, ritualized violence, environmental degradation, and genocide attest to the success the enemy has had in writing a powerful counternarrative. As Alfred the butler (Michael Caine) says to Batman in The Dark Knight (2008) as they struggle to understand the psychology of the Joker: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” And judging from the seventy million people killed in the twentieth century, the bloodiest century in history, Satan may have been the most successful evangelist of the twentieth century.

Nudges are inevitable. We nudge even when we don’t know it. For example, whenever someone says “most people,” they are nudging you in the direction of conformity. And they don’t even know they are nudging you. Conformism is one of life’s (and evil’s) biggest nudges.

Evangelism as we know it hasn’t worked. Either evangelism is so aggressive you want to get a restraining order, or else evangelism is so restrained you want to call it to order. Our strategies have been spectacularly useless at best, counterproductive at worst. We have lived through an exodus, but not of the biblical kind.

God-guarantees

It’s time to fundamentally change this approach: nudge. Nudge is built on five God-guarantees:

Every person you notice, every person you brush up against, is a child of God, a Jesus-in-you noticer.

Every brush is a bush.

Every best is a blest.

Every worst is a juncture for grace.

Every noticer needs a nudge.

What does this mean?

Human beings are created in the image of God.

God is already present in that person’s life in the form of some burning bush.

The best things about that person are blessings from God.

The worst things about that person are arenas for God’s redemption.

People are hungry for encouragement and love and need help noticing the presence of the divine in their lives.

Nudge Trudge

Faith coaches and spiritual directors are God’s A Team nudgers. They make a life’s work of carefully and skillfully nudging those who trust them. And these wise and loving mentors have a saying:

Tell them: and if they can’t understand,

Show them: and if they can’t see it,

Do it to them.

There are three forms of nudges that increasingly demand more creativity

from the nudger. These forms become more intimate and loving to the

nudge as they progress.

The trudge formula for nudge evangelism is simple: Start small; scale fast; and live, Jesus, live! Nudge is encapsulated in Jesus’ first postresurrection directive: “Go quickly and tell …”22 To “go” is to move forward and do something, however modest: “Start small.” To be “quick” is to use momentum to “scale fast.” To “tell” is to lift up the name of Jesus, tell the good news that everyone has the potential to become a different kind of person, and with our ancestors, “speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.”

A brick wall is … essentially

an aggregation of small effects.23

—Alec Clifton-Taylor

1. Start Small

Nudging is made up of small things, but it is no small thing. Small inputs can have massive consequences. It is less that “everything matters” than that small things matter everywhere. No moment is too small, no person is too small, to gently steer and move people down life paths and away from death valleys. Nudgers encourage first steps, small steps, and are open to the surprise of giant leaps forward.

One of the most distinguishing features of Jesus’ teaching was precisely in this notion that from tiny beginnings God’s reign grows. The ancient Hebrews compared God’s workings to the monstrous cedars of Lebanon and wings of eagles. Jesus loves looking at mustard seeds, grains of wheat, leftover crumbs, and barnyard hens. He invites us to look around at our fields, our gardens, our orchards, our vineyards, our backyards. Jesus is not against large but invites us to start small and do little large. “Little is much if God is in it.”24

It would be hard to overestimate the tremendous power you have to influence the direction of people’s lives, even when that person is a stranger. Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously pronounced that we should “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world, indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”25 The world has been changed by one word here, one story there, metaphors above and over all. It is not just that “a word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.”26 A nudge here, a nudge there are like baskets of blessings that pop out just when you need them the most to give life a burst.

In the animal kingdom, the bigger the brain, the smaller the face. We big-brained people do not know our face, who we are, and how severely we have been defaced from our original divine design. In the words of William Golding, whose book Lord of the Flies (1954) was inspired by his wartime experiences, anyone who could not see that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head.”27 In small, everyday ways, evangelists nudge out of others their original human face and what God is doing to summon them to become new human beings called to renew human society. The more I discover what I am, the more miserable I get; the more I discover who God is and who God made me, the happier I become.

In the Jesus kingdom, the bigger the brain in your head, the bigger the love in your heart. And that one-pound heart, made large with love and connected to a two-pound brain, made small by humility, can challenge the world to give peace and love a fighting chance.

To be sure, there is no path through life without detours. But detours, roundabouts, and imperfections, as the incarnation’s setting straight of our sidetracked humanity makes clear, are the paths used by the Spirit to take us home.

2. Scale Fast

Once you have learned the nudge on a small scale, you can leverage and reuse attentional strategies to expand evangelism across every aspect of your life and across your connections.

You know a nudge is providential when the person being nudged already knows they need that very nudge. A nudge is only of value if there is an “aha” moment that accompanies it. Jesus never did anything the Father had not already been doing, and the very instinct to nudge is predicated by a knowledge that God had somehow prepared this very event. The most powerful nudges are those that coax someone in directions they already know they should be going. When a nudger pours fuel at the right moment to a low-grade fire already burning in the heart and mind, the combustion is explosive and the conflagration is breathtaking.

In God nothing is empty of sense … so the conviction of a

transcendental meaning in all things seeks to formulate itself.28

—Dutch historian Johan Huizinga

To the ears of faith, we are never out of the range of God’s voice: every distress a call, every surprise a service, every relationship a blessing, every phone call a connection, every hesitation or doubt a direction. We respond to each of these, trusting that our small saves will make a saving difference even if we never know how it all plays out or how it all works in God’s scheme of things. Most often we never know “the rest of the story.”

But we don’t need to. What counts in evangelism is not cognition, but recognition. Can we identify the face of Christ when he shows it to us? What is our receptiveness to the Spirit, who appears in others and in one another? Are we able to decipher the playings of the Spirit in others’ lives? That’s enough. Jesus “appeared” to the Twelve, to Cephas, and to the five hundred; and Paul says, “He appeared to me.” Has he “appeared” to you? If he “appeared” to you, would you know it? Can you apprehend his appearing?

3. Live, Jesus, Live!

Do we have any faith “to speak of ”?

There comes a time when nudging means a no-beating-about-the-bush stepping forward to meet the other and tell it like it is, or in other words, to tell who Jesus is.

I call dropping the name of Jesus the “Nudge Bomb.” Yet even when we throw the bomb, the nudger seldom throws his or her voice. While slow to speak,29 we are always to be ready to give the “reason” for our high-hope living.30 Jeremiah’s confession about the futility of holding his breath is ours: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,’ his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary of holding it in; indeed, and I cannot.”31 Our nudges toward lives of freedom and communion and hope will require speaking the name of Jesus and inviting others to accept the liberation that comes with surrender, the communion that comes from submission.

One day a nudger asked a question of John Wesley: “Do you know Jesus Christ?” Even though Wesley was an Oxford don, a theologian, hymn writer, Christian author, and missionary to America, he realized that he really didn’t “know” Jesus Christ in all of these activities like he was being called to know him. What Wesley had been living out of was a Christian faith based more on rational defenses of the cold logic and coherence of the Apostles’ Creed or the Thirty-nine Articles rather than a personal experience of and a heart strangely warmed by the fires at the altar of Jesus the Christ.

Intimate spouses of fifty years know the nuances of their love, the snorts and grunts in sleep, what is normal and what is not. It’s what poet Galway Kinnell calls the “familiar touch of the long married.”32 Do we, after years of walking with Christ, know him and his familiar touch?

In all of our nudges, in all of our helping people see the God who is already at play in their lives, we must never forget that we ultimately do not offer others our skills, our wisdom, or our expertise. We offer others Christ and the Holy Spirit, the only powers that can create the new humanity. Or as the apostle Paul put it, “To me, to live is Christ.”33 Not acknowledging Christ when he appears is dereliction of discipleship.

As you walk down the stairs toward baggage claim at the Memphis Airport, there is a sign that greets you when you land on the ground floor. It is the motto of Graceland. The sign reads: “Discover Your Inner Elvis.” Nudgers help people discover their inner Jesus. Nudgers do that by lifting up Christ, not themselves, and trust Jesus to stir others to new life and new relationships.

Will someone mistake you for Jesus today?

Semiotics 101

For nudge evangelism to work, we must bring together two things seldom seen together: evangelism and semiotics. Since you now have some notion of what I mean by “evangelism,” let me say a word about the more unfamiliar term semiotics.

A teacher walks up to a chalkboard and writes “H2O.” H2O is an abstraction of water. You can’t drink it, be quenched by it, swim in it, or float on it. It’s a useful abstraction. Semiotics is an attempt to get our eyes off the chalkboard and into the real world. It is the art of making connections, linking disparate dots, seeing the relationships between apparently trifling matters, and turning them into metonymic moments.

Most important, semiotics is a Jesus word. In fact, Jesus instructed us to learn semiotics. It’s a direct order.

One of Jesus’ favorite sayings went something like “Red sky in morning, sailors take warning; red sky at night, sailors delight.” He then went on: “You know how to read the signs of the sky. You must also learn how to read the signs of the times.”34 The Greek word for signs is semeia (from which we get the word semiotics). We are directed by Jesus to learn how to read signs, to read “the handwriting on the wall.” God’s hand is still writing on walls today. Evangelists are people with red-sky-at-morning sensitivities.

Hence the yoking of evangelism and semiotics.

The world is ruled by signs, with money the most mastered semiotic system out there. We all do semiotics, whether we know it or not. Waiting on tables is a semiotic system, with every interaction an exchange of visual and verbal markers. At Le Peep restaurant in Peoria, Illinois, my waitress turned to her trainee and said, “See the crumpled-up napkin on his plate? That’s the universal sign of ‘I’m done.’ Take his plate away.”

Some things look easy until you try them (like juggling and jigsaws). Other things look hard until you try them (like semiotics).

Here’s an example. You’ve just purchased a new car. You drive your new car out of the dealership, and as soon as you hit the highway, something happens. The moment your rubber hits the road, something starts to happen. What is it?

You say, “Depreciation.” How true. You’ve just lost three thousand dollars, at minimum. I call the smell of a new car the most expensive cologne in the universe. Lasts about a month. You do the math: three thousand dollars divided by thirty days.… By the way, scientists now tell us that the smell of a new car is toxic.

But something else happens as well. You begin to see that car you just purchased everywhere. Am I right or what?

I don’t think people are now buying that car to copy you. Nothing has changed except one thing: Because of your investment in that car, you are now in a state of “semiotic awareness.”

And when people observe you and your car, they are also in a state of semiotic awareness whether they know it or not. In the land of semiotics, cars are driven less to get you somewhere and more to be seen and to be read. Cars are identity signals. They are signs of who we are or want to be.

We see what we choose to see, as artists have been telling us for centuries. Michelangelo is said to have remarked that he released David from the marble block he found him in. “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through,” confessed Jackson Pollock.35 Artists are simply people with high levels of semiotic awareness.

Most disciples of Jesus are not in a state of semiotic awareness. The church especially is not good at reading signs. Those who are preoccupied with reading signs are looking for one thing only: not signs of our times, but end-times signs, signs of the return of Christ … signs of the latter days and the end of days.

By reading the signs of the times, I am referring to the signs of the Spirit’s activity in the world. Jesus wept over Jerusalem because it could not read the signs: “You did not recognize the time of your visitation.”36 Nudgers are connectors of signs and channelers of their significance. Are you ready for signs? Are you able to read signs?

Nudge is an invitation to move beyond church-centric Christianity to a holistic, omnipresent theology of the signified reign of God. God is, Paul told the Athenians, “not far from any one of us.”37 If God can speak through a burning bush, through plagues of locust, through Balaam’s ass, through Babylon, through blood on doorposts, through Peter, through Judas, through Pilate’s jesting sign hung over the head of our Lord, and through the cross itself, then God can and will speak through art deco architecture, abstract expressionism, classic literature like Virgil’s Aeneid, ass media, disease, Disney, hunger, Twitter, etc. The question is never, “Is God using this?” Rather the question is, “What is my/our invitation upon hearing?”

God meets us everywhere, in a bewildering variety of forms and fashions. Eighteenth-century hymn writer Isaac Watts called John’s book of Revelation “the opera of the apocalypse.”38 We grow giddy over mystic numbers, signs and seals, heraldic beasts and composite beings, but what about the opera of the everyday? The ordinary and mundane? John Updike believed his only duty as a writer was “to describe reality as it had come … to give the mundane its beautiful due.”39 Updike was a brilliant semiotician.

Nudge argues for the triangulation of all three: Scripture, Culture, Spirit. But we walk a tonal tightrope: in touch with the world but in tune with the Spirit through highly pitched souls, with heightened sensitivities that connect to the Scriptures and then to the Spirit and then to the culture.

As we watch for the signs of your kingdom on earth,

we echo the song of the angels in heaven.40

—Eucharistic Prayer F, Common Worship

Why are we fascinated with the CBS network’s CSI franchise? We are transfixed by how investigators can “read” a crime scene. We read anthropologists’ works because they can “read” a culture. We read Dan Brown novels in record-bursting numbers (The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, The Lost Symbol) because of the power and mystique of symbology (the Hollywood name for semiotics) and our interest in the hidden forces at work in people’s lives and in our world.

The ultimate in social as well as spiritual illiteracy is the inability to read the handwriting on the wall. There are many forms of biblical, cultural, and spiritual illiteracy that go beyond not knowing the difference between Melchizedek and Methuselah, or between Dorothy Day and Dorothy Sayers … and Doris Day, for that matter. How many people have been waiting their entire lives for a message from God when they have been staring it in the face all along? How many people are deaf to the dog-whistle voice of the divine that only they are vibed to hear?41

Life without Landlines

To get into “Len’s Lair” (aka, my study), I bend down and step up at the same time, and then pass through a small corridor to enter a totally silent room. I switch on some lights, burn some candles, and wake my computer.

Suddenly, there it is: the world. I’m connected to the far reaches of the planet. On our little island I’ve picked up signals that were there all the time. I have the world at my fingertips. All I need is the right

apparatus, the right wireless card or radio or TV or whatever) that can “connect” me with what was always there but was invisible and unavailable until the receiver was activated.

Think of semiotics as a receiver. We live in an ocean of waves—radio, cell phone, wi-fi, infrared, cosmic. These waves not only surround us; they pass through us and can even penetrate walls. These waves will continue to remain invisible unless there is a receiver that can channel them into forms we can hear and see. That “make me a channel of blessing” stuff? Semiotic awareness at its best.

This book is your wireless card to pick up the signals of transcendence, the immanent transcendent, that are out there but not being downloaded. Semiotics is the art of finding channels and making connections. Evangelism as semiotics is the art of tuning our receivers to the “I AM” channel and setting the controls to receive and transmit transdimensional frequencies. This book is your compass in a world where the magnetic lines of the earth are invisible. These magnetic lines have always been there and are not dependent on our compass. But the compass becomes our means of making visible and interpreting what we cannot see.

Marius von Senden, reviewing every published case of blind people receiving sight over a three-hundred-year period in his classic book Space and Sight (1932), concluded that every newly sighted adult sooner or later comes to a motivation crisis—and that not every patient gets through it.42 There are plenty of people out there who are “seeing but not seeing.” Or to put it another way, too many Christians are walking blind through life when they don’t have to.

Our survival, individual and cultural, depends on our ability

to read and interpret ecologically what our man-made

environments are saying to us and doing to us.43

—Eric McLuhan

Throughout Scripture God uses sign language to communicate relationship: Noah and the rainbow,44 Abraham and circumcision,45 Moses and the Passover blood posts,46 Moses and the exodus cloud/fire pillars,47 Samson and his golden locks,48 shepherds and the manger,49 Jesus and the cross, and even Pilate’s jesting billboard hung over the head of Christ on the cross was a sign.50 The same sign can be different things to different people. The Passover was freedom to the Israelites and death to the Egyptians. The sign Pilate hung over Christ’s head was irony to Pilate, blasphemous to the Jewish religious leaders, and truth to all followers of Christ. The same sign, different meanings. In fact, when Jesus turned water into wine, or fed the five thousand, or raised Lazarus from the dead, Jesus didn’t think of what he was doing as a “miracle.” He thought of what he was doing as a sign.

God is still signing us. God’s finger is still writing. We may not be able to read the divine finger because we’ve got our fingers in our ears or are so fixated at the finger pointing to the moon that we can’t see beyond the fingertips. But God’s finger is busy writing in strange and sundry signs, designs, cosigns, and signals.

Everything that surrounds you can give you something.51

—Hungarian photographer André Kertész

I begin every day with what I call my “Bugs Bunny” ritual. Where Bugs Bunny chews his carrot and asks “What’s up, Doc?” I drink my coffee and ask, “What’s up, God?”

In fact, some sign readers are arguing that our very survival as a species depends on our ability to “read the signs.” Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2004), argues that the only common denominator behind all cases of collapse is not the destruction of the environment, as serious as that is. It is not economic collapse, as universal as that is. The one elementary but elemental factor in all civilizations that collapsed into extinction is the failure to read the handwriting on the wall, the failure to respond to warning signs. Every extinct culture hurled signs high into the heavens for all to see. But every collapsing culture failed to read and heed these flares.52

The Problem Is Not with Life

Sometimes my kids come to me and complain: “Daddy, I’m bored.” I tell them, “Sorry. You aren’t bored. You’re having a semiotic breakdown.” They then run to their mother, who rolls her eyes and comforts them with “Don’t worry. Your father is just having one of his semiotic spells. He’ll get over it.”

But I’m right.53 And I’m not going to get over it. When my kids are bored, the problem is not with life. Life is full of wonderful, exciting, and adventurous things. My kids don’t have life fatigue. The problem is not with life. The problem is with them. In a state of semiotic awareness, all of life is bathed in beauty and sacredness. When they get bored, they have entered a state of semiotic breakdown. The fact that many people live boring lives, the fact that many people make so little of their lives is not life’s fault. People are in a state of semiotic breakdown.

Semiotic breakdown is the disconnect from all that is and can be from perceived possibility. Semiotic breakdown has degrees. The lightest of these is simply missing the message and doing nothing in most cases. The most serious is seeing the signs, believing they mean something, but having the wrong interpretation and setting off in a destructive path. The advice of park rangers applies here: If you’re lost, stop. Call for help. Reorient yourself. Find true north. Suicide is the ultimate state of semiotic breakdown.

The world is so full of a number of things

I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.54

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Much of the problem with the church is precisely this. The “ole ship,” as Methodist cofounder Charles Wesley liked to call it, is in a state of semiotic breakdown. The church sees mysterious hieroglyphics all around, but because it cannot read the sign language, it fails to see that these are really Hieroglyphic of holiness.

Without doing our semiotic homework, Christians can only follow trends. We can’t create them. Faith widens the imagination and lengthens the horizons. So why is church so narrow in its imagination, so short in its scope of thinking? Why is the body of Christ not bursting with creativity, but a bastion of boredom?

It is in a state of semiotic breakdown. We are as clueless as to what the Spirit is up to as the critic who dismissed the Beatles when he first heard them as “strictly routine rhythm-and-blues.”55 One of the greatest examples of semiotics in the Scriptures is the story of the wise men, who were probably not “wise men” but Eastern magicians, sorcerers, or diviners (magoi).56 In the Greek New Testament magos means most often “interpreters of dreams” or “experts in astrology.” In other words, sign readers. These “magi” had the imagination to read the signals, register the early intelligence, and risk a long journey so that they got there first. Pagan semioticians got to Jesus before the holy and righteous.

If the inability to read signs is a surefire recipe for failure and extinction, the ability to read signs is now being defined as the key ingredient to success and leadership. Harvard Business School’s Leadership Initiative has spent years developing a “Great American Business Leaders” database. The project identified and analyzed the accomplishments of some 860 top executives in the twentieth century, and the results are being made known through the writings of two leadership professors: Anthony J. Mayo, the director of the Initiative, and Nitin Nohria, the new dean of Harvard Business School. In the work titled In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders of the 20th Century (2005),57 the coauthors distilled tons of data into three leadership archetypes: Mold-Makers, Mold-Breakers, and Mold-Takers (i.e., the entrepreneur, the charismatic, the manager). Whatever their style or “type,” however, there was one ingredient that all shared in common: an outsized “ability to read the forces that shaped the times in which they lived … and to seize on the resulting opportunities.”58

The coauthors call this key leadership trait “contextual intelligence.” In words that appear lifted from the biblical description of the tribe of Issachar (Israel’s resident semioticians, who “knew the times” and “knew what best to do”),59 Mayo and Nohria portray the century’s best leaders as people who understood the forces that defined their eras, and as people who “adapted their enterprises to best respond to those forces.” Both “knowing the times” and “knowing what to do” are what made them leaders: “Contextual intelligence is an underappreciated but all-encompassing differentiator between

success and failure.”60

The inability to read signs helps explain a great deal about the past, the present, and the future. For example, take the rise of Nazism. How did one of the most cultured and Christianized countries in the West succumb to the appeal of Hitler? How did the very culture that brought Christian arts and philosophy to their highest and most luminous levels become responsible for some of the most heinous atrocities in history? Its lack of attentiveness.

A few read the signs: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred Delp, Martin Niemoller, Joseph Ratzinger Sr., the policeman father of Pope Benedict XVI. But by and large the Christian church in Germany was as sign blind as the cousin of Winston Churchill, Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest- Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry (1878–1949), who after he met Hitler called him “a kindly man with a receding chin and an impressive face.”61

Or to take one more example: The problem with the Iraq war was not so much bad military intelligence, but deficient cultural intelligence. There was very little contextual intelligence of the political, religious, and social culture of Iraq and its diverse peoples (Kurds, Sunnis). A decades-old reliance on relational intelligence was abandoned for satellites that could read license plates from space. Unfortunately, they failed to read the nuances of the population. There is also very little contextual intelligence of the mediated world in which we live. War has a very healthy future, but the future of war is inescapably global and fought not in physical space but in informational space. This is what Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and even the middle-class Iraqi citizen Salam Pax and his “Baghdad Blog,”62 seemed to understand better than the United States.

