Write from the Deep

Chaos is a given in life today, especially if you’re a writer. Finding time to write in the midst of all that’s going on can seem impossible. Which can be depressing and frustrating. Which can steal our ability to enjoy the task God has given us to share His stories. Guest Tricia Goyer is here to help you not only cope with chaos, but find happiness in the midst of it!

About Tricia Goyer

Tricia Goyer is a speaker, podcast host, and USA Today bestselling author of over 80 books. Tricia writes in numerous genres including fiction, parenting, marriage, and books for children and teens. She’s a wife, homeschooling mom of ten, and she loves to mentor writers through WriteThatBook.Club. Tricia lives near Little Rock, AR.

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. We’re excited because we have a guest, and I’m super excited about the topic. I’m going to let Karen introduce our guest.

Karen: Our guest is the amazing Tricia Goyer. I mean, there are some people who use amazing for everything, but when you use that word for Tricia, it’s true. She’s been married to her husband, John, for 28 years and they have—are you sitting down?—ten children officially, plus two more bonus daughters, who totally count as their kids.

She has started Hope Pregnancy center in Kalispell, Montana, led a teen moms support group since 2002, and God has opened the doors for her to publish 70 plus books and 500 plus articles. We call her—she’s a part of the same brainstorming group that I’m a part of that meets once a year—and we call her the Energizer bunny. She just does not stop.

She’s also had the privilege to speak all over the United States and internationally. On top of all that, she homeschools their kids. She’s been homeschooling for 25 years and still has another 10 years to go. That just boggles my mind. And she’s such a joyful, happy person, even on top of all of that.

I love this quote from her website: “I dared to say to God, ‘If you can do anything with my life, please do.’ I’m amazed what God’s done. I know where I was headed: to destruction and a life of pain and shame. Yet God has turned everything around for his good.”

That’s what we’re here to talk about today. How God turns everything around for his good and for our good. So, Tricia thank you. Thank you for being with us and welcome!

Tricia: Thank you, Erin and Karen. It’s so great to be here. I love connecting with you, and I think you guys are awesome, too.

Erin: Well, thank you. We are delighted for you to be here. Our first question, as usual, is what does the deep mean to you?

Tricia: Well, the deep means really going deep into God’s love. As someone who grew up not understanding God’s love, I didn’t have a biological dad around, my stepdad was very distant, it has taken me a long time to understand, to truly understand the love of God. Now that I totally understand this love, I feel like I can just climb up in his lap and be in his embrace.

That is the deep to me, just realizing that his love will never leave me and that he is always with me.

Erin: I like that.

Karen: We’re here to talk to Tricia today about having a happy heart. She’s just recently had a book release called Heart Happy: Staying Centered in God’s Love Through Chaotic Circumstances. But I started reading it, and I’m pretty sure that Erin started reading it, and it’s pretty remarkable.

It’s funny, when you think of happy people, you look at them and you think they’ve never known a difficult day in their lives. But that’s just not true. Tricia, why might writers struggle to be happy in the Lord?

Tricia: Well, I think sometimes we just don’t understand what happy is. I think sometimes we think happy is that everything has to be going right in our world, and happy is that we have a great day, and I’ve lost ten pounds, and my jeans fit better. All of those things is what we tie our happiness to.

But actually happy and blessed are words that can be both used in the same Scripture verses. So, you know, those verses that say, “Blessed is the one who… fill in the blank,” it could be also translated happy. And that isn’t blessed, like, blessed that I have a new SUV. It is going back to God’s Word saying: walking the right path. So that word blessed and happy is translated from the word essure, which means walking on the right path.

When we are in God’s will, when we are walking on his path, that is where we find our happiness and blessed. And we all know God’s path. Isn’t perfect and we don’t have everyday sunshine and birds singing out the window. But if we know we have God, we can lean on him. We can depend on him. We can seek him for our strength. That is where we get that inner happiness that only comes with communion with God.

Erin: There’s a lot in the Bible about joy. Tell me what you see as the difference between being joyful and being happy.

Tricia: That is such a good question. I think joy is that outward expression of, you know, we have the self-control, we have the faithfulness, and the joy is the outward expression of what God is doing in our lives.

I see happy more as a deep-rooted thing in our soul. When we are happy in the Lord, it’s more like a contentment, a settling in our heart with God’s heart. Joy, we can be joyful and rejoice, and it’s having joy in that outward expression. But happy is more the inward expression and the inward state of being connected with God.

Erin: That’s super interesting. I like that distinction. I’m thinking, too, for writers, like both of those, being joyful and happiness, I think that writers can struggle with them. It’s a very difficult journey, or can be. Why do you think it’s important for writers to be happy? I mean, what happens if we’re not happy?

Tricia: Yeah, that’s such a good question. I think going back to what does it mean to be happy and what happens when we’re not happy? There are times when we are going to feel unsettled. There are times when we’re going to have a whole list of chaos in our life. There’s going to be all the external things, but it goes back to the happiness in the Lord. Where I got this term from, the term heart happy, was from George Mueller.

George Mueller was someone who lived 150 years ago and he cared for orphans. He also journaled everything that was going on in his life. He had lists and lists of prayer requests, and he always took his needs before God, that God would provide for him. Even though he was caring for thousands of orphans at a time, he never requested money. He knew that the Lord would provide.

George Mueller says that before he would get up in his day, before he did anything else, he would read Scripture, he would pray, and he would get his heart happy in the Lord. It just made me realize, like that’s been a routine in my life for many, many years. I mean, for decades, no matter what’s going on.

We’ve added kids biologically. We’ve added kids through adoption in our home. There’s been a lot of trauma. There’s been a lot of chaos, and every day I jump out of bed because I need Jesus so much. I need to be in God’s Word. I read Scripture and then ask God, “What do you have for me?” There might be a lot going on in my life, but I have to center my heart in the Lord.

If we are struggling, which all of us do, with not feeling happy, we need to go back to where the source is from. We need to go back to God. We need to go back to his Word. And it’s not like the circumstances always change. But my heart changes in the middle of the circumstances, where I can step back and say, “You are in control. You know what’s going on. You love me completely. You have a good plan for my life. You have a good plan for these circumstances.”

Then I can go on with my day better able to handle trying to meet a writing deadline, trying to deal with kids from trauma, trying to homeschool my children, whatever it is. The happiness must come from that time with the Lord first, and that makes all the difference in our day.

Karen: I think that’s an excellent point. Too many of us tie happiness to our circumstances. And, “How can I be happy when this is happening? And this is happening? And I’m suffering this, and I’ve just had a loss, and I’m sick all the time and blah, blah, blah. How am I supposed to be happy in the face of this?”

And that’s because we’re looking at it through human, finite eyes, rather than going back to Scripture and understanding that circumstances don’t have anything to do with it. I love what C.S. Lewis said once, and I can never remember the exact quote, but it’s along the lines of, “I don’t pray to change God’s mind. I pray to gain God’s heart.”

You have to recognize that, in many ways, happiness has very little to do with us specifically. It has very little to do with what’s going on in our lives. It completely has to do with whether we are content in God, as you have said.

Erin: Yeah. The other thing that I noticed too, Tricia, when you were talking about that, we have to go back to, “God loves me. God knows what he’s doing.” You know, you were preaching to yourself. Faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ. You were preaching to yourself from God’s Word so that your faith can grow, so that the Holy Spirit can work on you.

Because I was thinking, “What are the steps to being happy? What about the person who’s really struggling?” But you exactly gave us the formula, so to speak. Going to God, looking at his Word and preaching to yourself, and understanding and knowing those promises.

Guys, for you out there who just, you know, today is a rough day, and you’re struggling with this, go back to just the one thing you know for sure about God and preach it to yourself because the Holy Spirit will work through that.

Karen: Amen.

Tricia: Yeah. I have a good example of that from when we were doing trauma therapy with my little guy who we adopted. He was almost three years old, and we had no relationship because we got him when he was almost three. He’d been moved around in foster care, and he was destructive.

My whole life of having him was just, “Don’t do that. Stop doing that. Put that down. Why won’t you do this?” I mean, trying to get him to obey me.

