Write from the Deep

Many things in today’s world make us feel we need to hurry up and get them done. But there are some things that we should NOT hurry to do. Here are 10 specific things you need to do for your career—and life—but never in a hurry.

But first, thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

The new year started a few weeks ago, and by now we’re probably deep into the commitments, resolutions, and activities of life. If you’re like most people, all that has probably come with a sense of rushing about.

Now, rushing isn’t always bad. If, say, your carbon monoxide alarm is going off, rushing out of the house is prudent. But if rushing becomes the normal course of our lives, it leads to stress, anxiety, and exhaustion. That isn’t the way God designed us to live and function.

This year we want to encourage you to slow down. To NOT live your life in a constant state of “hurry.” To help you do that in concrete ways, we’ve made a list of 10 things to NOT hurry. We’ll start off with something writing related.

Some of you may have started the year with a goal of finishing your book and publishing it this year. That is not necessarily wise. Especially if it’s your first book, and most especially if it’s the first draft. Trust us when we say that learning the craft takes time, and you can’t put a deadline on that. 

Most writers don’t know what they don’t know until AFTER they write their first book AND get professional feedback. The last thing you want to do for your writing career is be in a hurry to publish something that isn’t ready. Unless you’ve been studying craft for a few years and revised that first book multiple times, it’s very likely not ready.

Trust us. We have seen lots and LOTS of manuscripts over the years that were pitched to agents or publishers, or self-published, long before they were ready. So take your time. Don’t hurry.

Proverbs 19:2 (NLT) says, “Enthusiasm without knowledge is no good; haste makes mistakes.” We want your first book to have every chance of success, not mistakes.

With so much information and advice available these days, it’s easy to take in huge quantities of ideas, techniques, facts, and so on, without ever stopping to absorb any of it. Instead of putting new ideas into practice, we just skip off to the next interesting idea. This year, we encourage you to slow down. To let a new idea or technique soak in. To reap the benefits before you move on.

Think about how many writing craft books are out there. And blogs, and articles, and workshops, and courses. You could spend a lifetime hurrying from thing to thing. Don’t do that. Spend some time applying what you’ve learned about dialogue, for example, before you go off to read that book on subplots.

We’re not saying you have to be an expert in one thing before you can move on, because improving craft does seem to go in waves. What we are saying is that you don’t want to let distraction pull you away before you’ve gained real and lasting benefit from what you’re learning. 

This same principle applies to life lessons. Take the time to reflect on new insights and experiences. Often your newfound knowledge will apply to other areas of life. You just need to stop and connect them. This is a great practice to not only gain wisdom, but to improve creativity, because creativity is about making connections.

The next thing to NOT hurry is conversation. James 1:19 (NLT) tells us “Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.”

Think about the good old days when people sat on the front porch and chewed the fat. My dad is in his eighties now. When he was a kid, his family lived in a small town. No one locked their doors when they left the house—that was considered rude because a neighbor might need to borrow something while you were gone. Since the doors weren’t locked, it wasn’t uncommon for his family to come home from somewhere and find folks sitting in the living room waiting for their return, just to visit, to talk in an unhurried fashion.

One of the ways we see hurried conversation these days is a “like” on Facebook, or a thumbs up on a text. Or a quick direct message or email. This seems to be today’s preferred method of communication. Or if there is an actual conversion, it seems that people just want to get their point across and move on.

This year we encourage you to change that. To stop and have deliberate conversations, not quick information exchanges. Put your phone down, turn off the TV, close your laptop, look someone in the eyes, and listen.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to devote hours and hours to every conversation. Five relaxed minutes of undivided attention is worth far more than an hour of distracted “uh-huhs.”

Going along with not hurrying conversation, the next thing to NOT hurry is relationships. The writing business, and life, is all about relationships, and good relationships take time.

Get to know people through unhurried conversation. Spend time with them. Get to know them over time. Go to writing conferences not once, but year after year to meet industry professionals and other writers. Ask them questions about what they do, who they are, and what they like. 

You don’t want to end up with an agent whose style is completely wrong for you. Or a publisher who likes to work with the type of author that you definitely ARE NOT. You don’t want to end up with a critique partner who isn’t as experienced as you need. You don’t want to line up a newsletter swap with a writer who turns out to be unreliable, or hire a PR person who doesn’t understand your brand.

Your goal is to learn about other writers and industry professionals as human beings—not instruments to help further your career. 

But don’t forget about the non-writing relationships in your life. They need time too. Life is busy, and the dual careers writers often have makes things even more challenging. But if we don’t slow down for relationships, we’ll be missing out on the very thing God created us for. We have been made by a relational God for fellowship. This year we encourage you to NOT hurry through the very thing you were made for. 

In our hurry-up life, we can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking we have no time for prayer. Or our prayer time becomes a quick recitation of our list of “needs.” This is not what God intended when he told us to pray—and we are indeed instructed to pray.

Prayer isn’t just for the super spiritual or the super devoted. It’s for everyone, all the time. When we hurry through prayer time, we’re hurrying our relationship and our conversation—two things we’ve already said we shouldn’t do.

In our last episode on Silence, we talked about how incorporating silence into our times of prayer can help us focus on God and hear him better so our prayers become a relationship-building conversation. This year, we encourage you to pay special attention to your time with God. Make it unhurried. Make it deliberate.

We’re not saying you can’t have short times with God, or that a short sentence of prayer before you head into an important meeting, or phone call, or whatever, is inappropriate. But we are encouraging you to stop, to focus, and to be mindful of who it is you’re speaking to.

The writing journey is a long-haul effort. It’s built upon a series of accomplishments. Everything from your first attempt at writing an article, to your first draft of a novel or memoir, to your first critique, your first published work, to your first book sale or contract, your first critical review, and so on to the next and the next and the next.

Too often our focus is on getting to “somewhere down the road,” and we forget that being right here, right now, is important. It’s a place of learning and growing. And—now hear this everybody—it’s a place that is actually JUST FINE.

This year, wouldn’t it be nice to simply be okay with where you are and not feel like you’re always in a hurry to finish whatever you’re working on so you could get to the next thing? Because there is ALWAYS a next thing. Consequently we’re always trying to move on and never satisfied with where we are or what we’ve done. That is not a happy way to live.

Don’t hear us saying that you shouldn’t set deadlines and you shouldn’t try to grow. We’re simply saying that if, for example, you’re at the “freshman level” of writing, enjoy your “freshman year.”

That doesn’t mean there is no movement forward. Of course there will be. But move at a reasonable pace. Don’t spend all your time rushing or wishing you were at the next grade. Take time to celebrate each small milestone and to acknowledge and enjoy the fruit of your efforts.

The next thing to NOT hurry through is trials. Yes, we know that might sound dumb, but hear us out. What we mean is that when you’re going through trials, and the writing life—even the Christian life—can sometimes feel like one big trial, don’t put all your focus on trying to claw your way past the trial.

There are things we can learn in trials—things we can’t learn any other way. There are ways we meet God in trials, and these are ways to meet him that won’t happen outside of trials. If your sole focus is on escaping the trial, you’ll miss God. 

You need your energy and your focus on God, not on the emotional turmoil you’ll feel as all your attempts to escape trials fail. There is a reason God left believers on this earth and didn’t whisk us all to heaven the moment we gave our lives to Christ. Part of that reason is for us to experience him—and his grace—here and now in this futile, imperfect place.

Don’t miss out on the way God can reveal himself as a stronghold and refuge in this place.

The next thing to NOT hurry is decisions. What we’re talking about here are big, life-changing kinds of decisions. Not decisions about whether to have tuna or chicken for lunch. The writing life is filled with decisions so here are some dos and don’ts that can help you not hurry into a decision:

Don’ts:

Dos:

Schedule white space into your day. White space is a buffer where nothing is scheduled so you can slow down. Breathe. Reflect.

Think about your daily choices and activities so you’re not stuck in poor habits that you do without even thinking about. Experience your life. Don’t hurry through it.

Our next thing to not hurry is personal. It’s individual: Don’t hurry whatever it is that God may be telling you that you’re hurrying this year.

Take time to think and pray about this. Where are you dissatisfied? That might be a clue. Where are you in a hurry where you shouldn’t be? Maybe it’s something we already said. Maybe it’s something we didn’t say. Maybe there isn’t anything, and if so, good for you! But do go to God and ask.

It could be something that you’re hurrying for yourself, but it could also be something you’re hurrying someone else into. God knows, so seek him and patiently wait to hear from him. 

Ecclesiastes 3:1 (NLT) tells us, “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven.”

The chapter goes on to list all kinds of different activities and seasons, like a time to laugh and time to cry, to build up and tear down, and so on. But one thing it doesn’t say is “a time to hurry.” 

God doesn’t mean for us to live a hurried life. He means for us to live a purposeful life in relationship with him and others. Part of why we hurry is because we don’t always trust God with where we are. We don’t trust him with the times and seasons of our life. But that’s the very thing we need to do, because only God is sovereign and only he can see the whole picture.

Let’s leave the times and seasons to God and rest in an unhurried life, confident that he has our best in mind and will bring it about.

How often have we told ourselves to hurry up? Here are 10 specific things you need to do for your career—and life—but never in a hurry. #amwriting #christianwriter
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What’s one thing you want to NOT hurry this year?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Thanks so much to our January sponsor of the month Kimberley Woodhouse! She’s an award-winning and bestselling author of more than forty books.  Her books have been awarded the Carol Award, Holt Medallion, Reader’s Choice Award, Selah Award, Spur Award, Christian Market Book Award, Golden Scroll Award among others. A popular speaker/teacher, she’s shared with over 1,000,000 people at more than twenty-five hundred venues across the country. Check out her latest book: The Secrets Beneath. Connect with Kim at www.kimberleywoodhouse.com.

Many thanks also to the folks at PodcastPS for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 206 – 10 Things to NOT Hurry appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Everywhere we go in today’s world, there’s an abundance of noise. Silence has become a thing of the past, yet we’ve never needed it more. Learn how to tap into the beauty and benefits of one of today’s most precious commodities: silence.

But first, thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

It’s a new year, and it’s a time where many people take stock and evaluate the past year, or the coming year. What do you hope for this year?

At Write from the Deep our hope and prayer for us and for you is that we’d all grow and deepen in our relationship with God. In our intimacy. Toward that end, we started a series last year on activities, or practices, to deepen our relationship with God. 

As we said before, some people call these practices spiritual disciplines, but we don’t necessarily want to think of them that way. They’re not disciplines for discipline’s sake. We’re not doing hard things just to make ourselves spiritual.

These are activities that are all about spiritual growth. They’re about tightening our connection to God and flourishing in our relationship with him. We want to grow in our conformity to Christ and in our role as his witnesses.

Today we want to talk about silence. Maybe you’ve had a very busy holiday season, and silence is something you welcome right now.  Or maybe the never-ending cycle of busyness has restarted after a holiday break, and silence feels like an impossibility. Or maybe you miss the sounds and festivities of friends and family celebrations, and you wish it weren’t so silent right now.

Whatever your situation, we want to give some thoughts and ideas of the good that can come from silence. We’ll talk about how and why you’d want to nurture and establish silence in your daily life.

First let’s talk about what silence is. Good ol’ Merriam Webster has several definitions, but the first one we want to talk about is the “absence of sound or noise: stillness.”

When you think about it, true silence—the absence of ALL noise—is hard to come by in our world today. There’s an abundance of mechanical sounds like cars, washing machines, office printers, and lawn mowers. There’s also a plethora of technology noise: beeps, whooshes, dings, rings. There’s entertainment noise—TV shows, music, social media videos, news broadcasts, the neighbor’s barbecue party. There’s even natural noise: birds, rain, wind, cicadas, waves.

Some people may never have experienced total silence, so just wrapping our minds around it might be difficult for some of us. It’s no wonder that silence can make us uncomfortable.

Dallas Willard, in his book The Spirit of the Disciplines, has this to say: “…noise comforts us in some curious way. In fact, we find complete silence shocking because it leaves the impression that nothing is happening. In a go-go world such as ours, what could be worse than that!” 

He goes on to say, “Think what it says about the inner emptiness of our lives if we must always turn on the … radio to make sure something is happening around us.”

But creating silence—an absence of sound—involves more than just turning off devices that make noises or isolating ourselves from other natural noises. Silence forces us to cease activity, to cease making sounds. Remember this first definition of silence is stillness. We spend way more time than we realize on the go, either in body or mind. Spending time in silence means we stop moving, and we stop our thoughts from endless whirling. 

This stillness can make silence even more disconcerting. Dallas Willard says, “Silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing us upon the stark realities of our life.”

So why on earth would we want to create silence? What are the benefits of this disconcerting, possibly even frightening activity?

1. Stillness promotes awareness.

Stillness gives us a time and place to evaluate what’s happening within us and around us. 

Silence gives us an opportunity to stop and evaluate and make changes.

2. Stillness strips away the world and leaves us only with God.

Another benefit of silence, of stillness, is that it gives us time to relish and acknowledge a simple, quiet connection with God. God is the only one who can fill our deepest longing and desire.

Acts 17:25 (NIV) tells us “…he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.” We need time to soak in this truth, to let it sink deep into our hearts. It’s an acknowledgement of our full dependence on God. That gives us proper humility, gratitude, and a willingness to serve.

3. Silence helps us sort out and identify meaning.

Another benefit of silence is that it gives us time and space to ponder meaning. “Silence attracts meaning. If you stay silent for a whole hour, it will be hard not to write a poem.” (Richard Rohr, “Silent Compassion”)

We don’t want to go through life not recognizing our purpose, our meaning, and the meaning of what God is doing in us, through us, around us, and in the world. We’re here for God’s glory, to recognize his value, to worship and adore him. Meaning and purpose come from him and if we don’t take time to stop and recognize that, we’re missing out on his design for us.

We’ve talked about silence as stillness, so now let’s turn to another definition of silence. Merriam Webster says silence is “forbearance from speech or noise: muteness.”

The first thing we want to focus on with this definition is ceasing to talk. This can be very difficult for some of us. Why?

Ceasing to talk is “forbearance from speech,” but what about the other aspect of this definition: “forbearance from noise”?

We already talked about personal stillness and not doing things that make mechanical noise, but what we mean in this definition of forbearance from “noise” is avoiding things like clamor, babble, grumbling, and piling on of pointless arguments.

Many writers have newsletters. Are we saying you shouldn’t send them out because they’re noise? Not exactly. What we’re saying is that you need to take a good look at the content you put out. Be objective and critical, because yes, it might be noise. If it is noise, either change it so it’s communication that truly matters, or don’t send it out. There’s nothing wrong with telling your readers that you’re only going to send letters when there is news.

Ephesians 4:29 says, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”

James 1:26 is a pretty scathing pronouncement about our ability, or lack thereof, to control our tongue: “Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless.” NIV

Titus 3:9 tells us, “But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless.”

In those days they quarreled about the law, but we can strongly consider applying this same notion to arguments about things like politics today.

What are the benefits of NOT talking or making noise?

1. We learn how to listen. 

When we are forced to cease talking, there is room for someone else to speak. That’s a crucial first step to listening. We need to be silent. If we’re not talking, that also helps us interrupt our own self-focus, which will increase our capacity to actually listen to whoever is talking.

The next step is to ask the Holy Spirit for help in truly paying attention to what we’re hearing. To focus on listening, on considering what someone else is saying, on empathizing and learning, rather than sitting there looking like we’re listening when really we’re formulating our own response.

2. We gain insight.

Listening then turns into another amazing benefit of silence: we gain understanding and insight.

Remember that the Bible calls those who don’t want to understand, who just want to air their own opinions, fools. As followers of Christ, we’re called to compassion, concern, and love for others, which starts with understanding.

3. We learn prudence.

Another benefit of not talking is that we learn prudence. Practicing silence helps our first response to become listening rather than leaping in with an opinion, an argument, or an unnecessary comment. Our words will then become prudent, compassionate, timely, respectful, and wise. 

4. Muteness allows for life-transforming concentration on God.

Dallas Willard, again in his book The Spirit of the Disciplines, lists another important benefit of not talking: “Only silence will allow us life-transforming concentration upon God. It allows us to hear the gentle God whose only Son ‘shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear his voice above the street noise.’” (Matthew 12:19 KJV)

5. We gain a richer and more satisfying prayer life.

The benefit that flows out of our concentration on God is a richer and more satisfying prayer life. In our prayer life, how often do we go on and on with our talking, and we completely forget to be silent and listen for God? 

