03.13.07 Apparently

Apparently it takes longer to sign a book deal than it does a record contract.

02.28.07 Big Big God

BRENTWOOD — Not that long ago, Jeff Atwood and his daughter Madison were having a conversation about God. More specifically, they talked about the size of God. Atwood was happy to have this or any conversation with his 10-year-old, because when she was a baby, she contracted bacterial meningitis.

“We almost lost her. She was on life support for several days. She was our first child, and it was her first ear infection. You expect those things will work out. You go get an antibiotic and move on. But the germ moved into her bloodstream and it was affecting the lining around her brain.” Madison survived, but the experience left her with a significant brain injury.

“She doesn’t really comprehend really abstract things; things difficult for her to get her arms around,” Atwood said.

So that day when they were talking about God, Madison couldn’t help but ask about God’s size.

“She and I were sitting around talking about God and she said ‘like Jesus up in heaven’ and she pointed up. ‘Is he like me, little like me?’ and I said, ‘No. He’s big. A big, big God.’ “

After saying those words aloud, inspiration struck.

“I said, ‘Wow. There’s a book idea,’ “ he said.

Read More

02.07.07 Good Words: In The Name Of Jesus

In The Name Of Jesus is a tiny book I read on a car ride from some Southern state to it’s neighbor.  But it’s message will take a lifetime for me to live an adequate response to, if I ever complete the task at all.

Henri J.M. Nouwen, like most guys still using middle initials, is ridiculously well-educated and important...at least to academics like himself.  The kind of guy you’d think has arrived.  Yet he writes transparently…

After twenty-five years in the academic world as a teacher of pastoral psychology, pastoral theology, and Christian spirituality, I began to experience a deep inner threat.  As I entered my fifties and was able to realize the unlikelihood of doubling my years, I came face to face with the simple question, “Did becoming older bring me closer to Jesus?” After twenty-five years of priesthood, I found myself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied with burning issues.  Everyone was saying that I was doing really well, but something inside was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger…

...I woke up one day with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term “burnout” was a convenient psychological translation for spiritual death.

In the midst of this I kept praying, “Lord, show me where you want me to go and I will follow you, but please be clear and unambiguous about it!” Well, God was.

What happened next is radical.  This Notre Dame and Harvard professor abandons the life he’s always known for one in which his vast knowledge of God and scripture and psychology are not needed as much as he is.

I highly recommend this book that walked me through a dark time of my own, not only for those experiencing burn-out and doubt but for the prevention of it down the road.  Nouwen, using simple language and his own story, writes about well-worn wallpaper-like topics like prayer and obeying God but in refreshingly honest and clear ways that reshaped my life in important ways.

Like I said, it’s a small book: 81 pages of large print.  But it tames big ideas like resisting the temptation to be spectacular and embracing instead a life of faithfulness, or resisting the temptation to be relevant and embracing instead a life of pray. These seem like they’d require deep scriptural unraveling to fully communicate but they don’t.  All Nouwen’s smarts somehow unfold on the page as cutting simplicity instead of a detailed exegesis of scholarly proportions.

The book is a transcription more-or-less of a speech Nouwen gave on the topic of Christian Leadership but, whether you think you’re a leader or not, this book is worth reading.  I hope it moves, provokes, and inspires you the way it has me every time I’ve read it.

01.04.07 Heretic’s Guide To A Bad Start

One of the perks of my job I love most is the amount of free books I get sent.  About once a month someone sends me a book to read and review, sometimes even write a blur about for marketing purposes or something.

Yesterday I received A Heretic’s Guide To Eternity by Spencer Burke, the founder of theooze.com - an on-line “emergent” community.

I’ve only skimmed it so far and only truly read the forward 0 by Brian McLaren.  It’s a strange little forward.  Three pages of defensiveness and disclaimers.  He parses the word heretic and defends it’s use against a not yet and very imaginary attack from who know who.

I imagine that the blogs and maybe even religious broadcasting airwaves will soon be buzzing with scandalous outrage that Spencer and Barry have used the word “heretic” in their title.  Maybe the risk they’re taking won’t be worth it, as scores of serious, concerned people try to take the logs our of the authors’ eyes, unaware that they might even have a tiny metal shaving in their own...if some people do more than react to the scandalous title and actually read this book and realize, not what’s wrong with heresy (which is obvious to almost everybody), but what’s so often wrong with religion, including “our” religion (whichever that might be).

The whole is prickly like this.  And I got the feeling at the end of it all that McLaren was saying essentially, “If you, Shaun, don’t like anything in this book you’re about to read, well, you’re a bad bad mean person who doesn’t think enough for himself.”

Pompous.  Fists gloved and ready.  A horrible tone to set at the beginning.

12.21.06 Ebola

I finished the chapter I needed to turn in to a publisher this week.  The thing that took the longest and was most painful was cutting it down.  I tend to repeat myself in my writing and throw in things I find amusing or interesting that, if I’m honest/realistic, no one else would care about.  Here’s an example, a funny bit I cut out because, um, it just didn’t fit in the end.  It didn’t add anything to the chapter except humor:

My wife is a mild hypochondriac.  And for this reason I don’t like the internet.

If her neck is stiff, if her tongue is a different shade of pink, she visits one of those be-your-own-doctor sites. It quickly analyzes her list of symptoms and then displays a few of the possible illnesses she may be afflicted with – ordered from most heinous to least.

Entering head ache, back pain and fatigue she soon discovers she has the Ebola virus, gonorrhea or an allergy to dairy.

I’ve noticed that any set of symptoms actually will yield a list containing the Ebola virus.

Dry skin?  Ebola virus.  Watery eyes?  Ebola virus.  Acne?  Ebola virus.

Where was I going with this?  Well, it’s a tenuous connection at best but the connection was: Every thing that is “wrong with the world,” no matter how small a symptom it may be, leads us back to the same diagnosis, the same disease: The Fall.

A stretch I know.  That’s why it got deleted.

If you write, how do you edit?  How do you go about deciding what stays and what goes?  And do you do most of your editing as you write or write all you can and want to and then, in the end, go back and edit?