So we go to trauma therapy, and I’m thinking it was going to, like, teach me how to discipline him. Instead, she says, “This is what I want you to do. I want you to get some special toys and spend five minutes a day with Casey, and your complete focus is on him. I want you to see what he’s doing, state what he’s doing, repeat what he says, and to praise him.”

So I would say, “Okay, Casey, you are lining up your cars. You are handing Mommy a car. Good job, Casey, for sharing your car with Mommy.”

Then he would say, “Mommy car. Mommy car. You gave mommy a car.” And that relationship was built. It wasn’t about getting him to obey. It wasn’t about the obedience. The relationship was built as I was connecting with him. I was seeing him. I was repeating him. He came to trust me, and I came to appreciate him.

I realized one day that as I’m going to God’s Word, that’s what I’m doing. I am seeing what God’s doing. “In your Word, God, you say that you are faithful. You say you can pull us out from the miry pit. I see your faithfulness, God. I praise you for your faithfulness.”

Just like I was building that relationship with Casey, I can do that with God every day of my life when I see what he’s doing, when I repeat what he says, and when I praise him. That has just become something that I’ve done in my life, and it came from trauma therapy with a little three-year-old guy.

Erin: That is very cool. I think that’s such a good description of how we can build a relationship with God. I think that’s amazing. So how is Casey doing these days?

Tricia: He is doing awesome. He’s eleven now, and he is such a mama’s boy. I’ll be sitting on the couch and he’ll just climb up and wrap his big arms and legs around me and just have a hug with me. We love reading together. Every night, I go up to his room and we’re actually reading through the Little House on the Prairie series. He just thinks it’s cool that Mom is there reading to him. I get to pick the books for reading.

We have a wonderful relationship now, but it doesn’t come from me saying, “You’re not doing this right, and you’re not doing that right,” which I think sometimes we do with God. Like, “How come you’re not doing this? And how come you’re not doing that right? Things were supposed to turn out differently. I was supposed to have ten books published by now, and this isn’t working right.”

Or whatever it is, we’re pointing out what God’s doing wrong. Instead, we just need to commune with him and build that relationship with.

Erin: I wonder if sometimes we’re worried that God is pointing out things we’re doing wrong, too. And he’s not. He’s looking at us. He’s doing the same thing, going “Wow, Erin, you’re looking at me. Good job, Erin.”

Karen: One of the things that we wanted to talk about was how shame interferes with happiness. I think shame and false guilt, both do that. When we think that we’re hearing God criticize us and that that’s all that we’re getting from God as input, that’s not input from the Lord. God doesn’t work with us that way. He works the way that you did with your little boy. He draws us in love and he tells us how much he loves us and why he loves us.

So how do things like shame and false guilt interfere with that heart happiness?

Tricia: I talk about this in the book because for many years, even after I accepted Christ, I felt shame because I chose to have an abortion at age fifteen. I listened to the wrong voices. I was trying to escape what I thought was a problem, and I made a very bad decision.

For years, even after I became a Christian, it was like, “God loves me, except for this. God forgives me. Except for this. I can forgive myself, except for this.”

It was really going through a post-abortion Bible study that I realized, like, if I’m saying God can’t forgive me for this or his love doesn’t go this far, then none of it counts. I either have to accept all of it or none of it.

So I started really walking out in that love. But it has been even over time, I’m very much a people pleaser. I want to make everyone happy. I want to turn in the book right on time and have it be perfect. I mean, all those things go back to that, trying to please other people and trying to please God.

And it really came after I ended up adopting all these kids. I had to ask for extensions on a couple of books deadlines. My house is messy all the time. I remember one day in the laundry room, just crying. Like, “I can’t do this. It’s too much.”

It was like God was saying, “Finally. You’ve finally gotten to the place where you need me.”

Because I think I was working so hard to try to please him and make him happy. I felt that the gentlest whisper, “I love you just as much. I love you just as much if you miss your deadline,” which I try not to miss my deadlines.

“I love you just as much as if there’s a pile of laundry,” which currently there’s laundry in my laundry room.

I just had to get to that place, and that’s why the deep to me is God’s love and realizing we don’t have to perform to get to God’s love. We will never be perfect. I try really hard to be perfect. And God’s like, “Will you stop? Will you stop? I love you just as you are.”

Erin: I think that’s interesting because sometimes we as writers feel like our writing is our performance. Like that’s where we’re gaining our value or our worth. It’s not. It’s just not.

Karen: And that’s dangerous because then that leads you to look to other measuring sticks. To sales and to how much marketing money you get, and “That person’s on the bestseller list and I’m not. Why aren’t I on the bestseller list? That person started writing five years after I did, and they’ve sold a ga-jillion books and I’ve sold thirty-two.”

We fall into comparison and we fall into looking at the wrong measuring sticks for our worth. Then we start asking ourselves, “Did God really call me to write?”

We start getting into this downward spiral that absolutely delights the enemy. He’s so happy when he can sidetrack us and take us down into that dark hole of depression and shame and false guilt. It’s dangerous, and we just need to treat it like a rattlesnake and stay as far away from that as we can.

Tricia: Yeah. And I think it’s so important. I love what you were saying, Karen, about comparing with others, because once we start writing, I mean, there’s Amazon ratings and bestsellers lists, and all those things.

I have a sweet friend who I took to her very first conference. I introduced her around. I introduced her to my agent. She signed with my agent, and her book hit the bestsellers list and stayed there for a very, very, very long time. I’m like, what? I don’t understand. I think I had like thirteen or fourteen books at the time, and her one book had sold way more than mine.

I just felt God saying, “I have a plan for you. It’s a different plan than my plan for her. Would you have written all these other books if you just had one that really hit it big?”

I’d be like, “Uh, no.” I’d be sitting back going, “Great! I don’t need to write about that subject…”

And he’s like, “I have a plan for you. I need you to write this, and I need you to write that.” And the sales are enough to keep going.

We always try to compare and God’s like, “Look at me. Lift your eyes.”

That’s why my morning time is so important. It just turns my eyes to God instead of all those other things and all those other thoughts that are swirling around in our minds.

Karen: I read a challenge on Facebook, of all places, where it said: First thing in the morning, reach for the Bible, not the screen. It was urging people: Don’t get on your phone. Don’t get on your tablet. Don’t get on anything like that. Get into Scripture and reach for that first, and then go to the screen if you need to.

Tricia: Absolutely.

Erin: What I like also about your book is the subtitle. I think it’s great: Staying Centered in God’s Love through Chaotic Circumstances. I’m pretty sure that from what we’ve heard from you today, you’ve lived through chaotic circumstances. What do you think is the biggest challenge for writers in trying to stay centered on God’s love when they’re in chaotic circumstances? What do you think is the biggest challenge there and how can they overcome that?

Tricia: When we think of chaos, we think of the whirlwind, and we think of the tornado. We think of all these things swirling around us. I think the biggest challenge is to think that we can let those things overwhelm us and that it’s an excuse for not doing what God called us to do.

I think with me, God, put these book ideas in my life. I’ve had book contracts and it could have been easy for me to say, “I’m dealing with kids in trauma right now. I cannot do do this.”

But instead I said, “You know what? There’s trauma going on. We are working on the trauma. But for the next hour, I’m going to work on the message God gave me for other people.”

Sometimes those messages have included things like what I wrote my book called Calming Angry Kids, which talks about how to help kids who are angry and in trauma. I worked on books that deal with those sorts of things. But sometimes I’m working on novels, and I’m just pouring my emotions into the characters. Because God gave me a message and he gave me the ability to write this.

We can just step back and say, “There’s too much going on. I can’t do this.” But I’ve seen God’s face the most over and over again when I say, “Okay, I only have an hour today, and I really am tired right now, but I really feel that this is something you’ve called me to write.”

I still sit in the chair, put my fingers on the keyboard, and I still work on it. It’s amazing. I’ve had books I wrote in the middle of the biggest, biggest chaos. When we had a teen that was really acting out, I was writing the novel called The Elder Sister about Miriam.

I was in the middle of it. I was digging into the Bible and writing about Miriam and Moses and Aaron and learning about their culture and all those things. There’d be sometimes screaming in the other room, with this teen, as I’m sitting there working on this book.