How often do we complain that we don’t hear from him, and yet we’re always the one doing the talking and never the one doing the listening?

When we stop talking, that opens the door for listening, for hearing God speak, and for time to let understanding come. If we don’t take time for silence in our prayer life, how can God direct us in how HE wants us to pray? We’re in danger of just babbling, or at the very least, neglecting prayer for things God would like us to pray for.

It’s very clear in Scripture that God ordained prayer. God wants us to be prayerfully involved in what happens in our daily lives, praying for our daily bread even, as Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:11). And we’re to be prayerfully involved on a spiritual “world war” scale as Paul says to the Ephesians in chapter 6:10-20.

When we’re praying as God directs, we can’t help but feel a more dynamic relationship with God and his involvement in all aspects of our lives, from the mundane to the very real struggle between good and evil.

One last definition of silence we want to cover is what Merriam Webster says is “absence of mention: secrecy.”

We don’t go blabbing a secret. We don’t “share it as a prayer request,” and we don’t hint about it to others. We practice the absence of mentioning it. Obviously there are some exceptions in the case of harmful activity, but that’s not the typical situation.

 The benefit of secrecy is that you become trustworthy.

People need trustworthy listeners. God made humans to be relational people, and as Christ followers, we should do that in the best way we can.  

This might show up as bragging or the need to point out our own importance. Or It might show up as excuses, or assigning blame, or constant diffidence.

In The Spirit of the Disciplines, Dallas Willard says, “We run off at the mouth because we are inwardly uneasy about what others think of us…we use words to ‘adjust’ our appearance and elicit their approval. Otherwise, we fear our virtues might not receive adequate appreciation and our shortcomings might not be properly ‘understood.’”

The benefit of the absence of mention is reliance on God.

What happens when we refrain from speaking to “manage our image”? Dallas Willard says, “In not speaking, we resign how we appear to God. And that is hard.” But he goes on to point out that God is always for us, and Jesus is always interceding for us. The Bible tells us that in Romans 8:31-34:

“What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.”

Ultimately the practice of secrecy will help us rely on God for our identity and our confidence. It helps us gain an inner confidence that has no need to speak. 

This type of silence, “absence of mention,” or “secrecy,” may bring up a few questions like:

1. What about the need to “defend ourselves” if someone slanders us?

What should we do if someone writes lies about us? Especially if writing is our profession and it could hinder our sales? Are we just supposed to let our publisher take the hit in sales?

2. How do we practice an “absence of mention” in light of the need to market our books?

We’ve talked about what silence is, and what the benefits are of this practice, but how on earth can we make it happen in this noisy world?

1. Be willing to face it.

To benefit from silence, we first need to be willing to face it. Like solitude, which we talked about in a previous episode, the discomfort or the difficulty of silence may make us shy away from it. We may need to force ourselves. Ask God for help!

2. Start with short periods.

Consider starting with short periods of silence, even as little as 30 seconds. You’d be surprised how long that can feel like. Then gradually build up to more time.

3. Incorporate silence into your prayer time.

Every time you pray, start with silence, quieting yourself, even if you’re just meaning to pray a brief prayer before a meal, or for something you just got an email about, or whatever. As you go to God in more extended times of prayer, incorporate longer a period of silence, or several periods.

4. Take time for silence when you practice solitude.

We said in our episode on solitude that solitude doesn’t have to include silence, but it can. Being silent without the presence of others is much easier than achieving silence in the presence of others.

5. Take time for silence before you fall asleep at night.

You could have take time for silence when you first get into bed, or maybe you find a chair in a quiet corner of the house right before you go to bed.

6. Take time for silence when you wake up.

If you have chronic insomnia like Erin does, you have lots of opportunity to practice silence during the night. Or if you sleep well, then try taking time for silence when you first wake up in the morning. Maybe before you get out of bed, or maybe before you shower or start whatever morning routine you have. Or maybe you make a time of silence part of your morning routine.

Consider memorizing Habakkuk 2:20: “But the Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth keep silence before him.” You can recite that to yourself first to help you submit yourself to him and put yourself in the right place before him—humbled, submitted, and taking the time to be still and know he is God.

7. Go outside when it’s snowing.

If it’s winter where you are, like it is here in the United States where we are, maybe you’ll have a day or night where you get a peaceful snowfall. Bundle up and go sit out on your back porch or in your garage or backyard. Chances are that the flakes will fall silently, and snow that may already be on the ground will help to mute the surrounding noises to help you find silence.

8. Pray a specific prayer for silence.

We already mentioned asking God for help with practicing silence when it’s uncomfortable, but you can also pray for help with the practice of not talking in the presence of others. Ask God to remind you to keep your mouth shut and wait and listen. 

Psalm 141:3 says, “Set a guard over my mouth, Lord; keep watch over the door of my lips.” We encourage you to memorize this and repeat this prayer often!

9. Don’t give up.

Don’t give up if you can’t find true silence. It’s not always possible. I (Erin) have tinnitus, so there’s no longer any such thing as true silence for me. There’s always a ringing. But I can’t let that stop me from practicing as much silence as I can.

There is a reason for the saying, “Silence is golden.” It really is. In our silence, God can do much in our hearts and spirits and minds. Enter into that silence right now and let him know you are listening and ready for his word!

Silence isn’t just golden, it’s necessary. Come discover why. #amwriting #christianwriter
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How do you feel about silence?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Thanks so much to our January sponsor of the month Kimberley Woodhouse! She’s an award-winning and bestselling author of more than forty books.  Her books have been awarded the Carol Award, Holt Medallion, Reader’s Choice Award, Selah Award, Spur Award, Christian Market Book Award, Golden Scroll Award among others. A popular speaker/teacher, she’s shared with over 1,000,000 people at more than twenty-five hundred venues across the country. Check out her latest book: The Secrets Beneath. Connect with Kim at www.kimberleywoodhouse.com.

Many thanks also to the folks at PodcastPS for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 205 – The Beauty and Blessings of Silence appeared first on Write from the Deep.

The Advent season is about celebration and expectation. Though we’re almost finished with Advent, the four themes of the season can be anchors for you all year long! Come explore these Advent Anchors to keep you safe and steady in troubled waters.

But first, thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

I love Advent. I love the sense of anticipation, the way it teaches us to watch and wait, to celebrate and prepare for not just Christ’s birth, but for the day He will return to this broken, weary world. It’s celebration of what has happened and expectation of what will happen. Though the Advent season this year is almost over, the four themes of Advent—hope, peace, joy, and love—can carry us all year long. In fact, we need to carry a spirit of Advent through the whole year. To help us do that, we’re going to discuss four Advent anchors that can hold us firm and fast, no matter what troubled waters come our way.

Let’s start with the Advent theme of hope. Writers are well acquainted with hope. When we embark on the task God gives us to write, we are full of hope and expectation for what God will do in us and through us. As time passes, though, and we experience the good and bad of the writing life, it can become harder to hold on to hope. And when we get bogged down in the state of the world and the church and publishing, it can become almost impossible.

How do we hold on to hope? We take a firm grasp on Advent Anchor 1 from Psalm 119:14: “You are my refuge and my shield; I have put my hope in your word.”

Advent Anchor 1 is to put your hope in God’s Word! What does that mean? It means trust. Trust what his word says rather than what you see around you, i.e., the world and all its problems.

If you trust what the world is saying, there’s no way to avoid becoming discouraged. Hopeless. But when you put your hope in God’s word, you understand this world is the enemy’s playground. He’s doing all he can to derail God’s work and His redemption of the lost. Compelling truth.org says it this way: 

“When humanity chose to listen to Satan rather than God, Satan became ‘ruler of this world’ (John 12:31). This means that Satan has a degree of authority on earth, and Satan’s objective is to cause suffering, death, and separation from God. …Never forget that ‘the devil prowls like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour’ (1 Peter 5:8). Satan is the king of deception and desires us to believe the lie that God does not care about our suffering (John 8:44).”

The key to being hopeful in a seemingly hopeless world is to keep our focus on God and the undeniable truths in his word. 

John 3:16 begins with, “For God so loved the world…” That means he cares about every one of us, believer and nonbeliever alike. He sent his Son to die for us and restore us to Him and His love. 

Psalm 34:18 tells us that God comforts the brokenhearted. If He didn’t care, why would He do that? And Psalm 89:14 says, “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne; love and faithfulness go before Him.”

These are only a few of the many Scriptures that put the lie to all Satan is and does. Hope in God’s word, friends. Trust what God says. Then, no matter how turbulent the waters around us, we can know we’re held fast by Almighty God. We can echo the psalmist in Psalm 42:11, “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

Many of our books have carried a theme of peace to readers. We’ve crafted stories that take readers on a journey through struggles into the arms of God’s peace. Yet, how often do we ourselves wrestle with anxiety, fear, and a sense of inadequacy? How often do we wonder if God really gave us this task to write his stories and books, especially when we consider things like sales and contracts and the many human measuring sticks of “success”?

Which leads us to Colossians 3:15: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts…” That leads us right to Advent Anchor 2: Let Christ’s peace rule in your heart.

Colossians 3:15 ends with a fascinating fact: “…since as members of one body you were called to peace.” Called to peace. I looked in Webster’s for a definition of call, and found a boatload, many of which didn’t seem to fit in this context.

Then I looked for the Jewish word used in this verse, and found that it’s kaleó, which means “I summon, invite” and “I name.” That last meaning really hit me. In fact, kaleó is also used in Matthew 1:21: “…and they shall call his name Immanuel.”

God summons and invites us to peace. But more than that, as his followers he names us peace. In other words, that’s who we are in him. His peace is a part of our spiritual DNA. Even as a father imparts traits to a child, so God, when we accept Christ, weaves his peace into the very fabric of who we are. All we need to do is embrace it, as his beloved children. To choose it over those powerful worldly emotions that seek to drown us. 

If you’re struggling with negative emotions, with wondering why God asked you to write when you can’t seem to gain any ground, with family or personal crises…it’s time. Choose God’s peace. Place it, not emotions, on the throne of your heart. Usher God’s peace in with an open heart. Because his peace is more powerful than any turbulence. His peace pours oil over troubled waters. 

Okay, story time. I’ve always wondered where that phrase, pouring oil over troubled waters, came from. Turns out it’s an Irish priest named Utta and the Irish missionary, St. Aidan. Before a sea voyage, brother Utta went to St. Aidan and asked him to pray for them as they traveled on the sea. He did so, but also gave them some holy oil, saying, “you will meet with a storm and contrary wind; but be mindful to cast this oil I give you into the sea, and the wind will cease immediately; you will have pleasant calm weather to attend you and send you home by the way that you desire.” 

Sure enough, Utta and his companions were caught in a terrible storm, and were sure they would die. But Utta remembered St. Aidan’s words, grabbed the vial of oil and threw it on the raging waters. Immediately, the waters calmed and the sun came out, and the rest of their voyage was safe. 

What we see in that story, and in Scripture, is that embracing God’s peace requires action on our part. Yes, it’s a part of us, but we must turn to it and choose it when everything seems to be saying the last thing we should be is peace-filled.

How do we do that? Philippians 4:6-9 gives us the perfect guide: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” 

Step One: Prayer and petition with thanksgiving in every situation

To be clear, this is telling us to be THANKFUL for the difficulties that have made us anxious. Why would that be? I think it’s to give us opportunity to do exactly what our guest Rachel Hauck was talking about in our last podcast episode: Watch and wait and see what amazing thing the Almighty God is going to do.

Step Two: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Philippians 4:8

It’s an old principle: Garbage in, garbage out. What you put into your mind will produce a result. Put in what is true, noble, and so on, and you get God’s peace. Put in Satan’s lies or the world’s ideologies, you get anxiety, worry, and worse. 

Step three: “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice…” Philippians 4:9

There’s so much wisdom in the Bible, and Paul shares a wealth of guidance for godly living. But we need to do more than just read it. We need to put it into practice. Follow the wisdom in the word of God. Do the things we’re instructed to do as his followers.

The result of following these three steps? “…The God of peace will be with you.” Philippians 4:9

I’m sure you’ve all heard people speak many times about the difference between happiness and joy, so we’ll just start here with this: Joy is based on internal factors. Happiness is based on external factors. 

Now, there’s nothing wrong with happiness. It’s fun and positive. But it can be gone as fast as it comes. Poor book sales, canceled contracts, massive rewrites, unfair reviews…so many things in the writing life can kill happiness.

But joy that’s based in God has staying power. It’s an attitude of the heart and spirit. Because it’s from God, it can co-exist with other emotions, even negative ones. We can be joyful in the face of anger, fear, even unhappiness. Joy is grander and deeper than happiness, and God’s joy carries us through whatever storms we encounter. 

Advent Anchor 3, then, is tap into God’s joy. How do we do that? How do we immerse ourselves in that divine, sustaining joy?

David gives us some tips. Consider Psalm 16:11: “…in your presence there is fullness of joy.”

Step One: Spend time with God

Just as you can’t build a healthy relationship with other people without spending time with them, you can’t find joy in your relationship with God unless you spend time in his presence, talking with him, getting to know him and learning what he thinks of you. Trust me, it’s good news!

The great thing is that wherever you are, God is there, too. All you need to do is turn your heart and thoughts to him. Seek his presence. Revel in his accessibility to you. He’s never too busy, never distracted, never dismissive. Think about that. There is no other person in the whole wide world you can say that about. God’s attention is always on you, and he’s waiting for you to seek him out. So do so. 

David’s next tip is from Psalm 33:21: “In him our hearts rejoice, for we trust in his holy name.”

Step Two: Trust God

My hubby and I have been through a lot of difficult things over the nearly forty-four years of our marriage. Some of them were devastating. After a number of years and crazy things happening, we developed a sort of mantra for our lives: “God is in control. I may not understand it, I may not even like it, but I trust him.”

Do you trust God? Really trust him? To the point that you can echo with Job, “Yea, though he slay me, I will trust in him” (Job 13:15)?

If you’re not sure, then let me encourage you to dig in and explore whether or not God is trustworthy. Even if you do trust him, dig in and be reminded of God’s character. If you seek him, he’ll show you who he is. I guarantee it. 

The next step to tapping into God’s supernatural joy comes in the first half of Psalm 9:1: “I will praise you, Lord, with all my heart”   

Step Three: Praise him

When we praise God, we focus on who he is, what he’s done. Praise ushers us into his presence, and centers our hearts and minds on him. Praise reminds us of God’s intervention in our lives and of the blessings he has given us. Praise breaks the chains Satan tries to put on us by enlisting God’s protection and action. Praise restores our souls and infuses us with joy. 

Finally, consider the second half of Psalm 9:2: “I will tell of all the marvelous things you have done.”

Step Four: Testify

If you’re a parent, remember the first time your child took a step? What did you do? Told everyone about this amazing feat! Or the last time you saw a great movie, what did you do? Told your friends and family about it. Or the first time you got a writing contract? You sang it from the rooftops!

When God works in your life, when he blesses you or upholds you, when he brings you relief or an answer to prayer, when he opens your imagination and gives you a story solution you never would have thought of, when he speaks to or through you at a writers’ conference…whatever he’s done through and for you, tell others! Let people know the wonder of following this loving, all-powerful, unbelievably kind God. Don’t keep it to yourself, friends. Sing it out!

Follow these tips from David, and you’ll be able to say with him: “I will be filled with joy because of you…O Most High.” Psalm 9:2

Love is my favorite Advent theme. My favorite theme for the whole year! Love. Not just any love, but God’s love. There is no comparison to God’s love. No love so amazing, eternal, or far-reaching. His love is what draws us to him. It’s what motivates us to do whatever task he’s given us, even when it’s something as hard at times as writing. 

Advent Anchor 4 is the simplest, and yet the most profound: Dwell in God’s Love.

There are so many verses in the Bible about God’s love. In fact, He tells us about his love 310 times in 280 verses! But here’s the deal: even if you read those verses over and over and over, you’d never fully understand God’s love for you.

In Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:18-19 he says, “And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.” 

Yet there is nothing more deserving of study and exploration. God’s love is the beginning and end of all that exists. It is what brought us all into existence, and it is what will usher us into eternity with him. So what are some resources to help you better understand God’s love? 