Whether we know it or not, we all read signs. God is also a sign reader: The bow in the clouds is God’s sign, not to us but to God to remind God that there is a promise in place never again to destroy the earth with a flood.

You do semiotics all the time. In fact, every one of you is a master semiotician. You may not know it, but you are. And I’ll prove it to you one more time.

You can’t get a driver’s license until you learn your semiotics: You learn to read the signs of the road. In fact, you are given a test on your semiotic skills at reading road signs.

You can’t balance a checkbook until you learn your semiotics: You learn to read the signs of mathematics. You learn the sign language of math.

You can’t get a job until you learn your semiotics: You learn to read the signs of a language. You learn English or Spanish or Mandarin or Japanese. You can’t read anything until you learn your semiotics.

Semiotics is the art and science of paying attention. Since evangelism is also the art and science of paying attention, I will argue that evangelism is semiotics. There is another book to be written on the prophetic role of reading the signs or semiotics.63 Nudge argues that a semiotics evangelism is more pay attention than attract attention. The best evangelists are not the attention getters, but attention givers. Yet the most attentive semiotician is hopeless if the sign is read yet misinterpreted. Our quest is to be so filled with the Spirit of God, and to be wearing interpretive Jesus goggles, that we not only notice, but are able to interpret and respond.

Paying Attention

One of the earliest admonitions in life is this: “Pay attention.” One of the hardest things in the world to do is this: “Pay attention.” Nobody attends to attention. People teach us how to think, but not how to pay attention. But paying attention changes your brain, your being, your future. According to some scholars, the root lig in the word religion means “to pay attention.” If so, from its very definition, religion helps us learn to pay attention to people and to life.

Our poets and our artists have understood this better than our theologians. Poet John Ciardi defined human identity in precisely these terms: “We are what we do with our attention.”64 I call Mary Oliver the twentieth century Thoreau. Oliver says, “This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the so l exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.” 65 In a poem Oliver says, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. / I do know how to pay attention.”66 When poet Annie Dillard was asked by Life magazine “What is the meaning of life?” her response was very simple: “Pay attention so that creation need not play to an empty house.”67 “[God] asks nothing but attention,” wrote poet William Butler Yeats.68 Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes calls “extreme attention” the number-one “creative faculty.”69 In fact, Fuentes defines love as “attention. Paying attention to the other person. Opening oneself to attention.”70 “To understand something,” Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti has written, “you have to pay attention, you have to love, and when you love something, the very nature of love is discipline.”71

Prayer is properly not petition,

but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.72

—Iris Murdoch

Prayer is where the Christian tradition attends most often to paying attention. Sixteenth-century Spanish mystic/poet St. John of the Cross said that the heart of prayer is giving “loving attention to God” so that even “when the spiritual person cannot meditate, let him learn to be still in God, fixing his loving attention upon Him.”73 Iris Murdoch, an Irish novelist and philosopher, argued in a quote so rich it needs to be cited twice, “Prayer is properly not petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of love.”74 In her argument that prayer needs to become less a matter of what we say and more a matter of what we hear, the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil liked to say that “prayer is paying attention.”75 Prayer is not getting God to pay attention, but learning to pay attention ourselves to what God is doing. Semiotic praying is listening, listening to God speaking to us now.

I would want to argue with Murdoch and Weil somewhat and say that prayer is what happens when you pay attention fully, when you are at full attention, and your attention always gets God’s attention. Paying attention is a form of surrender. We are always surrendered and surrendering to something, but most of us live in the delusion we are in control. Surrender is a willingness to be open to possibilities we cannot imagine. Control suggests that if we can’t imagine it, it cannot be, and we set about to ensure it.

British novelist and Christian essayist Dorothy L. Sayers in a letter written during World War II expressed her conviction that “we have rather lost sight of the idea that Christianity is supposed to be an interpretation of the universe.”76 The church has done itself a disservice, she argued, by presenting Christianity not as a way of seeing all things but as one competing ideology among many. “Instead of leading us to see God in new and surprising places, it too often has led us to confine God inside our place.”77

There are a few in the theological world who have understood the importance of paying attention. “If I gave my attention to your handiwork, I should become your handiwork,” wrote the English theologian and biblical scholar Austin Farrer, echoing the prophetic vision of William Blake, who believed you become what you behold.78 Of anyone alive, however, British sociologist and theologian David Martin has cried the loudest and made the strongest case for the spiritual life being one of sign language. In words that led directly to the writing of this book, “I suggest we look at Christian faith as a code book for picking up signals of transcendence, and the question is how we are to pick up those signals and interpret the code?”79

But examples like these from the Christian world are exceptions that prove the rule. By and large, the Christian community has taken little notice of what it means to “take notice” and “pay heed.”

Not so for the advertising world, which has made paying attention a science. What is public relations but the business of getting noticed. Umberto Eco defines semiotics in this way: “Semiotics is in principle the

discipline studying everything that can be used in order to lie.”80

Tell someone that they can read the signs of the stock market and in that way become rich, and people will do it in a New York minute. Tell someone that they can read the signs of the Spirit and become spiritually rich, and they yawn and walk away. We are more prone to read signs of someone’s economic and social status than to read signs of the divine at play in people’s lives. We have become experts at reading surface appearances and wonder why the number of what appear to be divine disappearances increases. You cannot serve two Semeia.

But now ask the beasts, and let them teach you;

And the birds of the heavens, and let them tell you.

Or speak to the earth, and let it teach you;

And let the fish of the sea declare to you.

Who among all these does not know

That the hand of the Lord has done this,

In whose hand is the life of every living thing,

And the breath of all mankind?

—Job 12:7–10 NASB

We live in an attention-deficit culture more adept at gaining attention than at paying attention, furiously beating bushes that advance our interests while not paying attention to burning bushes that showcase God’s activities.

Joseph Nye Jr. of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government names the “paradox of plenty” as one of the characteristic features of postmodern culture. In his words, “A plenitude of information leads to a poverty of attention.… Those who can distinguish valuable signals from white noise gain power. Editors, filters, and cue givers become more in demand, and this is a source of power for those who can tell us where to focus our attention.” 81 If the future lies with those who can help people “focus attention” and “decode secrets,”82 then the greatest days for evangelism lie in the future. In a world where everyone suffers from attention-deficit disorder, evangelists are people with “Attention Surplus Disorder.”83

Whether attention is the highest goal of education, as some have argued,84 is another conversation. But paying attention is the highest form of opening to life and to God. Unarguably the greatest gift you can give another is your attention, partly because it gets us away from our attentiongetting “myness”85 and places us in a larger attention-giving “youness” and “thereness.” To pay attention means you are no longer the center of attention. Attention givers treat signs as subjects of multisensory study. Attention getters objectify themselves as the ultimate sign.

The greatest gift we can give God is our passionate attention, which as we have seen, is but another name for prayer. God pervades the world through the Spirit, but for most of us we live in a world without regard. The writer of Hebrews even goes so far as to suggest that the key to staying faithful and on track with the Spirit is our attentiveness. “Pay more careful attention … to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away.”86 “Drift away” is a nautical phrase that beautifully conveys how easy it is for us to stray and go adrift without the focusing of attentiveness.

Our inattentiveness to the world contrasts so sharply to Jesus’ attentiveness to all of creation. Jesus was a “dawn collector”87 who found God’s Spirit in all things, in all aspects of the natural world, both animate

(birds, animals, flowers, seeds) and inanimate (pots, coins), yet showed how we can experience God’s Spirit in ways that are beyond and “beneath language.”88

The moment one gives close attention to anything, even

a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome,

indescribably magnificent world in itself.89

—Henry Miller

Psalm 19 may very well be the greatest song in the Psalter and one of the most magnificent poems in all of literature. We have no evidence of Jesus ever citing it, but both the apostle Paul and John use it to reference Jesus and his mission.90 We shall return to this profound passage and its early elaboration of the connection between voice and vision, or what I call a “sound theology.” But for now let’s pay attention to its declaration of God’s universal disclosure:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day to day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language

where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.91

The world is not God, of course, but the incarnation goes all the way down, and the Spirit indwells all that exists. Nothing is without a witness to the divine; everything that exists praises the Creator. If

Christians are not the best at giving voice through art, poetry, and music to these unspoken voices, then something is wrong. We are living ADD lives.

Poet/critic Paul Mariani says it is our lack of imagination that has closed us to an awareness of God in the world.

If the incarnation has indeed occurred, as I believe it has, then the evidence of that central act in human history—when the creator took on our limitations with our bones and flesh—should have consequences that are reverberating down to our own moment—evidence of God’s immanent presence ought to be capable of breaking in on us each day the way air and light and sound do if only we know of what to look and listen for.92

This is part of our humanness: Homo sapiens are literally human knowers. And what are we to “know”? Know God, know each other, and know life. Since the days of cave dwellers, people have buried their

dead with what they would need in the afterlife. We have always known instinctively that there is more. Enter into a relationship with a poem, a painting, a musical composition, a sunrise, a snowflake, a flower—know skunk cabbages in January, crocuses in February, cymbidiums in March, harebells in April, poppies in May, irises in June, cowslips in July, pansies in August, marigolds in September, toadlilies in October, mums in November, dahlias in December. God’s creation is a revelation of divine presence. This is the genius of Christian theology: It radically reconfigures the human conception of the sacred. Nothing is inherently “profane.” It may be profaned by sin; but it is inherently an arena of divine activity and spiritual insight. The locus and focus of biblical theology is the world, not the heavens.

What is the grass?

I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrance designedly dropt,

Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners,

that we may see and remark, and say Whose?93

—Walt Whitman (1855)

Jesus expressed an earthy, semiotic theology by materializing his message through various media, including images, stories, actions (stilled storms, healed limbs), and objects like spit, fig trees, bursting baskets, etc. He was a master semiotician. You might even say that Jesus’ ministry was more a semiotics ministry than a preaching, teaching, or healing ministry. Instead of taking stands, Jesus took hikes during which he performed signs: like the coin with Caesar’s image stamped on it, or the overturned money

changers’ tables, or the water-into-wine at small-town Cana of Galilee. Significantly, Jesus’ “first sign” interceded not to sober up the party, but to make it more festive with 600 to 900 bonus bottles of vintage wine. Jesus’ public entry into Jerusalem was a masterful use of signs: a donkey, not a dressed-up horse, as you would expect of a king. The ultimate sign that reveals Jesus as the life-giving Sign? The raising of Lazarus.94

Jesus’ first postresurrection sermon is a sign. Jews raised their right hand to greet one another. The left hand was the dirty hand, the right the clean hand. When raised as a gesture of greeting, it showed that one was not carrying a weapon. Jesus greets his disciples with his right hand. To be sure, he has to walk through walls to get to them. But when he does, he raises his hands and reveals his real weapons: his wounds.

Jesus warns not to become dependent on these signs and rebukes those who get addicted to the signs.95 If you followed Jesus because of the signs he performed, that wasn’t all bad. But you had to move to something deeper. The ultimate sign was not a performing Messiah, but a participating people in the Messiah’s death and resurrection.96 The only sign that matters is a participation in the cross and resurrection. And those who follow Jesus without signs are more “blessed” than those who need the signs.97 Fix our eyes on God, the starter and finisher of our faith.98

“What do you mean?” they asked composer Robert Schumann. “I mean this,” he answered and played the piece again. “What do you mean?” they asked Jesus. “I mean this,” he replied; and he took the bread, gave thanks, broke it into fragments, and shared those broken pieces with his disciples. And that piece, and those broken pieces, have been shared in every conceivable setting and played in every known language ever since.

Faith is the gift of reading the signs of the presence of God. The point of reading signs is not the signs themselves, but the Signifier, Jesus the Christ. Jesus is not some floating signifier at the whim of our advertising campaigns or some magnetic personality. Jesus is the ultimate Sign (Semeion—note the

singular)99 of God. The church is a sign of the revelation that Christ is and was. Or as Karl Barth puts it, “The church exists … to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to the world’s own manner and which contradicts it in a way that is full of promise.”100 That is why the church will always be a sign that will be opposed.101 But as with all good signs, the church points away from itself and toward the triune God. Its message is not “Come to church” but “Come to Christ.”102

Nudge evangelism, or spreading the evangelion (“good news”), is announcing the good sign. I like how Bill Hull puts it: “If I am driving from Seattle to Los Angeles and see a sign that reads, ‘Los Angeles, 400 miles,’ I don’t pull over and sit under the sign. The sign points me to my goal. Signs of God’s manifest presence point me to Christ.”103

Walk with thy fellow-creatures: note the hush

And whispers amongst them. There’s not a spring,

Or leafe but hath his morning hymn. Each bush

And oak knows I am. Canst thou not sing?

…

Birds, beasts, all things

Adore him in their kinds.

Thus all is hurl’d

In sacred hymnes and order, the great chime

And symphony of nature.104

—Henry Vaughan

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

God posts all sorts of billboards and signposts on life’s highway. Human circumstances have divine meaning. This book is designed to help you pay attention to the variety of signs and signals God gives us about what God’s up to and what’s up ahead.

The concept of paying attention is related to the ancient notion of respect, which comes from the Latin respicere, meaning “take account” or “pay attention.” Key to this understanding of respect, however, is a form of observing that implies honoring. In the Latin meaning of respect, by paying attention, you value and honor what you are observing. When we don’t pay attention to what God is doing, we dishonor and devalue him. In everything we do, whether it be reading the Word, hiking in the woods, watching a movie, viewing a painting, we respect God when we ask ourselves this question: “What is God’s invitation here?” By not paying attention to life, we pay God no respect.

When we see all things in God, and refer all things to Him, we

read in common matters superior expressions of meaning.105

—Philosopher William James

That makes Christian semiotics more than awareness or attentiveness, however. That’s Zen semiotics. Christian semiotics enters into the connections between signs and people and God. In other words,

Christian semiotics is attention that leads to intention, attention that leads to transformation and remembrance. An attention that leads to remembrance is called a sacrament. The most sacred signs are called sacraments, and sacraments work through what they say; they impact what they symbolize. Sacraments are celebrations of our attentiveness and sign reading.106 The more attentive you are, the more you will recover as well as discover. The more attentive you are, the more you see Christ in every person and the sacramental nature of all of life.

The practice of evangelism is, in many ways, life itself—being a true human being. It is to pay attention to life and to God. Evangelism is sensational: helping people hear, see, taste, smell, and touch the creativity of God in their lives and the necessity of their response to God’s initiatives. Nudge evangelism is the decipherment of the workings of the Spirit in people’s lives and nudging them in those directions. Evangelism is bringing people into contact with Jesus, who is already there.

In Grandfather’s mind, there could be no separation between

awareness and tracking for they were one in the same thing.107

—Tom Brown Jr., Grandfather (1993)

One of the best-loved stories about Emily Dickinson, perhaps everyone’s favorite nineteenth-century poet, is the time her father rushed to ring the fire bell during dinnertime. The people of the village came running out of their homes, hugging napkins and silverware. “Where’s the fire?” everyone wanted to know.

Emily Dickinson’s father announced there was no fire. Just a beautiful sunset he didn’t want anyone to miss. Hence he rang the bell before it was too late and the sun went down.

The villagers returned to their dining tables, shaking their heads at “that crazy Dickinson man.”108 But should we all not be ringing bells at the beauty of creation? When’s the last time you rang the bell for burning bushes?

The church used to ring bells to call the community together and to announce the beauty of worship about to take place. Now we’re in the bells and whistles business. I shall never forget the first time I attended a Roman Catholic Mass and heard the sanctus bell ring during the “Holy, Holy, Holy” and the sacring bell rung three times at the elevation of the host. I came home and asked my mother what all that bell ringing was about.

She said, “It’s to tell you ‘Christ is alive,’ alive in the bread and wine.”

“But why a bell?” I persisted. Her reason for the bell scared me at the same time it sparked my imagination. As a liturgical explanation it turned out not to be accurate, but it turned me into a lifelong bell ringer. In olden times, she explained, they used to bury people with strings attached to bells above ground, so that if perchance they buried you alive, you could ring the bell when you woke up. When people above ground heard the bell ringing, they would know “He’s alive!” and immediately dig you out. My mother claimed that her grandmother knew someone who had been “saved by the bell.”

Evangelists are bell ringers. We spend our lives digging people out of self-dug graves and ringing bells that say, “Christ is alive; Jesus is real; God’s Spirit is active in your life.” To people buried alive, trapped in tombs and wrapped in grave cloths, we speak Jesus’ words to Lazarus: “Come out.” Even those who are walking zombies can learn to pay attention to God’s presence and movement. An old Methodist hymn says, “I can hear my Savior calling,” and our response is, “Where He leads me I will follow, I’ll go with Him, with Him all the way.”

I have freed a thousand slaves, but I could have freed a

thousand more if they knew they were slaves.109

—Underground railroader Harriet Tubman

At our home on Orcas Island, we like to feed the birds and hummers. This also attracts other less desirable wildlife like squirrels, ferrets, otters, and mice. But you can’t have one without the other. We also like to leave our doors to the deck open, which means that more than a couple of times a summer a bird or hummer will get trapped inside the house.

When this happens, the whole family mobilizes into action, for we know that if we don’t “help” it escape, it will die inside the house, and everyone knows this from personal discoveries of shriveled-up corpses found months later in the most unlikely of places. As soon as the bird or hummer sees one of us approach it, it will fly as fast as it can in the opposite direction, often smashing against a window or upending one of the colorful tumblers that attracted it inside in the first place. So another family member darts in that direction, nudging it from its place of hiding, only to have it fly even harder and faster to another part of the room, refusing to believe that it can’t escape on its own. But wherever it flees, one of us will be there to nudge it toward the open door.

It is not usually until the poor little bird is so exhausted from trying to escape and its body is so crushed and beaten from its fear of our nudges that it can be guided to freedom or cupped in our hands and released. For some birds liberation takes only a few nudges. For other birds more self-reliant or stubborn, it may take an hour and dozens of nudges.

Never once has one of these freed creatures U-turned in flight and bounded back to say thanks. But the Sweet family always feels pride and joy when we work together to nudge a trapped and doomed bird finally toward life and food. Without our lifting that creature in our arms through prodding and nudging and poking and holding, it would have remained trapped and helpless, its fears sentencing itself to death.

Conclusion

Jesus said that our hearts follow whatever we “treasure” or pay attention to.110 In fact, “Pay attention” may have been Jesus’ signature phrase. Every speaker has pet phrases that they use over and over again. Sometimes these phrases are fillers, giving the speaker time to organize what comes next; sometimes these phrases are feeders, pumping new energy and punctuation into the speech; sometimes they become verbal tics … you know? … you know what I mean?

Paul’s signature phrase was “Now!” Jesus’ signature phrase was something that no one really knows how to translate. The King James Version renders it “Verily, verily, I say unto thee!” The NIV translates it “I tell you the truth.” I really like that, because wherever Jesus went, there was truth. We cannot always give “the whole truth,” and sometimes “nothing but the truth” is unkind, but we can always tell “the truth.” Some contend that the most authentic twenty-first-century equivalent would be “Listen up!” I argue that today’s version would be this: “Pay attention.”

I have circled in my Bible every time Jesus says this phrase in the Gospels, and virtually every page is strewn with circles, sometimes five or six. It’s almost as if Jesus couldn’t tell a story or start a saying without reminding his hearers: “Pay attention.”

You are what you pay attention to. No attention, no life. Everything comes to life when you pay attention to it. In a world of inattentiveness, a world that goes largely unregarded, it is the special mission given to humans to bring the world to life. How do we save the world? How do we keep the

world alive? Through loving attention … by “tending and tilling,” naming and cherishing the tiniest part of what God has created.

I know that nothing has ever been real

Without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

And they come toward me, to meet and be met.111

—Rainer Rilke

Discover More Online

CHECK OUT INTERACTIVES FOR YOUR PERSONAL OR SMALL-GROUP USE AND MUCH MORE ON THE NUDGE WEB SITE: WWW.NUDGETHEBOOK.COM

Good Girls Don't Have to Dress Bad -- and CONTEST!

2010-08-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

Good Girls Don't Have to Dress Bad
by
Shari Braendel

I met Shari Braendel at a Proverbs 31 She Speaks conference. She was so down to earth, and she really wanted to help women look their best! I was excited to find that she has put years of fashion advice in a new book, called Good Girls Don't Have to Dress Bad.

This is a fabulous handbook for women of all ages. She addresses body type, best color schemes depending on skin tone and hair color, and the best hair and make up for your style. There are chapters on undergarments, the dreaded swimsuit and jeans, and designing a wardrobe that fits your style without breaking the bank.

Shari's writing style is so straightforward and friendly it is almost like having your own personal shopper who happens to be your best friend! This book would be a great gift for a college graduate and is just as helpful for someone who is hitting a 'milestone' birthday but doesn't want the world to know which one.

You can get a copy of this book at Amazon.

A QUICK INTERVIEW WITH SHARI:

Where did you get the idea for the book?
My speaking platform is fashion with a faith emphasis. I have been involved with the fashion industry longer than I’ve been a Christian so pulling the two topics together was a natural thing for me. I was compelled to write it because I found that Christians are hesitant to talk about outer beauty. I knew it was time to give Christian women permission to talk about this topic and get it out in the open.