After I went back and read it, I’m like, “How did this even happen?”

It was probably my least edited book. It just was God. It was God’s hand on it, because he knew I was trying to be faithful in the midst of the chaos. That is such a meaningful book to me, because I know what was going on around it. Then to hear about the grumbling and all the things with the Israelites. I mean, those emotions are there inside the book because they were there inside my home.

There’s no coincidence that that was going on and I’m trying to write this story. I was crying as I was writing and pouring into this character of Miriam because some of the things she faced were similar to the chaos happening in my life.

So I think instead of saying, “I can’t do it. I don’t have time. I’m just going to put this writing thing to the side,” realize that through it, whatever is going on, it can channel into your work, too, and God has a purpose for it.

Karen: I love that. I love how he takes each of us and he shows what he wants us to do, and we just have to be obedient. Sometimes that’s people like you, Tricia, who are able to keep going, even with the screaming in the next room. But if you’re the kind of person that needs to just kind of turtle in and stay away from everything for a little while, God’s okay with that because he works with us as we are.

He created us. He knows exactly what we need and what we’re able to do. I love that that book is special to you because you know that in your weakness, he was shown strong. You have testimony out there all over the bookshelves of how God has been faithful to you and how God has been faithful to you being faithful. I really love that.

Erin: We’re coming to the end of our time. Do you have some final words of wisdom you want to share with our listeners?

Tricia: Yeah. I would just say that I think all of us are going to have some level of chaos in our lives. I doubt there’s any people out there who say, “Oh, my life is perfectly happy, and there’s nothing going on.”

We’re all going to have some type of chaos. I think definitely leaning into God and then reaching out to others for support. Karen mentioned our group earlier. I would just pour out my prayer requests to them.

So, just have other people around you. I think it gets dangerous when we become isolated and when we don’t share our needs, and we don’t share our requests. Ask other people to pray for you during those times.

I know some of the prayers that the group wrote back to me were exactly what I needed in that moment and the encouragement to keep going. Whatever your chaotic circumstances are, just know that God’s there for you and other people can be there for you. But you just have to open your heart to both.

Karen: I think that sums this time up very well, so let’s just say amen!

Erin: Amen.

Facing Chaos? Guest @TriciaGoyer helps you find happiness in the midst of it! #amwriting #christianwriter
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Are there aspects of your writing journey that make you struggle with being happy?

Heart Happy: Staying Centered in God’s Love During Chaotic Circumstances by Tricia Goyer

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

The post 166 – Find Happiness in Chaos with Guest Tricia Goyer appeared first on Write from the Deep.

If ever there was someone we should get to know intimately, it’s God. How can we write about him and his truth if we don’t have a deep understanding of who he—the source of all truth—is? Join us as we explore God’s attributes and gain a clearer picture of the One we follow, love, and trust!

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

Erin: Welcome, listeners. Welcome into the deep with us. We’re glad you’re joining us.

Here’s my question. Can any of us really say we know God? We really KNOW him? Everything there is to know about him? I’m thinking not, because he’s very big and our brains are tiny in comparison. But that shouldn’t stop us from doing everything we can, doing our very best, to get to know him.

How can we follow him? How can we trust him? How can we properly worship him if we don’t know him?

Karen: So, we’re going to continue our series on God’s qualities and attributes. This is part three. If you haven’t heard part 1 and part 2, we’ll have a link in the show notes. I’ve got to tell you that in the course of doing these podcasts and trying to think of what the characteristics or traits are of God that I’ve noticed and that I want to explore more, it’s drawn me so much closer to the whole of who God is. Yet I know that I haven’t even begun.

I encourage you to do the same. What traits about God have you noticed? Dig in, explore them, and see where God leads you. Until then we’re going to share these traits today.

Erin: The first trait we’re going to talk about is that God is the Creator. It’s amusing that we didn’t get to this until part three. Like, we’re creators. As writers, we’re creators. I love to think of this in terms of how God made us in his image, right? So we’re creators, too. It’s our delight as writers to use the creative gifts.

But also I’m thinking about how he’s the ultimate Creator. He’s the prototype. He’s the first. He’s the best. He’s unlimited. He’s got all ability in creativity. Not only can he be an endless supply of creativity. He is a supply for himself and for us as we write.

Then I started thinking about how he acts in the world. God can creatively solve problems in ways that we will never see coming. I think of how many times our life seems so complicated or hopeless or confusing. We can’t see any solution to whatever the situation is.

We have a God who is perfectly creative, and he’s already figured out how to solve everything the way he wants to solve it. We are not always, and probably rarely, going to see it coming. But he’s so much bigger and smarter and wiser and creative.

Guys, I wish we would stop doubting his creativity and stop doubting it in ourselves. He’s given you that gift. Use it and know that he’s going to keep supplying that in you guys.

Karen: God is also infinite. Now this is the one that just, you know, kind of makes my brain hurt as I try to wrap it around the concept of infinite. No beginning. No end.

Colossians 1:17 tells us, “He is before all things and in him, all things hold together.” Everything holds together in him, but he was before all things. I want to give you a moment to take that in. God was before all things.

When Moses asked God in Exodus, “Who shall I say has sent me?”

God said, “I am that I am.”

Now that’s as definitive as it gets. I am that I am. What he used in there was Yahweh, Jehovah. It’s the most intensely sacred name to Jewish scribes. Many of them will not even pronounce the name. When possible they use another name because it embraces the totality of, “I am that I am.” Beginning, middle, end, beyond, beyond the beginning.

It’s the hardest for our finite brains to grasp the infinite qualities of God. And the fact that he has, as Erin said, infinite resources to work out his will in our lives, to answer the prayers that we bring to him as he sees best. And in the timing that he sees best.

It’s not like God is trying to figure out how to use these limited resources and who gets them. He has an infinite number of resources, not just in the physical, but in the spiritual: his grace, his goodness, his kindness, all of those things. No end to them. No. End.

Erin: One thing you could do with this word is think about the other things we’ve talked about as God being. Loving: infinitely loving. God being creative: infinitely creative. Just put infinite in front of everything. Infinitely big. Like, spend all day putting that word before every attribute and maybe we’ll get some teeny tiny understanding of the infinite incomprehensibility that is God so that we’ll love him and trust him and try to know him better.

The next one, well, here’s one that’s uncomfortable. At least it was for me when I started thinking about it, but I want to talk about it. God is righteously wrathful.

I know that we want to think of God as loving, and he is infinitely loving. We don’t want to think about the fact that he’s wrathful, but every day our God, the Creator of the universe, the God who sustains all life, who was before all things, who holds all things together, who gives us our very breath, every day he’s maligned. He’s minimized. He’s grossly undervalued. He’s taken for granted by Christians and non-Christians alike.

We make ourselves into God when we choose our will over his, and this has been happening, you know, since Adam and Eve. There are consequences for this. God told Adam in Genesis 3:17: “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.”

So yes, God is loving, but he’s also just, and there is a just wrath for sin. Thanks be to God that there is a perfect atonement for this wrath in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross.

But why am I talking to you about all this? It’s because I don’t want us to minimize our sin. I don’t want us to minimize our poor choices or our moral failures. If we minimize that, it’s like we’re saying Christ’s death on the cross was simple, a task that was easy. No big deal.

But it wasn’t. It was costly.

I want us to be mortified by sin. I’m not saying that, you know, we’re supposed to be paralyzed and beat ourselves up forever because again, our sins are atoned for through Christ. But I am saying that our attitude needs to be like Joseph’s attitude. I think of him in Potiphar’s house when Potiphar’s wife kept trying to seduce him. Joseph, in this terribly unfair situation basically says in Genesis 39:9, ” How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?”

Sin is a moral outrage against God. If we don’t keep that in mind, we will lose what it means to be God and what it means to be people. We can’t be properly humble, and we can’t be grateful for what he’s done for us. God help our world and our country in the wrath that we deserve for this moral outrage. I just want us to keep it in mind.

Karen: That makes me think of one of the other attributes I’ve been researching, and that’s the fact that God is incomprehensible. We are told in scripture to fear God. We are told in scripture that God’s grace and love are infinite. We are told in scripture that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God.