As someone who grew up in the church, I’ve long cherished hymns. I’ve often told writers that if they want to see powerful, concise writing, read the classic hymns. Their powerful truths reveal the wonder of God’s love.…

O Love that Will Not Let Me Go

“O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee; I give thee back the life I owe that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.”

The Love of God

“The love of God is greater far

“The guilty pair, bowed down with care,

“O love of God, how rich and pure!

And Can it Be?

“And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior’s blood? Died he for me, who caused his pain, for me, who Him to death pursued? Amazing love! How can it be that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”

Can it be? You’d better believe it! Because God’s love for us has no end. When we accept that love and dwell in it, every moment of every day, nothing can shake us. No storm, no trial, no disappointment, no upheaval…nothing can dislodge the anchor we have in his love. Not just for the coming year, but for our whole lives. 

As Romans 8:38-39 tells us:

“Nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

As we close this podcast, we want to offer the following benedictions for each of these themes. May they encourage and bless you today and in the coming year. 

A benediction of hope from Romans 15:13:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”

A benediction of peace from Philippians 4:7:

“[May] you …experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.”

A benediction of joy from 1 Peter 1:8-9:

“Though you have not seen him, you love him; and … you believe in him… [May you be] filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

A benediction of love from 1 John 3:1:

“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”

The writing life is almost never smooth sailing, but as Christian writers, we have rock solid hope. Here are 4 advent anchors to keep you safe and steady in troubled waters. #christianwriter #amwriting
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The post 204 – Advent Anchors for Troubled Waters appeared first on Write from the Deep.

So many things can go wrong on our journey as writers, leaving us wondering how we will ever deal with the problems that come at us. Guest Rachel Hauck encourages us not to waste time and energy on anxiety, but to learn how to watch and wait on Almighty God.

About Rachel Hauck

Rachel Hauck is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. She’s a RITA finalist and winner of Romantic Times Inspirational Novel of the Year, and Career Achievement Award. She writes vivid characters dealing with real life issues. Her book, Once Upon a Prince, was made into an original Hallmark movie. She also loves to encourage new writers and sits on the Executive Board of American Christian Fiction Writers. Visit her website at rachelhauck.com to find out more.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Welcome, listeners. We’re super excited that you’re here with us. We’re continuing our conversation with the fabulous Rachel Hauck, and we are going to dive right in.

I love this other thing that you had said, Rachel. You said, “God removes those things that hinder his love and hinder our love.”

I’m guessing you’ve probably had some experiences that taught you that. Do you want to share some of that?

Rachel: Absolutely. We have this chorus that we sing in a church. It says, “I want to be free from everything that keeps me from loving you.”

I think I’ve prayed for years, “God remove everything that hinders love.” 

The writing journey itself, you know, the highs and lows and the successes and the disappointments and all of that kind of re-fixes your gaze back on him. It’s like, “Why are you doing this?”

Learning not to compare yourself to other authors, for example.

Karen: Oh, that’s a biggie. 

Rachel: That’s a biggie, biggie, biggie. Cheering them on, being on God’s team. You know, when I hit the New York Times in 2016, probably a little bit of the Eeyore in me said, “Okay, next year, it’s not going to be you. It’s going to be somebody else and you’re going to have to be on their team. You’re going to have to cheer that person on.”

She wasn’t in our market, but Lisa Wingate, she just blew up the world with Before We Were Yours. 20,000 times more sales than my book The Wedding Dress. 

But, I cheered her on. Praise God for that story. Praise God for the gift of her writing and that story.

In 2021, out of the blue, an opportunity came to me. In the midst of the opportunity, and considering the opportunity, and going through the process—which ultimately we did not do—I started getting hit with this anxiety. Out of the blue, like I couldn’t do it. Or, “What if I can’t do it?”

It would come like once a week for 24 or 36 hours, and then I would go through it. First I thought it was the project, just working through, “Are we going to do the project?” 

Then it was not the project. So I felt like, “Okay, whew, done. That was weird.”

But then something else would pop up or, I would see something on Facebook or whatever. It was the weirdest thing. It would just come. I could feel it coming, and guys, it just drove me to my knees. 

I had dealt with it before probably more hormonally, but not at this kind of intensity, not like this at all. What’s funny, what the prelude to that was that during COVID, Tony said, “Hey, I’m going to get up at five and pray.”

I started getting up at five and praying with him. Then he said, “Well, let’s pray on the fives.”

So we’re praying at 5:00am and 5:00pm, and with the few prayer meetings that we had at church, somedays I was praying three hours. I was really doubling down on reading the Word every day on the YouVersion app. I’m thinking, “I’m ramping up.” 

I was ramping up for a battle. And bam, here comes this battle in 2021, about a year later. I started in May. Finally in July, I said, “All right, I have had enough of you. You hit me, I’m gonna hit you back.” 

I downloaded a counter on my phone like the old counter your mom might use to count up the grocery money in the store. I put an app on my phone, and you could put little titles on it, and I loaded up the verse addresses. You know, Philippians 4:6-7. I did Psalm 43:3-4. I did 2 Timothy 1:7 and Isaiah 26:3. 

Peace verses. God verses. I loaded them up and then I just quoted them, and I counted how many times I quoted them. I think I quoted Philippians 4:6-7 around 118 times in two weeks. 

I said, “It’s a divine exchange. This anxiety that I don’t want to admit must somehow reside in me body, soul, and spirit, so I’m going to do a divine battle. I’m going to put God’s Word in and drive anxiety out with God’s Word.” 

It is a fight. It is a battle. Every night on my five o’clock walk, even in July in the Florida sun, I’m walking, and I’m talking, and I’m sweating. 

Other things then would come up. “Rachel, you have a little bit of bitterness towards some things that happen in publishing. You need to deal with that.”

“Rachel, you have some resentment. You need to deal with that.”

It was gentle. As I was gazing at God, I was seeing the things in me that needed to be dealt with. These things were hindering love. Finally there was this deep down moment that I had to say, “God, I think deep down, way, way, way, way down there, I don’t trust you. I don’t trust that you have my good at heart.”

But in the midst of the suffering, I was seeing the good. I’m telling you guys, I probably wept every day. Good God tears every day for two years. 

Just somewhere along again, in that moment of suffering, in that dread, in that uncomfortableness, whatever would hit me. I remember one time I was in church, I was leading worship, and I was sitting on a stool, and I literally felt like I was going to fall over. I was just clinging to the keyboard. I’m like, “I’m just going to fall off the stool.”

I hadn’t slept well that night. I just felt crappy. But he stayed with me. 

The anxiety began to lift going into 2022. The Lord just began to lift it. In April, I kind of had a small wave and the Lord said, “Be in Psalm 139.”

So I read Psalm 139 every day. I just turned it into a prayer. There was an issue I had with a certain food and the Lord said, “You’ve got to stop being anxious over this.”

Hebrews 4:12, says that the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, and that it divides between soul and spirit, joint and marrow, thoughts and intentions of the heart.

That is every part of our being. The Word of God can rightly divide. Those things begin to change as I begin to do the divine exchange of my stuff that hindered love for the reality in the living Word being sown in me.

Yeah, you got to stay with it. We’ve kind of missed the fives lately. Still in prayer, but different hours and kind of off our routine. But it’s still me fighting to be in the Word, and fighting to stay in that place, and fighting to stay passionate. 

Of course there are seasons of rest. That was an intense season. I didn’t have to stay that intense because I was in a fight at that time. But I don’t want to lose the passion. I don’t want to lose the reality of just feeling his presence.

I’m telling you now, even more than ever before, and I’ve been a believer since I was six years old, I’ve been in prayer meetings since I graduated from college, regular prayer meetings. I’ve been in one prayer meeting we’ve had at church for 30 some-odd years. I’ve been at that meeting. 

But after 2021, I can sit in there and just begin to pray with the people and just begin to weep. The presence of God is so different for me. I believe he removed those things that hindered love.

Erin: Yeah, exactly. Oh my gosh, that’s a lot. You went through a lot with that. I guess what I want listeners to catch is that it was years. 

Rachel: Yeah. 

Erin: It was years of intense prayer and intense suffering and intense fighting. Sometimes I think we don’t realize that we are called to that battle. The Christian walk is not a walk in the park. It’s a fight, and it’s a fight that we’re meant to win. We’ve already won it through Christ, but yet we still fight to take hold of it. To completely grasp it all through prayer, through the Holy Spirit, through our Scripture memory. That’s it. 

Rachel: And if you don’t know what to pray, open your Bible and start praying it. 

Erin: Anything.

Rachel: Yeah. Anything. I mean, even just naming the patriarchs, just do it. It’s living and active. 

I think it was warfare and that’s one of the things we don’t…well, we’re uncomfortable with that, right? We don’t want to talk about warfare to that extent. But when those things come, and they do come, and it may be more external for you—maybe it’s someone who’s selling your name or bad mouthing your name or gossiping your name or hindering you on the job… 

Karen: Or critics. 

Rachel: Or critics. Right! We don’t read reviews, writers. You go to the Lord with it. But you’re also a critic of yourself. 

Erin: Yeah. 

Rachel: You know as a writer, I have to stop. I have to be very careful of that, because I’ll accuse myself of not being good. “I’m not as good as so and so.” 

Well, who’s the accuser of the brethren? Satan is the accuser of the brethren. Let’s not agree with him. 

Erin: Right. I think that’s a common thing that, especially women, but all people go through this imposter syndrome and the constant thought of, “What if I can’t do it?”

Man, I have sure had that going through my head! I’ll confess right now, every time our website pops up with some kind of gobbledygook problem that I don’t understand and I call Karen and whine to her about it, the whole time I keep thinking, “What if I can’t fix this?”

It’s always just, “What if I can’t? What if I can’t?”

I forget to think, “So what if I can’t? So what?“

It’s helped me so much to put that word in front of it. So what if I can’t do it? 

Rachel: That’s right. 

Erin: God’s going to figure that out. Sometimes it’s so hard for us to remember that the battle is the Lord’s and we take it on and we’re not supposed to. We’re just supposed to walk where he tells us to walk and do what he tells us to do, but trust him for the getting it right and the doing of it and the making of what he wants to happen happen. 

I don’t know why in our humanness we keep trying to pull that job back. I don’t know what we can do to not do that but what you did, Rachel. Keep on praying. Keep on battling it. 

Karen: Don and I watch a lot of BBC mysteries and in one of them, the protagonist who was an inspector in the law enforcement kept doing that. Kept going by himself to deal with stuff, and kept getting hit on the head, and kept getting accused of killing somebody. Every time he went off by himself to try and do what he thought needed to be done, Don and I were like, “Don’t do it! Don’t go by yourself!”

We need to realize that for ourselves. Don’t do it. Don’t try to take this on by yourself. This is God’s work, not yours. 

Rachel: That’s so true. One of the things that I learned, without getting into too much detail, one of the things that hit me—and this started in May, now this was October, and I was going to take off November from social media. But I saw something on Facebook with some old friends and there was kind of a little bit of a hesitancy for me to be involved. 

I got in this huge dilemma. Do I go to this gathering? Do I not go to this gathering?

Guys, it was just weighing on me. It was dread. I would hate to even open up Facebook because if they nailed down a date, then I had to decide.

Oh my gosh, I was darned if I do, darned if I don’t. That kind of thing. And it never happened. I felt like the Lord kept saying, “Watch me, watch me, watch me.”

I’d counsel with younger women at church or younger people at church and I’d say, “I just don’t know how to get out of this.”

But now I’ll say, ” Oh no. Oh no, watch, watch.”

What it taught me was to say, “I don’t know how this is going to work out, but you’re going to work it out. You’re going to work it out.”

Again, it was getting rid of that thing in me. To be honest, it could have been one of those deals where it was like, you know, “Rachel, just deal with it. Don’t worry about it. Just deal with it. It is what it is.” You know, kind of like why would God interfere with these other people? 

But it was like, “No, watch. Watch what I do. Watch what I do. Watch.”

Karen: I love how often God says that in Scripture: watch and wait. Watch and wait. 

Now, we watch, but we’re not so good at waiting. We’re kind of like, “Hey, Jesus, you’re not operating on my timeline here. I’ve been waiting a long time.”

And he’s like, “You’ve been waiting five minutes. Get over yourself. Trust me.” 

Erin: I think that’s part of the childlike trust and faith that we just can’t seem to catch on to as adults. When you have kids, they’re going to trust you when you tell them, “Hey, don’t worry about it. We’re not going to get lost going to the store.”

I had that fear when I was like five years old. We’d be driving in the car somewhere and it’d be like forever. I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, we’re just going to get lost. How does Dad know where to go?” 

I always trusted him. But I kept thinking, “What happens when I grow up? I’m not going to know.” 

As a child, we can trust that Dad knows where he’s going. That’s what we need to have. That’s the attitude that we need to have with God, the trust that just stops thinking of all the human things we keep trying to think of, and instead grab on with that childlike faith. You know, “Dad’s going to catch me if I jump into the pool. It’s fine.” 

Rachel: That’s really true. You know what else Jesus says a lot and God says a lot: Don’t be afraid. Fear not. 

Erin: Yeah. Do not fear. Everywhere. 

Rachel: Yeah. Watch for that, guys. 

Erin: So why are we afraid? 

Karen: Because we’re human. 

Rachel: The world we live in. 

Erin: I’ve loved this conversation. We’re pretty much at the end of our time here, Rachel, but I want to mention one other quote of yours: “I discovered dreams are best realized when running in partnership with the living God.”

Would you have any final words of wisdom or encouragement that you would want to give to help listeners hold on to that partnership and understanding?

Rachel: I think that’s it. Find that place in God. I think we make it so hard. We think in our mind, “How am I going to do this thing with God?”

I just say fix a time that’s yours. Get your Bible reading going. Just do it. There’s Bible reading apps. YouVersion has a Bible reading app.

You read a couple of chapters a day, and just start there. Start filling yourself with the Word of God. Even praying prepared prayers. A lot of times that helps. I am horrible at praying a list, but in my notes on my phone, I paste prayers in there. I paste Scripture. 

As you’re reading the Word, go to the Psalms and just open it up. As you’re reading it, turn it into a prayer. It’s getting that part of your heart alive that will make the reality of running with God all the more real, and maybe that you won’t care as much if it takes so long for something that you want to happen. 

You can start asking God,”In this journey of waiting, draw me near to you. What’s the process?”

If you’re wanting to have a book published, if you’re learning to write, if you’re waiting for something to happen with your writing, just keep leaning on him. God doesn’t want any one of us sitting on the bench. He’s got a plan for all of us, and each one of our journey is unique. 

Mine’s not the same as Erin’s, not the same as Karen’s, not the same as any other writer. It’s unique, and it has blessings in it for all of us. He’s loving. He’s a kind father, and he leads by the positive. 

As parents, we often go, “Kid, you can’t do that,” or “Kid, you’re like this,” and we point out the negative. But God’s more likely to go, “How about you do this? How about that?” Or, “Kid, you’re this,” and he points out the positive. 

I was walking down the street one day and I helped this lady. This was during all of that 2021 mess. I’m walking and praying and doing my Scriptures, and this lady needed help with her groceries. So I carried her groceries to an apartment across the street. I’m walking back, and the Lord just says to my heart, “Rachel, you’re so kind.”

I almost fell on the sidewalk weeping because it was just such a moment with the Holy Spirit. I told my husband that God telling me that I’m kind, rather than the negative of telling me I’m selfish, or that I only think of myself, or whatever, did more to make me want kindness than pointing out the negative would have.

Listen for that positive voice of the Father. And yes, every once in a while he still says, “Hey, you need to stop doing that.”

Karen: This has been wonderful. Thank you so much for all the wisdom and all the guidance. Friends, I think that we can all say an amen to what she shared with us, and especially an amen to watching and waiting. In everything that we do, let’s keep our focus on God. Let’s watch and wait and know that he’s in control and he’s at work.

Erin: Amen. 

Rachel: Amen.

Guest @RachelHauck encourages us to give up anxiety and instead to watch and wait on Almighty God. #amwriting #christianwriter
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The post 203 – Watching, Waiting, and Anxiety with Guest Rachel Hauck appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Our journey as writers who believe in God has many ups and downs, mountaintops and canyons. It’s so easy to forget, when the downs come, that they, too, are from God. And that He allows and uses them for His purpose. Join our guest Rachel Hauck as we consider the gift of suffering.