What are the major themes of the book?
It is a guide for women to know exactly how to dress, how to make up their face, what eye frames, hairstyle, jeans, and swimsuit they should buy all based on their individual body shape and coloring. There’s even a shopping guide available that tells women exactly what style and brand of clothes to buy based on their budget and their clothing personality, which they identify in the book. Modesty is an overall theme, and understanding that you are beautiful EXACTLY the way you are, no matter your size, is a major theme throughout. It is also full of pictures with real women of all shapes and sizes and is a full color book for only $14.99 which I’m thrilled that Zondervan put so much effort into the book and kept the price affordable so anyone could afford it.

What kind of research did you have to do for the book?
Through my blog and speaking over the past several years, I found that most women are not raised with mothers who knew how to teach them to dress. So we’ve become a society of women who wear what the salespeople in the stores tells us to wear, and for the most part, most salespeople are uneducated in knowing about colors and body shapes for an individual. If black is in style, the salespeople insist it will work for you, even if it doesn’t. They just want to sell clothes, and you can’t blame them, because they haven’t been trained. This book will give a woman complete confidence in knowing what works for HER and even gives checklists as to what she should have in her closet. It’s an easy, do it yourself guide to knowing how to dress for YOU, not someone else.

What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
My prayer is that when a woman finishes this book, she will say, “Oh my goodness, I never knew it was this easy!” I hope she will look in the mirror and finally be convinced that she is beautiful exactly as she is and now has the knowledge and confidence to dress her beautiful self so she feels good every time she goes to her closet because she’ll know exactly what to wear for any occasion. Impulsive shopping nightmares will become a thing of the past because she’s armed with the knowledge from the book. That’s my prayer!

ABOUT THE BOOK:

In Good Girls Don’t Have to Dress Bad, Shari Braendel teaches you how to appreciate the body God gave you and how to always look your best-from conquering the battle of finding the right swimsuit, to choosing how many bangles you should wear or how big your purse should be, to wearing the right style jeans that will best flatter your thighs or hips, to finding the best places to shop to suit your unique personal style.

Many of us are watching reality TV shows to get a clue on how to dress right and look good. We hungrily purchase fashion magazines any time the cover article has something to do with how we can hide our despised body parts. We make mad dashes to the local department store to pick up the new anti-wrinkle cream Oprah promised will take ten years away from our face.

We care about how we look. Why is that? Because we’re women, and women love to look and feel good. God made us that way. And this is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a wonderful thing. God loves beauty. He doesn’t want us to reflect his image being sloppy, disheveled women of God who don’t pay any attention to what we look like.

Good Girls Don’t Have to Dress Bad will show you how to look and feel your best, no matter what day it is or what the occasion. And it will also stop you from screaming at the top of your lungs, “I have nothing to wear.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Shari Braendel is a sought-after speaker for Christian women’s retreats, conferences, and youth events all over the nation. A fabulous, fun, and refreshing fashionista, she regularly hosts workshops for women to help them appreciate their beauty, discover their natural assets, and learn what to wear so they can look and feel their best.

Learn more about Shari at http://www.sharibraendel.com.

CHECK OUT THIS COOL CONTEST!

Fashion Makeover Contest
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Complete and submit the entry form at www.FashionMeetsFaith.com, Shari Braendel FaceBook page, Zondervan FaceBook page, Zondervan Twitter account between August 9, 2010 at 9:00 a.m. (EST) and August 28, 2010 at 5:00 p.m (EST).

First Prize: One Winner will receive . . .
One $500 Visa gift card, one web camera, one-hour fashion consultation with Shari Braendel via Skype, one set of color swatches, and one autographed copy of Good Girls Don’t Have to Dress Bad. Approximate retail value: $600. The fashion consultation will be scheduled at a mutually convenient time for the winner and Ms. Braendel on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday between September 15 and November 15, 2010.

Second Prize: Three Winners will receive . . .
One $100 Visa gift card, one 30-minute fashion consultation with Shari Braendel via telephone, one set of color swatches, and one autographed copy of Good Girls Don’t Have to Dress Bad. Approximate retail value: $450. The fashion consultation will be scheduled at a mutually convenient time for the winner and Ms. Braendel on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday between September 15 and November 15, 2010.

Third Prize: Ten Winners will receive . . .
One autographed copy of Good Girls Don’t Have to Dress Bad. Approximate retail value $150.

For complete details, visit Shari’s website.

Thanks to Zondervan for providing a copy of this book for review.

The Malacca Conspiracy

2010-08-16T05:35:00.000-07:00

This week, the

Christian Fiction Blog Alliance

is introducing

Malacca ConspiracyZondervan (June 4, 2010)

byDon Brown

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

DON BROWN, a former U.S. Navy JAG Officer, is the author of Zondervan’s riveting NAVY JUSTICE SERIES. a dynamic storyline chronicling the life and adventures of JAG officer ZACK BREWER. In 2003, Don began writing Treason, his first novel in the NAVY JUSTICE SERIES.

Paying no homage to political correctness, DON BROWN’S writing style is described as “gripping,” casting an entertaining and educational spin on a wide-range of current issues, from radical Islamic infiltration of the military, to the explosive issue of gays in the military, to the modern day issues of presidential politics in the early 21st Century.

In November of 2009, four years after it was released, and in the wake of Fort Hood, TREASON rocketed to the top-selling in the nation on the Amazon.com bestseller list for fiction, and remained there for over a week. On Thanksgiving Day of 2009, all four of Don’s novels were ranked in the top 5 on the Amazon bestseller list for fiction!

DON BROWN graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1982, and after finishing law school, continued his post-graduate studies through the Naval War College, earning the Navy’s nonresident certificate in International Law.

During his five years on active duty in the Navy, Don served in the Pentagon, was published in the Naval Law Review, and was also a recipient of the Navy Achievement Medal, the Navy Commendation Medal, and the National Defense Service Medal.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A rogue Indonesian general and his army of terrorists attack oil tankers in the Strait of Malacca in order to profit from oil futures and buy nuclear weapons to establish an Islamic superpower.

Navy JAG officers Zack Brewer and Diane Colcernian race against the odds and a 24-hour deadline before nuclear attacks hit the United States. Departing from the sea of books barely better than soap opera romance and using the frantic pacing of suspense fiction, Brown glides flawlessly among global hotspots of terrorism--including the United States--and the book's principal settings in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

The President of the United States orders ships of the U.S. Seventh Fleet towards the Malacca Straits to reassert control over the sea lanes, but with time quickly ticking away, will they arrive in time for Zack and Diane to survive this dangerous and final high-stakes drama of life and death?

Chasing Superwoman

2010-08-10T18:53:00.000-07:00

Chasing Superwoman
by
Susan DiMickele

MY THOUGHTS:

This is an honest book full of the chaos of a working mom's life. Susan portrays the multiple roles she plays in day and the vague lines that divide them all with grace and a lot of humor. She shares the guilt, the joys, and the accomplishment that can be felt in each of the roles as they are juggled (and occasionally dropped) in the pursuit of becoming 'superwoman'. And she humbly admits that God must be in control of each portion of a working mom's life in order to make it work at all.

I was able to empathize with Susan as the book progressed -- although our career paths are different I have definitely been in the same situations she describes. This book will resonate with most working moms in professional roles and you will be able to laugh at her (and yourself) in many situations. It also provides a good look at 'the other side' if you are a stay at home mom who wants to understand what the life of a work outside the home mom is really like.

I would have liked the book better if Susan could have provided some tips for managing the hectic life of a working mom. I definitely appreciated her spaghetti sauce recipe at the end.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Susan DiMickele may be a partner in an international, prestigious law firm, but beneath her navy suit and around the corner from her legal office, she morphs into the mother of three young children. As legalese gives way to homework, bedtime stories, and sibling rivalry, the roles of Lady Lawyer and Devoted Mommy collide, offering a funny yet poignant look at the practical, ethical, and spiritual struggles faced by professional working moms. Chasing Superwoman: A Working Mom’s Adventures in Life and Faith provides a much needed dialogue about the complex lives of women who must live out a vibrant faith amid the unprecedented demands placed upon their daily lives.

Recognizing that there are no simple answers to merge these sometimes mutually exclusive roles, DiMickele seeks to provide an honest look at the spiritual struggles facing working mothers who are raising young children. She encourages women who balance these demanding dual positions to embrace their roles and trust God to provide strength and wisdom for their journeys. Examining issues ranging from school involvement and shopping excursions, to perpetual exhaustion and church involvement, DiMickele reassures working moms that God accepts them with grace, just as they are. She also encourages them with the knowledge that they are not alone and that God will provide teachable, faith-building moments amid their difficult daily challenges. DiMickele looks through the lens of events that shaped her own spiritual journey and captures many compelling, universal moments that any working mom will recognize.

Chasing Superwoman reflects the day-to-day realities of working mothers of school-age children as they struggle to teach their little ones to know and love God. Juggling a schedule that leaves precious little time to rest in or reflect on God’s promises, DiMickele recognizes that God is ultimately the One in control of her life as well as the lives of her children. As terrifying as it is to realize that no amount of organization will remove the stresses within the role of a working mom, it is reassuring to know that Superwoman is not the ultimate goal. Superwoman doesn’t need Jesus. DiMickele and the women who read her book not only need Him; they are buoyed above the demands of their daily lives by His grace alone and are able to reflect His love back into the lives of their children and co-workers.

You can read chapter one of Chasing Superwoman here.

Want to read more by and about Susan DiMickele? Check out her blog.

Thank you to David C. Cook for providing a copy of this book for review.

Life's Too Short to Miss the Big Picture

2010-06-17T19:16:00.000-07:00

About the Book:

(Brentwood, TN) – Do you ever feel like life is getting the best of you? Do you routinely question if this is really all there is? Do you wish you had more time and energy to focus on family, friends and other important, worthwhile ventures? Don’t miss the big picture—life ahead looks good!

Day-to-day life responsibilities, coupled with the ordinary consequences for each decision, create stress upon stress if we let it pile up. The world is crying for relief—for something more. Life coach and well-known author Steve Diggs’ latest release, Life’s Too Short to Miss the Big Picture, challenges readers to focus on making each day count for something important.

With seventy short Life Note chapters Diggs shares small dragon-slaying habits each reader can develop to see big long-term results. With chapter titles like “Eat Your Problems for Breakfast” and “Stop Petting Piranhas,” the author delivers single takeaway points with humor and honesty. Reading a Steve Diggs book is like having your own personal cheerleader. Each chapter is an energy bite filled with enough insight and nourishment to last the entire day.

About the Author:

Steve Diggs, Personal Finance & Life-Skills Coach, is the author of six books, hundreds of articles, and is a fixture on local and network television and radio. He speaks to enthusiastic audiences worldwide over 250 times yearly. Steve is proud to announce that Bonnie, his bride of 33 years, has just picked his option up for another two years. The couple lives in Brentwood, Tennessee. For more about Steve’s ministry, go to http://www.nodebtnosweat.com or www.SteveDiggs.com.

START SMALL IF YOU HAVE TO, BUT START

by Steve Diggs

As a habit, I don’t put bumper stickers on my car. It’s partially because they distract from the appearance of the car, but there’s actually another reason why my car is a sticker-free zone. Frankly, I don’t generally prefer to go around announcing all my political beliefs and preferences to a world that mostly doesn’t care—and when it does, can become hostile.

But what about those bumper stickers that tell the world that I’m a Christian? You know the ones. Sometimes they’re in the shape of a fish. Others make a proclamation of belief in Jesus as the Way to God. Why don’t I put those particular stickers on my car? After all, if I’m really serious about Jesus, don’t I want to be a walking, talking billboard? Isn’t life too short to miss such opportunities?

This is where it’s going to get a bit tougher, because this is going to force me to admit an embarrassing truth. I don’t put those bumper stickers on my car because I’m afraid I’ll do something that will destroy my witness. I’m afraid I’ll do more harm than good. What if I cut another driver off in traffic, or lose my temper and glare at someone? Do I really want the last thing they see as I pull away to be a sign advertising my allegiance to Jesus? It’s the same reason I don’t wear many “Jesus shirts.” I love and respect other Christians who attach the bumper stickers and wear the clothes—as long as they are 66 Life’s Too Short to Miss the Big Picture really representing Jesus. But as I say elsewhere in this book, Jesus gets some of his worst PR from professing Christians who don’t live their profession.

Recently I was working on a project with one of my dearest friends, Pat Boone. One thing about Pat—he’s not ashamed to proclaim his faith. As a matter of fact, he wears neck chains and rings with godly symbols all the time. One day as we were wrapping up some work in his den, Pat pulled out a ring and said, “Steve, I have a gift for you.” I wasn’t quite sure how to handle a guy giving me jewelry. But in a moment I saw what it was: a beautifully designed ring with a very large cross in the middle—just like the one Pat was wearing.

Ah, this was perfect for me! Not as bold as a bumper sticker or as bombastic as a tee-shirt—but at least it was something. It was a start. So I thanked Pat profusely and accepted the gift. As I put the ring on my pinky, I decided that this would be my first witness to the world, so I turned the cross outward.

Since that day, I’ve worn my cross ring 24/7. As a matter of fact, recently a young woman at a cash register noticed it when I paid my bill. Over the months I’d seen her on a number of occasions. I had always been amiable and friendly. She said, “I really like your ring.” I thanked her politely and walked on. Was she another Christian who had been encouraged by my ring? Was she a seeker who had run me through whatever litmus test she uses to assess whether Christians are real or fakes? I don’t know. But at least in that one particular case, I was able to smile in my heart as I walked away knowing that I had acted like Jesus would want me to act. I had not embarrassed my Master.

Now for you Christians who are much more mature than I am—those of you with fifteen “Jesus stickers” on your car, a gold cross chain around your neck, and an “I love Jesus” tee-shirt with Scripture verses on both front and back panels—my baby step probably sounds pretty pathetic. But for me it was a start.

Maybe it would do us all well to realize two things:

1. Life is too short not to be a walking, talking, living, breathing banner for Jesus.

2. Life is also too short not to walk the walk if we talk the talk.

Frankly, this is sort of exciting for me. Who knows, it may help me graduate to a bumper sticker—or even a tee-shirt.

Excerpt from Life's Too Short to Miss the Big Picture,

with permission from Leafwood Publishers.

Life, In Spite of Me

2010-05-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

Life, In Spite of Me -- Extraordinary Hope After a Fatal Choice
by
Kristen Anderson with Tricia Goyer

MY THOUGHTS:
Teens are often overwhelmed by life and are unable to see beyond the immediate pain in their lives. Kristen Anderson had suffered through the suicide of one friend, terminal illness of another, severe depression of her father, and rape. Life didn't seem to leave much room for hope, and the lonely whistle of an oncoming train seemed to offer an immediate way out. She settled onto the tracks and waited for the end.

By God's grace, the story doesn't end here -- He had bigger plans. Kristen's life was spared that night, although she lost her legs on the tracks. This book tells her story of struggle and recovery in a raw, unapologetic way. Kristen isn't asking for our pity and doesn't spend any time wallowing in her choices. She addresses her life, her failures, and her search for meaning in a head-on manner that causes the reader to do the same in his or her own life.

Why ARE we here? Why has God chosen to keep us in this world? What role are we to play? How can we truly find Him and His purpose for our lives?

Kristen and Tricia have done a fabulous job in writing this memoir. I was unable to put it down from the moment I opened the cover, which in itself is intriguing! I would highly recommend this book for all teenagers struggling with identity or lack of hope, and for all parents of teens. In addition, I'd recommend it for anyone who wonders what is going on in the minds of teens or who may be searching for hope themselves. Actually, anyone who is looking for a story that will leave them feeling that God IS in control after all will benefit from reading this book.

See a video trailer about this book here.

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Kristen Anderson thought she had the picture-perfect life until strokes of gray dimmed her outlook: three friends and her grandmother died within two years. Still reeling from these losses, she was raped by a friend she thought she could trust. She soon spiraled into a seemingly bottomless depression.

One January night, the seventeen-year-old decided she no longer wanted to deal with the emotional pain that smothered her. She lay down on a set of cold railroad tracks and waited for a freight train to send her to heaven…and peace.

But Kristen’s story doesn’t end there.

In Life, In Spite of Me this remarkably joyful young woman shares the miracle of her survival, the agonizing aftermath of her failed suicide attempt, and the hope that has completely transformed her life, giving her a powerful purpose for living.

Her gripping story of finding joy against all odds provides a vivid and unforgettable reminder that life is a gift to be treasured.

To download and read the first chapter of this book, go here.

This book was provided for review by the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group

When You Lose Someone You Love

2010-04-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

Today's Wild Card author is:

Richard Exley

and the book:

When You Lose Someone You Love: Comfort for Those Who Grieve

David C. Cook; New edition (October 1, 2009)

***Special thanks to Audra Jennings of The B&B Media Group for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Richard Exley is the author of twenty-nine books and has written both fiction and nonfiction. His articles have appeared in numerous magazines, including Leadership Journal, Charisma, Ministries Today, The Pentecostal Evangel, Advance, Enrichment, and New Man. He has served as senior pastor of churches in Colorado and Oklahoma, hosted several popular television and radio programs, including the nationally syndicated Straight from the Heart, and appeared on the 700 Club, Richard Roberts Live, Action Sixty, the former PTL, The New Jim Bakker Show, and The Harvest Show. Richard and his wife, Brenda Starr, spend their time in a secluded cabin overlooking picturesque Beaver Lake in Northwest Arkansas.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

List Price: $9.99
Paperback: 128 pages
Publisher: David C. Cook; New edition (October 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 143476480X
ISBN-13: 978-1434764805

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:

When Death Comes

The first letter

Dear David,

How often I think of the loss of your beloved and the anguished grief to which it gave birth. The initial moments have been indelibly imprinted upon my mind. I can still see you smiling bravely as you rose to greet me when I came to give what comfort I could. Somehow that brave smile was even more heartrending than the sobs that came later. Even in the moment of your loss, you still wanted to be the caregiver; you wanted to make my task easier.

In your grief, you said that you felt handicapped, that you had never had to deal with anything like this before. How right you are. Nothing in life really prepares us for the death of a loved one, especially if that death is totally unexpected. Although we know that people—even children—die every day, we never think it can happen in our family. And with good reason, for it has been estimated that the average person can go through a twenty-year period without being exposed to the death of a single relative or friend.

Still, sooner or later all of us are confronted with the inevitable. It may come unexpectedly. A phone call in the middle of the night notifies us of our brother’s sudden death. A uniformed police officer quietly informs us of a fatal car accident involving our son or daughter. Or it may come as the long-awaited blow at the end of a lengthy illness. However it happens, it is always painful and inevitably followed by grief and an almost overwhelming sense of loss.

I won’t pretend that I know entirely what you are feeling or that I can fully comprehend the depth of your grief. Nor will I pretend that I have all the answers to your tormenting questions. In truth, all I really have to share is my love and the painful lessons I have learned while dealing with my own grief and while helping others deal with theirs.

My first experience with death came when I was just nine years old. Mother was taken to the hospital sometime in the middle of the night, and Grandma Exley came to stay with my two brothers and me. For the next two and a half days, Mother struggled to give birth to her fourth child. She succeeded only after the doctors belatedly performed a cesarean section. I was too young to understand any of this, but I can remember the laughter and cheers when Grandma told us that we had a baby sister. In minutes we were announcing it to the neighborhood.

Sometime later, Dad came home and gathered us three boys around him. He was bowed with weariness and grief. With great difficulty, he told us the painful news. Yes, Mother had given birth to a daughter, our long-awaited sister, but things didn’t look good. The baby was hydrocephalic and wasn’t expected to

live. Even if she did live, she would never be normal.

Tears were running down Dad’s cheeks when he finished, and I seemed to be smothering. I couldn’t get my breath. I sat there numbly for a minute; then I burst off the couch and ran through the dining room and kitchen, choking on my sobs. I flung open the screen door, making a frightful racket, and stumbled down the back steps toward the garage.

For the better part of the next hour, I lay facedown on the dirt floor. Great heaving sobs convulsed my small frame, and it seemed like everything in the universe withdrew, leaving me alone with my pain. The dusty floor mingled with my tears, becoming mud, and I pounded my fists into the ground until I had no strength left. After a long while, my grief seemed to exhaust itself, leaving me with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I think I accepted Carolyn’s death that afternoon, but it wouldn’t become a reality until just before Christmas, three months later. The intervening weeks were filled with several crises. Once, Dad and Aunt Elsie rushed to the children’s hospital in Denver. When they arrived, Carolyn was critical,

at the point of death. The doctors were able to stabilize her condition, and after she had spent several days in the hospital, they brought her home for the last time. I vaguely remember Mother placing Carolyn in my lap as I sat in the armchair. She watched with a painful love as I fed my baby sister a few ounces of formula.

It seemed that each day brought some new disappointment. Soon we realized that Carolyn was both blind and deaf, and her head, larger than the rest of her tiny body at birth, became increasingly disproportionate. With a pain that still lingers, I remember watching Mother as she bathed Carolyn tenderly, then carefully measured her head to see if, by some miracle, it was any smaller. It never was. Mama would bite her lip, and silent tears ran down her cheeks as she put away the cloth tape measure.