And we are also told to fear not. All of this, it may seem contradictory, but it’s not. It’s everything that God is. Yet to our minds, it’s incomprehensible. How often have you prayed and asked God for an answer? It seems like the answer doesn’t come, and you just, you can’t figure out what he’s doing. We can go through our whole lives and feel as though God never brought that answer to bear, even though we prayed.

We say to ourselves, “When I get to eternity, I’ll ask God about this and I’ll get an answer.”

I’ve come to the place where I’ve decided that there are things that we will not need to understand. When we are standing before God Almighty, I’m not going to say to him, “By the way, about that prayer that I prayed back in 1996 that you never seemed to answer, what was going up with that?”

We will never say that to God, because as Psalms 145:3 tells us, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.” We can’t comprehend all of who God is and how great he is.

Romans 11:33-34 tells us, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been in his counselor?'”

None of us can counsel him. None of us will really know the mind of the Lord until we are there standing face to face with him, because sin has come into our world. Sin is in our hearts. It’s a part of humanity, and it blocks our ability to fully grasp God in all his power and glory. To fully comprehend the totality of God.

Scripture tells us that we see through a glass darkly. It’s that veil of sin that’s blocking our eyes and blocking our understanding. But someday, someday we will know as we are known. We will see him and it will all be there in front of us. We will be able to say yes and holy, holy, holy Lord, God Almighty.

For now, as we dwell behind the veil, we know as much of God as he chooses to reveal. I am so grateful that he reveals himself to us in the ways that he does. Even as I understand, as Erin has said, we’re just getting a teeny tiny piece of the totality of who God is.

Erin: The next trait we want to talk about is that God is omnipresent. What I like about this is that it reassures us that God is always with us. Always. No matter if we feel his presence or not.

I was talking to somebody recently and it just broke my heart. This person was telling me how they used to feel God’s presence so often, and it was so comforting. Lately, they hadn’t been feeling God’s presence and that was traumatic. I don’t know what’s happening there or why, but I do think that there are times when we don’t feel his presence. Those are times when we have to reach out and step out in faith and trust the truth that we know. That he is still present, even if we don’t feel him.

I think sometimes, too, we’re tempted. Especially if maybe we’ve done something we shouldn’t have and maybe we stumbled, we think he’s going to give up on us. We think he’s going to turn his back on us. He does not. He does not. He is always with us no matter what.

I love Deuteronomy 31:8. It’s one of my memory verses. “The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged.”

If ever there was a verse for writers, it’s that one. It’s a hard journey. The writing life is hard. We have to do things that are scary and that make us afraid. We have expectations, we sometimes get discouraged because of them. We sometimes feel alone. But, guys, he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged because the infinite Lord goes before you and is always, always with you.

Karen: I really love that. I like that verse in Deuteronomy so much. It’s a very good reminder. Emotions do not equal scriptural truth. We’ve got to rest on the truth and not on what we’re feeling.

Another attribute is that God is impartial. Now this one I kind of had trouble with. It talks about it all throughout scripture. In Acts 10:34 Peter says, “I most certainly understand now that God is not one to show partiality.”

Erin and I were actually just discussing it this morning. What is partiality? We looked in Webster’s and it’s “unfair bias in favor of one thing or person compared with another; favoritism.”

That makes a lot of sense: unfair bias. God does not show bias that is unfair. God doesn’t show bias as we know it.

There’s a section in Isaiah 43 that talks about God giving other peoples in ransom for Israel. Letting other people be killed or destroyed in order to save Israel. My human mind wants to look at that and say, “Teacher’s pet, teacher’s pet. God loves them better than the others.”

But God shows no partiality. Not of one individual over another, not of one race over another. He does not show an unfair bias toward anyone. In God’s eyes, we are all the same, and we have one purpose. We’ll get to that in a second. Colossians 3:25 says, “For he who does wrong will receive the consequences of the wrong, which he has done, and that without partiality.”

Just as Erin talked about him being righteously wrathful, he judges according to truth. He doesn’t judge according to emotion. He judges according to truth and according to Christ’s blood. If you’ve been covered by Christ’s blood, if you’ve accepted the gift of salvation, then you will receive grace. But God still has that side of him where he’s going to come in and be wrathful, and he’s going to judge based on truth.

When we tend to question God’s actions because they seem to show partiality, we’re operating from our finite minds and our emotions. We’ve seen so often how people are swayed, or how they’re bribed, or how what seems a good thing actually wasn’t because they were doing something to gain something.

God will never do that. He is God Almighty. He chooses whom to draw, and whom to use to change lives, whose hearts to harden. He doesn’t do it based on his emotions or because he likes one person better than another. He does it based on his knowledge and his wisdom. He’s the creator using creation to display his glory.

God is impartial. He is infinitely impartial. He doesn’t do things because he likes one person better than another. He does it because it’s right. And because he knows it’s the best way to bring his glory and his salvation to the world.

Erin: As you’re talking about these things, it makes me think of that verse in Revelation. I just pulled it up. It’s Revelation 7:9, and it’s about a great multitude from the great tribulation. “After these things, I looked, and behold a great multitude, which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues standing before the throne and before the lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands and crying out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.'”

It’s no partiality. All different nations, tribes, peoples. What a multitude there is going to be one day. It’s going to be like this kaleidoscope of cultures and tongues and people. I just think that’s cool.

Karen: They’ll all be praising God. It’ll all be for God’s glory.

Erin: The next attribute we want to talk about is that God is perfect. That means that everything he does is always already perfect. How many of these attributes go hand in hand, right? God is perfect. He’s infinite. His love for us is perfect. It doesn’t come and go. It isn’t biased. It isn’t based on you.

His faithfulness is perfect. No matter what we think about that. His judgment is perfect. No matter what we think about that.

Karen: Noticing a pattern here.

Erin: Exactly. His justice is perfect, no matter what. His revelation of himself to us is perfect. No matter how much we might wish for a billboard. His plans for us are perfect. And, guys, his plans for the world, no matter what we may think about things that are going on, his plans are still perfect.

Karen: We can hold onto the truth of who God is in the face of what evidence—worldly evidence and the evidence of our minds and our hearts—seem to be telling us. These are distractions and things that the enemy, the prince of this world, is using to try and draw us away from that faith in God.

But here’s one that I absolutely love, and this characteristic gives me the greatest hope. God is immutable. He never changes. He never changes. God is God. I Am that I Am. That’s who God is.

He’s infinitely dependable. If he doesn’t change, if his promises and his purposes, his work in, and his plans for us never change, we don’t have to worry about somebody changing his mind or swaying him to another path or convincing him that we’re really not worth anything and shouldn’t be saved.

We never have to worry about God doing what he says he won’t do. We never have to be afraid. He has told us to fear not. Yes, we need to fear his grandeur and fear his glory and fear his wrath and his judgment. We need to walk in a way that remembers we are the created, and he is the Creator.

Yet God tells us himself in Malachi 3:6 that he doesn’t change. Not ever. In Psalm 33:11, it says, “The counsel of the Lord stands for forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.”

And his plan has always been to draw us to him, to restore us to a state of grace, and to save all those who will come to him and accept that gift of salvation.

Our God is an awesome God. It’s not a cliche. It’s not just a worship song. It’s a truth of who he is. He’s immutable. He’s perfect. He’s infinite. He’s all of these things that we’ve been talking about, and so much more that we will never understand until the veil is lifted and we see him face to face. God Almighty, the God who created us, will deign to come down and let us see him without the veil that we may understand all of who he is.

We’ll spend eternity rejoicing in that and glorying in him. He’s amazing. So, dig in. Find out the attributes of God that draw you and dig in and learn more about him. You can spend your whole life doing it, and I can’t think of a better way to spend your life.

Erin: Amen.

Karen: Amen.

Want to know God’s heart? Come join us! #Christianwriter #amwriting
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What characteristics of God are you most familiar with? What about the least familiar with?

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The post Do You Really Know Who God Is? Part 3 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

As writers, our goal is to encourage and challenge our readers, to point them to God and His truth. In fact, guest Cathy Gohlke takes that a step farther and encourages us to be “pen warriors and light bearers.” She shares how God showed her this was her job as a writer, and how you, too, can become a warrior for God in your writing.