About Rachel Hauck

Rachel Hauck is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author. She’s a RITA finalist and winner of Romantic Times Inspirational Novel of the Year, and Career Achievement Award. She writes vivid characters dealing with real life issues. Her book, Once Upon a Prince, was made into an original Hallmark movie. She also loves to encourage new writers and sits on the Executive Board of American Christian Fiction Writers. Visit her website at rachelhauck.com to find out more.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Welcome, listeners. Welcome to the deep with us today. We’re excited that you’re here, and we’re excited that we have a guest today. Yay! I’ll let Karen introduce her. 

Karen: Our guest is Rachel Hauck, and she is just a wonderful person. Not only is she a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal best-selling author, but she is a phenomenal worship leader. She leads worship at the ACFW Conference every year, and boy, she sure knows how to usher us into the presence of the Lord.

For all those reasons, Rachel, we are delighted to have you here. Welcome! 

Rachel: Thank you. It’s good to be here. 

Erin: We love to start our show by asking all of our guests, what does the deep mean to you, Rachel? 

Rachel: The deep. Oh, man. What just comes to mind immediately is deep calls to deep. So it’s just that deeper part of God, wanting to know those deeper things. Going below the surface. Pulling up treasure. 

Karen: Mm hmm. 

Erin: Yeah, I love that God wants to go deep with us. I mean we want to go deep with him, but he wants to go deep with us and reveal deep things about himself to us. Can you guys imagine that? The God of the universe wants to not only know us deeply but reveal deep things about who he is, too. We could probably meditate on that all day, but we’ll move on. 

One of the fun things that we wanted to talk to Rachel about—I mean she’s just been in the business for so long and done so many great things as an author—but one of the things that she had said in an email was, “God’s after my heart. Not my stuff, or not an employee. He wants me.” 

Rachel, I loved that. What I want to know is how did you come to that? I bet that wasn’t an overnight learning experience. 

Rachel: No, not at all. I think it’s just the whole process of coming into the things that he called me to do. Like he called me to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I was a child, people would say, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I’d say, “I want to be a writer.”

My father would say to me, “Rachel, you’re a writer. Be a writer.” 

I studied journalism at Ohio State. Didn’t want to be a reporter. The Lord, sent me to where I live now. I was in the software world for a while.

Anyway, Christian fiction was big in the early 90s, and I started writing, but it was lots of disappointment, you know? The rejection. We were talking about that before the show. Rejections and things like that were coming up. Meeting people, just waiting for the right doors to open. Writing full time and then being back in the corporate world. Just all of that journey.

All along, the Lord was dealing with things in my heart. I remember when I got my first contract with Thomas Nelson, who at the time was my dream publisher. 

Erin: Wow. 

Rachel: I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, what if I can’t do it? What if I can’t do it?” 

I was driving down the road and the Holy Spirit said to me, “Okay, you just keep saying you can’t and don’t be surprised when you fail.” 

Karen: Right. 

Rachel: So that’s when it began. Getting at those deeper issues, and what comes out of my mouth, and what I believe, and how I processed even writing stories, and just laying on the floor, trying to come up with an idea, weeping before the Lord. I had so many tears in those early days, like, “I don’t know what I’m doing!” and not feeling good enough.

You know how publishing works. Maybe you get promoted, maybe you don’t. 

Karen: Right.

Rachel: And out of the gate, pouring my heart into a story, but ending up not really being on the front of the promotional list. For the reasons that, well you know, business. That’s when the business kicks in.

The Lord was just leading me through that saying, “You’re writing for different reasons than I’ve called you to write, Rachel.”

So it was book after book. Technically after my first couple of books with Thomas Nelson, I should have been gone. I just didn’t have the numbers.

That’s when they came to me and said, “Hey, would you write with country singer Sarah Evans?”

I said, “Sure.” 

I’d already had a moment with the Lord where I’d said, “Look, I’ve got nothing. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a career. They could call me today and tell me, ‘Don’t turn in the book you’re writing,’—which was Love Starts with Elle—I could go anywhere. Tony can eat cereal and he can wear wrinkled shorts. I don’t care.”

And so they’d come to me a few months after that and said, “Will you write with Sarah Evans?”

I just knew, and I said, “Yes. Absolutely.”

That was three of the easiest books I ever wrote, as far as just the grace that was on me. Not only did I have to write a book for my publisher, I had to write a book for this country singer. We paired together, of course, for the idea of the series, but I was the one doing the finger work. 

After that was The Wedding Dress, which changed everything. So it was doing what he called me to do and sticking with it, even when it didn’t look like I was being successful in the world’s standards.

Karen: It’s interesting, Erin and I, before we do any of our meetings or we do any of the podcasts, we read from Streams in the Desert the devotional for the day. The verse that we read this morning was Genesis 15:13-14, and it’s so perfect for anyone going into publishing:

“Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be mistreated for one hundred years. But afterward, They will come out with great possessions.” 

That’s perfect. Then the devotional goes on to say, “I can be sure that part of God’s promised blessing to me is delay and suffering.” 

Welcome to publishing. 

Rachel: Welcome to publishing. I remember saying that at one ACFW conference when I was in the middle of leading worship. I said, “If you don’t plug into Jesus, this industry will kill you.”

Karen: That’s exactly right. 

Rachel: But you know, I love Genesis 15:1, where God says to Abraham, “I am your exceeding great reward.” 

Really, that’s where it all starts. That the journey of life, no matter what you’re doing—publishing, editing, writing, mixing cement, raising kids at home—is about coming up from the wilderness, leaning on your beloved.

It’s about being conformed into the image of Christ, which is Romans 8. I know the verse because I memorized it, but I can’t pull it out of my secession, and you guys don’t want me to quote the whole thing. But Paul writes that Jesus is the firstborn of the dead. He said that we are conformed that he might be the firstborn of many brothers and sisters.

So we’re conformed to him because he’s the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. How do you conform me to him? 

Karen: By suffering, pain, death, resurrection… 

Rachel: By the life that I lead. Right. By the good, the bad, the valleys, the mountains. 

Karen: It’s in those difficult places that we put our roots deep into who Jesus is because it’s only when we do that that we can withstand the storms. 

We moved to Washington a little over a year ago not knowing much about this community to which we moved. It’s Gold Bar, Washington. Little did I know that half of the year, they call it Blow Bar, because the winds are just channeled by the Cascade Mountains. We’re at the foot of the Cascade Mountains. It’s beautiful, but the wind is just channeled past us. 

I look out in my backyard sometimes, and I just wait for that music. You know that music from the Wizard of Oz where you see the gal on the broom? Yeah. We got our weather station so that we could see how strong the winds are that are blowing through. The only way you survive that is having your roots so deep into the Lord that nothing can rip you out. Nothing can destroy you.

Erin: Yeah, I think that… with the suffering, nobody wants to suffer, okay? We don’t. But suffering gets our attention. I think suffering draws us to what’s really important and it makes us think about, well, was that review really important or, was it more important what God thinks about my effort here?

Or, is selling 200 books really important? Or is that one person whose life may be forever changed, is that what’s important? So it’s awful. Nobody loves it, but yet we can’t learn anything without it. 

Why did God do that? Don’t you wonder, why is that the plan? I don’t know that I have a good answer to that.

Rachel: This past summer, my older brother had his esophagus rupture. We were all on our way to the annual family gathering in Eastern Tennessee. He was airlifted from Tallahassee to Jacksonville for emergency surgery. He almost died. My husband and I were headed up. We had just gone through Jacksonville when he called and said he was taking himself—he’s not married, he’s a bachelor—taking himself to the emergency room.

We ended up turning around and going back down to be with him in Jacksonville. He was under by the time that we were there. He was in the hospital for five weeks, and he was never alone. Family and friends rotated in and out to be with him. But when I was there with him, and my sister came down to be with us as well, I asked that question a lot. What is this suffering? 

Of course he was the one really doing the suffering, but we were there with him. I’m telling you guys, it makes me cry just talking about it. The nearness of God was tangible. One day I was sitting next to my brother and I was just praying. He had tennis on the TV, and we were just being with him in the room.

I started singing, “Hallelujah, hallelujah.” And then, “Come, Lord Jesus,” and boom, he was in the room. 

Erin: Wow. 

Rachel: I just lost it. I remember he was standing at my brother’s feet and he said, “It won’t be long.”

I knew it wasn’t death. I knew it was healing. 

He’d said that to me about my grandmother and she died a week later, but she was a hundred and two, going on a hundred and three. She wanted to go. 

There were several other moments. It just, I almost miss it. I don’t want him to be in hospital, but the nearness of God in that moment… 

I can’t tell you that there’s a formula to touch God in the midst of suffering except just keep going to him, keep going to him, keep going to him.

The beauty was the Lord even set up my brother for this. He just had. 

My brother told me one day, “I think I dreamed this before it happened.”

One day he was riding his bike and he was just kind of singing to the Lord in his garage. This is not a “sing to the Lord” kind of guy. He doesn’t go to church every week. You could have knocked me out of my chair when he was telling me this. 

He said he was singing in the spirit, listening to a jazz song, and the most incredible peace fell over him and his eyes teared up. 

He was tearing up telling me the story and he goes to God, like, “Hey, come on, you know I don’t like this emotional stuff.” 

But the Lord in his kindness prepared him. So I think that, Erin, coming out of your question, I don’t get it, and I remember walking down the hospital hall, weeping, I had to hide behind a post, just weeping, and saying, “God, I don’t understand suffering. But I feel you so near. I almost welcome it.” You know? 

Erin: Yeah. 

Karen: Don and I went through so much in our lives, in our relationship, in just everything, and we came to the place where our mantra, if you will, and I’ve said this before on the podcast, became: God is in control. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it. I may not like it, but God is in control. 

It’s that sense of whatever it is, whether it’s suffering or whether it’s great success, whether it’s utter failure—and I’ve been in both places, great success and utter failure—in all of it, it’s knowing that God is present and God is at work. 

His work isn’t to make me a success. His work is to make me a reflection of a loving Lord to a lost and hurting world. That’s the work that He is doing in me. Whatever I write, or publish, or whatever, the podcasts, if they are part of that, that’s because of his purposes and his will. Everything else doesn’t matter. I just need to rest in him and say, “Okay, where do you want to take us today?”

Rachel: One hundred percent. Absolutely. 

Erin: Suffering is very much part of the human experience. In many ways, this was Job’s question to God. “Are you really running the universe right? Because there’s suffering happening.” 

God’s like, “Hey, I’m God.”

You can’t question that even though we might want to. But the suffering, I think, brings in many ways, our compassion and our humanity. It’s something that we have in common with everybody all over the world. But I also think it’s so interesting that at the end of time, when the new heavens and the new earth are here and we are in God’s presence, I mean, no more suffering.

What a contrast that will be. How can we even imagine that? Here, there’s suffering. There, there isn’t. It’s something to just dwell upon and try to look forward to it and try to understand it. And we never will, so there you go. I’ll just stop there.

Rachel: Yeah. I think that is Romans 8:18. Paul writes that we can’t imagine that with this present suffering…what’s coming. 

Erin: Yeah. 

Rachel: We can’t compare it to the glory that will be revealed in us. But if we share in his suffering, we will also share in his glory.

Karen: Right. 

Rachel: I think of the existential question, if God is good, why is there evil? And I really think that’s what this earthly journey is all about: eradicating evil. He allowed it because it’s the opposite of good. You know, he’s so good, he could allow evil to exist. In the end of the age, he’s going to eradicate it.

Whatever your end-time eschatology is, one day it’s going to be gone and forever we’re going to live in the light of his glory. Forever. I can’t even imagine like, what am I going to be doing a thousand years from now? You know, you still have this concept of, “Okay, but when I die…” But no, you will never die again.

Erin: Right. 

Rachel: You just can’t even imagine that. You almost go, “Man, I’m going to get bored living forever.” But you won’t.

Karen: I don’t think so! 

Rachel: I know, right? We won’t. 

Karen: I’ll spend the first millennia just talking to the animals. 

The thing that I look at when we talk about suffering and the thing that it constantly brings me back to, especially in light of being a writer and how we feel as though things just aren’t happening the way we thought they would, and how this journey isn’t what we thought it would be, or it’s so much better than we thought it would be, is how when something happens, some hiccup in the road, we let ourselves go to that place of, “I lost my faith in God.”

Or, “This happened and I started doubting God’s goodness.” Or, “If God was loving, then why?”

I look at Isaiah 45:5-6. It says: “I am the Lord.” Listen to that. “I am the Lord and there is no other. Apart from me, there is no other. I will strengthen you, though you have not acknowledged me so that from the rising of the sun to the place of its setting, men may know there is none besides me. I am the Lord and there is no other.” 

God is God, and who are we that he takes notice of us? Yet we have the gall to say things like, “I lost my faith because…”

Then you didn’t have those deep roots in your faith. You weren’t submitted to the fact that God is God and you are created to honor him and glorify him. No matter what. Even if you’re walking across the water and then you start to sink. You are there, whether you drown or whether you survive, and he lifts you up out of the waves, you belong to God, and he is the one who is in control. Not you. 

Erin: All of those things—when we get sidetracked—it’s just a distraction. It’s a distraction to what we’re supposed to be doing. We’re supposed to be pointing to God’s glory. As writers, that’s our job. We’ve talked about suffering and we’ve talked about a future glory, but at the same time, that’s why what we do now matters. That’s why every word we write matters. It’s important to be telling people what’s going on here and what’s to come. We have such an important job. 

Rachel: I was talking with a friend this morning about Dante’s Inferno of all things. She was a hospice nurse, and so she’d been there with people about to die. She’d seen some who knew they were being carried away by angels and some who were dying in agony, literally being carted off to hell. She said that Dante’s Inferno really brought hell into a reality with her.

I was saying that the hard part about Dante’s Inferno is he didn’t give the answer. You don’t want to go here, so where am I going? Here’s how you get to heaven, you know? But that’s not the rest of Dante’s Inferno.

I think if we show flawed characters and people who are really struggling with life, and in that somehow there’s the revelation of Jesus, that’s how I approach writing a story. Everyone’s going to be messed up and just as flawed as anybody else, but somewhere along the way, they encounter the one who has the answers.

Erin: Yeah. 

Karen: We need to show the reality that when some people encounter the one who has the answers, they don’t like the answers and they walk away. Away from the only answer, away from the love, and it needs to break our hearts the way that it breaks Jesus’ heart. 

We need to be sure that we are authentic in what we’re writing about the struggles of the Christian life. This is not an easy gig. I mean, let alone as a Christian being called to write and to publishing, it’s like double damnation. You find these things that we need to communicate, the truth of it and the truth of him, to a world that’s lost in darkness. 

Wow, this has been a great conversation, Rachel. I’m just so delighted with all that we’ve talked about. And listeners, get excited because there’s more coming next time.

Guest @RachelHauck encourages us to see suffering as a gift from God. #ChristianWriter #amwriting
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What do you think about the human struggle with suffering?

Enter for a chance to win a free copy of Shadia Hrichi’s latest Bible study Rahab! One copy will be given away each week during the month of November!

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Special thanks to our November sponsor of the month Christy Bass Adams. She’s the author of a devotional titled Learning As I Go: Big Lessons from Little People, and a middle grades novel, The Adventures of Cricket and Kyle: Imagination Checkers. She’s also a speaker and leads women’s conferences and Bible studies, and she’s a monthly contributor to Inspire-a-fire and a newspaper columnist for Greene Publishing.

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 202 – Why Suffering Matters with Guest Rachel Hauck appeared first on Write from the Deep.

We’ve all faced times of trial, but what do you do when MORE crises happen while you’re already in the middle of a crisis? Guest Shadia Hrichi shares how God used crisis upon crisis to strengthen her faith and her writing.

About Shadia Hrichi

Shadia Hrichi is a passionate Bible teacher who loves seeing lives transformed by the power of God’s Word. She holds a master’s in biblical and theological studies and a master’s in criminal justice. Her Bible studies include her latest release, Rahab: Rediscovering the God Who Saves Me, as well as TAMAR,  HAGAR,  LEGION,  and WORTHY OF LOVE, endorsed by Francine Rivers, Liz Curtis-Higgs, Chris Tiegreen, Bible Study Magazine, and others. Shadia enjoys speaking at retreats and events, and loves to visit the ocean each week for “a date with Jesus.”

Enter for a chance to win a free copy of Shadia Hrichi’s latest Bible study Rahab! One copy will be given away each week during the month of November!

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Welcome, listeners. We are delighted that you’re here with us. We’re doubly delighted because we have a guest, and I’m going to let Karen introduce her.