Carolyn died in her sleep at home early one morning. Our family doctor and Aunt Elsie arrived at about the same time. He confirmed the death, and Aunt Elsie fixed breakfast, which no one ate. A short time later, the mortician came and took Carolyn’s tiny body away, and the gray December day passed in a maze of necessary activities.

The funeral service and the trip to the cemetery have been completely blocked from my memory, leaving me without a single detail. However, I do remember eating supper after the funeral. Grief rendered the food tasteless, but we ate anyway, mechanically, out of some misbegotten sense of obligation. We ate in the kitchen with one small lamp as the only light. It cast deep shadows around the table, shadows that matched the sorrow in our hearts. To this day, I have not had a sadder meal.

As a child, I was able to accept Carolyn’s death without affixing responsibility. It was enough to know that she was with Jesus, in heaven, where there is no more sickness or pain, no more sorrow or crying. By Christmas her death was already becoming a painful but fading memory.

The questions came later, after I became a pastor and found myself ministering to families in similar situations. Their desperate questions gave birth to my own: Was God to blame for Carolyn’s death? Did He kill her, or at least allow her to die? Questions like these drove me to my knees. Desperately I searched the Scriptures for understanding.

After months of painful agonizing, I concluded that sin, not God, is responsible for disease and death. That is not to say that Carolyn’s death was the result of her own personal sin, or even—God forbid—the sin of her parents. Rather, it means that sin has tainted the entire human race, and diseases and death are the inevitable consequences. Romans 5:12 (KJV) declares, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the

world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men.”

As I counsel those who question why humans must suffer, sometimes I simplistically explain that we inhabit a planet which is in rebellion, that we are part of a race living outside of God’s will, and that one consequence of that rebellion is sickness and death. God doesn’t send this plague upon people, nor does He will it. It is simply a natural consequence of humanity’s fallen state. Although as believers we

are new creations in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), we remain a part of this human family—a family that is tainted by sin and death. As a consequence, we, too, suffer the inevitable repercussions of that fallen state, even though we may be personally committed to the doing of God’s will and the coming of His kingdom.

In truth, the cause of sickness and death is not God but the hated enemy, sin. Not necessarily our personal sin, nor a specific sin—for life and death cannot be reduced to a mathematical equation—but the fact of sin.

Jesus addressed the relationship between personal sin and death in Luke 13:1–5: “Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you no!’”

Jesus does not tell us why these particular individuals died while others equally sinful were allowed to live, but He does make it clear that the reason for their deaths is far more complicated than mere cause and effect.

As you well know, David, when death strikes unexpectedly, we long for a reason, an explanation, but often there is none. In desperation we try to make some sense out of it, but often there are simply no pat answers, no ready conclusions. In times like these we must always resist the temptation to speak where God has not spoken. Beyond the simple explanation that death comes as a result of humanity’s sinful state, God has not given us any insight into the “why” of individual deaths.

In many ways, David, death remains a mystery, even to the Christian. Why is one child taken in infancy and not another? Why is a good man stricken in the prime of life, leaving behind a wife and children, while other vicious and cruel men live to a ripe old age? Why? Why? Why? The questions are almost endless, and I must admit that I am often without answers, but of this one thing I am sure—God is not to blame! In fact, when tragedy strikes, when a loved one dies, God’s heart is the first of all hearts to break!

In His comfort,

Richard

Lord Jesus, my grief is unspeakable; the pain never goes away day or night. I can’t sleep. It seems I watch the clock tick away the minutes all night long. I have no appetite, no interest in food. The tastiest meal is tasteless in my mouth. All the color has gone out of my world, leaving it bleak and barren. Worst of all are the tormenting questions. Why did this happen? Why didn’t You answer our prayers? Where are

You when I need You?

Yet even in the darkest night I cling to You. I trust Your love and wisdom even when I cannot understand

Your ways. In my heart of hearts, I know You are too wise to ever make a mistake and too loving to ever cause one of Your own needless pain. When I weep, I choose to believe that You are weeping with me. Knowing that You share my grief gives me comfort even if it doesn’t take away the pain. The promise of Your presence and the hope of eternal life give me the strength to go on. With Your help I truly believe that my mourning will one day be turned into dancing, and until that happens, I will trust You. In Your

holy name I pray. Amen.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or

danger or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. —Romans 8:35, 37–39

©2009 Cook Communications Ministries. When You Lose Someone You Love by Richard Exley. Used with permission. May not be further reproduced. All rights reserved.

Love Mercy

2010-04-16T06:10:00.000-07:00

Love Mercy
by
Lisa Samson and Ty Samson

Subtitled 'A Mother & Daughter's Journey from the American Dream to the Kingdom of God', this book is destined to be fertilizer, a seed, or precious water for any heart that desires to grow closer to Jesus. Depending on where you are in your walk with the Lord, Lisa and Ty's openness about their soul searching and hesitant steps following after Christ will meet you where you are and will challenge you to step out of your comfort zone.

When I picked this book up, I expected it to be just another story about a mission trip to Africa, maybe with a unique mother-daughter bonding experience. I was so wrong. This is a book about learning to obey God in every moment of life from the perspective of a mother and also from the perspective of her daughter. It is about living out the command of our Father to "act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" (Micah 6:8) in our pretty little suburban homes every morning when we wake up. It is really knowing who our neighbors are, and realizing that God loves everyone as much as he does those whom we are comfortable around.

Lisa and Ty have written a book that reveals their very hearts, shares their resistance to difficult teachings, bares their lack of understanding of unfair situations, and reveals their ever-growing trust in God. I pray this book will continue to haunt my soul so I may, too, move forward on this journey to the Kingdom of God for the rest of my life.

Please get a copy of this book from Amazon.com. I pray it sends us all on the journey God wants for our lives.

Learn more about Lisa at her website.

Find out what others thought about this book at these blogs:

Thank you, Zondervan, for providing a book for this review.

Power PraiseMoves DVD

2010-04-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

Today's Wild Card author is:

Laurette Willis

and the book:

Power PraiseMoves™ DVD

December 1, 2009

***Special thanks to David P. Bartlett - Print & Internet Publicist - Harvest House Publishers for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Laurette Willis, the founder of PraiseMoves®, is a Women’s Fitness Specialist and certified personal trainer, as well as a popular keynote speaker and an award-winning actor and playwright. She has produced the videos PraiseMoves™ and 20-Minute PraiseMoves™ and written BASIC Steps to Godly Fitness.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

List Price: $16.99
Actors: Laurette Willis
Directors: Josh Atkinson
Format: NTSC
Region: All Regions
Number of discs: 1
Studio: CT Videography
DVD Release Date: December 1, 2009
Run Time: 120 minutes
ASIN: 0736928456

AND NOW...A SAMPLE OF THE VIDEO:

Crave

2010-02-10T14:49:00.001-08:00

Today's Wild Card author is:

Chris Tomlinson

and the book:

Crave

Harvest House Publishers (January 1, 2010)

***Special thanks to Dave Bartlett of Harvest House Publishers for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Chris Tomlinson, a graduate from the U.S. Air Force Academy and the UCLA Anderson School of Business, is a businessman and writer who desires to see people realize the beauty and joy of knowing Jesus. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife, Anna.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

List Price: $13.99
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Harvest House Publishers (January 1, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0736926933
ISBN-13: 978-0736926935

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:

Habit:

Habits Are Good
Unless They Become Our Habit

I hate to floss.

I don’t think I’ve ever liked it. My parents must have taught me how to floss when I was a child—they are great parents. But I don’t remember them doing so.

I do remember learning how to ride a bicycle on our front lawn. I also remember learning how to water-ski behind our pontoon boat. I have some recollection of learning to snow ski down the tee boxes on the golf course near our house, and I can recall learning how to jump off a diving board wearing a super-cool green and purple Speedo. My memories of learning how to read, spell, and count are clear. And I think I remember learning how to brush my teeth and comb my hair. But I don’t remember learning how to floss.

Come to think of it, I had an abnormal relationship with my dentist, Dr. Avery. I knew him to be a man of the church, and he had an expansive grin, so I felt good around him, even though he wanted to stick drills and needles in my mouth. But his best attribute was his laughing gas machine. I really loved the man for it. Nobody in his right mind likes going to the dentist, but I did.

After most checkups, he strolled into the office lobby with me in tow, waded through the towering piles of Reader’s Digest and Southern Living toward my waiting mother, flashed his enormous smile, and said these beautiful words: “Chris has a cavity.”

I loved those four words. Joy welled up inside me when I heard them because I knew I would soon be back in that office, high as a kite on laughing gas, floating in the blissful euphoria of altered hues and offbeat sounds. That was my reward for failing to brush properly, and what a reward it was. I would return to my dentist with great anticipation, and after he finished filling my latest cavity, Dr. Avery would always give me a new toothbrush and tell me to be sure to floss. I would nod my head in superficial assent. I knew it was the right thing to do because he told me time after time and my mom told me time after time, but it just seemed so rewarding not to do it.

Maybe that is why I have never liked to floss.

As I got older, I noticed a lot of things in my life mirrored my reticence toward flossing. I don’t particularly like doing sit-ups or eating vegetables. I rarely clean my shower, and I’m almost certain I have never once dusted the leaves on my fake ficus tree. I know I should spend time each day in prayer and reading my Bible, but I don’t do that with any regularity. I can’t remember a sustained period of time in which I consistently thought of someone else first, and I don’t often look for opportunities to provide for those in need.

Finally, I believe I have the world’s greatest information—the gospel of Jesus Christ, a message of great news to everyone on earth, something so important that I should not rest or eat or drink anything until I have shared it with every one of those people. But I have only told a few people about it. I haven’t even covered my apartment building, much less my neighborhood, city, state, or country. And if my apartment building, neighborhood, city, state, and country are still unreached for Christ, maybe you haven’t told them about this gospel either. We would both acknowledge the primacy of sharing the gospel with the world, but it seems to occupy very little of our conversation.

All of this makes me wonder if we spend nearly all of our time bypassing opportunities to do the things we know we should be doing. I see evidence of this both in my spiritual walk and in the mundane duties of being a presentable human. And as I look at the lives around me, both inside and outside the church, I think I can fairly say I’m not alone. When faced with the opportunity to do something for God, we'd rather eat chips.

Why are we like this? My own attitude toward God saddens me; I am actually pretty annoyed by it. But apparently I am not saddened or annoyed enough to really do something about it.

When I begin to feel badly about myself, I often try to take solace in the Scriptures and seek comfort in the stories of the heroes of the Bible. These were ordinary men and women who did extraordinary things for God. The apostle Paul is easily one of the Bible’s greatest heroes. He wrote about half of the books in the New Testament, and he is revered as one of the foundation stones of the faith, a man given over to God’s Spirit in heart, mind, and soul.

I did not write half of the books in the New Testament. In fact, I didn’t write any of them. I am not revered as anything in particular that I know of. But I find Paul wasn’t so unlike me in some ways. In a letter he wrote to the Christians in Rome, Paul cried out in the frustration of his flesh, “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.”

This is the story of my life as well. This inclination to do wrong, or at a minimum, to do what is easy, is as natural to me as sneezing.

Often, I know the right thing to do, whether it is going to lunch with someone who needs a friend, or sharing my faith with someone who needs hope, or simply loving someone who is hard to love. But more times than not, I ignore these opportunities or come up with excuses or reasons why I shouldn’t have to act on them. Sometimes I know that what I’m about to do is wrong; I even know that when I am finished doing or saying the thing I know I shouldn’t do or say, I will be sorry I did it or wish I had not said it. And I do it anyway. Thinking I can get away with this kind of thing is like walking up a sheet of ice in bowling shoes; I don’t have a chance of making it up to the top, but I try anyway and fall every time.

God, however, was ready to give me cleats. I found them in David Crowder’s book Praise Habit: Finding God in Sunsets and Sushi. One particular section caught my eye.

Years ago a friend told me that an action repeated for a minimum of 21 days is likely to become a permanent habit. So I thought I’d give it a shot…After much thought I decided that my trained response to “Hello” or “How’s it going?” or “Hi” would be to salute and wink. In the beginning it was quite fun. Some pal would walk in the room and say, “What’s up?” and I would raise hand over eye in quick, sharp movements and wink while responding, “Not much.” It was beauty. The internal joy it brought was overwhelming. It was the perfect habit to form. It was quirky but legitimate. Impossible to tell if I was serious or not. The “Sunshine Sailor” is what I called it…Soon enough, before long I didn’t even think about it…until one day when I saluted the convenience store clerk and realized it did nothing inside. There was no suppressed smile…nothing joyous bursting in my chest…It was habit. I had done it.

It seems for most bad habits we [form], there was never any intentional formation…usually, destructive habits are formed more subtly with very little thought and planning. Good habits seem more difficult to manage…Why does it seem like the formation must be much more intentional in our adoption of good habits?

Lacing up these cleats, I reflected on this passage, and I thought a lot about the concept of habit forming. I often think of something that would be good to do on a regular basis, and sometimes I try my hardest to do it. Or I may find something about myself that I don’t like, or something that someone else doesn’t like about me, and if I agree with them, I try my hardest not to do it. I usually have some measure of success with my attempts toward personal change, but they never seem to work out on a long-term basis.

Searching for answers, I turned to the source of all knowledge: Google. I searched on the following phrase: “I do the things I don’t want to do,” looking for commentary on the apostle Paul’s frustration with his flesh, hoping to find some other poor soul who had felt my pain or had lived what I was living or had experienced what I was going through and had come out on the other side.

The first website Google listed opened with this:

Bored? Listless? Help is at hand!

Pass away the pointless hours with our list of things to do when you’re bored.

Push your eyes for an interesting light show.

Try to not think about penguins.

Repeat the same word over and over until it loses its meaning.

Try to swallow your tongue.

Step off a curb with eyes shut. Imagine it’s a cliff.

Have a water drinking contest.

Stare at the back of someone’s head until they turn around.

Pick up a dog so it can see things from your point of view.

Let me be clear: I appreciate the creativity this represents, and if I were to be completely honest, I have to admit I am thinking of penguins right now. I also wish I had a little dog.

What bothers me, though, is this: Why did this useless information appear when I went looking for Bible verses describing the frustration I feel with the inadequacies and emptiness of my life? Why isn’t the Internet full of wisdom for souls desperately seeking a greater understanding of our human condition instead of inane information that addresses none of the real problems we face in life?

Clearly, this list doesn’t answer my question at all. But as I thought more and more about this list of things to do when I am bored, I realized the words I read on that page were emblematic of the things I waste my time on every day. Maybe the things I do aren’t quite as useless, but they are no more valuable when weighed on the scales of eternity.

So I decided the time had come, and I would live like this no more. My habits had to change. I decided that for the next 21 days, through rain and snow, hell and high water, under no circumstances backing down, I would floss.

And floss I did.

On the first day of my experiment, I wrote out the numbers up to 21 on a green sticky note, which I stuck to the wall beside my bathroom mirror. Every night, when I was getting ready for bed, that day’s number called to me softly. So I would floss, and then I would cross off a number. And it felt great—a neat and tidy little system of accountability.

Days flew by quickly, and nighttime would find me in my bathroom, laboring with my new, minty friend in the fight against unwanted plaque. Night after night, me and my floss. Days turned into weeks, and we were still together.

The morning of the fourteenth day, I awoke and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I noticed I had forgotten to cross off the previous night’s number, and an anxious pause came over me. Had I failed myself yet again? My confidence returned quickly, though, as I remembered that indeed, I had flossed the night before but had forgotten to mark it down. The habit was slowly taking shape.

The days continued on, and I was excited to finally be a person of good habits. All the poor habits in my life, my little grinding sins that cling to me like gum on a shoe, my idiosyncrasies that don’t bother me but drive others crazy—all of these things would soon be footnotes in the chapters of my life. My horizon was clear and blue; nothing could stand in my way from being exactly the person I thought I should be. I grew more and more content with who I was, and more importantly, with the man I was becoming.

The final day of flossing arrived as quickly as the end of an all too pleasant vacation. I had emerged as the conquering hero in this trial. I didn’t need to see Dr. Avery anymore, and his laughing gas machine was now a thing of the past. I had achieved resounding success in this area, putting together a DiMaggioan streak I had never before accomplished in all my life.

As I reflected on my triumph, the simplicity of it all struck me; it merely required a little determination, a little persistence, a little accountability, and a little green sticky note.

The implications were staggering. If I could master a habit of the flesh, why could I not also master a habit of the soul? I knew life to be far more than good dental hygiene. I knew God wanted me to address my lack of discipline in my Christian walk. And I felt the deeper cravings for more of God in my life. I had tried so many different things to experience God more fully, and perhaps this notion of habit forming could be a way to satisfy these longings.

I sensed a time was coming in my life when God would need me. I knew He could use my success and my good habits for His purposes in order to advance His kingdom on earth. I had practiced on something small, but I had succeeded, and God saw what I had accomplished. He knew He could count on me, and He knew I wouldn’t let Him down. Every boy who plays basketball on his driveway or practices his swing in his backyard dreams that one day, during the right game and at the right time, his moment will arrive, and he will be ready for it.

However, I also knew my time of testing had only just begun. I knew of many areas in my life that needed more practice, and I was finally ready to lay them before the Lord and say, Teach me how to do this better.

So I sat down to write a list of good habits I would like to have in God’s kingdom, behaviors and practices I knew would take me closer to the heart of Jesus and awaken my cravings for more of Him, and I came up with a really good list.

obedience

purity

charity

humility

love

prayer

I thought of others, but I figured I should start slowly. The journey of my entire life would be spent shaping and forming these habits, but I could get started on them right away.

There were my goals, simple and on paper. Just as my little green sticky note and I had scaled the rocky heights of proper dental hygiene, so too would we conquer the sins of my soul. I began my quest in earnest, brimming with the confidence and optimism that only past success can bring, energized by my ability to make things right in my life, destined to be a person of good habits.

And clean teeth.

The Male Factor

2010-01-15T12:15:00.000-08:00

The Male Factor

The Unwritten Rules, Misperceptions, and Secret Beliefs of Men in the Workplace

Shaunti Felhahn

My Thoughts:

Every woman who works with men in any capacity should read this book. No exceptions.

It doesn't matter what you were taught in business school, how well you think you are accepted by the 'old boys club', or how many glass ceilings you have crashed through, I bet you are making serious mistakes that are impacting your effectiveness on the job.

Shaunti Feldhahn has gotten into the heads of the men we work with and has learned the things they will never tell us directly. Not because they don't want to -- but because they didn't really know how to explain what was different. Based on years of research and anonymous interviews, this book reveals what men really think about the way women operate in the workplace and why we aren't as successful as we could be.

Using concrete examples, practical suggestions, and honest quotations, this book will allow women to understand the unwritten rules they are breaking and learn ways to make subtle changes in the ways they speak, interact, and present themselves that will make a tangible difference immediately. This book will be a resource for my training of women in the future and will be recommended to all my women business friends.

Learn more about this book at Shaunti's website.

You can purchase the book at the Multnomah Books site.

A copy of this book was provided by Multnomah Books for this review.

Not So Fast

2010-01-14T12:54:00.000-08:00

NOT SO FAST

Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families

Ann Kroeker

ABOUT THE BOOK

For many family life has become a series of hellos and goodbyes as they pass in the hallway or the garage. In an effort to ensure our children are appropriately socialized and developed, we seem to have enrolled or involved them in so many different sports or activities that we are always on the run. It doesn't mean we aren't doing valuable things, but maybe it means we aren't doing the best things for the long term.

And when we are all together under one roof, are we really all together, or are we merely sitting near each other involved in separate activities such as watching tv, reading the paper, or playing on the computer? How long has it been since your family really had an unplanned conversation about the day?

Ann Kroeker's new book, Not So Fast, provides a candid look at today's family life and the impact our hurriedness has on our children. She shares her family's attempts to slow down and step out of the craziness of all aspects of life that define our generation and the benefits her family has received. In addition, she candidly shares the failed attempts and false starts, the complaints of the children, and the open-mouthed disbelief of her extended family and neighbors as she introduced attempts to slow down their life. She also provides tangible suggestions for applying in your own family's life and examples of other real-life families who have benefitted from stepping out of the frenzy.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone who feels as if the world is spinning out of control -- for those whose days don't seem to have enough hours for all the activities they have planned.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ann Kroeker is an acclaimed writer and speaker committed to encouraging and inspiring families as they face the demands of daily living. She is the author of The Contemplative Mom and has contributed to the award winning Experiencing the Passion of Jesus. You can learn more about her at her website.

A copy of this book was provided by David C. Cook for review.

Touching Wonder

2009-12-02T12:51:00.000-08:00

Touching Wonder -- Recapturing the Awe of Christmas
by
John Blase

You are invited to visit uReadBooks.com to listen to this new Christmas audio special!

uReadBooks presents:

Touching Wonder -

A Christmas Radio Special

Does it seem like you have heard the Christmas story a few too many times for it to still hold the wonder that it once had? With his instant classic, Touching Wonder, author John Blase breathes new life into the story of the Nativity. Just in time for the holiday season, uReadBooks.com presents a half hour Christmas special featuring excerpts from this new book.

About the book:

Little children understand how amazing the Nativity story is. But, sometimes, as we become men and women, we put away the childlike with the childish. The result? We lose something vital—the wonder of it all. When author John Blase went looking for the lost wonder of Christmas, he went back to the place he’d last seen it—the stories from Luke 1-2. What he found fills the pages of his new book, Touching Wonder: Recapturing the Awe of Christmas (David C Cook, September 2009), with flesh and bone and dust and night and a baby’s cry; the intimate union of human and divine—the Incarnation.