About Cathy Gohlke

Bestselling, Christy Hall of Fame, and Carol and INSPY Award-winning author, Cathy Gohlke writes novels steeped with inspirational lessons, speaking of world and life events through the lens of history. She champions the battle against oppression, celebrating the freedom found only in Christ. When not traveling to historic sites for research, she and her husband of 39 years, Dan, divide their time between Northern Virginia and the Jersey Shore, enjoying time with their grown children and grandchildren. Visit her website at cathygohlke.com.

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 have joined us here in the deep, and we’re excited because we have a guest! We’ll let Karen introduce her.

Karen: Cathy Gohlke is our guest today, and we’re so excited. She’s a bestselling Christy Hall of Famer and a Carol and INSPY award-winning author of ten critically claimed novels. The most recent of which is A Hundred Crickets Singing. She signed her first novel contract on her 50th birthday, folks. That book resulted in her first Christy Award, all confirmation that it’s never too late to step into the dreams God plants in our hearts.

She and her husband of 39 years, Dan, divide their time between north Virginia and the Jersey shore, where they share time with their children and three precious grandchildren. All that’s so great. You can find out more about her at authorcathygohlke.com.

Welcome, Cathy. We’re so glad you’re here.

Cathy: Thank you, Karen. Thank you, Erin. I’m thrilled to be here with you, and I so appreciate the invitation.

Erin: We’re glad to have you, and we look forward to asking all of our guests, what does the deep mean to you?

Cathy: To me, the deep means going deep into the heart of God, seeking his perspective about our broken world and asking what grieves my Father in heaven? And what, conversely, gives him unbounded joy? And what makes me, his child, weep with him? And where do I find his joy in my life?

I find those answers, that sorrow and that joy, in Scripture. In Psalms and Proverbs and the countless stories from the Old and the New Testament. And honestly, the sorrows I find on the world stage in today’s headlines and current events. And in history.

Erin: Yeah, it’s so cool that we have a God who reveals his heart to us in Scripture. That’s a place where it’s there for all time for us to look at and also by his Spirit, his Spirit living in us to help us see those things, too. I love that definition of going deep into the heart of God. That’s great.

Cathy: Well, I think what you just said is true, too, about Scripture. It is always relevant. It is timeless. I mean, it was relevant 2,000, 4,000 years ago, but it’s relevant to today. For me as a writer, and I know writers are listening today, it’s always that God presses some need, some concern, on my heart and on my mind. Some current event that I believe grieves his heart and won’t let me go.

It’s those things that I see emerging in the headlines, some division in society or some injustice I observe. It’s that thing that if I was given the gift of oratory, I’d stand on my soap box and declare, but because I’m a warrior with a pen, that’s what I do with it.

Erin: I love that.

Karen: A warrior with a pen. That’s exactly what we’re talking about today: being warriors with a pen. I’m in an online group with Cathy and other published authors, and she had posted her speech that she gave when she won the Christy Hall of Fame Award. I want to share with you just a few paragraphs from that, because it just struck me. The truth of it and the power of it struck me so hard. This is from Cathy’s speech for that award:

“Through Christian fiction, we battle a confusing and broken world. Our weapons are our minds and pens gifted by the Lord, forged through life experiences, and sharpened by the iron we find in one another. Through story, we enter dark rooms where gradually we lift the shutters of lanterns offering God’s love and redeeming grace. Only then can we rise and walk with our characters and readers into hope, joy, and privilege. Conversely, many writers I see tonight look younger than I, and that does my heart good, reminding me that God is on the move, and that Christian fiction—stories that change lives, bringing hearts closer to the heart of God—is in strong hands. So know that I’m cheering for you and praying for the stories you write and will write. May God bless you, pen warriors and light bearers for the kingdom of heaven.”

That’s you guys, all of you listening. That’s you—pen warriors and light bearers for the kingdom of heaven.

Then she ends with, “May God give your words wings into the hearts of readers for years to come.”

Amen! That whole imagery, Cathy, of being pen warriors, light bearers, for the kingdom of God, I love that. I absolutely love that. When did you realize that that’s what you were?

Cathy: I think that was a gradual thing. Although, I think maybe it came with my very first book. I always knew that I wanted to write an underground railroad story for my first book.

I actually thought that was the only book I’d ever write in my life. I was the most surprised person when anybody wanted more. But really, I started that book not as Christian fiction. I started writing because I wanted to become a writer. I wanted to write stories, and I wanted to write YA fiction.

I was working as a children’s librarian at the time in the school, and I wanted to write books that would set my young readers in the library on fire and get my son reading. But as I wrote that first chapter, it kept coming back to questions. Like, I mean, I remember a question about searching, you know, how our Lord went, searching for a lost lamb. My character felt lost in his confusion about the times and what was going on.

As I wrote this story, people kept telling me, “You should take out all that Christian stuff because it’s really not going to sell.”

Honestly, I tried, but it didn’t work. It just kept coming back because that’s who I am and that’s who God is. He is relentless in our hearts, praise his holy name.

Karen: Amen.

Cathy: So, I wrote it as he gave it to me. I realized as I went through that story that we’re in a battle ground for our minds and our hearts as writers. The enemy will do anything and everything to kill, steal, and destroy. As well meaning as the people I knew at the time were about telling me to take all of that out, that was a subtle infiltration of the enemy for me.

I think it was at that time that I knew that I had to be honest with the Lord. I had to be honest with myself. I had to be faithful to what he gave me. I knew that that was a battle ground, and I think that was the beginning.

Karen: The enemy is so determined to slither his way in and to whisper those things to our hearts and into our dreams that make us think that if we don’t do this, if we don’t do that, then our dreams will never come to fruition.

Then we kind of paint it with this seemingly holy response. Or we say, “Well, if my books don’t get published then readers won’t read what God has given me to tell them. So I have to make sure that the book gets published so that I can serve God that way.”

Those are all lies and justifications that we tell ourselves and that the enemy whispers to us. You know, “If you don’t gain a platform, you’ll never be able to speak out for God.” We forget that every single moment of this journey, every single step we take, has already been prepared by God. He’s there in every moment and every decision.

We don’t have to listen to those voices that are coming at us, whether it’s our friends, or other writing people, or it’s the enemy, we don’t have to listen to those because we can go to the core. We can go to the truth and that’s God’s Word. We can pray to him and prepare ourselves.

I was looking for Scripture about being a warrior and I love Psalm 144:1-2. Listen to this guys and think about it for you as you’re writing. “Blessed, be the Lord, my Rock, who trains my hands for war.”

He trains your hands on the keyboard. Your hands on the pen.

“Who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

Oh my gosh. Warrior with a pen.

“Blessed be the Lord. My Rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle; he is my steadfast love and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me.” Psalm 144:1-2 (ESV)

Cathy: Amen. I love that.

Erin: Cathy, I like what you said, too, about these people giving you advice. They were well-meaning, and you had to be very discerning about that. You had to keep that soaked in prayer. And for you, you knew where God was calling you to.

“For you,” I like how you said it that way as well, because for some people, they’re going to write different kinds of stories than you write. That’s what God is leading them to. But the real key is for us to have that discernment about these subtle, well-meaning pieces of advice that can come from both friend and foe. It’s so hard.

How would you say that you were able to discern it? What were the things that really helped you to discern God’s specific leading for you?

Cathy: I think I came to a point, and I don’t know when this realization really hit, but it’s been a few years. I came to realize that the experiences in our lives, the very unique experiences that we have been given, sometimes we fail through those. Sometimes we rise victorious. But those experiences are uniquely ours from the Lord, and we learn unique things.

Now it’s true that there’s nothing new under the sun in one way, but we are uniquely and wonderfully made. The way we perceive what’s happened, the way we engage with what’s happened, those unique experiences are ours, and they’re given for a purpose. We can’t ignore that.

Karen: Right.

Cathy: But I think as writers we can use either of those experiences, the things we’ve learned from those experiences, the emotions we’ve experienced, we can use those things to transform our writing from entertainment to parable. I think that is the place and the time.