Karen: It’s Shadia Hrichi! We’ve had her here a couple of times before and we’re having her back because we love her. And we love the way that she brings the Bible to life for us and helps us to apply it in every step of what we’re doing for God as we’re on this journey to write and share his truth.

She holds a Master’s in Biblical and Theological Studies as well as a Master’s in Criminal Justice. She is an amazing teacher and the author of a number of Bible studies and has just released her newest on Rahab. Shadia, welcome. We’re so glad to have you here. 

Shadia: Oh, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for having me back.

I appreciate all that you do to invest in writers. Your ministry is beautiful. Thanks for having me. 

Erin: Thank you. Well, as we love to begin, what does the deep mean to you, Shadia? 

Shadia: When I think of the deep and my walk with God, I’m reminded, of what Paul says: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and I want to know God more.”

I think that’s what we all want as Christians. We all want to know God more. It’s just like any relationship. You do that by going deep, by spending that time together and intentionally investing in that relationship. I just want to know him more.

Erin: I love that the focus on intention there is the key. We might want things, but if we don’t do anything about them, they’re just desires, not goals. 

Shadia: Yes. 

Erin: But if we have the intention and the goal of doing that, of spending that time, then it can happen. So I love that word. 

Shadia: And it’s God’s desire too. We’re right in alignment. It’s his will. 

Erin: That’s right. And he does draw us. I think that’s something we can be praying for when we’re praying about having a deeper relationship with him, that he would call, that he would draw us, and that we would meet him with that intentionality as well. So I like that.

Well, we’re excited about the release of your new Bible study. I got to tell you guys, go look at her Bible studies. These are great. I have thoroughly enjoyed even just looking through them. But digging into them and doing them—doing is a cool experience. We’ve got to definitely say that is a life-changing type of a Bible study experience when you’re going deep.

Rahab: Rediscovering the God Who Saves Me is the newest one, and so I’m excited about that because it’s about Rahab. That’s interesting. But as you were writing this study, how did it impact your own faith walk? Especially how that regarded your situation with your mom’s health? 

Shadia: Yeah. It’s interesting because with this particular Bible study, faith and salvation together are the primary themes of the entire Bible study. Those are the center cores of Rahab’s story and this particular Bible study. Looking back, I realized I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when God allowed me to experience not one, but two really difficult events that challenged my faith.

One of them we talked about last time with me having to suddenly have to move. That happened about halfway through writing this Bible study, and that was very, very difficult. But who knew I was going to be in store for something far worse? It happened just a couple of weeks away from my book deadline.

Whenever you’re on a book deadline, anybody who’s experienced that knows that’s pretty stressful. Everything is basically on hold until you finish this book. You’re not cleaning the house. Your friends have to bring you food.

So here I was at the end. I had just a couple of weeks left for finishing the book. I had about two days left that I was writing for the end of the study. I’m under all this pressure, and I get a phone call from my brother. Now I live in California, my family’s originally from New York, so my brother, my mom, and so forth are living in New York. I get a call from my brother saying that mom is in the hospital.

Now at that point, I had already made three trips to New York just in that past year because her health had been slowly failing, but she kept bouncing back. The last time I saw her, she was getting stronger. She was back home and things seemed to be going fine.

But my brother calls me and by the time he called me and said that she was in the hospital, I mean, hours later, she’s already on life support. I almost didn’t even comprehend the words. It happened so fast.

Just hours later, I’m on a flight back to New York. All my friends and Bible study group and prayer team are praying alongside with me for two things. I wanted to get back in time to say goodbye, and more importantly, to share the gospel one last time.

I think I’ve shared on this program before, I wasn’t raised in a Christian family, I’m the only Christian in the family. Twenty-five years of witnessing, and I’m still the only Christian in the family. I’ve been witnessing to my mom for years, and there was a time many years before that she had prayed with me to receive Christ, but I never really saw much fruit. She was kind of on her own, and one of those people that…I mean, I can’t put this on my shoulders, but I sometimes feel that if I had just been there, she would have went to church with me.

Karen: Right, right. 

Shadia: You get it. I honestly just never knew where she stood with the Lord. When the plane landed, a friend picked me up, and we drove straight to the hospital. I went right up to her room.

She’s in ICU, my brother’s there, my stepfather’s there, my aunt, my mom’s sister. Mom is sedated, completely sedated. There are fifteen wires and tubes and all those things. Quite honestly, looking back, I was probably just in shock.

I’ve heard people say that even if somebody’s sedated or in a coma or anything like that, their hearing still works. 

Karen: You can talk to them. Right. 

Shadia: Yeah. So I held on to that. I went up to her bed, and I held her hand. I thought to myself—obviously praying this whole entire time—I thought, “God, she’s heard the gospel. I don’t need to go through the Romans road. I mean, she knows it.” 

So all I just kept saying was, “Run to Jesus. Run to Jesus.”

I would read things like Psalm 23, the Shepherd Psalm, and I played the song “Amazing Grace,” just little things like that. Even though my family was in the room with me, and they’re not believers. They’ve always been very gracious and sensitive to my faith, and I appreciate that. So there was no one standing in the way of any of that.

I remember saying to my mom, “Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

She never did. At one moment, she did open her eyes once and she turned and I felt like she was looking at me, but then she closed them again and I’m like, “Oh God, did she, is she there? Does she hear me?”

You don’t know. It’s so hard. And by the next morning she was gone. 

Karen: Oh, gosh. 

Shadia: Yeah. She passed.

God had answered one of my prayers. I got there in time to say goodbye. In the dark days that followed, God was still with me. God’s light was still there.

What happened afterwards, though, is the most interesting part of what happened. I’m in New York, and I had to stay helping my brother, my stepfather, and everyone with the burial plans, the paperwork. All the logistical things that had to be arranged.

She passed on Tuesday, and by Friday, I had scheduled a flight to return home on Saturday morning. There was nothing left that needed to be done. My brother who owns a restaurant, was kind of already back in work mode. You know, life still goes on. We’re still grieving and so forth, but there are still responsibilities.

Karen: Right. 

Shadia: I booked my flight for Saturday morning, but Friday, I had no peace. I just kept sensing this thought, like I had to stay one more day. I’m like, “Is that you God? Or is this my imagination?”

You know, you’re under all this stress to begin with. But by Friday night, I think it was around 11 o’clock, I can’t sleep. I’m feeling like I’m supposed to stay another day, and I’m questioning it because I’m like, “What for? There’s nothing left to do. I’ve got to get back home. I’ve got work to do.”

Of course, I’m asking God for clarity. “God, can you make it clear? Is this you?”

But I didn’t get that sense. Finally, since this feeling wouldn’t go away, I decided, “All right, well, if this is God, I need to do this, and if it’s not, what am I going to lose?”

Here I am, 11 o’clock at night, getting on my iPad, cancelling the flight, cancelling the drive to the airport. Then, of course, the airline didn’t have a flight on Sunday, so I had to book for another airline, and so on. All the things.

So I change everything, and now I’m going to fly out Sunday. So Saturday morning comes, and I’m throwing my hands up. “Okay, here I am.”

My brother’s back at work. My stepfather has some things to do, and I’m just home at my parents’ house, and I had nothing really to do. I’d already scoured Mom’s room for journals, photos, anything personal, anything special that might minister to me or my family. Mementos or whatever.

I thought, “Well, I haven’t done that in her art studio.” She was an artist, so she had an art studio. I thought, “Let me go in there and poke around.”

In the back of the studio, I found an old bookshelf. I was looking for journals, though she wasn’t a journaler. She wasn’t a writer, but I had given her a journal once like twenty years ago.

Lo and behold, I recognized it. Although at the moment, I couldn’t even remember if it was the one I gave her twenty years ago. But I recognized that it had no title. It wasn’t a book. So I pulled it out and then I recognized it immediately. It had this yellow sunflower on top and it was a journal I had given to her twenty years before.

Erin: Wow. 

Shadia: In that journal were just three entries. In one of the entries, she wrote a prayer telling God how much she thanked him for me, that I had shared the Lord with her and witnessed to her. Then she wrote a prayer of salvation, giving her life to Christ. Dedicating her life to Christ.

I’m reading these words like, “Is this really what I’m reading?”

Especially because of the fact that she was not a writer. She wasn’t a journal type person, but I’ve got boxes of journals, you know what I mean? But that wasn’t her thing. So for her to write this down, this is significant. She wrote this prayer of salvation and thanked God for me telling her about him. 

I thought in that moment that even though mom had struggled all those years to hold on to her faith—because we’d had conversations now and then—I’d just never, I mean, I was looking for that clear sign, that evidence. I was struggling myself, not seeing that evidence and God reminded me of 2nd Timothy 2:13, which says that even if we are faithless, God remains faithful. He cannot deny who he is.

It seemed that he honored Mom’s prayer because it was a sincere prayer. I’m the one who had to rest in that truth, trusting in who God is and thanking him for displaying that for me by ensuring I would delay that trip in order to find that journal rather than spending the next six months in despair until the next time I was back there.

Here’s one more tiny piece of this story. When I got back home here in California, the next morning, my mind’s still a little bit blown, and I was struggling again. Like, “Is she really in heaven? Is she really with God? Is it true?”

That’s when the Spirit spoke clearly—that clarity I wanted on Friday, and I didn’t get it. I got it on Monday morning, back in California. He spoke very clearly, giving me that reminder of me finding that journal, delaying the trip. He said to me, “Is it in God’s nature to give you false hope?” 

Erin: Wow. 

Karen: Amen. 

Shadia: Yeah. Then, of course, when I finally started getting back to finishing the end of the Bible study, it’s nothing like what I would’ve written before this happened. So, yeah, I’m just praying that story encourages many others..kind of like Rahab. She saved her family. She went back for her family. She could have jumped out the window with the spies and saved herself. 

Karen: Yeah. 

Shadia: She could have been rescued that night, but she stayed back and risked her life to save her family. I feel like God allowed me to see that connection. 

Erin: Yeah. 

Shadia: That’s what he did. He allowed my faith to really be challenged in a beautiful way and again displayed the beauty of who he is, which is ultimately what we want. That’s what I want. I want to know him more. 

Karen: Right. 

Shadia: He revealed himself more clearly.

Karen: Yeah, that’s amazing. 

Erin: That’s what he does. That’s who he is. That’s the goal—that God reveals who he is in his word and through us. 

Shadia: He wants to be known. 

Karen: Right. 

Erin: And trusted—us understanding by faith that we can trust who he is and who he’s revealed himself to be, which is why I like so much that you write Bible studies. Because that’s one of the ways that we understand who God is and how he reveals himself to us. He left us the Bible to reveal himself to us. 

Shadia: Absolutely. 

Erin: We don’t dig in the way we need to. I saw this quote on some of your promotional material for the Bible study for Rahab. You’d said, “In today’s fast-paced, instant-results, frenzied way of life, many Christians have come to lean on a Bible verse or even a word as spiritual nourishment.”

I thought, “Yeah!” You tell us, though, why is that a problem? 

Shadia: Yeah, it certainly is the culture we’re in now. “Just a Bible verse a day and keep the devil away” kind of thing. The problem with it is that except perhaps the book of Proverbs, the Bible wasn’t written to be understood in verses.

A lot of the Bible is narrative, or in the New Testament, there are stories. Everything is written in within context. Then even broader of that, all of the Bible is written and connects to the rest of the Bible. There’s one redemptive story throughout the entire Bible. Then each element of the Bible, whether it’s a book or even if you just take a chapter, it all has to be understood within context.

That’s how you get to know God more. That’s how you see what this bigger picture is. Where is he coming from? What is he trying to teach us?

We can’t survive spiritually on breadcrumbs. God’s given us bread. God’s given us food. God’s given us a feast. 

We can’t easily take it all in at once, but he’s also provided nerds like me who love to do that extra digging and then provide guidance on how you can dig in, on how you can know God more. He has revealed himself in his word. It’s very important to study the Bible with those bigger pictures in mind and looking at everything and how it relates to the Bible as a whole. 

Erin: Yeah. I think of so many people out there who have a question about God, or an anger toward God, or a disbelief, they’ll pull out one little thing, but there’s a whole backstory behind all this. 

You know, somebody once said to me, “Are you saying that people who follow the Jewish faith tradition, but don’t follow Christ, they’re not Christians then? What’s going to happen to them? Jesus was a Jew.” 

I’m just like, “What? There’s a whole story in there. A whole redemptive story about how God woos his people.”

Shadia: Yes. 

Karen: The interesting thing is, as writers, none of us write books with the intent that our readers will come and pull one sentence, one paragraph out and put that up on their wall and use that without context. I mean, they could pull something that somebody bad says, and say, “I’m so inspired by this.”

You’re like, “Ah, you have to read that in context of the story in order to understand.”

That’s the same thing with the scriptures. 

Shadia: Yes. I think this is why so many Christians are feeling empty, longing for deeper intimacy with God, because they’re only looking at the examples out there, like this verse a day, a word a day. There’s nothing wrong with those things, just like you shared, Karen. I mean, I have a Bible verse on my wall.

Karen: Sure. 

Shadia: But I know the context of the story and it has such richer application to me because I’m aware of the bigger story. 

Karen: Because you’ve gone deeper.

Erin: These little Bible snippets, they’re like Twitter. It’s all soundbites. Soundbite faith is not deep. It’s not going deep with God, so obviously Bible study is going to help us with that. And reading the Bible through in its entirety. That’s a great practice for us to be doing every year or every two years or every six months or whatever it is.

We’re not saying you shouldn’t meditate on a Bible verse or even a word. Those things can still be good. If you’re thinking about how God is almighty, well what does that mean? Invariably, if you have more context of the Bible, what you’re coming up with for what “almighty” means are things that we’ve seen in the Bible and also in our lives. There’s that richer context there. I love that. 

Shadia: Yeah. 

Erin: This has been a great conversation again. Of course! But we’re already coming to the end of our time. Are there some final words of wisdom that you would want to leave us with, either from your own life or from what you’ve learned with studying Rahab or whatever?

Shadia: One of the things that I could share about the story of Rahab is how it just applies to us. I’m always saying that the Rahab story is our story because the entire Bible is a picture of God’s passionate pursuit of his adulterous bride. 

Karen: Right. 

Shadia: That’s us. One of the prostitutes. But from Genesis all the way to Revelation, God is working out his plan of salvation to bring his bride home. Rahab, who’s this prostitute who’s rescued ends up in the lineage of Christ. She ends up marrying a prince of Judah. Her story reminds us that no matter what we’ve done, God is willing to embrace us if we turn to him and be saved.

Her story is our story because we are the prostitute. We become the bride of Christ. It is such a perfect place to begin a exploration into who God is. Her story is amazing, and we didn’t even talk about this whole aspect of where it appears in the Bible and the fact that they’re on the edge of the Promised Land, all that stuff. Powerful story and a beautiful story and a greatly, greatly theologically significant story in the Bible. 

Erin: Cool. And we recommend it, by the way!

Karen: We all need to delve deeper. Yes, we all need to delve deeper into Rahab and to understand all of that, where it fits in God’s story and in his relationship with us.

But more than anything else, I just want to say thanks for sharing what God did for you and the way that he blessed you beyond anything you could imagine. That’s the sign of a loving father. We can rest in him. We can take him at his word when he says that if we come to him and lay our burdens on him, we can then rest.

We can rest in him. We don’t have to worry. We don’t have to be anxious for anything. And boy, howdy, if Christians don’t know how to worry, they don’t know how to do anything. They are worriers from the ground up, and we should not be. We should be resting in the God who loves us beyond our imagining.

Thank you, Shadia, and may God be with each of us every step of the day.

Shadia: Thank you. 

Karen: Amen. 

Erin: Amen.

Guest @ShadiaHrichi shares how God used crisis upon crisis to strengthen her faith and her writing. #amwriting #christianwriter
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Rahab: Rediscovering the God Who Saves Me by Shadia Hrichi

Enter for a chance to win a free copy of Shadia Hrichi’s latest Bible study Rahab! One copy will be given away each week during the month of November!

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Special thanks to our November sponsor of the month Christy Bass Adams. She’s the author of a devotional titled Learning As I Go: Big Lessons from Little People, and a middle grades novel, The Adventures of Cricket and Kyle: Imagination Checkers. She’s also a speaker and leads women’s conferences and Bible studies, and she’s a monthly contributor to Inspire-a-fire and a newspaper columnist for Greene Publishing.