By boldly imagining the first two chapters of the gospel of Luke, writer, editor, and former pastor John Blase has created an instant classic for Christmastime. In a tale that reads like a novel parallel parked by the record of Scripture, Blase beckons those who could use a little wonder in their lives to step onto the stage of history and witness the long awaited coming of the Messiah. With Eugene Peterson’s The Message Bible translation as his backdrop, Blase adds his own voice and commentary to the historic events, exploring the renowned drama from an array of viewpoints.

In Touching Wonder, readers will meet a cast of unruly unlikelies—a frightened teenaged girl, a worried carpenter, a collection of senior citizens, a disillusioned young shepherd, even an angel or two—moving toward the realization that the little one just born is the One. This imaginative retelling of the grand miracle will leave readers wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and heart-full. The Lord is come!

In this lovely and distinctive book to be read…and re-read…and pondered in the heart, young and old will recapture the wonder of the Christmas story by seeing through the eyes of those who lived it. The book’s graceful design and Amanda Jolman’s beautiful line drawings combine to make this a thoughtful Christmas gift as well as a wonder that families will treasure for years to come.

MY THOUGHTS:

This is a powerful little book to help bring the true spirit of Christmas back to your family. In twelve short chapters, easily read daily at dinnertime with the family, Touching Wonder brings together familiar scriptures and manger reality so lifelike that you'll swear you hear the bleating of sheep. It's as if you are closer than a fly on the wall -- you become a true participant in the world changing birth of Jesus the Christ. This book will become a treasured tradition for our family.

Touching Wonder: Recapturing the Awe of Christmas

by John Blase

David C Cook/September 2009

http://www.davidccook.com/

http://www.johnblase.com/

A copy of this book was provided for review by David C. Cook.

To listen to or download the program, visit www.ureadbooks.com/touchingwonder.

Live Deeply and Live Relationally

2009-11-18T17:32:00.000-08:00

Today's Wild Card authors are:

Lenya Heitzig

AND

Penny Rose

and the books:

Live Deeply: A Study in the Parables of Jesus

David C. Cook; New edition edition (June 1, 2009)

AND

Live Relationally: Lessons from the Women of Genesis

David C. Cook; New edition edition (June 1, 2009)

ABOUT THE AUTHORs:

Lenya Heitzig is an award-winning author and popular Bible teacher. After beginning her ministry as a single women’s counselor with Youth With a Mission, Lenya married Skip and together they started Calvary of Albuquerque, one of the fast growing churches in the country. The author of Holy Moments and coauthor of the Gold Medallion-winning, Pathways to God’s Treasures, Lenya currently serves as Director of Women at Calvary, overseeing weekly Bible studies and yearly retreats. Lenya and Skip live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Visit the author's website.

Penny Pierce Rose is the award-winning author/coauthor of several books and Bible studies, including the ECPA Gold Medallion winner, Pathways to God’s Treasures. She has served on the board of directors for the Southwest Women’s Festival and develops Bible study curriculum for the women’s programs at Calvary of Albuquerque. Penny, her husband, Kerry, and their three children, Erin, Kristian, and Ryan, live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

Live Deeply:
List Price: $14.99
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: David C. Cook; New edition edition (June 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1434799867
ISBN-13: 978-1434799869

Live Relationally:
List Price: $14.99
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: David C. Cook; New edition edition (June 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1434767485
ISBN-13: 978-1434767486

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTERs:

LESSON ONE

Root Determines Fruit

Matthew 13:1–23

Lenya adored Mrs. Johnson, her elementary school teacher, because she had the ability to bring Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to life. Lenya’s sister would anxiously wait for her to arrive home to retell the story in every detail. Penny loved nothing more than spooky bedtime tales from her granddaddy. She’d lie awake at night, jumping at every sound, wondering whether the boogeyman was real. All our kids loved trips to the library for story hour.

Since ancient times, storytellers have enthralled audiences with tales both entertaining and instructive. In 300 BC, Aesop, the Greek storyteller, featured animals like the tortoise and the hare in his fables vividly illustrating how to solve problems. The Brothers Grimm gathered fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel in nineteenth-century Germany to teach children valuable moral lessons. Baby boomers were mesmerized when Walt Disney animated their favorite stories in amazing Technicolor.

However, throughout history no one has compared to Jesus Christ as a storyteller. Rather than telling fables or fairy tales, He told parables. A parable is a short, simple story designed to communicate a spiritual truth, religious principle, or moral lesson. It is a figure of speech in which truth is illustrated by a comparison or example drawn from everyday experiences. Warren Wiersbe simply says, “A parable is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.”1 Throughout this study we’ll learn from the stories Jesus told, comparing them to our lives and putting His eternal truths into practice.

Day 1: Matthew 13:1–3 Floating Pulpit Day 2: Matthew 13:3–9 Fertile Parable Day 3: Matthew 13:10–13 Few Perceive Day 4: Matthew 13:14–17 Fulfilled Prophecy Day 5: Matthew 13:18–23 Four Possibilities

DAY 1

Floating Pulpit

Lift up…

Lord, I love to gather with Your people and listen to Your Word. Help me to be a faithful hearer, not only listening to what You say but obeying Your commands. Thank You for being in our midst. Amen.

Look at…

Jesus proved Himself to be the promised King—the Messiah of Israel—through His impeccable birthright, powerful words, and supernatural deeds. Despite His amazing miracles and the many ways He fulfilled prophecy, the religious leaders rejected His lordship. Knowing the religious leaders had turned on Him, Jesus directed His attention to the common people. Matthew 13 tells how Jesus stepped onto a floating pulpit on the Sea of Galilee and spoke in parables to explain how the gospel—the good news of salvation—would inaugurate the kingdom of heaven on earth.

The parable of the Sower is one of seven parables Jesus taught to describe what His kingdom would look like as a result of the religious establishment rejecting Him. This parable was a precursor to the Great Commission that Jesus would give His disciples after His death, burial, and resurrection: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). There is no evidence that the religious leaders stayed to listen to Jesus’ simple stories. Yet after this teaching session, the resentment of the religious leaders only deepened.

Read Matthew 13:1–3.

On the same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the sea. Matthew 13:1

Explain what Jesus did on this day in His ministry.

Matthew 13:1 is the continuation of a critical day in Jesus’ ministry. Briefly scan Matthew 12; then answer the following questions to learn more about this “same day.”
What day of the week is referred to here?
What miracles did Jesus perform on this day?
Describe Jesus’ encounters with the religious leaders.
What did He teach about becoming a member of His family?

According to Mark 3:6, what did the Pharisees begin to do on this fateful day?

And great multitudes were gathered together to Him, so that He got into a boat and sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore. Then He spoke many things to them in parables, saying: “Behold, a sower went out to sow.” Matthew 13:2–3

Explain why Jesus got into the boat.
How many people stayed to hear Jesus’ message?
What method of teaching did Jesus use in speaking to the
multitudes?
What types of things did He teach in parables?
Galilee was an important region to Jesus. Fill in the following table to learn more.

Scripture Galilee’s Significance

Matthew 4:18–21
Matthew 17:22–23
Matthew 26:31–32
Luke 1:26–28
Luke 2:39–40
Acts 10:36–38

We’ve learned that many people came to know Jesus in Galilee. Journal about the place where you encountered Jesus and how meeting Him affected your feelings about that location.

Jesus was “moved with compassion” for the multitudes that followed Him. Circle below to indicate how you respond to the many people who are lost and looking for a shepherd.

Eager to share the gospel

Impatient with their ignorance

Anxious to get away

Concerned for their eternity

Frightened by their unruliness

Other __________________

Journal a prayer asking God to supernaturally fill you with compassion for the multitudes that don’t know Him.

The multitudes crowded around Jesus, so He turned a boat on the Sea of Galilee into a floating pulpit. In his book Fully Human, Fully Alive, John Powell tells about a friend vacationing in the Bahamas who was drawn to a noisy crowd gathered toward the end of a pier:

Upon investigation he discovered that the object of all the attention was a young man making the last-minute preparations for a solo journey around the world in a homemade boat. Without exception everyone on the pier was vocally pessimistic. All were actively volunteering to tell the ambitious sailor all the things that could possibly go wrong. “The sun will broil you! … You won’t have enough food! … That boat of yours won’t withstand the waves in a storm! … You’ll never make it!”

When my friend heard all these discouraging warnings to the adventurous young man, he felt an irresistible desire to offer some optimism and encouragement. As the little craft began drifting away from the pier towards the horizon, my friend went to the end of the pier, waving both arms wildly like semaphores spelling confidence. He kept shouting: “Bon Voyage! You’re really something! We’re with you! We’re proud of you!”2

If you had been there as the boat was leaving, which group on the pier would you have been among: the optimists or the pessimists? More importantly, if you had been in the crowds along the Sea of Galilee, would you have joined the Pharisees seeking to harm Jesus or the crowd eagerly listening to the stories Jesus told?

Listen to …

The best leaders … almost without exception and at every level, are master users of stories and symbols.

—Tom Peters

LESSON ONE

Eve--Trouble in Paradise

Genesis 2:18-3:24

The first trouble in paradise was man's aloneness. For six consecutive days--as God created light, the cosmos, the land and sea, the stars and planets, the creatures in the sea and sky, and every living thing that moves, including the ultimate creation of man--God declared, “It is good.” But there was one thing that wasn't good: Man did not have a companion. So God created the perfect mate for Adam. She would be the counterpart for him physically, spiritually, intellectually, and socially. She was intended to complete him. She was more than a mate--she was a soul mate.

We know this woman as Eve. Although the Bible does not describe her, there is no doubt that she was the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Why? She was God's masterpiece. The Divine dipped His paintbrush into the palette of dust and clay and breathed life from His wellspring of inspiration to form a portrait of perfection. Just imagine a woman with a face more beautiful than Helen of Troy, a body more statuesque than the Venus de Milo, a personality more captivating than Cleopatra, and a smile more mysterious than the Mona Lisa. She ate a perfect diet, so her figure was probably flawless. Because of an untainted gene pool, she was undoubtedly without physical defect. Due to the antediluvian atmosphere, her complexion was age-defying perfection. She was never a child, daughter, or sister. She was the first wife, the first mother, and the first woman to encounter evil incarnate. That's when real trouble in paradise began.

Day 1: Genesis 2:18-25 Paradise Found

Day 2: Genesis 3:1-6 Innocence Lost

Day 3: Genesis 3:7-13 Hiding Out

Day 4: Genesis 3:14-19 Judgment Pronounced

Day 5: Genesis 3:20-24 East of Eden

DAY 1

Paradise Found

Lift up …

Thank You, Lord, that I am fearfully and wonderfully made. You have created me in Your image to glorify Your name. May I fulfill Your will in my heart and home. Amen.

Look at …

We begin our study when God made man and woman. Though God created both humans and animals, this does not mean that they are on equal footing. People are made in God's image, setting us apart from animals in a profound way. We possess a soul. The soul refers to a person's inner life. It is the center of our emotions and personality. The word soul is first used in Genesis: “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being [soul]” (Gen. 2:7). In other words, humans possess intellect, emotion, and will.

For instance, dogs aren't bright enough to realize they'll never catch their own tails; cows don't weep over the beauty of a sunset; and a female praying mantis can't keep herself from chewing her spouse's head off. People, on the other hand, have the ability to acquire knowledge and experience deep feelings. They also have the capacity for self-control. While animals act instinctively, we as humans should behave transcendently. We are God's special creation endowed with the gift of “soul-power.”

Read Genesis 2:18-25.

And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. And Adam said: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. Genesis 2:18-25

Explain the problem and solution God first spoke about in this passage.

Describe in detail the task God assigned to Adam.

Compare and contrast Adam to the rest of the living beings.

In your own words describe how God created woman.

a. When Adam met his mate he made a proclamation. What do you think “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” signified for Adam?

b. What did he call his mate and why?

Here we find the first mention of marriage in Scripture. Explain God's intent for marriage.

a. What else do you learn about the man and wife in this passage?

b. Why do you think this is relevant?

Live out …

a. God declared that man needs companionship. Read Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 and explain some of the reasons why it is better to have a mate to come alongside you.

Read the sidebar concerning “Threefold Strength” and talk about how you have experienced God's supernatural strength in your life and/or marriage.

Many women today struggle with the way they look, think, and feel. But when God made Eve from Adam's rib, this was not His intent. When He made you, He made you to be the person you are too. With this in mind, journal Psalm 139:13-14 into a personal psalm praising God for making you just as you are.

For You formed my inward parts;

You covered me in my mother's womb.

I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

Marvelous are Your works. Ps. 139:13-14

Before the fall, Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed. It's probably difficult to imagine being unashamed about our looks, actions, or thoughts. But Jesus came to free us from condemnation (Rom. 8:1). Read the following Scriptures and talk about how we can either stand ashamed or unashamed before God.

Psalm 119:5-6

Isaiah 41:11

Isaiah 49:23

Jeremiah 8:9

It's safe to say that none of us is perfectly content with our frame. We all wish we were better, thinner, richer, healthier, smarter, or younger. We may think that if we were different in some way people would accept us, respect us, or love us more. Maybe we'd even love and respect ourselves more. Like Eve, we would walk in this world unashamed.

A recent University of Waterloo study determined that people's self-esteem is linked to such traits as physical appearance, social skills, and popularity. Research associate Danu Anthony noted that acceptance from others is strongly tied to appearances. Furthermore, the study found that self-esteem is connected to traits that earn acceptance from other people. “People state emphatically that it is 'what's inside' that counts and encourage their children not to judge others based on appearances, yet they revere attractive people to an astonishing degree,” Anthony says. “They say they value communal qualities such as kindness and understanding more than any other traits, but seem to be exceptionally interested in achieving good looks and popularity.” The bottom line is that people's looks and behavior are intimately linked to being accepted by others.3

As women of faith, we know that acceptance from others is not nearly as important as our acceptance of One Man--the God/Man Jesus Christ, the second Adam. Only by accepting Jesus Christ's sacrificial death will you be made whole: “You are complete in Him” (Col. 2:10).

Listen to…

The woman was formed out of man--not out of his head to rule over him; not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him; but out of his side to be his equal, from beneath his arm to be protected, and from near his heart to be loved.

--Matthew Henry

Embrace the Struggle

2009-10-31T15:50:00.000-07:00

Today's Wild Card authors are:

Zig Ziglar
and
Julie Ziglar Norman

and the book:

Embrace the Struggle

Howard Books (October 27, 2009)

***Special thanks to Jennifer Willingham of HOWARD BOOKS (SIMON & SCHUSTER) for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHORs:

Zig Ziglar is the president of Zig Ziglar Corporation and has motivated the sales forces of multinational corporations and thousands of individuals. One of the leading stars of the “positive thinking” movement, he is the author of bestsellers See You at the Top, Secrets of Closing the Sale, Success and Self-Image, 5 Steps to Successful Selling, How to Be a Winner, and How to Get What You Want.

Visit the author's website.

Julie Ziglar Norman is the overly proud mother and grandmother of one son, three daughters, and twelve grandchildren. She lives in Alvord, Texas, with her husband of twenty-six years, Jim Norman; three horses, three rescued dogs and three rescued cats, and she is currently writing her first solo book to be published by Brown Books in 2010.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

List Price: $23.99
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Howard Books (October 27, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 143914219X
ISBN-13: 978-1439142196

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:

FOREWORD

Zig Ziglar, my father, is in a struggle right now. A struggle so profound and so real that by sharing it with you I believe you will be filled with hope and encouragement. The gift that God has given Dad is the gift of encouragement and the ability to transfer hope to others so that they can rise above whatever circumstance they are in. As Dad has always said, “Getting knocked down in life is a given. Getting up, starting from where you are and moving forward, is a choice.”

On March 7, 2007, our family experienced what Dr. James Dobson calls “a suddenly.” I was out of town when I got the call. I went numb as I listened to my sister Cindy’s voice, “Dad fell down the stairs. He has a serious head injury.” Suddenly, our family joined millions of other families facing similar circumstances and life was very different. Dad, at eighty years of age, lost the vitality he was renowned for; he no longer moved with the energy and agility of a sixty-five-year-old man. Almost overnight he aged fifteen plus years, and thus began his struggle to live with and overcome the effects of a brain injury.

The next weeks were very anxious as we figured out the impact of the accident and the possibilities for recovery. The calendar became filled with doctors and more doctors. Life was changing fast. But the amazing thing was that Dad’s attitude never changed. I knew that he hurt all over from falling down a sixteen step staircase onto a marble floor. I could see that his balance was impaired and that his short-term memory was “really short,” as he likes to say, but still he was as optimistic and, if possible, even more loving than before the fall. As usual, he was more concerned for us than he was for himself.

“Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t do.” I have heard Dad say that hundreds of times. “It isn’t what happens to you, but how you respond to what happens to you that makes the difference.” “Go as far as you can see, then you can see farther.” These are words my father has taught and words he lives by daily. And that is why I’m so excited about this book. Once again my father is using his circumstances, as unfortunate as they may be, to encourage others in their own struggles. As my sister Julie says, he is willing to be transparent, and he continues to write and speak because he wants to show his audiences that life on life’s terms is well worth living. Life may never be the same again but that doesn’t mean it can’t be just as wonderful and fulfilling in an entirely new and different way.

My wish for you as you journey through this book is that you will count your blessings until your gratitude bucket is full, and if you or someone you love is in a struggle, take courage and press on, because, as the Ziglar family has learned, it is in the depths of the struggle that God reveals His eternal blessings.

Embrace the Struggle,

Tom Ziglar

Proud Son of Zig Ziglar

INTRODUCTION

I’m convinced that in the last year the overwhelming majority of people have been struggling with some kind of concern—personal, family, business, health, relationships—you name it. I know I certainly have! It seems these are things that just happen over the course of time. The question is how do you handle struggle?

Through the years I’ve spoken about and written often on how to overcome negative situations, but as a motivational/inspirational speaker and author, I have to admit that I personally have spent the majority of my time focused on how to accomplish the next positive achievement. I believe I have given an honest and realistic picture of how to address struggles in the past but as you know, what we know is a result of what we’ve learned. The things we learn firsthand have a much greater impact on us and better position us to help others deal with similar circumstances. In fact, the Bible tells us this is so; “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of our mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God (2 Corinthians 1:3–4 NKJV).

Until now, my greatest life struggle has been dealing with the death of my forty-six-year-old daughter, Suzan. I wrote extensively in Confessions of a Grieving Christian about how I grappled with my grief and how God comforted me. Not surprisingly, that book has been the one of mine that has generated the most letters from readers. Why? Because that topic directly addresses an emotional struggle all of us eventually face in our lives. Generally, you don’t read a book about grief unless you are grieving. And you typically won’t gravitate toward a book on overcoming struggles unless you, or someone you love, are in the midst of a struggle. If you find this to be your case, you my friend, are reading the right book!

I know without a doubt that the personal struggle I’ve been going through since my fall has given me insight that I could not have had otherwise. I’ve been overwhelmed time and time again as I have discovered that the principles I’ve taught through the years apply to my present circumstances more completely than they ever have at any other time in my life. And, amazingly, the simplest concepts of all have proven to be the most applicable life buoys for me.

The pages that follow this introduction are full of inspiring stories of individuals who have faced struggles and not only survived, but live a life far more fulfilling than they ever experienced before their struggle began. Many of the stories come from individuals who, upon hearing about my brain injury, sought to encourage and comfort me with the comfort that God had extended to them during their struggle.

I will share with you the principles and scriptures that have served as lifelines for me and explain how I have applied them to my struggle. You will hear how my struggle has impacted and influenced the lives of my wife, the Redhead (When I’m talking about her, I call her the Redhead. When I’m talking to her, I call her Sugar Baby. Her name is Jean.), my son Tom, my daughters, Cindy and Julie, and my granddaughter Katherine. You’ll also learn how this has impacted my speaking career, my writing and the wonderful staff I’m blessed to have at our company, Ziglar, Inc.

My personal struggle is health related but this book deals with not only the struggle physical limitations create, but also financial, spiritual, family and relationship struggles. This book is about living life on life’s terms. It is about knowing what you can change and what you can’t change and learning how to live your life with an enthusiastic expectation for what is yet to come. Where there is a struggle there is life. For that we can be grateful!

CHAPTER ONE

THE FALL AND THE FUTURE

I get lots of ideas when the lights go out at night and it gets very quiet. Sometimes they come when I first lie down to sleep, other times I wake up with an idea racing through my mind, but regardless of when an idea comes, I have made it a habit to get out of bed and write the idea down before it disappears into my dreams. You should do the same. (This book is not really about me and my accident . . . it’s about you having the benefit of my experience, good or bad!)

I’ve also made it a habit not to disturb the Redhead if I can possibly help it and that night was no exception. I quietly slid out of bed and hurried toward my office which is across the hall and to the right of the head of the staircase. As usual, I did not turn on a light. I had traveled that particular path thousands of times in the twenty-two years we’d lived in our home. However, in all of those years I had never accidentally put my left foot down where the second floor ended and the first step down our staircase began! Let’s just say that misstep more than disturbed the Redhead!

Most of what I am writing at this point is information my family filled me in on after the accident. Since I was unconscious for several minutes I have absolutely no recall of what happened after I fell but from what the Redhead tells me she grabbed the phone and dialed 911 as soon as she realized I was tumbling down the stairs. An ambulance was dispatched and help was at the house within a few minutes of my fall.