You know, our demons come for us in many forms. Some are overt and some are subtle, as we’ve talked about. But they creep in like thieves in the night. You know, things like shame and addiction and discouragement and despair and feelings of hopelessness or being overlooked. And for writers, we all battle insecurity. No matter how many books publish, no matter how many awards we’ve won, we battle insecurity, discouragement, sometimes jealousy, or envy, or feelings of effectiveness. Or maybe we feel like, “Oh, what’s my purpose?”

Sometimes we have ridicule even from our families or health challenges. Sometimes it’s the challenge of the blank page. It’s a war. It’s a battle every day. I think that realizing how we are uniquely gifted by the Lord with those experiences can really transform our writing.

Karen: I agree. I think it’s the difference between sharing the reality of those battles, the reality of what we went through: being vulnerable and transparent about our failures, as well as our successes, putting that on the page, letting our characters go through those same things and fail and succeed and showing through it all God’s presence and how he works in those things. That’s what transforms our stories such that God can reach and speak to the readers.

I’ve known authors who have written stories and they kind of try to cover up for God, because they feel like if they failed or something bad has happened to them, God blew it. So they have to make everything look good, and they themselves have to seem like everything is great all the time or else people will be saying, “Well, what’s the point of serving God if you have to go through all these difficult things?”

We have to let people know that serving God will bring difficult things. That’s what it is to be in the fellowship of suffering with the Christ who suffered for us, and who suffers with us whenever we struggle. Being a believer and being a Christian writer doesn’t mean everything’s going to go great. It means that when it doesn’t go great, when in fact it goes horribly, horribly wrong, we have a Savior who understands. A Savior who walks with us, and like you said, uses those experiences to refine us and to prepare us, and to use those things to prepare others for the battle.

Cathy: I think that’s so true and so exciting because just like we talk about story, we are the heroes of our own story, and we have that outward journey, just like our characters. And we have that inward journey that the Lord walks us through. If we didn’t have that inward journey, if we didn’t face that conflict and do that battle in our lives or through our characters, there’d be no story.

Karen: Conflict, conflict, conflict.

Cathy: That’s right. Stories should never be short of conflict because if they are, they’re short of victory.

Karen: Yeah.

Erin: That’s really the key. The more our characters struggle, the more heroic they appear when they triumph. The same is true in our life, only we don’t want to do that.

Karen: The interesting thing, though, for believers is that yes, there’s triumph, but before the triumph, there has to be surrender. You know, you look at the world today and their message is that you need to be strong and you need to face all this and never surrender, never give up. Yet as believers, we have to surrender everything, but to God.

My husband and I, when we sold the last home that we sold in Illinois, and this is twenty some years ago, it took two years for that house to sell. Now we knew God was leading us to move to Oregon to help my folks. But we couldn’t go anywhere until we sold the house. We were constantly checking again with God and guessing and saying, “What is this all supposed to mean?”

Then after awhile, we just stopped asking those questions. After a while, Don and I created a kind of mantra. We said, “God is in control. I may not understand it. I may not even like it, but he’s in control, and I trust him.” You go into every day saying that several times a day. “I trust you. I don’t get it, but I trust you.”

Cathy: Right. And he is faithful. He is trustworthy. We can see that through history, through the Bible, and throughout our lives.

I love what you said about surrender because until we surrender to him, we don’t have a captain. We don’t have anybody to lead this army. Until we surrender to him, we bow our knee to him, we’re not even able to put on the armor. That armor that’s listed in Ephesians six, that helmet of salvation, that sword of the Spirit, that girdle of truth, that shield of faith that is going to repel the fiery darts of the enemy that aim straight for our hearts.

We have to through faith put on that armor every single day. As writers, if we don’t have that armor on, we have a thin skin, and you can’t be a writer and have a thin skin. You won’t survive.

Karen: No, you really won’t. It seems like there are whole armies of reviewers out there just determined to tell you how you should have written this way and how your story doesn’t work here and how “Good heavens didn’t anybody tell you what a bad idea this was for a book?”

Cathy: No shortage of “help.”

Erin: Cathy, I love that you started your whole writing career or at least your publishing career at age fifty. Talk just a little bit about how that dream came about and happened there at age fifty.

Cathy: Well, it started at age five without the zero at the other end, when I was sitting on a sofa with my younger brother, Danny, and our grandmother was sandwiched between us reading us Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

That book was magic to me. I thought in my five-year old brain, I couldn’t read, and I believed that those black block symbols on the page were created by magic that enabled Grandma to read that story again and again. She’s like, “Cathy books aren’t created by magic. Real people write books.”

Well, I didn’t believe that could be true, so I challenged her and I said, “If that’s so, can I write books?”

She said, “Well, usually men write books.” My grandmother was, you know, from the Edwardian age. She said, “But I don’t see why not. You have to learn to read.”

I knew always that I wanted to be a writer. I didn’t have the opportunity for that kind of education. Nobody in my family had done it. Nobody believed it could be done, but the dream never died. After my children were old enough, I took classes at night and online for writing, and I started writing for two local newspapers, just picking up light news and features.

Then I started working in the children’s library, and I wrote plays for a group of mothers. We called ourselves The Mom Street Players. We performed in libraries, and the school, and restaurants sometimes. I wrote poetry, and I guess my first publications in Christian literature were with Marlene Bagnall and her book, My Turn to Care: Essays about Caring for Aging Parents.

I did all kinds of writing, whatever I could do. I wrote skits for church. But I always wanted to write a novel. Finally, I started taking a course through Writing for Children and Teenagers. That was a wonderful correspondence course because it was very much like working with an editor. That’s when I started my first novel.

It took me many years to really learn how to write that novel, but that was the beginning. When I sold that novel, I signed that contract on my 50th birthday. It felt like a new beginning, like the Lord had given me this second opportunity at life. I have loved it.

Karen: I know you guys are just hearing our voices, but I hope in Cathy’s voice, you can hear the amazing, beautiful smile on her face right now. We have video. She’s got a great smile as she talks about God letting her step into that dream and making it a reality! That’s what we all want. We all want to step into the dream God has for us and serve him.

Cathy, believe it or not, our time is coming to an end. Do you have any final words of encouragement or wisdom for our listeners today?

Cathy: Just keep writing. Keep reading. Keep believing. Stay deep in the Word of God. Spend time with him every single day in prayer and in the Bible and in meditation. Just be with him and enjoy him and let him enjoy you. Then go forward with the unique experiences he’s given you to write. To live. He will lead you where he means for you to go.

Karen: Amen. Let me conclude today with the Scripture that you mentioned in Ephesians six, starting with verse ten:

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints, and also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.” Ephesians 6:10-20 ESV

And for us, keep alert with all perseverance making supplication for all the writers and for each and every one of us who are warriors with pens, that words may be given to us, in writing boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel for which we are ambassadors in chains that we may declare it boldly, put it on the page and write as God calls us to write.

Erin: Amen.

Cathy: Amen.

Be a pen warrior and light bearer in your writing! Guest @GohlkeCathy tells how! #amwriting #christianwriter
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Have you ever felt like a pen warrior? Why or why not?

A Hundred Crickets Singing by Cathy Gohlke

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The post 164 – Be a Pen Warrior! with Guest Cathy Gohlke appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Guest Debbie Macomber is a firm believer in following your God-given dreams. Why? Because everyone told her, from an early age, the dream God gave her—to be a writer—couldn’t happen! But she kept going until the dream God gave her was a reality far beyond her imaginings!

About Debbie Macomber

Debbie Macomber is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and one of today’s most popular writers with more than 200 million copies of her books in print worldwide. In her novels, Macomber brings to life compelling relationships that embrace family and enduring friendships, uplifting her readers with stories of connection and hope. Macomber’s novels have spent over 1,000 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Fifteen of these novels hit the number one spot.

Debbie serves on the Guideposts National Advisory Cabinet, is a YFC National Ambassador, and is World Vision’s international spokesperson for their Knit for Kids charity initiative. A devoted grandmother, Debbie and Wayne live in Port Orchard, Washington, the town which inspired the Cedar Cove series.

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

Erin: Welcome listeners. We are so excited to have you here with us in the deep. We have a guest and Karen gets to reveal our surprise mystery guest and introduce her!