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 201 – When a Crisis Upends Your World with Guest Shadia Hrichi appeared first on Write from the Deep.

It’s been such an honor and delight to share your writing and spiritual journey with you! As we celebrate our 200th episode, we have a gift for you: writing wisdom and advice from some of our amazing guests! So come listen in and be blessed!

But first, thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Welcome to the deep, my friends! We’re glad you’re here with us. Today we’re celebrating! It’s our 200th episode! We started this podcast in September of 2015, everybody. Two episodes per month for eight years!

God has been so kind in giving us this task, showing his faithfulness and presence. Way back when, before we started this podcast, God spoke to us at the same time about how writers needed encouragement to help them deal with the struggles in their spiritual life on the writing journey. We’re so honored that he’s given us this task, and we’re delighted that you all are here.

Yes, God did lay it on our hearts. You have to know, we didn’t tell each other about it at that time. He spoke to us individually, and then we came together and discovered this and knew it was God.

We have to give a shout out to Thomas Umstattd Jr.,  too. Right about the time we were thinking about this, Erin mentioned it to Thomas at an ACFW conference. He said, “You and Karen doing a spiritual podcast for writers? Huh. That could be very interesting!”

It was so kind and so encouraging. Thomas and James L. Rubart gave us advice and tech help, too. We sure didn’t know how to do any of this, but Thomas did, and he was a resource and guide as we got started.

Thanks also to our awesome sound editor Mike at Podcast PS. He gets the brunt of all our bloopers and goofs, and he fixes them. Thanks, Mike!

For all of you out there who’ve supported us on Patreon, you’ve been a crucial part of these podcasts as well. We couldn’t have done this without you.

As we thought about how to celebrate this 200th episode, it occurred to us to reach out to former guests of the podcast and ask them for their advice and counsel for you. Our celebration is a special treat for you!  To keep the podcast from being an hour long, we’ve shortened some of the comments.

DiAnn Mills shared this:

“Karen and Erin’s interview with me…showed Christian sisterhood in action. They made me feel like I was the most important person on the planet. I valued the prayer time, professionalism, and insight into my book’s topic. The time sped by, and I regretted the ending of our conversation.”  DiAnn Mills

That’s how we always feel at the end of our time with our guests. Oh my goodness, we’ve laughed and cried and grown closer to God and each other. It’s fellowship in action. We’re so blessed by the body of Christ. That’s God’s design and purpose. We’re in this together, y’all. Stay connected, stay encouraged.

“You’re already doing a good thing for your life as a writer, because you are listening to this wonderful writing podcast. We can learn so much from one another. Be a writer’s writer like Karen and Erin. Cheer another writer on. Offer encouragement. Open doors. Someday another writer will do that for you, too. We can help one another.”  Karen Stiller, author of The Minister’s Wife, and Holiness Here coming out in Spring of 2024.

“I’ve always loved the title of your podcast, Write from the Deep, because it’s truly the only guarantee of a Christian writer’s success. No matter what degrees we hold, how many contracts we’ve secured, workshops we’ve taught or attended—if we don’t quiet the outer noise and dig deep to hear the still, small Voice inside, we have nothing of eternal value to write. So, no matter what distracts us, we can Write from the Deep when we LIVE from the deep. That’s why David’s psalms are so powerful. He wrote what he lived, and his words burn in our souls.”  Mesu Andrews

“When I was first published, decades ago, it was a challenge to find helpful information on the craft of writing. Writers groups were a rare gift and writer’s conferences became a lifeline. I’ve appreciated the way Write from the Deep has brought these necessary components to the next generation of writers. The variety of topics, personal stories and valuable insights from Karen and Erin have made this podcast a treasure chest for both new and experienced writers. Thank you, friends, for all your hard work. I’m honored to have been a guest and blessed to be a listener.”  Robin Jones Gunn

“God planted a love for words within the heart of every writer. God does not need our words, but he delights in using them in order to encourage, teach, inspire, and challenge – first us, and then others. Let God first have his way in your heart, then he will gladly help himself to your words to advance his kingdom purposes.”  Shadia Hrichi

We need encouragement, we need inspiration. This world can be difficult and dark. Lindsay Franklin shared with us that they recently discovered a would-be intruder trying to break into their house. While they were all home, in the middle of the day! How brazen. How disconcerting and eerie that must have been! So Lindsay Franklin gave us this bit of wisdom:

“Life is weird, but God is good. We’re never promised things will be easy or everything will work out perfectly. But we are promised God’s presence, and that’s more than enough.”  Lindsay Franklin

“I’ve been taking great comfort recently in these words of Jesus from John 8:12: ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’ It gives me such peace to know that if I am truly following Jesus, I am walking in his light and I can trust him to lead me one step at a time, only as far ahead as I can see for the next step and the next and the next. I’m trying to live life that way—one step at a time, eyes on Jesus, all the way home!”  Deborah Raney

Robin Lee Hatcher gave us this Scripture from Isaiah 42:16 (NASB95):

“I will lead the blind by a way they do not know, In paths they do not know I will guide them. I will make darkness into light before them and rugged places into plains. These are the things I will do, and I will not leave them undone.”

“God gave me this verse for a particular book when I was in a panic, not knowing how to tell the story in my heart. He made darkness into light before me then, and he has continued to do so for the many novels that have followed.”  Robin Lee Hatcher

These Bible verses from literary agent Steve Laube then tell us what happens next, when God makes our darkness light:

“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God…His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire…Therefore, I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name forever.”  Combined from Matthew 5:16; John 5:44; 1 Corinthians 10:31; 2 Peter 1:3-4; Psalm 86:12

“My advice is pretty simple and something I’m still working on myself: Keep your focus on the Lord. Always. It’s so easy to be distracted by this world and all the things. Everything we do should be done to the best of our ability for the glory of the Lord.”  Kimberly Woodhouse

Kim is still working on that, like we all should be, because it’s hard!

Paul Hastings, host of Compelled Podcast – Christian Stories and Testimonies gives advice that echoes Kim’s:

“Sometimes when I grow discouraged by lack of progress, I must be reminded of an eternal perspective. Seek first the kingdom of God, and he’ll take care of the rest. Even if you never achieve fame or acclaim as an author here on this Earth, if you serve the Lord faithfully then at the end of time you will hear the words ‘Well done, good and faithful servant… enter into the joy of your Master’ (Matthew 25:21).”  Paul Hastings

“The Holy Spirit knows best about your career. Trust his voice rather than the siren call of social media. Faithfulness trumps fame and. Book sales don’t equal your worth.”  Mary DeMuth

“Don’t get your identity or self esteem from your successes and failures as a writer.”  Sharon Dunn

“We are beloved children of God. That is our identity whether we write or not, whether we have ‘success’ or not. 2 Corinthians 4:7 tells us, ‘We have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us (ESV).'”  Sharon Hinck

I like the focus Thomas Umstattd Jr. has on service in the advice he sent us:

“As a Christian author, your job is to honor God and thrill your reader. That’s it. At the end of the day, no one else matters. Not your agent, publisher, book store owner, book critic, English teacher, or editor. They are not your customer. They are not your God.  If your readers love your book, and you honored God in writing it, that is enough.  Love God, and serve your reader.”  Thomas Umstattd Jr.

Thomas also shared this Scripture with us:

“‘And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second [commandment] is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”  Mark 12:30-31 (ESV)

“To my writing brothers and sisters, a simple word of encouragement: God is already preparing the hearts of your readers for the message or story he has called and equipped you to share. Even before you’ve written a word. Even before you’ve posted something about your W-I-P on social media. Even before you’ve sent the first email, the first newsletter, the first blog post. Before all that, God. You can trust him. You can rest in him. Take a deep breath, and write.”  Liz Curtis Higgs

“No matter what, when, or how God called you to write, the platforms and audience he gives you are HIS. Your career is HIS. Write as he guides you. And be willing to leave it all behind if he calls you to something new and unexpected. Your writing is not your life-path. JESUS IS.”  Brandilyn Collins

Elizabeth Ludwig says something similar:

“My advice to writers is don’t ignore your spiritual journey! God has much to teach you along the way. Sometimes, getting there is more beneficial than actually arriving.”  Elizabeth Ludwig

“I loved being part of Write from the Deep. During the two episodes that we visited, I especially loved connecting my health and spiritual journeys to the writer’s journey. And the Scripture that speaks to all of that is found in John 13:7, where Jesus is washing his disciples’ feet and he says, “You do not understand now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” After our conversations, it became even more clear to me that God is using each of our writing paths in ways we may not fully know this side of Eternity. And that gives me purpose and peace, knowing I don’t have to design and figure everything out on my own.”  Lori Ann Wood

“It can be difficult for authors to dig deeply into their own pain and past mistakes when shaping their stories, but the result can have eternal results in readers’ lives when they do…I would encourage young writers to set priorities in their life and writing, and then allocate their time accordingly, aware of the endless distractions that would divert them from God’s calling to write.”  Lynn Austin

Not only do we have to deal with distractions, we also have to deal with blank pages…sitting there…waiting for our genius…and waiting…and waiting…

Robin Lee Hatcher offers these words of wisdom for writers:

“You can’t fix anything you haven’t written. Give yourself permission to write ‘bad stuff.’ You can fix bad stuff. You can’t fix a blank page.”  Robin Lee Hatcher

I always find the blank page the hardest part, maybe some of you can relate. Once something is there, then comes the fun part—making it better, for me that’s easier, so I love Robin’s advice. Just get something on the page.

“Some of the best advice I’ve received as a writer is to invite God into my creative process. And so now, that’s the advice I love to give other writers, too. Pray before you write. Talk to God about the details, big and small. And ask him to show you the stories he has for you. It is such a gift to be able to create alongside our Creator.”  Becca Wierwille

To follow that up, Laurel Thomas says:

“My advice would be to receive with confidence from the Creator as we create!”  Laurel Thomas

I love that simple key: receive with confidence. That means we take note of the fact that God is the ultimate Creator, and he’s made us in his likeness, and he DOES gift us with creativity. It comes from God. We don’t have to manufacture it. We can be confident that it’s already ours through him.

Lenora Worth echoes that:

“Always, always, ask God first. Ask him when you get an idea. Ask him when you write the proposal. Ask him when you have doubts or when you hear good news. Ask him, ‘Lord, can you show me the way?’ And thank Him. He gives us the talent and the words. Never take that for granted as we tell the greatest story ever told. His story.”  Lenora Worth

Our creativity is important. Cathy Gohlke had this to say:

“Our world stands in great need of stories that discover the healing wonder found in relationship with our Heavenly Father.  Take stock of your life, of the unique experiences—the good, the bad, the victories and failures, the times you’ve shone in the sun, and the times you’ve had to rise from the ashes—and the lessons learned from those experiences.  Recognize the threads God has woven through your life—the themes—and objectively view the tapestry he’s created in you.  Realize that these life experiences and how you’ve grown from them, how they’ve brought you closer to God, are his gifts to you—gifts that you, as a writer, are able to use to inspire readers through your pen.  What the enemy means for evil God can use for good—as long as we open our hands and allow him. As writers we are constantly faced with discouragement and self-doubt.  Realize these are insidious, desperate tools of our common enemy.  Realize, too, that God has given us armor—the armor and implements of war found in Ephesians 6.”  Cathy Gohlke

“Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.”  Ephesians 6:14-18

We can’t forget that last part about praying. Prayer is the thing we do while we’re WEARING the armor. We don’t just stand around dressed in armor. We use it in prayer battle.

Prayer isn’t the least thing you can do. It’s the greatest. We need to be bolstered by prayer because of another Scripture that Christy Bass Adams mentioned:

“I’m reminded of Matthew 10:16 (CSB) as Jesus is sending out the disciples and instructs, ‘Look, I’m sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves.’ Answering the call to write is like sending the sheep out among wolves. This world needs confident, focused, and determined Christians. We must intentionally pay attention, research, and carefully analyze our partnerships and alignments. Writers are vulnerable. Rejections can often cripple us or steal our hope for a season. We must learn to speak up. Fight for what is true and right. Take a stand on faith and be firm about that stand. But also, be gentle in our tone. Innocent as doves. Kind in our responses. Careful and purposeful with our words. Words are powerful and we must use them for the greater and higher authority of Jesus Christ.”  Christy Bass Adams

“Do not be afraid, for He is ever with us. Claim your name—Image Bearer of the King—and go daily into battle for the Kingdom of Heaven as the pen warrior you are, remembering that victory and glory belong to Him.”  Cathy Gohlke 

What a blessing it’s been to talk and share with these amazing people and writers, and to share the experiences and wisdom God has given them with all of you. As we mentioned, our goal with this podcast was to encourage writers in their spiritual journeys.

Tina Yeager shared this encouragement with us, and with you:

“Karen and Erin inspire listeners to draw from the living wells of their souls for meaningful creative work. Write from the Deep delves into topics with profound impact. May all of us called by our Creator remember our purpose as a compass, to submit to his guidance, and to maintain an attitude of worshipful wonder. May anointing continue flowing from this podcast through all who experience it for many seasons to come.”  Tina Yeager

May each of you continue to draw closer to the One who guides and uses us for His purposes. Blessings to you all.

Join us for writing wisdom and advice from many of our previous guests as we celebrate 200 episodes! #amwriting #christianwriter
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What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever gotten?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Thanks so much to our October sponsor of the month, Tammy Partlow! She’s a speaker at women’s retreats, and her debut novel Blood Beneath the Pines, a suspense set in the deep South, is now available. She’s hard at work on the next book in the series!

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 200 – Writing Wisdom and Advice: A Celebration of Our 200th Episode appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Even if you have all the craft books you could ever need on your bookshelves, you’re not fully equipped to write. Because your craft isn’t the only thing you need to work on. So join us in this podcast, the first of a new series on activities that draw us closer to God, as we explore solitude.

But first, thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

As Christian writers, most of us would wholeheartedly agree that the deeper our relationship with God grows, the more at peace and on target we’ll be as we live—and write—within God’s will for us. No matter the path, no matter the difficulty, we can remain steadfast and purposeful in seasons of ease and seasons of hardship. 

But the catch, of course, is in how exactly we are to deepen and maintain our relationship with God. Let’s face it, few of us can say we’ve arrived at our best and deepest relationship with him. It’s a process, and sometimes a very difficult one.

It just so happens that there is a Biblical model for spiritual growth and development, for building and deepening our relationship with God, and Jesus himself modeled it for us, as did the apostles in the Bible. Yet few of us faithfully follow in the footsteps of our spiritual models. Few of us truly do the things they did.

What are these things? We’re glad you asked, because we’re going to be talking about them in various upcoming episodes over the next few months. You’ve probably already heard of these things, these practices. Some people call them spiritual disciplines, but let’s not think of them that way. Because they’re not disciplines for discipline’s sake. We’re not doing hard things just to make ourselves spiritual.

These are activities. They’re practices that are all about spiritual growth. They’re about tightening our connection to God and blossoming in our conformity to Christ and in our role as his witnesses. 

Today we’re going to focus on the practice, or let’s call it the relationship-building activity, of solitude.

That might sound crazy. How can solitude build a relationship? What we mean when we say solitude in this context is simply the practice of withdrawing from human-to-human interaction in order to focus on God. To listen for him, to listen to him, and to talk with him. 

By solitude, we also mean taking a break from the onslaught of this world and all the opinions, values, and agendas that perpetually bombard us. To get away from wondering if what we’re saying or thinking might be “liked” on social media.

What we’re talking about is not just being physically alone—being some place where no one else is—but also consciously isolating our minds from the input of other people, from what they’d say or think. A place where you’re separated from human companionship, attention, and influence, and where you’re fully available in God’s presence.

We know that there are extroverts—like Karen—out there for whom being cut off from people feels awful. And there are introverts like Erin who may be thinking, “Bring it on. I’m fine without people!” But we’d all be missing the point because we’d be focusing on how this practice makes us feel rather than on the purpose and usefulness of this activity.

Let’s talk for a few minutes about what this activity of solitude is and isn’t:

First, it isn’t the same as “loneliness.” An article in Psychology Today talks about the difference between loneliness and solitude. It says, “loneliness is harsh, punishment, a deficiency state, a state of discontent marked by a sense of estrangement, an awareness of excess aloneness.”

That does sound awful!