“THE CALL”

While the paramedics attended to me the Redhead called our children. By then it was about 10:30 p.m. so seeing our name come up on Caller ID at that hour struck fear into our children’s hearts. And this time, I’m sorry to say, their fear was not unfounded. My son Tom refers to that night as the night he got “the call.” I’m quite sure each of you has had “the call” at one time or another and can relate to what our children were experiencing. I’m grateful that all three of them, including Tom who was out of town, hurried to the hospital to help their “elderly parents”—that is what I call us when I’m about half-teasing and about half-relieved that our kids are hovering around us, willing and eager to help.

Over the next several hours it became apparent that my left side took the brunt of my fall. When I landed at the bottom of the stairs I hit my head on the marble floor and then slammed it against the front door. Please don’t ask for a reenactment—you get the picture! I had to spend a few nights at the hospital so the doctors could monitor the two areas where my brain had a bleed, and I needed some time to get used to the positional vertigo that I began to experience about twelve hours after I fell. Amazingly, I suffered no broken bones, but I can testify that I was one sore and dizzy guy!

What we didn’t know when I finally left the hospital was how seriously my short-term memory had been affected. Sometimes it is nice to be a little clueless. Everyone in the family has had ample time to adjust to the fact that my short-term memory is very, very, short. Now we are all learning how to live with that fact.

Life is change. On March 7, 2007, my life changed completely with one, simple, misplaced step. Some would say it changed for the worse, and by man’s standards they would be entirely right. Fortunately, and I can assure you this is not by chance, the one verse that I’ve written in the majority of books I’ve been asked to autograph, the verse that I believe encourages people most in the midst of their troubles, Romans 8:28, And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose (KJV), is the verse that allows me to know that God will use this season of my life, difficult though it may be, for His glory and my ultimate benefit.

By man’s standards my fall down the stairs and the vertigo and the brain injury that resulted in my short-term memory loss would seem to dictate an end to my long and much loved career, but I’m here to tell you that even with its problems, life is more inspiring, more intriguing, and more fulfilling than ever. For me, when life does take an unexpected turn, it is somewhat like taking a hike on a new trail; I can’t wait to see what is around the next bend. If the going gets really rocky, I might start hoping smoother ground is just ahead, or that I’m close to the end of the trail where I can take a long desired break from the grueling journey. But my enthusiastic expectation for what is yet to come, for what God has planned for me and my life, never wavers. I trust Him.

I also trust my family. Many years ago I told my family that I was concerned that I might not be able to realize it myself if I started to lose my edge and my speeches were no longer as effective as they should be. I did not want to embarrass myself so I asked them to promise that they would tell me if they ever thought it was time for me to step down from the stage. As I got older and started experiencing some of what I’d call the usual memory loss that happens when we pass the ages of fifty, sixty, and then seventy, the children often checked on me to be sure I was still able to deliver. Thankfully, they were discreet and until after the accident I didn’t even know they had already begun checking me out periodically. They took their assignment seriously and I’m glad they did.

It is true that as I neared the age of eighty, I began to rely on notes to help me keep my place as I was speaking. But I figured that most folks rely on notes by the time they are eighty so I wasn’t at all concerned about how my audience would perceive my occasional pass by the podium to reference my outline. My daughter Julie reviewed the DVD of the Get Motivated Seminar engagement I did in San Bernardino, California on March 6, 2007, the day before my accident and she assures me that I was still completely stage worthy at that point. Unfortunately, my brain injury had such a profound effect on my short-term memory that the ability to reference an outline was beyond me. I could look at the outline but I couldn’t remember the last point that I had made. To add insult to injury, the vertigo I was experiencing made it virtually impossible for me to even walk around the stage safely.

THE DILEMMA

Obviously, I had a real dilemma. I book engagements months and years in advance and there were several engagements pending when I fell. I know companies and individuals alike are negatively impacted if I can’t keep an engagement, so I have always done everything in my power to be where I’m expected. I’ve missed the funerals of my siblings and friends and I’ve spoken when I probably should not have due to illness, but I always felt like my responsibility to show up according to plan was paramount. I can still hear my mother saying, “If a man’s word is no good—he is no good.” I had given my word.

Situations like the one I’m in create circumstances that make a fellow really grateful to have good family relationships. I knew I could count on the help of my family and I got it in spades! The Redhead, Tom, Cindy and Julie enlisted the help of my doctors who were working with me after my accident, as well as the help of my friends and associates, to determine if I should find a way to continue speaking or stay home and concentrate on my writing.

My family was open to seeing how I would progress, but they were concerned about the very real possibility that my vertigo might cause another fall and that traveling would put me in more vulnerable positions than staying close to home would. When they discussed the idea that it might be time for me to retire from public speaking, it was quickly followed by a concern that God might not be done with using me on the stage and none of them wanted to be responsible for suggesting I stop if that was, in fact, the case. However, it was crystal clear that short of an outright miracle I would not be giving the kind of speeches my audiences had come to expect.

The doctors had said that I might recover more of my short-term memory with time as my brain healed but they couldn’t be sure of what the ultimate outcome was going to be. More than a year has passed since my fall and it seems that I have good days and other days. (You know there are no bad days. After all, some people didn’t wake up today and compared to them I’m having a better than good day!) Since I am over eighty years of age we are taking the conservative approach to my medical options. We’re taking our time and applying the good old Ben Franklin approach I’ve taught all these years; divide a page from top to bottom, put positive benefits of procedures/therapies in one column and possible negative outcomes in the other, and we’ll let the obvious, as well as prayer, determine our decisions.

I’ll go into more detail later about some of the therapies, supplements, exercises and medical treatments friends and even clients have suggested and that we’ve tried, but for now I want you to know that we’ve never stopped looking at possible treatments for what ails me. We pray about the treatments and supplements we are told about and if we feel God is leading me to try them, I try them. My doctors remain supportive and encouraging about the possibilities the future holds.

My associates, particularly those who also speak on public platforms, were and still are concerned about me retaining my dignity and going out on top. The thought of me, in many cases, their mentor, performing differently and faltering here and there before an audience is almost unthinkable. I love them for wanting to help me be remembered as I was before the accident. And I love them for personally helping me move ahead, to do what God puts in front of me to the best of my ability.

THE IMMEDIATE SOLUTION

Thankfully, the only speaking engagement that I had to miss immediately after my fall was for my friends and business associates Peter and Tamara Lowe at one of their big Get Motivated Seminars in Houston, Texas on March 13, 2007. After a lot of in-depth examination by no less than five doctors, it was determined that I had retained almost all of the information I have taught over my many years as a speaker and author, and that I was totally “present” when being spoken to. The only new memory problem I had was with the most immediate short-term. When questioned I could answer without any hesitation, but if you asked me what you had asked me when I finished answering the question I could not tell you. Yes, my memory about current events is that short! (You’re probably wondering how this book got written and I’ll tell you—we are both the beneficiaries of the good help I have. Between my executive assistant, Laurie Magers, my editor/daughter Julie Norman and others on my staff, we got it done!)

Since I could recall information when asked, Peter Lowe came up with the idea of changing my speaking format. For years I have been known for my energetic, highly physical speaking style. Some people have even accused me of being more than enthusiastic during presentations. I liked to somewhat live out the stories while I was telling them, and I thought standing stock still behind a podium might block or slow down the words that came flying out of my mouth at the rate of 250 per minute with gusts up to 450. You would naturally assume that it was my vertigo that put an end to all my physical onstage activity, but it really had more to do with the fact that we couldn’t find anyone who felt comfortable chasing me around the stage to ask the next question in our new interview format! Sorry, I couldn’t contain myself.

Sitting down for one-on-one interviews on stage came about through a combination of me being unsteady on my feet and my mind not keeping track of what I’d already said. Peter Lowe interviewed me for the first time in Boise, Idaho on March 27, 2007, just twenty days after my fall but after a few engagements it occurred to him that my associates, Bryan Flanagan and Krish Dhanam, both of whom have shared the Get Motivated Seminar platforms with me on many occasions, might be a better fit for the job. They have both taught my material and they’ve studied it in order to apply it to their lives. They can tell most of my stories almost word for word, and in the event I had trouble recalling any answer to their questions they could help out by prompting me toward the answer or outright supplying the answer if it still eluded me. It made perfect sense to ask them to interview me at the Get Motivated Seminars. Fortunately, they both agreed and with great faith we pressed forward to keep my commitments.

LOVE AND HONOR

Both Krish and Bryan did an excellent job of interviewing me on stage. They carefully laid out their questions so that we could cover several different areas of interest such as the mental, physical, spiritual, financial and relational sides of life. Their goal and mine was to continue to give the audience valuable, applicable, life improving information in an entertaining way.

I cannot express fully the gratitude I have for these two men. Engagement after engagement, they tweaked their questions as they learned better how to deal with my short-term memory. They spent hours and hours working on how to make me look my very best. They learned how to highlight the good and minimize the imperfections that were bound to happen with the kind of brain injury I suffered.

We continued on this course with the public seminars but we had to address what we, as a company, would do about my corporate engagements and about my two day Born to Win seminar that I had hosted since the 1970s. My son Tom was the president of our company at that time (now he is the CEO) and I sorely wish that all the weight of this problem hadn’t fallen squarely on his shoulders, but he handled and continues to handle the business beautifully.

Tom decided that we’d notify the corporations I was scheduled to speak for about my accident and the change to an interview format and let them decide if they wanted to keep their engagement or cancel, and that we would not book anymore corporate events for the foreseeable future. He also decided we would promote the upcoming Born to Win seminar as the final one.

THE LAST BORN-TO-WIN SEMINAR

I know rock stars have farewell tours, sometimes they have one every four or five years, but I had never considered that I might actually “plan” to do any of the things I do for the last time. I’ve always planned to die while I’m still doing what I love doing. When folks say they’ve heard I’m retired, I say with mock surprise, “Retired! Friend, you weren’t listening! I said I was reFIRED! I’m not gonna ease up, shut up, let up or give up, until I’m taken up! Matter of fact, I’m just getting’ warmed up!”

Some people might think that’s reaching a little far for a man who has celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of his twenty-first birthday. (For those of you who are mathematically challenged that means I’m eighty-one years old.) But I am truly the kind of guy who goes after Moby Dick in a rowboat and takes the tartar sauce with him! Which will help you understand that it was with a bit of trepidation that I agreed to the “last” Born to Win seminar.

It wasn’t long before I understood why rock stars have so many farewell tours. They sell out—fast! I was overwhelmed at the immediate response to the announcement. Many who attended Born to Win did so several times through the years. Some brought their employees; others came with their whole family in tow. Larry Carpenter particularly stands out in my mind. He attended forty-five times over twenty-seven consecutive years. His beautiful wife Lisa and their three sons participated more times than I can remember. Larry also financially sponsored nearly 200 people down through the years because he wanted the people he cares about to experience what he experienced there. The last Born to Win was no exception. He brought his whole family and as we’d say down home, a passel of friends to boot! That event was like old home week for the Redhead and me. We got to see so many people whom we’d come to know and love. We were in “tall cotton” the whole time.

Because of my accident, my involvement had been scaled down a great deal but I was scheduled to have three different interview sessions with Krish Dhanam and a great deal of time mixing and mingling with the participants. Krish did the interview the first evening and later fell ill so another long time associate and friend Jill Tibbels agreed to do the Saturday morning interview, which went off exceptionally well. Jill always does an incredible job of anything we ask her to do. That’s just one of the reasons we’re so grateful her association with us spans more than twenty-five years.

Tom came up with the idea of making this final BTW more intimate and special by having a “family” session where the Redhead, Tom, Cindy and Julie joined me on the stage in a living room setting to tell stories about what it was like having me for a husband and father. I often tell people that if I’d known how much fun grandkids were going to be I would have been a whole lot nicer to their parents! I’d like to add that had I known my wife and children would be taking the stage to talk about me . . .

We all had a marvelous time but I suspect my jaw was dropped open most of the time. I had no idea that I had raised so many hams! All three of my children had the audience holding on to their sides. Honestly, I didn’t know that growing up and working with me had provided them with so much funny material! And then the Redhead chimed in and people were almost rolling on the floor. It was as if my family had been saving up for this one occasion. It was all in good, loving fun and the ones I love most in this world did get around to saying that they loved AND respected me, so all’s well that ends well.

ANOTHER UNEXPECTED TWIST

Except, as is often the case, what appears to be an ending is anything but. That afternoon of August 25, 2007, was another beginning for me with my daughter and long-time editor, Julie Norman. I love seeing the hand of Providence in my life. Julie became my editor as a result of having won a place at the bi-annual Writer’s Workshop that Guideposts hosts to develop new talent for their magazine. John and Elizabeth Sherrill, long-time roving editors for Guideposts and well-known co-authors of Corrie Ten Boom’s, The Hiding Place, as well as Brother Andrew’s, The Cross and the Switchblade, noted that Julie was a natural at editing. When Julie told me they, and a few others who were leading the workshop, had commented on her editing ability, I immediately knew I needed her to help me with my books. Fifteen years and twenty-one books later we’re still writing away. This book is our first effort as co-authors. With my short term memory loss, the kind of help I needed was more in-depth than the usual editing Julie has done in the past.

And now we’re speaking together as well! Jay Hellwig, my driver and personal assistant and the husband of Jill Hellwig, our number one salesperson for more than thirteen years, noticed that the Born to Win attendees responded enthusiastically to what Julie had to say from the stage. He told Tom that he thought it would be a more natural fit to have Julie interview me at the Peter Lowe Get Motivated Seminars. He pointed out that because of our father/daughter relationship she could more comfortably interrupt me if I started to repeat myself and, after all, she had been editing everything I’d said in print for years, she knew all of my material. It was such an obvious fit I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself! Julie, it seems, had been being prepared all along to help me at this time in my life.

It made sense to Tom, too, and when he asked Julie if she would travel with me and her mother and interview me on stage, she agreed without hesitation.

EMBRACE

THE

STRUGGLE

ZIG ZIGLAR

JULIE ZIGLAR NORMAN

Howard Books

West Monroe, Louisiana

DEDICATION PAGE

To the Redhead,

My bride of sixty-one years, the only woman I’ve ever loved

and the most important person in my life.

Sure do love you, Sweetheart!

Our purpose at Howard Books is to:

Increase faith in the hearts of growing Christians
Inspire holiness in the lives of believers
Instill hope in the hearts of struggling people everywhere
Because He’s coming again!

[Howard Logo]Published by Howard Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 www.howardpublishing.com

Embrace the Struggle © 2009 Zig Ziglar

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Howard Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

[Add agent line here, if applicable]

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK

ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-4219-6

ISBN-10: 1-4391-4219-X

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

HOWARD and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact: Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com.

Edited by Denny Boultinghouse

Cover design by TK

Interior design by TK

Photography/illustrations by TK

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked AMP are from the Amplified Bible®, copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission (www.Lockman.org). Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version. Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked TLB are taken from The Living Bible, copyright © 1971. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. Scripture quotations marked TNIV are taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version®. TNIV®. Copyright© 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. Scriptures marked LITV are taken from the Literal Translation of the Holy Bible. Copyright © 1976 - 2000 by Jay P. Green, Sr. Used by permission of the copyright holder. Courtesy of Sovereign Grace Publishers and Christian Literature World.

No Idea

2009-10-19T14:39:00.000-07:00

No Idea -- Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

Greg Garrett

I received a copy of this book for review purposes from David C. Cook Publishers. I haven't had a chance to finish it yet and I'll return to update this posting when I do. I'm excited about the book because it gives a down to earth life story about listening to God's call on your life.

“Once you’ve decided that you’re going to live—no mean feat for some of us—how do you figure out what you’re supposed to do with that life?” --Greg Garrett

One thing is guaranteed: life on this earth is unpredictable—and sometimes frighteningly so. How can we as Christians live faithfully when we’re not quite sure where the path ahead is taking us? How do we find joy and purpose in the midst of the uncertain, the unfinished, the uneasy? In the stirring follow-up to his critically acclaimed spiritual autobiography Crossing Myself, author Greg Garrett explores the universal journey of life by tackling these questions with thoughtfulness, transparent honesty, and humor.

After touching thousands with his intimate memoir about faith and depression, Crossing Myself, award-winning writer and teacher Greg Garrett turns his attention to the ongoing problem of living faithfully in No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows (David C Cook, September 2009). Taking Thomas Merton’s famous prayer that begins, “My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going” as his inspiration, Garrett looks back at his own journey and tells engaging stories out of that life that will speak to everyone who has ever felt lost along the way.

While returning to faith and community, Garrett finds a motivation for living in service to the Church and to others. By examining how to learn and live with what we’re supposed to be doing, he proves himself a provocative, appealing, and truly helpful companion on the often meandering, sometimes confusing path of following Jesus. His reflections on family, relationships, faith, and vocation will encourage readers to reflect on their own experiences and discover how God might be working in their own lives.

In this spiritual memoir that’s automatically distinct, Garrett appeals to young Christians and seekers in the edgy, transparent style of Anne Lamott, Don Miller, and Cathleen Falsani. A candid and stimulating look at discipleship, discernment, and joy, No Idea is perfect for anyone who has ever wanted to walk the right path but has no idea what step to take next.

Author Bio

Greg Garrett is a popular writer, teacher, speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and meadia guest. The critically acclaimed author of thenovels Free Bird, Cycling, and Shame, the memoir Crossing Myself, numerous nonfiction books on faith, culture, and narrative, and an array of essays, articles, reviews, and lessons, Greg is also a primary writer for the Scripture project The Voice. An award-winning professor of English at Baylor University, Greg serves the church as Writer in Residence for the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Sourthwest as a lay preacher at St. David's Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas.

Fear Not Tomorrow

2009-09-30T11:31:00.001-07:00

Today's Wild Card author is:

Ruth Graham

and the book:

Fear Not Tomorrow, God is Already There: Trusting Him in Uncertain Times

Howard Books (September 29, 2009)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ruth Graham is the daughter of the revered American pastor Billy Graham. She has appeared on a variety of radio and television shows and is the author of the bestselling In Every Pew Sits a Broken Heart.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

List Price: $22.99
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Howard Books (September 29, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1416558438
ISBN-13: 978-1416558439

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:

Trust at My Doorstep

Chapter 1

It had been a difficult few months. One of my children was struggling, and I didn’t know how things would play out. I was anxious, frightened, and continually preoccupied. I could imagine what might be ahead. The questions were relentless: What could I have done differently? Was it my fault? What could I do to change it? How could I protect my child? Was there another step I could take? I felt as if I were being sucked under by a whirlpool of scenes, conversations, and hypothetical outcomes. I lost weight. I battled headaches. I felt like I was constantly vibrating. The fear was overwhelming.

This particular day, the postman arrived at my door with a padded envelope. It was addressed to me in familiar back-slanted handwriting—something from Mother. Feeling the envelope, I knew it was too light to contain a book. What could it be? My birthday was still a long way off. As I tore at the flap and reached inside, I took hold of what felt like a long, narrow picture frame. Pulling it out, I stopped for a moment and stared. It was the framed print from the wall in front of Mother’s desk. In black calligraphy bordered by a flowering vine I read the familiar words: “Fear not tomorrow, God is already there.”

Instantly, I was transported back to the mountain home of my childhood in Montreat, North Carolina. My mother’s plain wooden desk flanked by a tall chest of drawers and a bookcase took up much of one wall in her room. Always lying open on the desk, surrounded by various reference materials, was her well-marked, dog-eared Bible. On the wall facing the desk hung a collection of precious photographs and artifacts: a crown of thorns woven for Mother by the head of the Jerusalem police, a slave collar given to her by Johnny Cash, a rude wooden cross fashioned by my brother Franklin, photographs of loved ones and of those for whom she was praying. Centered above these artifacts was the print I now held. I’m not sure where Mother got it or who gave it to her, only that I cannot remember a time when it wasn’t hanging there like a banner.

I imagined my mother standing on a chair in front of the desk, reaching to take the print off the wall. Sending me such a gift was just like Mother. All my life, since I left home for boarding school in the ninth grade, she had been sending me letters filled with encouragement from the Scriptures—bits of what she was learning in her own study time or wisdom for some situation I might be facing. Now here she was identifying with my mother’s heart, sending me a poignant reassurance. We had not talked much about the circumstances of my struggle. Mother just intuitively knew I might need something like this—a reminder that God was working in our lives and that he cared about our future. I appreciated her sensitivity. She didn’t blame or condemn me; she didn’t unload a lot of advice. She just sent me something that had been of value to her, something that had reassured her, no doubt, as she had mothered us. Standing on my doorstep, holding that print, I felt the words penetrate my heart and mind, almost as if I had never seen them before, as if they were a message written directly to me. I read them again slowly: “Fear not tomorrow, God is already there.”

Little Foxes

Since that day on my doorstep, I have faced quite a few threatening tomorrows, and I have battled fear and anxiety as resilient foes. Perhaps you have fought this same battle. We may experience moments of clarity, as I did reading my mother’s framed print, but then we return to daily life and to the struggle. We wonder how we’re supposed to “fear not tomorrow” in the worst-case scenarios of our lives: a frightening diagnosis, betrayal, separation from a child who has gone off to war, the loss of a job, the evaporation of our retirement, the drug addiction of a loved one, abandonment by a spouse, failure at our workplace, the loss of a home, a legal verdict that changes our lives, the death of a loved one, the exposure of a secret, the loss of our possessions to flood, earthquake, tornado, or financial disaster.