Karen: Our mystery guest is the amazing Debbie Macomber. You know, the first time I became aware of Debbie, it was on a family vacation. I was with my parents, and we were driving somewhere that was a long trip. I had picked up a book that looked so fun. Debbie, I think the title may have been My Funny Valentine. It was one of her Valentine books.

I was sitting in the backseat reading it, and I was laughing out loud. My mother finally reached back and plucked the book out of my hands. She started reading it and then she was laughing out loud. Then the two of us, we just had a grand time on this trip trading the book back and forth and talking about the characters. I thought my dad was going to pull over and put us out of the car with the book.

Sometime after that, I was at a writer’s conference and Debbie was there signing books, and I was signing books. I screwed up my courage, and I went over and thanked her because my mom had passed before we met. I told Debbie how much that memory meant to me, that memory of shared laughter and just being able to play and have fun, and it came through her book. Debbie was so gracious and so kind, and so we became friends.

I absolutely love this woman, not just for her amazing talent at writing. I mean, if you think about it, she’s phenomenal as a writer. She’s a number one New York Times bestselling author. One of today’s most popular writers with more than 200 million copies of her books in print worldwide. In 2022, she has all new hardcover publications coming out. One called The Best is Yet to Come in July and The Christmas Spirit in October. And of course, a new Christmas book.

Debbie’s Christmas books are legendary and several of them have been crafted into Hallmark Channel movies.

Debbie: Oh, thank you, Karen. See, I’m just downright friendly.

Erin: Well, we are delighted that you’re here with us. We want to ask you first, what does the deep mean to you?

Debbie: Well, that was such an interesting question. And I gave it a lot of thought. I’m thinking about the writing process itself. The deep means to me to connect with my Savior with every story I write. I mean, long before I ever get an idea, I ask God for the idea. Then as I write the synopsis, I ask him to help me to make this book special in different ways.

Now, I don’t know if I’ve shared this with you before, but I have a way of deciding which books I write, because I’m a storyteller. That’s the gift God gave me. It has to be relevant to my reader. It has to be provocative. It has to be entertaining because I’m not here to teach anybody anything. It has to be realistic. And it has to be believable. If the story idea aligns with those words then I know I’ve got a good idea.

So when I dig to the deep it’s when I start the writing process, first with the synopsis and then every day with every chapter in every scene, and that’s digging in, connecting with my Savior to guide my writing.

Karen: I love that. I don’t think anybody’s ever made that definition before. That’s great. But it doesn’t surprise me. I saw that you were talking on something called the Anchor Gathering. Can you tell us a little about the Anchor Gathering?

Debbie: The Anchor Gathering was started by my friend, Katie Robertson, who lost her daughter. As a result of the death of this child, she wanted to reach out to as many women for Christ as possible. So she started this gathering. It was first all together in person. But with COVID, this is one of the benefits of COVID, it’s broke out into Zoom meetings and it spread all over the country.

Karen: That’s outstanding. What’s the primary goal?

Debbie: The primary goal is to introduce women in a friendly and fun atmosphere and to share anchor moments. That means the moments that you really felt you needed something in your life, and that something was Jesus Christ.

Karen: Amen. That’s cool. Did you already do that talk? When I saw the announcement about it, it was upcoming. Have you done it already?

Debbie: Yes, I did. It actually aired in February.

Erin: We’ll have a link to that in the show notes for people who want to listen.

Karen: I would really like to do that. You were going to talk about writers and faith and how God gives us dreams and then uses those dreams in our life and in our writing. How about if you unpack that a little for us?

Debbie: I can tell you that I always wanted to be a writer, even from the time I can remember. But I have such an unusual background because I’m dyslexic. I didn’t learn to read until the fifth grade. I can remember the third grade teacher telling my mother, “Debbie’s a nice little girl, but she’s never going to do well.”

I lived to fulfill that in school. I mean, I really didn’t do well in school. I struggled. I was always nearly at the bottom of my class. I feel fortunate to have graduated from high school. The only time I ever told anyone I wanted to write books was the principal of our high school.

Right before I graduated, she did an interview with each one of us girls. It was a Catholic girls school. She asked me what I wanted to do for my future. I told her, “I want to write books.”

She had this kind of pitying look in her eyes. She didn’t say the words, but the message I got was, “You need to think about something in line with your intelligence level.” And in fact, she sent me home for the rest of the day for me to think about this.

Erin: Wow.

Debbie: But that dream would not go away. When I talk about this at writers conferences, I talk about how, if you hurt yourself or burn yourself, that pain will throb. But when I thought about writing books, I throbbed with joy. That happy anticipation would come over me and story ideas would pop into my head.

I just couldn’t let go of that dream. But I was afraid. I was very afraid, because I’d had nothing but failure in my life. I mean, I married as a teenager. Wayne and I had the four babies and, you know, here was this dream. It was only after I met Jesus Christ that I had the courage to do it.

Karen: Do you know what? It’s amazing to me. I mean, I sit here and I’m thinking about all the lives you’ve touched through your stories. You say you’re not here to teach anybody, but God teaches through the words that you put on the page. God takes those stories—which you tell so well, that draw us in and immerse us in those characters—and he uses those stories to show us ourselves and to show us our need for him.

That’s the beauty of writing, like you said, with Christ at every angle. And you know that those people were placed in your path, those naysayers, were placed in your path by Satan because he knew what was coming. He knew what God wanted to do with you. Satan made every effort to kill that dream before it could ever come to fruition. How good of God not to let that die. That is just so amazing.

Debbie: You know, that’s so true that God did prepare the way for me. As I look back on my life, I can see it in every step. I could tell you, I shared this story at writer’s conferences, that one of the propelling reasons that I started writing was that there was a death in our family. A cousin that I had grown up with, whom I was very close to, died of cancer.

When I visited him at the hospital, I got lost and I asked a doctor, “How do I get from here to there?”

He said, “Go down the hallway all the way to the end, take the first right, and walk through the door marked: Absolutely No Admittance.”

That’s what we have to do when we’re following our dreams. We have to be willing to walk through that door.

Erin: And not just that, but I cannot believe that you were so brave to tell that principal what your dream was and what you wanted to do, and she stomped on you!

Debbie: She lived long enough to see my published books, which is great.

Erin: But I’m just, I’m so impressed. That’s just a testimony, I think, to God and the dream that he gave you. But just that kind of overcoming the discouragement. I know that there are untold amount of listeners out there who are going to hear that and say, “You know what? Somebody did that to me, too! My husband, my kid, my neighbor, my whoever, made me feel like I couldn’t do this. I was brave, and they squashed me.”

And look at you. You’re the encouragement for them to stand up and move forward.

Debbie: Oh, I wish I could say I’m just so incredibly talented that I sold right away, but it was five years. I joke around and I say the rejections came so fast that they hit me in the head on the way home from the post office.

Erin: But what kept you going? Was that the dream? Like how did you really know? Some of our listeners might be feeling like, “Well, I don’t know if it’s just me or if it’s God telling me. What if it’s what I want, but not what God wants?” What do you think about that?

Debbie: Well, I don’t know, because I’ve met so many writers who say, “God wants me to write,” and who am I to say? You know, you have to have that passion and that dream that just won’t let go. You have to be willing to continue besides rejection besides discouragement. If God really told somebody to be a writer and to write, he will show you the way.

I read a book, a Norman Vincent Peale classic. I would force myself to sit down and read a chapter after every rejection. There was a saying in that book that I said every single morning. It was my prayer. “I believe I am divinely guided. I believe I will always take the right turn in the road. I believe God will make a way where there is no way.”

Then I would start to write.

Erin: You know what I love? That you’re absolutely right. You were divinely guided. What I want our listeners to catch on this is that you were divinely guided through five years of rejection. Sometimes that’s the path. It’s five years or ten years or twenty years of rejection. But that doesn’t mean that he’s not guiding you. It’s just the path.

Debbie: Oh, there were a couple of times that were really dark moments before I published, too. One was when we were a single income family, and Wayne had been laid off. He came to me and he said, “I can’t make the car payment this month. I need you to get a job.”