Solitude, the same article says, “is the state of being alone without being lonely. It is a positive and constructive state of engagement with oneself.” 

Solitude is meant to be a constructive state. It’s meant to be good for something, and one of the things they say it’s good for is engagement with oneself. 

While we’ve mentioned that a main purpose for solitude is to help us engage and listen to God, it’s also important to engage and listen to ourselves. If you’ve ever been in a very noisy environment, you might’ve used the expression: “It’s so loud in here, I can’t hear myself think.” Well, our world is often so loud that we can’t hear ourselves think, and if we can’t think, we can’t truly know ourselves. 

If we don’t know ourselves, how can we be truly authentic in our relationship with God? How do we know what we think about what he’s saying, about who he is? 

Inauthenticity doesn’t necessarily we’re trying to lie, or misrepresent ourselves to God. That doesn’t work when we’re dealing with an all-knowing God, anyway. But we’re saying that there’s a barrier in our communication loop with God if we don’t know ourselves. We can’t have deep relationships without authenticity. 

This may be one reason why the idea of solitude can be uncomfortable for some people. It means we have to be vulnerable with ourselves. We’re dropping our mask and taking a good look at who we are and what we think. What if we don’t like what we see?

Sometimes that’s actually good. It helps us see where we need to make changes to move toward becoming the kind of person we will like when we take a close look.

Sometimes not liking what we see isn’t good, because it isn’t an accurate picture. But when we’re letting God into that place with us, where we’re completely vulnerable and exposed, we can let him tell us what HE sees. We can let him show us the truth of how he sees us. That truth is always delivered with a profound, unconditional, unchangeable love. The kind of love that heals and builds us up for the work God has tasked us with.

Know Yourself

One of the wonderful benefits of solitude is that we learn to know ourselves. We get a more accurate view of who we truly are and aren’t, and that can help us become better people. 

We’re not saying all this is easy. Our world today makes it far easier to live in a state of distraction and disconnection. That’s a state that doesn’t demand anything from us. Reconnection does demand things from us. We pretty much need to force ourselves to reconnect with our thoughts and feelings, and it’s hard. But the rewards are great.

Benjamin Franklin writes in Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1750, “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.”

Breaking Patterns of Conformity to Culture

Another benefit of solitude is that, by giving us distance from our society, we’re better able to identify and break any destructive patterns of thought that we’ve fallen into through our immersion in our culture. Every ad on social media, on television, in print, on buses and billboards, has an agenda, a perspective. So do the movies we watch, the novels we read, the streaming services we binge.

More often than not, this agenda is not in agreement with the gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s not in agreement with the biblical revelation of who God is, and the truth of how we are to live as Christ followers. Colossians 3:1-3 says:

“Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God’s right hand. Think about the things of heaven, not the things of earth. For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God.”  NLT

We need a break. We need time to pull away and recenter and make sure our hearts and minds are fixed on God, not on earthly things.

Deep Reading and Reflection

Another benefit of solitude is that it gives you the opportunity for deeper reading, and more than that, for reflecting on what you read. Imagine if you took time in solitude, with no distractions, to read your Bible more deeply and to spend time just thinking about it. What might the Holy Spirit say to you or do in you if you wait for Him? If you sit quietly and ponder the implications of what you’re reading? How much more grounded could you be in God’s truth?

You could also read other things in your practice of solitude. Inspirational biographies, theology, poems, or whatever can help you develop your thoughts and beliefs and reasoning skills. The technology in our fast-paced world is pushing us into shallow thinking. We’ve talked about this before on the podcast. But you can be training yourself to be a person who is characterized by thought and reflection rather than someone who might spout off quick reactionary responses that today’s social media constantly tempts us to do.

Worship

Another activity you might do in solitude is singing worship songs. Solitude need not be all carried out in silence. You can sing as loud as you want with no one to overhear, which is especially nice if you can’t carry a tune worth beans. The Bible encourages us to sing to the Lord, so we should. And not just to sing, but to sing new songs. You can make them up on the spot, about whatever you’re thinking and feeling. Let your creativity come out. We’re creative people, made in the image of our Creator. We honor him when we use our creativity to express ourselves in worship.

Experience Nature

Another benefit of solitude is the opportunity to get out alone and experience the wonder of God’s creativity and design in nature. To immerse ourselves in it. Romans 1:19-20 tells us that what can be known about God is plain to us because God has made it plain, “for since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made…”  (NIV)

God intends for us to see his fingerprints in nature. But we have to take the time to do it. To go out and soak ourselves in it and let the heavens declare God’s glory to us. 

Psalm 96:11-12 says,

“Let the heavens be glad, and the earth rejoice! Let the sea and everything in it shout his praise! Let the fields and their crops burst out with joy! Let the trees of the forest sing for joy”  NLT

Take the time to go listen to all this wonder, this praise!  

Creative Growth

Solitude can also give you the opportunity to foster creative growth. It gives you time with your Creator, where he can speak new ideas and inspirations to you. It gives you time and space to consider new creative connections, explore new ways to solve problems.

It can also give you an opportunity to go experience other forms of art—go to a local gallery or exhibit. Don’t just wander through, but take the time to sit and ponder the works, or maybe just one piece. How does it speak to the human condition? What does it imply about God? 

Or listen to some new music. Something you haven’t heard. Something that’s different. Let it speak to you. How does it inform or enhance your own creativity? What can it inspire?

We’ve covered some of the ways solitude can refine you and grow your relationship with God. Let’s talk now about putting this activity into practice.

Planning

First, solitude is going to require planning, especially if you don’t live alone and you have family responsibilities. Solitude can be nearly impossible to come by. I (Erin) remember the days of having preschoolers at home—you can’t even go to the restroom by yourself. 

Making a plan for when you can get away for solitude will require a few conversations and the cooperation of your family, and probably friends, too. You’ll want to talk this over with them and be sensitive to those who may not understand why you need solitude, who may even be hurt or offended. 

You also need a plan for where you’re going to go. Where will you find a place to be alone? You want to plan ahead so you’re not wasting your solitude time looking for a place to be alone. 

It might be as simple as sitting in the car in your garage, or on your back porch. Or it might be a walk, or a drive to someplace specific. Get a plan, and get it on your schedule. Otherwise it won’t happen.

Time 

The next thing solitude requires, and this is probably obvious, is time. Time is a precious commodity. We can never get more of it—there’s always 24 hours in a day. But we hope this podcast helps you see why solitude matters. Why it deserves some of our precious time. We need this break.

In Dallas Willard’s book, The Spirit of the Disciplines, he calls solitude one of the most fundamental disciplines for spiritual development. 

Even if all you can manage is a half an hour once a month, that’s a great start. Hopefully as the seasons in your life change, you’ll be able to set aside more time in the future. 

Commitment

The last requirement we want to talk about is commitment. For some of us, solitude will at first be awkward and uncomfortable. We may find it hard to begin, hard to sustain, and hard to continue with. We encourage you to make solitude a true commitment. Again in Dallas Willard’s book he says about solitude that it “must be returned to again and again” as the spiritual life develops. 

In other words, it’s not a one and done. It’s a continuing practice that helps shape us, that helps us grow in our likeness to Christ and makes us better able to avoid conforming to the patterns of this world. 

That’s the goal of all the disciplines, or activities we’ll be talking about in this series. We’re meant to be in the world, but not of it. We need these God-given activities to help us do that. To train us. To foster our growth and our connection to the God who has called us to be his own. To be his witnesses in a hurting, weary world.

It’s so worth it. We need to take the time to do these activities and draw closer to him.

As Christian writers, we need more than great craft. In this podcast we'll talk about what more we need and how to get it! #amwriting #christianwriter
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The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard

What do you think about solitude? Does in feel inviting, frightening, or something else altogether?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Thanks so much to our October sponsor of the month, Tammy Partlow! She’s a speaker at women’s retreats, and her debut novel Blood Beneath the Pines, a suspense set in the deep South, is now available. She’s hard at work on the next book in the series!

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The post 199 – Why Every Writer Needs Solitude appeared first on Write from the Deep.

If you’ve faced tragedy in your life, you know the first reaction is to ask why. Even get angry with God over what’s happened. Guest DiAnn Mills shares how God led her through all those stages, but even more, how he blessed her with reconciliation because of the tragedy. Come listen in as she shares all God has done in her life and writing since the worst day of her life.

About DiAnn Mills

DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure. She creates action-packed, suspense-filled novels to thrill readers. Her titles have appeared on the CBA and ECPA bestseller lists and won two Christy Awards, the Golden Scroll, Inspirational Reader’s Choice, and Carol Award contests. Connect with DiAnn at diannmills.com.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Welcome, listeners. I’m excited that you’re here with us in the deep, and there’s extra excitement today, yay, for our guest! Karen will introduce her.

Karen: Hey, we are welcoming DiAnn Mills to the podcast today, and we’re so excited. DiAnn has been a part of publishing for so many years, I think almost as long as I have. She’s an award-winning, bestselling author many times over, and a popular speaker and teacher at conferences. She’s a founding board member of the American Christian Fiction Writers. Thank you for that, DiAnn!  

She’s a former director of the Blue Ridge Christian Writers Conference and a member of the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association and of the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and International Thriller Writers. It’s amazing everything that she does, and she shares her passion for helping other writers be successful by teaching writing workshops around the country.

Not only that, she has been termed a coffee snob and she roasts her own coffee beans, y’all. She roasts her own beans. I am so in awe. She and her husband live in, as she says on her website, sunny Houston, Texas, but I think it’s fair to call it blazing Houston, Texas, with the way it’s been now. DiAnn, welcome. We’re so happy to have you here.

DiAnn: Oh, thank you, Karen and Erin. It is just wonderful to be with you. I’m excited. I’m always excited to talk about the craft of writing and especially to talk to my friends. What more could I ask for? 

Karen: I know!

Erin: Well, let’s start right off with what does the deep mean to you, DiAnn?

DiAnn: The deep means to me that the longer I know Jesus, the longer he is in my heart, the more that my power hour with him every morning deepens our relationship, the deeper we go. I love that. 

We just keep traveling this journey together, and he’ll say, “Stop a minute, DiAnn. I want you to see this. I want you to feel this. I want you to experience this.” 

I love that. There are no words or senses that we can talk about that can compare with what it means to go deeper. To go deep with Jesus. 

Karen: There’s an old hymn that I love called “In the Garden.” I come to the garden alone, and then he comes and meets you there and walks with you and talks with you, and the joy you feel as you tarry there? That’s that continual relationship with Jesus.

You don’t find it anyplace else, that continual conversation back and forth throughout the day. That continual sense of his actual presence and his guidance. It’s astounding when you finally realize as a believer that he is there for every minutiae, every second, every millisecond of your life, and he is guiding and directing and loving you.

It’s a new depth to your understanding of him and your submission to him. Because you can trust him so wholly. I mean, it’s amazing. 

Erin: It’s also where we grow. 

Karen: Yeah. 

Erin: We experience transformation in those times. We might not recognize it. It’s hard to measure your own growth in the moment, but without that continual contact, that power hour, that walking in the garden, we don’t have transformation. We don’t grow closer to Jesus, we don’t turn into that image, without him shaping us in those times. 

Karen: That’s exactly right. I know, DiAnn, that you’ve come from a very difficult and painful time in the last several years with the loss of your son, and that has probably drawn you even closer and deeper into Christ.

You’ve incorporated some of that into your newest book, Facing the Enemy, some of that experience into your fiction. We talk often with people about how we incorporate our own stories and our own struggles into fiction. I’d like to hear from you about your journey through that time. It was difficult, but I’d like you to share with our listeners how God met you there and how you got to the place where you could share what happened on that journey in your book.

DiAnn: Actually, it was July 2021. We were on a vacation in Ohio with my brother and sister and their spouses. My youngest son called my husband. My husband got off the phone and said, “I need to tell you something. Brett was…” Let me take a big deep breath here… “Brent was hit by a car. Hit and run, and was killed.”

The first thing I had to do was thank God for life, and for the years that we’d had with him. The second thing was, “Thank you God, that I’m with my brother and my sister.”

Karen: Yeah. 

DiAnn: That helped tremendously. Once home, I journaled. We always hear the value of journaling, but until you walk through a tragedy, it just does not have the impact of what that can mean. So, over the next days, I journaled. I journaled, “God, why? Why now? Why him?”

The way it happened, I was angry. I was hurt. I cried. I was angry at the whole world. 

Karen: Mm-hmm. 

DiAnn: The time came to write the book, and I knew that I needed something in my character’s life that was earth shattering, and there it was right in front of me. So, Facing the Enemy was my healing book. 

While it’s my healing book, it’s still hard to talk about those emotions without feeling them and experiencing them all over again. What I did is I took my heroine, whom I called Risa, her name means laugh in Spanish, and I had her experience the same thing that happened to our son, but in her personality. 

It was horrible writing that scene. But yet it was comforting, because I don’t want to experience anything and shut it up inside of me if it could help someone else. Some reader may have had a loss and have never been able to deal with it. I wanted that transparency.

I wanted to take my pain, what I was feeling, and use it in a story that might help others. Granted, my goal for writing is always to entertain, inspire, and encourage. Always. Once I got past that part of the tragedy, and where my heroine decided to go, and what she decided to do with it, I picked up my second great passion, and that is for adoption.

I have four sons. Three are adopted. I say the youngest one’s my fault. Brett was one of the adopted sons. I used a bit of an apprehension that I always had as a woman in my late twenties and having a new baby, a new toddler in my life who was calling me mommy.  I also knew that the mother had six months to make a decision whether she might want that child back, and so you live with that.

The two passions, the two things that I can cry very easily about are in Facing the Enemy. That’s one of the ways that God brought me deeper. 

I hesitate to say this because I’m concerned that readers might think, “Well, she took her son’s death and she just used it to write a book.”

Oh, that gives me a gasp in my spirit, and I hope no reader thinks that. Sharing pain is very difficult, but the transparency is where we grow and change and become better people and grow closer to Christ. I remember, and I’m going to say this in one breath, and I might have to stop and get a drink of water here, that at the funeral, my son, the youngest son, gave part of the message to everyone.

Because my Brett struggled with drugs and alcohol, struggled very much with that, and the addiction always had more control than what he was able to do. And so my youngest son said, “God said, ‘Come home. Be free.'” 

Yes. Yes. One more drink of water for me here…

Karen: It’s fine. Take your time. 

DiAnn: Oh, I don’t know what you’ve got to cut out… But anyway, that was the one thing I’ve always been able to remember. I think that helped in the healing process, not only for me, but for my character in the story. 

Erin: Wow. 

DiAnn: For all of us. 

Karen: I’ve always said, as I teach at writers conferences, that nothing in God’s economy is wasted. Everything that happens to us, if God has given us the task of writing about him and stories centered on him and his presence in our lives, nothing that happens to us is ever wasted. It all is used by him for his purposes to refine us or to grant us illumination that we can then share with others. 

My husband and I have struggled for lo these forty-three years of our marriage. Yet God has sustained and provided for us and brought us to a place where we’re stronger than ever. Though, we still struggle. 

We have such different backgrounds. When I wrote my book, The Breaking Point, I drew on so much of what we had experienced, not to capitalize on it, but to say that this is the reality. This is the reality of walking into a marriage without prayer. 

This is the reality of bringing two completely diverse backgrounds into the same quarter. This is the reality of when you grow up in Leave it to Beaver and your spouse grows up in Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s not an easy road. It’s very difficult and coming to a place where God has brought us that we have submitted to him and to each other, we still have to do that submission every day.

I know from the reader letters that I’ve received that book affected people and helped them in their struggles in their marriage. Because as believers, aren’t we called to transparency? Aren’t we called to share out of our own experiences and not hide our weaknesses? Not try to seem like the perfect Christians to everybody on the outside, because there’s no such thing. There’s just a forgiven believer who follows a suffering Savior. 

We have to be honest. Christ was honest. He shed blood, sweated blood, and that struggle was real, and it was for us. If we’re not willing to then share our own struggles and difficulties, we shouldn’t be doing this. 

Erin: Right. 

I want to circle back just for a minute to what you said first, DiAnn, about how you journaled. How you journaled first. I think that’s so important because there is where you were dealing with the brutal honesty of how you personally felt. You worked through those issues to the best of your ability at that time. You poured out that anger and that hurt and that why and that grief in that journal.

I love that you did that beforehand so that you weren’t trying to do that necessarily in the book. When it came to writing the book, you were able to draw on those feelings, but you’re speaking into that from the other side. People are getting the best of both worlds there, so I love that you did that. 