Fear not tomorrow? It is easy to say it but another thing to live it out. We drown in our questions: But what about . . . ? How will I . . . ? What if . . . ? But if I can’t even . . . ? Who will . . . ? And what does it mean that God is already there? Where? In our crises, God can seem silent, remote, or worse, even imaginary. You may feel as I have at times. I have real problems, and they are too big, too hard, too painful for me to solve. I don’t have time for theology. I’m in trouble here! I’m inadequate, and I need something real. Something practical. Something secure. Give me some solutions, some guarantees. Can’t you see that I’m terrified of tomorrow?

Fear and anxiety can exhaust us. King Solomon writes about the “little foxes that spoil the vines” (Song of Solomon 2:15 NKJV). Fear and anxiety are like that. Fear can wipe us out, burn up whatever energy we have, and hinder us from entering into the full experience of life that God desires for us. Certainly, fear and anxiety can become so severe they incapacitate us. But the majority of us live with fear and still function. I have heard fear compared to a jack hammer buzzing just outside the window. The noise is constantly there. When you sleep, the jack hammer quits, but when you wake up, it starts again, sapping your strength and attention until you’re no longer really living—just enduring.

Fear takes the air out of life. When we live with fear, we lose our capacity for fun and spontaneity. We can’t love others wholeheartedly. We become like that frog being boiled slowly. The water gets steadily hotter until we realize, “I’m not having any fun. I have no joy. I’m not alive. I’ve forgotten how to laugh.” During the difficult period with my child that I described above, I experienced fear in different ways. At times, I would have trouble functioning; at other times, I would be able to get up in the morning and do what was necessary. Up and down. Fear was that steady buzz or hum. I wasn’t able to hear the music of life clearly. Everything was filtered through that fear.

My mother was a master at finding ways to enjoy life despite the intense pressures she faced. She knew how to move fear out of the way and keep joy alive. Stories of her antics and pranks have become the stuff of legend in our family. As a young parent, for instance, I would tell my children, “Now don’t draw on yourselves.” Then I would leave the kids with Mother, only to find them covered in inky smiley faces that Mother herself had drawn! Once Mother made a mudslide for the grandchildren on the side of a steep embankment near our Montreat house. She turned on the hose and then promptly took her turn as the first one down. When much older, she accidently drove her car down that same steep embankment. Thinking she was stepping on the brake, she had stepped on the accelerator instead. She and her friend escaped unscathed, but afterward, Mother arranged for a stop sign to be staked at the bottom of the incline, lest other wayward drivers be tempted to take the same route!

Life is a gift from God to be enjoyed. Fear suffocates our spirits and robs us of that gift. It is human to experience the emotion of fear. Fear entered the human experience in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve rebelled against God and hid themselves from Him. But Peter describes Satan as a “roaring lion, seeking someone to devour,” and I believe fear is also Satan’s paw print (1 Peter 5:8). It is true that some kinds fear can help us—the kind that keeps us from stepping into oncoming traffic, for instance, or putting our hand on a hot stove. At times, God may use fear to keep us from making wrong choices or wrong decisions in life. But these moments of fear are different from what the Bible calls the “spirit of fear,” which I might describe as the condition or attitude that takes hold when our emotion of fear consumes us (2 Timothy 1:7 NKJV). As Paul writes, the spirit of fear does not come from God.

Shifting Our Focus

God is concerned about the way fear affects our lives. The Bible says, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment” (1 John 4:18 NKJV). Fear involves torment. Torment is not God’s will for us. God is committed to our peace. Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you” (John 14:27 NKJV). We read of Jesus, “He Himself is our peace” (Ephesians 2:14 NKJV). God has ordained peace for us (Isaiah 26:12). He did not design us to live in fear and anxiety but in peace. In Scripture, we find God repeatedly urging, commanding, people not to be afraid. God is not condemning us for feeling the emotion of fear, but He doesn’t want us to get stuck there or to set up camp in torment. The question is when we are at our wit’s end, how do we “fear not”? At such moments, peace can seem nothing more than an abstraction. We struggle even to imagine the experience.

Often, when we experience fear, we have allowed our circumstances to overwhelm or alter our perspective. Our perspective has become skewed. I have discovered that defeating fear in my life begins with shifting my focus. I take my eyes off the circumstances, off the source of my fear, and put my focus on God. Instead of mulling over the “what ifs” in my future—instead of looking ahead with anxiety, trepidation, dread, or even horror—I make the choice to look at God, to consider His character, and to trust that the One who loves me is “already there.” The message on Mother’s framed print helped me to make that kind of shift as I faced uncertainty with my child. I had been focusing on tomorrow; the words on the print brought my focus back to God.

Shifting our focus is first a decision, then a process. When we turn to God, our decision opens a door for peace and reassurance to enter our hearts. The Bible says of God, “You will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You” (Isaiah 26:3 NKJV, emphasis added). When we focus on God, peace follows. I find that as I concentrate on God, as I examine facets of His character, as I spend time with Him in prayer, sharing my heart and quieting myself to listen, as I meditate on what His Word says about Him, as I read about Jesus and observe the way He handled life—as I “stay” my mind on God—my problems begin to lose their power over me. Instead, I become absorbed in the power, the beauty, and the love of God. He is my focus now. I am learning about Him and getting to know Him. And the more I learn, the more I discover I can trust Him.

In the coming chapters, we will be doing just what the verse above from Isaiah says—staying, or fixing, our minds on God. We will examine some of God’s attributes and consider His ways. We will study the character of Jesus, for in learning about Jesus, we learn about God. Scripture calls Jesus the “express image” of God (Hebrews 1:3 NKJV). Jesus Himself told His disciples, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9 NKJV). If we want to know what God is like, we can look at Jesus. We can ask: How did Jesus deal with people? What were His relationships like? How did He respond to people’s distress? As we focus on God this way, we can expect God’s peace to crowd out the fear in our hearts.

For some of us, focusing on God, or considering that He is “already there” in our tomorrow, is not exactly a comfort. We may be afraid of God. What little we know of Him, or what we don’t know of Him, frightens us. We fear He is out to lower the boom on us, that He is looking for our faults and eager to point out our failings. We are afraid of His power. Afraid of His judgment. Afraid of being overwhelmed by Him. It is our human nature to fear what we don’t understand, and we don’t understand God. He is unfathomable. He is so much more than we can imagine—far more. He is not accountable to us. He is mysterious, and mystery can be frightening. On seeing the Lord on the throne, Isaiah said, “Woe is me, for I am undone!” (Isaiah 6:5). Isaiah saw his frailty in light of God’s almightiness; he was awed by God’s holiness and glory.

But Scripture also calls God “Abba,” an intimate word for Father that we would translate “Daddy” (Romans 8:15). While God is overwhelming, He is also tender with us. In the New Testament, we see Jesus touching, healing, and relating intimately with people. Bette Midler recorded a song with the lyric, “God is watching us from a distance.” That line is only half-true. God is watching us. But not from a distance. Jesus said, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him” (John 14:23 NKJV). God comes close. He makes His home with us. He longs for us as a lover for his bride. We take God for granted, we don’t develop the relationship, we ignore Him, we don’t spend time with Him, and yet He stays with us, longing for that intimacy. God makes covenant with us, and He keeps it. To me, that is one of the most reassuring truths about God. He will never give me up. Never desert me. Never leave me alone. Never (Hebrews 13:5).

As we learn more about God in these pages and spend time focusing our attention on Him, our relationship with Him will deepen. The Bible promises that when we draw near to God, he will draw near to us (James 4:8). As our relationship with God grows, so will our trust in Him. We will discover His constancy. When everything around us is unstable, God is stable. His character is consistent, unchanging. His love is secure. My prayer is that the more you learn of God and the closer you get to Him, the more you will be able not only to trust Him with your tomorrow but also to take comfort in the fact that He is the One who is already there.

Overcoming Our Misperceptions

Part of our challenge in learning to trust God involves overcoming misperceptions we may have of Him. If my view of God is not accurate, then my trust in Him will be more hesitant than hopeful. Often our picture of God is colored by our experiences with our own fathers or with other figures of authority in our lives. If your father was cold and demanding, then you may see God that way. If your father was gone, as mine often was, then you may see God as far away or busy with other things. If an authority figure was angry or abusive, then you may see God the same way and want nothing to do with Him. We are relational beings, and as such, we are hardwired to measure God by our experiences with significant people.

I did not always view God as someone with whom I could be comfortable. As I shared, my father was gone much of the time, fulfilling his calling to preach the gospel. I knew my father loved me; I knew I was important to him. But I also knew the world needed him, and for many years, I saw God as being similarly occupied with others and unreachable. I have since learned that God is not like that.

In my book In Every Pew Sits a Broken Heart, I share in detail about my life, my failures, and some of the ways God met me in my brokenness and redeemed it. I tell the story of what it was like to go home to Montreat after a major personal failure. Driving up the mountain to my parents’ home was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. I had no idea what they would say to me or how they would respond. I had gone against everyone’s advice. As I saw it, I had failed myself, my family, my children, and God. I felt deserving of condemnation and rejection. What would my parents do? Would they say they had told me so? That I had made my bed and now would have to lie in it?

As I approached the top of the mountain, I saw my father standing there in the driveway. I parked the car and opened the door to get out, but before I could as much as set my feet on the asphalt, my father was at my side. He wrapped his arms around me, and I heard him say, “Welcome home.” His acceptance instantly silenced my shame. I was broken, but I no longer feared. My father had embraced me at my worst and loved me anyway. I experienced grace. I would not compare my father with God, but that day my father showed me in a very practical, gracious way what God is like.

Through that experience, I was able to get a glimpse of the unconditional love God has for me. It has taken me a while to get to a point where I finally see God as “Abba,” as Daddy. Learning to know God intimately has been a process. But through the fog of doubt, anxiety, and fear, I do see Him now as warm and embracing. He loves me, enjoys me, and wants me to know His joy. He will do anything to draw me in. He wants my heart. He wants my trust.

Many years ago I taught a Bible study entitled “Enjoying God” for the women at my home church. I was convinced most of us did not enjoy God. Even the title of the study made us a bit uncomfortable. Was it sacrilegious to “enjoy” God? Wasn’t He austere and stern? Holy and unapproachable? I wanted to explore the possibilities.

The first week’s homework was to imagine crawling into God’s lap and calling him Daddy. I think many were slightly put off by the assignment. Some had to deal with the damaged image of an earthly father. Some had difficulty seeing God in such an intimate way. Each week the assignment was the same. Gradually, I began to hear reports of breakthroughs. Some people took longer than others to connect with God, but we sensed God doing something profound in the group. My own life changed over the course of that study as I too began to see God intimately—as a secure place of comfort and peace. As I focused on Him, God was chipping away at my misperceptions, helping me to open my heart to His love. And He can do the same for you.

Why, God?

Our misperceptions of God can also be formed in the trials and heartaches of life. You may have a long scar of pain running through your life—a spouse leaving, the loss of a child, bankruptcy, illness, addiction, things that take the breath out of you. Perhaps you feel that God abandoned you in those experiences. That He must not care about you. That if He loved you, He wouldn’t have let you go through all that hurt. You wonder, “Why should I trust Him now?”

Why, God? This is a real question we ask when life happens and things seem to go badly. Why are You letting my life unravel? Don’t You love me? Didn’t You promise to protect me? How could You let this happen? In the valleys of life, we can feel as if God has betrayed us. That He isn’t trustworthy, as we once thought. That we’ll never again have a stable or secure place to stand. When devastation occurs and we can’t see God anywhere, our trust in Him can crumble to dust. We may even reject Him for a time.

I’ve lived through personal events that have left me reeling. I have written about suffering in a broken marriage. As the marriage began to come apart I couldn’t “feel” God. I couldn’t hold myself together. I described the way I felt back then: “Raw. Lonely. Exposed. Like an egg without a shell.” I wanted to know why those circumstances were happening to me. Perhaps you have felt this way too.

I’ve seen loved ones suffer through crushing experiences, and I’ve asked God why. Why did my friend’s first grandchild die just hours after birth? Why did a young missionary couple’s two-year-old child drown in the backyard? Why was my friend diagnosed with lung cancer though she never smoked a day in her life? We witness or live through destruction caused by tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes. We call them “acts-of-God,” and we wonder why God would allow them. Fear not tomorrow? How can we do anything but fear after all the devastation we’ve already seen?

God is not threatened by our why. People say we can’t ask why, but we can—we should. We’re in good company when we ask why. Jesus, Job, David, Jeremiah, and many others we would call “heroes of the faith” have asked why. Asking why is part of the human experience. When we ask God why, we are expressing our innermost emotions, our hurt and disappointment, and God wants us to do that. He works with honesty. He is not threatened by our questions and doubts. He invites us to express our feelings. We’re in a relationship with Him—He doesn’t want us to shut our emotions down. While God already knows how we feel, we need to know; and often we discover what is in our hearts as we express ourselves freely to Him.

But we can also get stuck at why. While asking why can be a stimulus for further exploration, understanding, and honest grappling, sometimes it can become a defense—a way to keep God out and to keep intimacy with Him at bay. We can go round and round in circles with why, never really intending to get anywhere. We can get comfortable with why. We would rather stay where we are than do the hard work of learning how to trust God again. And if we’re not careful, some people will keep us there. They will feed our why as long as we let them. At a certain point, what we actually may need is someone to pull us forward and say, “Hey, let’s explore why you feel this way. Let’s not give up on God.”

God invites us to wrestle with our why, our questions. He wrestles with us, as He wrestled with Jacob (Genesis 32:24–32). But finally the angel of God touched Jacob’s thigh and put it out of socket. I can hear the angel saying, “It’s enough now. Let’s go forward.” My Uncle Clayton Bell, my mother’s brother, died suddenly of a heart attack at age sixty-eight. He loved God passionately and was pastoring a thriving church. Those who loved him asked God why. Why take this dynamic man at his prime? Why not leave him here to serve You? Aunt Peggy, my uncle’s wife, suffered greatly, but there came a time when I remember her saying, “I’m going to lean into the pain.” Whatever her questions, she was going to “lean,” trusting God and expecting Him to be there.

At some point, trusting God becomes a step of faith. No one can prove God. You will have to make the choice to trust Him for yourself. Making that choice doesn’t mean you have settled your questions; you may not see those questions resolved in this life. But you can make the decision to try trusting God again. You can take a step forward with all your unresolved questions and invite God to reveal Himself. It’s okay to live with what I call “unfinishedness.” I think about my mother and how “finished” she looked in her relationship with God—as if everything were settled, everything clear. But when you read Mother’s poetry, you discover she was anything but finished. She simply learned to live with her questions and to trust God anyway.

Walking Forward

Why not bring your questions along as you walk forward to discover more about God in this book? You can invite God to work with you as you read. Ask Him to help you in your battle with fear. Ask Him to help you overcome your misperceptions of Him so you can trust Him for tomorrow. God longs to reveal Himself to you. Jesus said about those who love God, “I too will love them and show myself to them” (John 14:21 TNIV). God wants us to see Him for who He really is.

We don’t have to get it all at once. Trusting God is a process. Just as there are stages of life, there are stages of faith. Trust comes bit by bit. Our part is to be willing—willing to move, willing to try. God wants our willingness. Someone once said you can’t steer a car that isn’t moving. If we can just make the choice to move, God will meet us. I want to challenge you. Open yourself up to the possibility of what God can do in your life. Let Him show Himself worthy of your trust. Walk forward into these pages and decide for yourself about God. See if His intimate love is real. See for yourself. Don’t let your questions or misperceptions be hindrances. They don’t have to stop you from moving. Let’s get to know God better. Let’s discover Him. We can bring our baggage, our questions, our “why” right along with us.

****************************************************

Fear Not Tomorrow, God is Already There:

Trusting Him in Uncertain Times

Ruth Graham

Howard Books

West Monroe, Louisiana

[Refer to P4P regarding inclusion of purpose statement.]

Our purpose at Howard Books is to:

Increase faith in the hearts of growing Christians
Inspire holiness in the lives of believers
Instill hope in the hearts of struggling people everywhere
Because He’s coming again!

[Howard Logo] Published by Howard Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

www.howardpublishing.com

Fear Not Tomorrow, God Is Already There © 2009 Ruth Graham

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Howard Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

Published in association with Ambassador Literary Agency, Nashville, Tennessee

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5843-9

ISBN-10: 4165-5843-8

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Manufactured in the United States of America

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact: Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com.

Edited by Stacy Mattingly and Cindy Lambert

Cover design by TK

Interior design by TK

Photography/illustrations by TK

Scripture quotations not otherwise marked are from the New American Standard Bible®. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. Scripture quotations marked AMP are from the Amplified Bible®, copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission (www.Lockman.org). Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version. Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NKJV are from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked The Message are from The Message. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked TNIV are taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version®. TNIV®. Copyright© 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Boy-sterous Living

2009-09-19T17:48:00.000-07:00

A must- read for all moms with boys!

About the book: Raising boys isn't easy. Life with them is loud. If it's quiet, they're probably up to something. Boys are messy, competitive, fearless, and proud. Living with them pretty much guarantees that you're in for an adventure.

In Boy-sterous Living, Jean shares a few of the priceless stories and laugh-out-loud lessons that she and her boys have experienced over the years. With humorous insight and practical advice, she offers encouragement and ideas to help both mothers and fathers impact and shape the lives of their sons. From understanding their love of sports to overcoming the superman complex, Jean shows moms how to find joy and contentment in everyday life by celebrating the laughter, passion, noise, and endless energy boys bring to our lives.

My Thoughts: As the mom of three girls when we adopted our twin boys, I suspected I might be in for a bit of a change, but I wasn't ready for the shocking difference between the sexes! It was obvious to me from the beginning that boys are very different than girls in many different ways. And it's not just environmental!

Jean Blackmer's experiences with her three sons (and her husband) have provided a lot of laughs as I read this book, but more importantly they have provided a lot of encouragement. I found myself nodding as I read, realizing that my boys are perfectly normal and that my expectations as a mom will always be just a bit off from what their expectations of life are. She provides practical advice and suggestions that have helped me immediately begin to understand and even be able to better communicate with all the men in my life, young and old.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with sons!

About the author: Jean is currently the Publishing Manager for MOPS International and she's been free-lance writing for 16 years. She has been published in a variety of local and national publications, including: Guideposts, MomSense, Today's Christian Woman, Christian Parenting Today, American Girl, Proverbs 31 Woman, Chicken Soup for the Mother and Son Soul, Chicken Soup Cookbook for the Busy Mom's Soul, Focus on the Family's Teen Phases, Guideposts Miracle Series, and others.

She also co-authored her first book, Where Women Walked: Powerful True Stories of Women's Perseverance and God's Provision. (Tyndale/Focus on the Family, 2004) This book was nominated for a Gold Medallion Award.

Jean graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder with a Bachelor's (1987) and a Master's (1992) degree in Journalism. She lives in Boulder with her husband Zane; three boys, Josh , Jordan , and Jake.

Find out more about Jean here!

Link to purchase the book: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-sterous-Living-Celebrating-Your-Rowdy/dp/0834123908/ref=sprightly-20

Check out what other bloggers are saying! http://www.litfusegroup.com/latest/current-blog-tours/89-boy-sterous-living-blog-tour

If God Were Real

2009-09-12T16:47:00.000-07:00

Today's Wild Card author is:

John Avant

and the book:

If God Were Real: A Journey into a Faith That Matters

Howard Books (July 7, 2009)

My Thoughts:
This is a life changing book. At first the title takes you aback a bit, of course God is real! But John Avant causes the reader to take an honest look at his or her life and we quickly see that we don't act as if we believe that. We act as if our church, our denomination, our beliefs might be real and that God is out there somewhere, but we live each day as if this life is the most important.

How differently would we live if we truly believed God is real? Would we really argue about the validity of sprinkling vs. immersion baptism? Would we spend so much time justifying our behavior or arguing over mundane points of scripture? Would we have so many denominations? Would we worry if our songs were too traditional or too contemporary?

John calls us to take a step of faith and live a life that makes a difference. Live a life of true belief, of true missionary faith. Stop being intellectual and be a tool of Christ!

This book is only for those who want to stop living a life of pretend faith and really act upon the belief that God is who he says he is. I challenge you to go out and buy it and start living out true faith!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

John Avant is the author of Passion Promise and Authentic Power, as well as numerous national articles. A pastor of a 7000-member Baptist church, he has served as vice president of the North American Mission Board and has been deeply involved in missions and church development around the world.

Visit the author's website.

Product Details:

List Price: $14.99
Publisher: Howard Books (July 7, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1416587799
ISBN-13: 978-1416587798

AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:

1

If God Were Real ... the Illusions of Ordinary life Would Be Shattered

We all need illusions. That's why we love movies.

Monica Bellucci

Shattering the Illusion That Christian Life Is Boring

Who doesn't love a great movie? All of the most exciting and wonderful parts oflife are right there on the screen to be enjoyed. Romance? Just come to my house anytime my wife, Donna, is watching television, and there's a pretty good chance she'll be watching Sleepless in Seattle. I thought the movie was kind of touching the first time I saw it. But Donna still cries, even now that she has the lines memorized.

As for me, I'll take a movie with raw, masculine courage every time. Nothing beats Gladiator or Braveheart for making you glad to be a man. Or how about pure adventure, like the Indiana Jones films? What could be more cool than watching Indiana get out of every trap-and along the way eat monkey brains, defeat evil, and get the girl?

Yes, movies are one of life's pleasures-even though we know that what they show us are just illusions. Could it be that we love movies because they allow us to experience, if only for a little while, what we'll never really have? Or what we aren't sure we can ever really be?

But what if life is meant to exceed even the best of what we see on film?

What if we are meant to live out the greatest romance of all?

What if we are designed to be powerful and courageous?

What if life could actually be filled with suspense and adventure and we really could live happily ever after?

Well, shouldn't we expect all these things to be true if God is real? If the One who created this vast universe with a word really did come and live as one of us, die and rise again for us, and promise to fill us with his Spirit, why would we not expect all that and more? Especially since Jesus himself said he carne so that we "may have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10).

Yes, things don't always go smoothly in the movies. In fact, a movie with no tension is boring. As Christians, we know that we won't live happily ever after until we get to heaven. In this world we will have pain and difficulties-but not boredom! Not if God is real.

The movies that seem so exciting to us might be boring when compared with the real lives we are meant to live.

If we actually lived as though God is real.

My friend Gary Witherall calls this kind of life "adventuring for God." Gary is one of those Christians who really believes in God. He has definitely traded in practical atheism for authentic faith. Gary and his wife, Bonnie, put their authentic faith into action as missionaries in Sidon, Lebanon. Regardless of the personal risk involved in taking their Christian witness to a place where many are hostile to Christianity in general and especially missionaries, Gary and Bonnie sought to show God's truth through their authentic, caring lives. They deeply loved the Palestinian people they served.

The following was written on the website of Operation Mobilization, the mission agency with which Gary and Bonnie served: "Some people talk about being on the cutting edge; some actually live there. Fewer choose to live on the bleeding edge of humanity, where nothing is humanly certain except great need, where risk defies other definitions, where light shines the brighter for the enveloping darkness. Sidon in Lebanon is such a place, and Bonnie and Gary Witherall were some of those few."

Gary's belief has been tested in the most extreme ways. In fact, Gary and Bonnie's life should be made into a movie. It already has been written as a book. Total Abandon is the story of Bonnie's murder. Bonnie, a nurse, was shot by a terrorist as she entered the clinic where she cared for Muslim women. The authorities quickly got Gary out of Lebanon. Less than a month after Bonnie's murder, Gary wrote the following in his journal: "Nothing remains and yet I have everything. I lost my wife, my ministry, my beautiful apartment overlooking the Mediterranean, my friends there, my Arabic classes, and three classes a week studying Islam. The little Honda we drove on the bumpy roads through the crazy traffic. The warmth of Bonnie lying quietly asleep next to me. I was robbed but have been found today steadfast, strong as a piece of steel yet completely broken. Lord, sustain me."!

Those were not just words in a journal. Since those days of crushing loss, Gary has returned to Lebanon many times, including once with my own daughter. He has stood in front of the place where Bonnie was murdered and preached forgiveness and love to the same culture that killed his wife. And then he sang with my daughter and the others there, ... "Blessed be the name of the Lord ... You give and take away ... My heart will choose to say, ... 'Lord, blessed be Your name.'"

Those who know Gary watch him live in boldness, forgiveness, joy, and service to others-even to those who would kill what he loved most. Who lives like this? Only those who believe God is real!

That's what it's like to believe in God. Gary is living, breathing, weeping, laughing evidence that God is indeed real. If God does not exist, Gary has done an incredible job of inventing God's impact in his life!

I've gotten to know Gary well since Bonnie's death. I have laughed and cried with him, counseled him, and received counsel from him. And I had the privilege to help officiate his wedding to Helena, his beautiful new wife (and the granddaughter of a martyr).

God is real to Gary. This man believes it-and then actually lives as though he does. This has not led to an easy life, but it has led to the adventure of real life. Gary has known passionate love, tragedy and heartbreak, terror and suspense, renewal and new love, courage, danger, and adventure. All of the things we flock to see in the movies are his in real life.

Living for God shouldn't be boring. When we live as though God is real, the true adventure begins. So maybe, after all, living a boring Christian life is a conscious choice, not an inevitable state. Perhaps for most of us the issue is not whether God is real but whether we really want the life that results from living like he is. Perhaps "adventuring for God" is a little too dangerous and risky for most of us. So the question may be, is it worth it to live as though God is real?

Shattering the Illusions of Religion

I've served as a pastor for twenty-seven years and served in a mission agency for two years. I have had the opportunity to see many lives like Gary's-enough to convince me that only God could be responsible for what I have seen in them. But I have to admit that I've also seen a lot of the opposite-lives of those who believe in God, who love Jesus, but who have just settled into lives that are nothing like the adventure of following the real God. Most of these are not bad people. They love their families and friends, try to live decent lives, and serve in their churches. But something is missing. Many of them are just overwhelmed with the stuff oflife. They're too busy trying to figure out how to afford a third car payment or how to get their son's grades up to think much about such "deep" things. They may never have stopped to wonder if there could be something more to their experience of God-something that could dramatically impact those allconsuming daily struggles.

Now, living a life of adventure is not, in itself, evidence that God is real. Some people live lives of reckless adventure without God. But my point is that if God is real, there's no need to live a boring life! We are meant for more. You can live a life of temporary adventure without God, but you cannot be an authentic follower of the real God without adventure. And why would you want to?

Many people do want very much to experience more than what they currently know of God. Every pastor hears regularly from those folks who want to "go deeper." I want a deeper knowledge of God too. In fact, I can't think of anything I want more. But my experience has been that many who want to go deeper are actually afflicted with an insidious spiritual disease I call Deeper-Sleep Syndrome. They make the mistake of thinking that going deeper means getting more knowledge about the Bible, having more Bible studies or worship services, or learning some spiritual mystery that they've somehow missed all these years. But as they dive into these things again and again, they're in danger of going so deep that they end up in a deep spiritual sleep, unconscious of what God really wants. That's DeeperSleep Syndrome.

The cure is actually quite simple. If God is real, surely he wants us to know him and to know him deeply. In fact, he says he has already told us all we need to know. "His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness" (2 Peter 1:3). Knowing more about God is a good thing; but acting on what we know is the real answer. James 2: 17 says, "Faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead."

So if we were to begin to really live out the teachings of Jesus, we would find ourselves in the middle of an incredible spiritual adventure.

Can it be that simple? After all, isn't that what Christians are already doing? Or at least something close to it?

I'm not so sure. When I examine my own life, I wonder how much I'm really seeking to follow Jesus, to do exactly what he said. Am I just a part of a church system that does its best to reinvent the words of Jesus to make what he said more palatable for our modern sensibilities, more in sync with the ways we really want to live? Maybe the nineteenth-century philosopher S0ren Kierkegard had it right: The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. ... My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I get on in the world?

Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.2

Wow. I don't think I would be quite that hard on scholarship, but he has a point. If God is real, he has told us what we need to know and what we need to do. Could it be that it's time to take what we know ... and do it?

I think we need to be prepared for the ramifications of this. We could be talking about a complete reshaping of how we have "done" our faith. But wouldn't that be worthwhile if it resulted in the kind of movement that changed the world, the very course of history, through a little group of peasant nobodies in the first century?

So where do we start? First of all, start with hope-wild, fan-tastic hope that your life could be worthy of the big screen. That all that captivates us while we sit with our popcorn and Cokes may not be just an illusion.

It is time to be "dis-illusioned."

I stumbled upon a website that fascinates me. It's called "The Joy of Disillusionment: A Resource for Those Leaving Christianity,"3 and it chronicles the journey and the thoughts of David P. Crews, who has moved from being a committed Christian, a selfprofessed believer in the God of the Bible, to being an atheist. Crews says, "This site is primarily directed to a select group ofpeople-those who are somewhere in the process of leaving their Christian beliefs behind them and moving forward into an unknown realm of rational, non-theistic thought and life."4 In other words, he writes to those who once lived as though God is real but now are on a journey to live as though he is not. I found that ironic and intriguing, since I'm writing to people who may not live as though God is real but are on a journey to live as though he is.

I find Crews' writings to be honest and fair and even instructive in a strange, backward kind of way. He writes: "For those of us who have come out of a religious life to the acceptance of disbelief and of a rational world view, the word disillusionment is uniquely appropriate, but in a new and positive way. In fact, it is the perfect term for us. When we dissect this word, the root is, of course, 'illusion.' To be 'dis-illusioned,' therefore, is to not be deceived by the illusion. Finally, it is to reject the illusion in favor of what is real."5

Strangely enough, I find this to be a great description of how Christ followers need to live if we believe God is real. We must come out of the current religious life we've been languishing in. We must "disbelieve" it. It is not a rational worldview to live in bland uniformity and creative vacuity if we believe what we say we believe. It is time to leave behind that illusion-to reject it in favor of what is real, the God on whom we have staked everything.

Crews goes on to give us a good prescription for living the "disillusioned" life. "When we replace illusion with reality, we step out of our cavern of myth and take a deep breath of the air outside-brisk and with a tang of scents unknown. It is the real world we are inhaling and it enlivens us to move forward and to value who and what we truly are."6

Yes! This atheist has just about nailed what life as a Christ follower ought to be.

But I don't know what I find sadder, the fact that David Crews has concluded that God is an illusion or the fact that we so often and so tragically live as though he is. It is time for us to step out of our cavern of myth-in which we live as though we were godless-and breathe the air God made in the same awesome, exhilarating way he made us to breathe it. Or else get honest and follow Crews into a life of less hypocrisy that simply discounts God altogether.

If you're ready to be "disillusioned"-if you are determined to live a life that is genuine, a life that embraces the reality of God rather than the illusion we seem to have made him-I affirm your path. I respect David Crews. In fact, I suspect I would like him. But I believe he is wrong, and desperately so. Our hope is valid. It's intellectually defensible. It's philosophically sound. But it's rarely lived.

So let's begin to live! All the romance and adventure of the most thrilling movies may actually be your birthright as a child of God. The curtain could be lifting, and the screenplay of your life could be about to come alive in a way that would make every flick you've ever seen a B film that can't even begin to measure up.

Shattering the Illusion That Hollywood Must Be Our Enemy

If we truly lived adventurous lives that reflect the reality of God, maybe Christ followers would make all the movies. No, I'm not talking about some battle plan to boycott Hollywood until the purveyors of on-screen smut go broke and Christians take over. (The fact that some have tried things like this fits the sad caricature of Christians the world thinks is true of all of us.) I'm saying that if we made movies that resembled the lives we are actually meant to live, the movies would be so good that everyone would want to see them!

All right, I know I'm being naive. We would leave out the sexual content that draws many people, and not everyone would flock to see our films. But the fact is that many of the best movies actually are about spiritual truths. It almost seems that the world is trying to write our stories for us. I am astounded at the prevalence of spiritual searching evident in movies today. Sometimes the world seems more interested in the wonders and possibilities of God than his followers are.

Tom Hanks seems to bring elements of the gospel into just about every film he stars in. He's the one who lays down his life for another in Saving Private Ryan. He's the simple man, Forrest Gump, who just can't get away from the amazing plan and purpose woven throughout his life. Gump is a simpleton, yet he confronts the atheist with a profoundly faith-filled statement: ''I'm going to heaven, Lieutenant Dan." And then he witnesses Dan's transformation. Hanks is the lost man in Cast Away who experiences the worst we might imagine life could offer and, in the end, sees that there's a plan by which all things work together for his good.

You just can't get away from God and his mysteries in the movies. And even when it's not blatant or intentional, many films seem almost like a retelling of the gospel.

I recently saw the blockbuster movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith. When the film ended, I walked out of the theater thinking, Well, they did it again! They just made a film that directly parallels the gospel, and they probably had no idea! (Spoiler alert! If you haven't seen the movie and don't want to know the ending, you might want to skip ahead to the next paragraph-or better yet, go see it and then keep reading.) A man-made virus has virtually destroyed humanity. Those not killed by the disease have been devoured by the horrific creatures that those infected by the virus became. Will Smith's character is a doctor, the only survivor in New York City. He spends his days seeking a cure that will transform the monsters mankind has become back into what they were created to be. At the end he sacrifices his life to save others and, ultimately, the entire world. And what is the means of this salvation? Blood.

Hello? Does anyone have any trouble seeing the gospel reflected in this story? A savior comes and sheds his blood to save and transform the human race, which has been infected by sin. It seems that God's plan is so hardwired into our souls that it leaks out everywhere, even when it may not be intentional.

Does it not seem strange and sad to you, though, that many people who claim to be Christians spend most of their time fo-cusing on the internal issues of church life that almost no one outside of the church cates about, i.e., the style of music and minor doctrinal disputes, while the world scrambles to write our story? And when the creative work of a follower of Christ actually does make the screen, most of the time the world flocks to see it! Films based on J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy and C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Natnia ate perfect examples.

The bottom line is, followers of Christ have a compelling story to tell. In fact, if we live like God is real, we have the story of all stories to tell! And we are made to tell it. The foundation of all our stories is that we were made in the image of God-in the image of the Creator. So we were designed to create. The spatk that lit the match of the universe ignites our souls.

Yet we seem to think that being a good Christian means pouring water on that spatk so it doesn't flame up and get too wild. After all, we have to be reverent, don't we?

What does that even mean? I've heard the "irreverent" criticism used hundreds of times to justify the squelching of creativity within the church. The critics don't always use the words reverent or irreverent. They may just criticize the music for being too loud or worldly, or the methods of the church too contemporaty. But it all seems to come back to the same thing: they want their Christianity to be neatly packaged, safe and quiet-reverent.

My problem is that Jesus' behavior as recorded in the Bible doesn't seem all that reverent to me. He condemned the teachers of the law and Phatisees-the most reverent of Jews-called them names like snakes and vipers, and chose to spend most of his time among big, loud crowds of peasants. He chose rough fishermen and embezzling tax collectors for his followers. He ran those in the religious business out of the temple with a whip.

Jesus calls us to passion, not boredom. Maybe it is time to reject cold "reverence" and join a "wild" crowd. And tell a "wild" story. My "wild" daughter is a theater actress in New York City. Maybe she can help us understand the story we are meant to tell; the real-life adventure we are meant to live; what the screenplay can look like when we choose to follow Jesus with passion in the real world.

Acting Out God's Love

CHRISTI AVANT WATSON

Rehearsal studios in Manhattan commonly smell of sweat and bare feet-not an altogether appealing aroma, but one I am familiar with nonetheless. Actors file into this pungent building, chatting excitedly. We are in the ensemble of a play going up at a rather prestigious off-Broadway theater. None of us has any lines. We sing only one song in the show. Nevertheless, we are buzzing like honey-starved bees, knOWing that after this production, we can place the name of this theater prominently on our resumes.

We hope the next casting director we see will observe this credit, jump for joy, and call us in for every project he has. Most likely, this will not happen; but we hope. After all, we are a people of crazy hope, illogical dreams, and gritty passion. An average person may go to five or six job interviews in a lifetime; we go to five or six a week. If one produces any results, even a follow-up phone call, we celebrate. Halfway through rehearsal, a presence enters the room, and all eyes turn in her direction. Dressed head to toe in the quintessential New York hue-black-the acclaimed playwright has joined the lowly ensemble players. In the middle of the room, she stands on a chair and warmly greets us. "I grew up in a strict evangelical home/' she says, "then I went to Berkeley, and I began to accept what is so acceptable today-that evangelicals are morons, idiots, and that they are ruining our world. However, after I moved to New York, I began to realize that to lump all of these people together is abit simple-minded. I decided to do an experiment, to write the church service-and the characters in that service-that would interest me as an atheist; and that is the history behind the show you are in." If I was buzzing before, now I was spinning out of control with anticipation. The only thing I love as much as singing or delving into an intriguing character is working with and knowing artists who are aggressively, and in this case publicly, searching for truth. Creative people, whether or not they follow Christ, have tapped into the remnants of God left in every human heart, and I absolutely love surrounding myself with that.

For two years I have been here, pursuing this absurd profession alongside New York's progressive and wonderful culture. I have had the privilege of performing allover the United States, even in Alaska. Every day is not a good day. Some days I feel like I have been thrown into a boxing ring, gloveless and in five-inch heels, and been pitted against a heavyweight champion. On those days I focus on the relationships I have developed that would never have taken root within the walls of a church. Although my friends are very spiritual, they tend to fall somewhere along the playwright's path. Either they have been wounded and are angry or they simply feel that the Christian church is irrelevant.

Often the church has not helped matters. Sometimes the church sings "Just As I Am" and then demands that others be just as she is.

Every day I pray that I can be a part of reversing the tragic flow that has left the state of the Christian church such that this is its impression on the world-or at least that I can follow Jesus Christ closely enough to heal the pain people feel.

Eric Bryant, one of the pastors at a "flow-reversing" church in Los Angeles, says that "Love is the best apologetic." After all, was it not love that drove Jesus Christ to hell and back on our behalf? No other force is powerful enough to turn the tide, and as ambassadors of that love, we have an amazing opportunity to alter the future.

Perhaps I'll never grace a Broadway stage or a big screen. Perhaps I'll never again get paid to do what I know I was born to. These thoughts are paralyzing sometimes, but all adventures come with great risk. In the end, the faces of my friends who have allowed me to share in their spiritual journeys are what matters. It is not the grandiose feats you accomplish but the people you actively and intentionally love who will take you on the great adventure available to every follower of Christ. If you restrict your love to those like you, those you understand, those who make you feel comfortable, you will be pretty bored. If you dare to open your life to one person who needs a friend, you just might find yourself in an adventure of eternal proportions.

Since we have the most compelling and interesting story to tell, and since it seems even those who don't believe our story want to tell it for us, maybe it's time that we actually begin to tell it ourselves-and even more important, to live it ourselves. To live like God is real.

The screenplays of the movies of our lives will be full of emotional ups and downs, joy and sorrow, laughter and tears. Like Gary and Bonnie Wither all's missionary service in Lebanon, like my daughter Christi's missionary service in the theater district of New York, authentic life in Christ will not always be easy, pleasant, or predictable.

But it will always be an adventure.

Trading Illusions for a Compelling Faith

I walked past the television the other day and stopped in my tracks when I heard a voice say, "I have been told you will not have a person of faith at your house .... Is that true?" The voice belonged to talk-show host Glenn Beck, and his question was addressed to comedian and illusionist Penn Jillette, who is well known for his controversial atheistic ideas. Jillette confirmed that Beck was correct and went on to explain why he would not allow Christians or other people of faith to visit in his home. He said that he did not use alcohol or drugs and would not allow people who did into his home to influence his children. He also did not want what he had seen in Christianity to influence his children in any way.7

Is it possible that while we Christians have been busy fighting the culture war and protecting our families from evil influences, we have done such a poor job of living out an intelligent, provocative, and compelling faith that people like Jillette now feel they must protect their children from us? Mter almost thirty years of ministry, I'm not sure he has it wrong. I've been fortunate to spend my ministry among loving people who helped my children to grow up seeing much of the good that is the church. But honestly, I've seen more children alienated from God and from the church by the actions of Christians than by anything atheists have done. I've lost count of the number of pastors I know whose children want nothing to do with the God of their parents, because they watched what people who claimed to love God did to those parents. Even I want to protect my children from some Christians.

In a different interview, with NPR, Jillette said, "Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O, and all other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have."8 Now that's funny. And also profoundly sad. For I believe the responsibility lies squarely at the feet of the church for allowing an illusionist like Penn Jillette to spend his whole life seeing only an illusion of what it means to follow Jesus, never the real thing. For offering so little ofJesus to the world that a man like Jillette can really think that all those things he mentioned, from his family to his Jell-O, are better off without God, without purpose, without hope of anything except utter annihilation, and without any contact from Christians. It's time that we change that, for Jillette's sake and for millions of others'. It's time to become the kind of people everyone wants to have over to his house-if nothing else, just to hear our stories, to explore the mystery of our lives, to try to understand what it is about us that draws them to us, even in their disbelief It's time to get the messed-up movie we've made of Christianity out of the theater and put a new show on the screen.

One that is worthy of the Producer.

So take a step toward that hope's becoming reality. Decide to take the risk of living like God is real, whatever that may mean and wherever that may take you. Perhaps the only way you'll be sure that God is real is to live as if he is and then watch what happens. Get ready, though. In the next chapter we'll see just how enormous that change may be.

The Book That Made America

2009-09-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

The Book That Made America: How the Bible Formed Our Nation (Nordskog Publishing) by Jerry Newcombe is a definitive volume on the Christian roots of our nation. Those who want to restore knowledge of our Christian heritage have their work cut out. As secularism continues its stranglehold on American education, we move further and further away from retaining our Christian roots. The Book That Made America will challenge anyone to know the true origin of our Nation and to fight to keep it. Newcombe hopes to educate Americans by providing the facts of history, proving that America began as a Christian nation and American’s have every right to preserve and uphold that heritage.

All that is positive in our foundation can be traced back to the Scriptures. Recently, President Obama declared that America is not a Christian nation, while Newsweek announced the demise of Christian America. This book is the answer to America’s critics with the facts of history.

Jerry Newcombe, D. Min., is senior producer for Coral Ridge Ministries and has produced or coproduced more than fifty documentaries. The host of two weekly radio shows, he has also been a guest on numerous television and radio talk shows - including Fox Business News, C-Span, USA Radio and Moody Radio. He is the author or coauthor of twenty two books, including with Dr. Kennedy, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?, How Would Jesus Vote?, and The Presence of a Hidden God.

Coral Ridge Ministries is a media outreach founded by Dr. D. James Kennedy. Its programming reaches a national television, radio, and Internet audience at www.coralridge.org.

You can purchase a copy at Amazon or at Nordskog Publishing.