But I’m wondering, obviously when you had to write those scenes and especially that one scene, practically speaking, how did you manage that in a practical way? Do you have any tips for the listeners on how to make yourself write those words on the keyboard? 

DiAnn: Uh, after a lot of tears. And I could only write a little bit through my journal at a time. I would read what I had written, and then I would close my eyes and tell myself, “Risa, how would you walk through this? How would you handle this?” 

By doing it through my character’s eyes… and I’m an organic writer, everything comes out of character. I’m a panster and my publisher may not always enjoy that. I am pretty much a panster, but I am organic. I will have seventeen pages of who my character is and a lot of backstory and things of that nature. 

In fact, one of the questions I asked myself came from Donald Maass, Writing the Breakout Novel, and taking many of his workshops, and that is, “What is the most painful experience you’ve ever walked through and who was there? What was the dialogue? What were you feeling?” And all those kinds of things. 

How many times have I given that advice? But when I had to do it, it was incredibly painful. That to me is a testimony not only to how valuable that question is, but to our God. As you said, nothing is wasted. 

Erin: Yeah. 

DiAnn: Nothing.

Karen: For a long time, I thought that if we say why to God, we were showing doubt, and I thought that was just wrong. I’ve come to understand having gone through the whole doubt process myself when I was angry…not that I ever really doubted God was who he was, but I was at a point where I was like, “Well, if this is what it means to serve you, then who needs it?”

I’ve come to understand that he’s so much bigger than anything that we can bring to him. Any emotion, any anger, any frustration, any despair. He’s so much bigger than any of that. He will meet us exactly where we are in the midst of our pain. 

I’m constantly amazed at the care that he shows us. At the provision. Even when we are sometimes spitting in his face, he is there wrapping his arms around us and loving us regardless.

Erin: I love, DiAnn, that you talked about another passion that you put into that book, because one of the things I wanted to ask you about is how you kept grief from inhibiting your imagination for the rest of the story.  

I see that one of those things was talking about another of your passions, which was adoption, but was there anything else you did to help jumpstart your creativity or help your creativity flow during those difficult times?

DiAnn: Understanding that the writing process is for the reader. It’s never about the writer. Never about me. Never. With that, it was like, “Okay, God, please stand behind my computer and put your hands on my shoulders so I can do this.”

But I always went back to… we were in Israel, my husband and I were in Israel, and we were at the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus sweated blood. I’m thinking just like he made a decision in a garden to take back, yank back, the decision that Adam and Eve made in a garden, then I’ve got to take what he did for me and move forward. That I can encourage somebody in their faith. That I can inspire someone in where they are. 

Also, the process of writing a book has that entertainment factor. That’s foremost. So it had to be a story that provided hope and encouragement and reality. One aspect of this story, and this is on the back cover copy so I don’t think I’m giving anything away, but Risa is an FBI special agent and she realized and found out that while her brother saved her and pushed her out of the way for him to be killed in the hit and run, that car was aiming for her. 

She resigned from the FBI simply because she didn’t want anyone else hurt. So she went back to her old job, which was a professor at a college, a local college, teaching creative writing. I mean, yes, we giggled with that because that’s kind of what I was doing. 

Karen: Right. 

DiAnn: You know, God has a way of just saying, “Hey, Diane, what about this? Or what about that?” 

That really did help. But, and this is a part that’s on the back cover copy. Risa has an assignment for her students, who are all freshmen in college, creative writing, and a short story had to be turned in over Christmas. One student said, “Can I turn mine in early?”

Well, she couldn’t resist, and she read it. Here he told, word for word, what had happened to her with information that no one else knew and that all exploded.

Erin: This is a great example of how creativity is about connections. I love what you’re saying that the Holy Spirit is there with you and empowering you and enabling you and then these connections happen. “Hey, how about if she’s a professor teaching creative writing? And oh, this can happen and that can happen,” and these connections are suddenly firing. I love that. 

As we’re approaching the end of our time here, do you have any final words of wisdom that you want to leave our listeners with?

DiAnn: Yes. Laugh. Be Risa. Laugh. We have to laugh. We have to learn to laugh. We have to reach from within us and laugh.

And hold on to Jesus. Oh my goodness, this world can be ugly and nasty, but look where we’re going. So let’s make an impact while we can.

Karen: I agree. DiAnn, we’re so grateful for you coming and sharing your story and the ways that God has met you in all of this.

Friends, as you listen, I’m praying for you. If you are facing a difficult time, may the God of all comfort cloak you in his presence and in his peace.

If you are considering incorporating your own struggles into your story, turn to him with it and let him guide you. Let him show you the suffering and the recovery, and let him show you the places where you can bring in laughter. Because even in our darkest moments, if we have our focus on him, he will delight us and he will give us reasons to laugh in the midst of tears.

Thank you so much, DiAnn, and God bless you and what you’re doing.

DiAnn: Thank you. Thank you for letting me be a guest. I’m honored, and thank you for putting up with my few moments of “get your professionalism together, DiAnn.”

Karen: No, no. Long ago, I used to sing with my dad a lot, and the words of the hymns that we sing get to me. I said, “I’m so worried that I’ll be singing my verse or doing a solo and I’ll just break down and cry.”

My dad said, “Karen, if that happens, then the people who are listening need your tears more than they need your voice.”

All of it again is used in God’s economy. 

Erin: Indeed! Thank you, Diane.

Facing the Enemy by DiAnn Mills

Guest @diannmills shares how God used the worst tragedy of her life to bless her and bring unexpected reconciliation. #christianwriter #amwriting
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In your own writing, have you found yourself needing to draw from a tragedy you experienced? What helped you through it?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

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The post 198 – The Blessing of Tragedy with Guest DiAnn Mills appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Christians are no strangers to suffering and persecution. From the days of the arena to today, following Jesus Christ is risky business. And writing for Him? It’s become more hazardous every day. In this “cancel culture” world, being firm about biblical truth can cost us everything. Are you prepared for the battle?

But first, thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

The world has gone crazy. Every day we see more evidence of the evil weaving its way into people’s minds and hearts. Women’s sports events being won by men who call themselves women. Government corruption on levels seldom seen before. Churches being destroyed by sin, sexual or otherwise. Respected Christian leaders being exposed for liars and base sins.

On and on the litany goes. What is—not was, but is—good is called evil, and evil is celebrated as right and loving. Isaiah 5:20 warns us about this very thing: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil…” In fact, it’s so loving, let’s teach it to children from the earliest age so they can be awakened to who they really are and live in total freedom… 

Then there are the unprecedented disasters taking place. Floods surging through one country after another. Cyclones leveling entire cities. Wildfires that blanket half the country in deadly smoke. Heat that makes it impossible to live. Earthquakes opening up the earth and swallowing tens of thousands of people. Just a few weeks ago, thirteen tornadoes ripped through the Chicagoland area. Thirteen! In one day! It’s like some kind of disaster flick come to life. 

Even in our own families, we see tension and division over philosophies and faith. Topics we used to discuss freely are suddenly taboo, and we find ourselves tiptoeing around issues to avoid conflicts. Believers following God’s laws are called hateful, judgmental, prejudiced, and, the worst accusation of all, so it seems, intolerant. 

As writers, we face sensitivity readers who tell us we can’t write history as it was. Rather we have to rewrite history to fit today’s narratives. Best-selling author Tamera Alexandar told us how that very situation led to her choosing to leave her publisher rather than rewrite a story to make it compliant, but basically a lie.

We’re told we can’t write the stories God has given us because we’re “appropriating” other cultures. Contracts are cancelled when publishers receive pushback for books written based on biblical truth. It’s censorship, plain and simple. And it’s running rampant—even celebrated!—everywhere we write, post, or speak. 

It’s so easy to lose heart in the face of all the insanity. Christians end up feeling overwhelmed and beat down by the whole so-called “cancel culture.” So what is the answer for writers who follow Christ? 

2 Timothy 3. Truly, that chapter of the Word equips us for exactly what we’re facing today. Look at the first nine verses:

“You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times.”  

Okay, we’re not saying we’re living in the last days. We may be, we may not. But whether Christ’s return happens now (let it be so, Lord Jesus!) or centuries from now, these current days are, indeed, very difficult. So let’s read on…

“For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred.” 

Does that sound like today or what? They will consider nothing sacred. Not faith, not family, not truth, not God…not life itself.

“They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control. They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. They will act religious, but they will reject the power that could make them godly. Stay away from people like that!”

Great advice. Stay away from people who have shown in their words, actions, and writings that they are working against God. If you encounter them face-to-face, remember to be “shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves.”

Have you ever wondered what Scripture means by shrewd as snakes? The snake has long been a symbol of craftiness and cunning. The Egyptians used the serpent in their hieroglyphics as a symbol of wisdom. Snakes are adaptable creatures who can thrive in any number of environments. They are also well known for the ability to fit into the smallest areas and attack from ambush. But one of the most cunning hunting techniques of snakes is called “caudal luring,” or using deceptive ploys to catch prey.

For example, juveniles of some pit vipers and dwarf boas have a bright yellow tip on their tails. With the rest of their body a darker color, they coil in cover, then use the bright yellow tail tip to like a fishing lure! But this lure is actually right next to their head. So the prey thinks that bright yellow thing is a yummy worm and comes to have lunch—only to become lunch itself. 

So being “shrewd as serpents” is being cunning and crafty. Webster’s identifies cunning as “having or showing skill in achieving one’s ends by deceit or evasion.” Which is exactly how Jesus dealt with the Pharisees and Sadducees. When they tried to trap him with leading or deceptive questions, instead of answering their question, Jesus turned the question to what really mattered. The Pharisees asked how Jews should respond to the Roman occupation, hoping to catch him saying something against Rome, and Jesus responded with Scripture: “Give to Cesar what is Cesar’s.” 

Let’s go back to 2nd Timothy, starting at verse ten:

“But you… certainly know what I teach, and how I live, and what my purpose in life is. You know my faith, my patience, my love, and my endurance. You know how much persecution and suffering I have endured. You know all about how I was persecuted in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra—but the Lord rescued me from all of it. Yes, and everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. But evil people and impostors will flourish. They will deceive others and will themselves be deceived.”

Did you catch that bit just before the evil will flourish?  Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. Not may one day, or runs the risk of. But will face persecution. Friends, we have to be ready! Which is exactly what Paul helps us do in the next section, starting at verse fourteen.

“But you must remain faithful to the things you have been taught. You know they are true, for you know you can trust those who taught you. You have been taught the holy Scriptures from childhood, and they have given you the wisdom to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in Christ Jesus.” 

Now we know some of us haven’t been taught the Scripture since childhood, but don’t worry. Because God has given us the Holy Spirit, when we study Scripture, no matter when we begin that study, the Spirit helps us understand and embrace God’s truths. As the next verse says, 

“All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work.”

Wow. So much truth, and encouragement, in one chapter of God’s Word! How do we as Christian writers deal with our world today? Stand Firm. Immerse ourselves in God’s Word that He may prepare and equip us. Because we never know when we’ll find ourselves on the firing lines. 

A good friend of Karen’s once came under fire for supporting a public figure he knew to be godly and good. This public figure had the temerity to speak truth into a situation steeped in lies. As a result, cancel culture went into overdrive to destroy him. 

In the midst of all this, her friend had posted a comment thanking this public figure for help he gave years ago. Somehow the media got hold of that comment and proceeded to go after her friend. And, as so often happens, this friend came under fire. He received  hate mail and was given the gift of trolls. 

Here’s the thing. This friend didn’t post back then to take a stand, but just to express thanks and encouragement to someone getting beat up. But that was all it took to be added to cancel-culture’s hit list. 

Not fun at all, but there’s something amazing in this story. You want to see how God takes care of us when we’re persecuted? Karen’s receives a weekly email from another friend with Scripture verses for each day of the week. As she was praying for her under-fire friend back then, that email came in and Karen opened it. Here’s what she found: 

“For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong.”  1 Peter 3:17 (NASB) 

“And David spoke the words of this song to the Lord in the day that the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. He said, ‘The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; My God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge; My savior, You save me from violence.'”  2 Samuel 22:1-3 (NASB) 

“For since He Himself was tempted in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted.”  Hebrews 2:18 (NASB) 

“The afflicted also will increase their gladness in the Lord, And the needy of mankind will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.”  Isaiah 29:19 (NASB) 

“Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace;”  Ephesians 6:14-15 (NASB) 

“But the salvation of the righteous is from the Lord; He is their strength in time of trouble. The Lord helps them and delivers them; He delivers them from the wicked and saves them, Because they take refuge in Him.”  Psalm 37:39-40 (NASB) 

“Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.”  1 Timothy 6:12 (NASB) 

When Karen finished reading, she sat back and shook her head. God is SO cool! Those verses spoke right to what her friend was facing. After receiving permission, she forwarded the Scripture email to her under-fire friend. God used those weekly Scripture emails to bless not just Karen, which they did, but to bless someone else she loves and respects.  

There’s one other thing we want to address. While we may not relish the idea of suffering and being persecuted in our stand for God’s truth, if that’s what God calls us to do, we will do it. But what about our families?

What if standing means we lose our jobs or finances? What if we find ourselves unable to care for our families? How can we let them suffer? God commands us to care for our families, right? So how do we reconcile all that? It’s one thing to suffer myself, but to make others suffer for my actions? What about 1 Timothy 5:8:

“But those who won’t care for their relatives, especially those in their own household, have denied the true faith. Such people are worse than unbelievers.”

Worse than unbelievers? How can we do that?

This is a real concern, and it stems from our determination in Christ to do what’s right. There’s no denying it would be terrible to see our families suffer for our actions, but as true as that verse from Timothy is, we have to also remember Jesus’ words in Matthew 10:34-39: 

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.  And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Friends, your family and friends are not yours. They are gifts from God. He has given them to you for HIS purposes. Bottom line, we serve a Savior who, for our sake and salvation, suffered the loss of friends and reputation, was persecuted and brutalized by religious leaders, suffered unimaginable tortures and pain, and endured a gruesome death. Remember Hebrews 12:1-3:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God’s throne. Think of all the hostility he endured from sinful people; then you won’t become weary and give up.” 

Because of the joy awaiting him. Friends, that joy set before him wasn’t some amazing reward meant just for Jesus. That joy is us! It’s that He restored us to His Father. He became our salvation. We follow Christ into whatever God chooses, however God chooses, all for the joy of being Christ’s light to a dark and suffering world.

Of course we don’t want our families to suffer, but they are in God’s hands. Not ours. And if God Almighty calls us to stand for Him regardless of the consequences, we’d better stand. For our sakes. For our families’ sakes. For the world’s sake. 

These are hard truths, we know. And we know how easy it is in today’s world to get focused on all that’s so very wrong with the world. To be pulled down in spirit by the evil that seems so entrenched, and so in control, of everything around us. Even worse, fear of reprisals can make us hesitant to take a stand and speak up for God’s truth.

If you find yourself feeling that way in your writing, in your relationships, in any area of your life, we encourage you to step away. Step away from all the external voices and stimuli. Focus on the all-powerful God who created you and asked you to write for Him. 

Step into Scripture, silence, time focused on truth. Step into fellowship with those you trust, with the truth-speakers God has given you. Step into God. Even if or when it means persecution. Cancel culture seems scary, but in light of God’s power and truth and in light of eternity with Him? It’s nothing. 

In fact, it will only come to your doorstep if God allows it. Which means it will only come to you if God has a purpose for it to do so. And remember, God’s purpose may be for you or it may be for others. You may never know. But you can ALWAYS know this: you will not face any persecution without God right there, beside you. Psalm 23:4 promises you this: 

“Even when I walk through the valley of death, I will not be afraid, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.”

So the days are ugly and dark, but our God is beautiful and light and truth! As we walk into each new day, whether in our lives or in our writing, may we stand firm in His truth. And may God, our salvation and strength, enable us, every day, to say with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: I will maintain my own ways before him. He shall be my salvation.”  

Say yes to whatever God has for you. And for your family. Stand firm for His truth. Know that your actions today have eternal impact. Embrace Jesus’ words from the sermon on the mount:

“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”  Matthew 5:13-16

Are you prepared to stand for God’s truth, no matter the cost? #Christianwriter #amwriting
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The post 197 – Standing in the Day of Evil appeared first on Write from the Deep.