Well, I knew I couldn’t do it all. I couldn’t be a writer and, you know, the kids were in sports and scouts and church and music and dancing, you know, all their different activities. I knew I was going to have to give up that dream, and I couldn’t even sleep that night. Wayne woke up and he said, “Are you awake?”

I said, “You know, I believe I really could have made it as a writer, honey. I do.

And he said, “Do it. Go for it.” I mean, you know, it was another two and a half years before I sold, but I had that wonderful support and the belief.

Erin: Wow. So how did you pay for the car?

Debbie: I started selling articles. I had to at least, because I was taking a hundred dollars a month out of our family income. And then right before I sold, this was the darkest moment. I had made enough money writing—I sold dozens of articles—I made enough money writing to attend my first writing conference. At this point I had never met another author in the world.

Two of the editors that I had been submitting to we’re going to be at this conference. One of them had agreed to read my manuscript. When I attended the workshop, she said that of the five manuscripts she had read, one showed promise. I was sure it was me, because I loved this story. I really, really loved this story.

It wasn’t. She had the whole room laughing at what she called the “infeasibility” of my plot.

Erin: Oh dear!

Debbie: Yeah. I’m a storyteller. I knew I had to learn to be a writer, but if my story wasn’t any good, then there was no hope. When I went up to her afterwards, I said, “If I rewrote this, would you be willing to look at it again?”

Even now, all these years later, I can remember that look that came over, and she said, “Throw it away. Throw it away.”

Erin: Wow.

Debbie: I went home and sat up all night. I was praying, and I was reading my devotion. The devotion for the day was John 14. Talk about divinely guided! Do you know what the first verse is? “Let not your heart be troubled.”

Okay, Lord. Funny, funny, funny. And then the last verse: “Arise. Let us go from here.”

I went back to the writer’s conference to collect a refund and they wouldn’t give it to me. So I attended a kids workshop because everything I’d sold at this point had to do with the kids. Everybody got up and said that this is a terrible time in publishing. Nobody’s buying, nobody’s taking new clients, don’t bother to send.

But an author got up and she said one thing I remember: Don’t leave a rejected manuscript on your desk.

With that itty bit of hope, that one itty bit, I wrote up a query letter to another publisher and waited and waited and waited.

Now if I’ve ever seen God’s hand in my life, and I have so many times, this is probably the most profound moment. I kept waiting for the answer to that query letter and every day, all of those negative voices I heard growing up, you know, those ugly voices. I couldn’t stand it. I thought, “I don’t care if you request this manuscript or not, I’m mailing it off.”

Well, again, Wayne was out of work. He was up in Alaska waiting to go out on the pipeline. The kids and I were living on his unemployment check. I went to the post office and I had mailed off that manuscript thinking, “Oh, I hope I’m doing the right thing.”

I get home, and there was a letter in the mailbox. The answer to my query letter. In a Sharpie pen right across my letter the editor wrote: Do not mail us your manuscript. We are not buying at this time.

And I had just spent ten precious dollars. Three weeks later, New York called and bought the book! If I had waited a half hour, I would never have mailed off that manuscript.

Karen: Oh, my gosh.

Erin: Well, there’s a very good witness for how God works in our lives. That’s just stunning. We’re going to have to sit here for like thirty seconds to take that in.

Ten dollars. That’s a lot of money. Like, that could buy a lot of macaroni and cheese. What kind of sacrifice was that for your family?

Debbie: That was a huge sacrifice because we were living on $150 a week, which was Wayne’s unemployment check. And, you know, he had to have money to live up in Alaska, too. So it was a huge sacrifice. I mean, I couldn’t afford the shoes for kids for school that year. And here I was spending ten dollars.

In fact, when I went home, I just said to the Lord, “I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t do this.” It was such a dark moment. And yet, you know, God was the one that said, “Hold on, hold on.”

Karen: Sunday’s comin’!

Debbie: Yeah. And the advance I got for that book got us through the winter. All winter.

Karen: Did they buy just that one book?

Debbie: They did, but they then asked me, “Do you have anything else?”

Well, I just so happened to have three other manuscripts that had all been rejected. They looked at them and they said, “We’ll buy them.” And they did one at a time, but I had to rewrite every single one of them because it was a learning process.

It was a four book apprenticeship.

Erin: I’m thinking that they also just really loved the story, you know? They were willing to hang with you through that. And again, there’s God. There’s God making a way when there is no way.

Debbie: This is the same manuscript one editor told me to throw away. Another editor saw the story ability. She saw that and had the trust and the faith that I could produce and good book.

Karen: That’s a good reminder to us that publishing, it’s not about formulas. It’s about the right gathering of the right people. I purchased manuscripts that other editors turned down because I loved them and I saw the potential in them.

Okay, true confession time. As an editor, I turned down the Mitford series from Jan Karon. But that’s because I knew that her series had a character in it that the publishing house I was working for at the time would not have been willing to have in the published book. So I let it go. And then it went on to become the big thing.

People always ask me, “Well, don’t you regret turning it down?”

I say, “No, because number one, it wasn’t right for our publishing house. Number two, our publishing house would never have done with it what that other publishing house did.”

God knows exactly where it needs to be. God knew when that person told you to throw it away. God was just standing there and smiling and saying, “Debbie, I’m glad your eyes are on me and not on that editor. And not on circumstances. You stay focused on me and you’re going to be okay.”

Debbie: Well, it was hard to hear that at the time.

Erin: Well, you’re plucky. I’m a little bit curious now that you’ve gone on, you’ve written all of these books and it sounds like you’re doing a magazine now too: Welcome Home. What led you to do that? Tell us a little bit about that.

Debbie: First of all, I love magazines. I have many subscriptions. The turn phrase that identifies Welcome Home is: Wherever you are, Debbie takes you home.

As I ease into retirement now, this is a way for me to introduce my readers to other writers. So we have lots of interviews with other writers, and articles. My daughter says that I was social media before there was social media, because I had learned valuable lessons about being a business woman from my father, who had his own business.

I knew I had to keep in touch with my readers. From the very first, from back in the 1980s, I was mailing out newsletters to my readers. This is just the growth of the newsletter that has been expanded to include recipes. I’m a frequent eater, so I love recipes. So I share recipes with my readers. I share do-it-yourself projects, and I have a whole team of excellent, excellent, editors that craft this together. It’s been a really wonderful experience.

Karen: It sounds wonderful. In fact, I’ll be subscribing!

Well, Debbie, we’re coming to the end of our time together. Do you have any final words of wisdom or thoughts that you want to share with our listeners?

Debbie: Well, I do want to say, remember, you are divinely guided. You will take the right turn in the road, and God will make a way where there is no way.

Karen: Amen.

Erin: Amen is right!

Do you have a God-given writing dream? How do you keep up your courage to follow it in the face of disappointment?

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The post 163 – Follow Your Dreams with Guest Debbie Macomber appeared first on Write from the Deep.

God is SO big. So full of mystery and wonder and power. How can our human minds ever really know him? By taking one attribute at a time and savoring it, letting him reveal himself to us. Come join us as we explore more attributes of the character of Almighty God.

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

Erin: Hello, listeners. Welcome to the deep. We’re glad that you’ve chosen to join us. A couple of episodes ago, in episode 159, we started talking about knowing who God is and quickly discovered we had way too much material. Surprise! God is very big. 

So, this is part two. It’s important as writers that we have the best understanding of who God is, what his character is, and what his attributes are because the writing life is hard. It’s filled with trials. It’s filled with temptations. It’s important that we know who we’re trusting in and that we know him well. 

Karen: Especially because he gives us truth to speak. We should expect attacks from our enemy, who prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). But you know what? If you’re grounded in who God is—in his attributes, in his character, in his truth—you can ward off the attacks.

Truth always prevails. God’s truth always prevails.

Erin: It does. Today we’ll start with: God is sovereign. What that means is that he rules. Always. Not sometimes. Not once in a while. Always. He can, because he’s all-powerful. We talked about that last time when we said God was all-powerful. Omnipotent.

But it’s more than just being able to rule. God has an actual plan that is perfect. That he’s ruling by. If you’re familiar with the whole plotter and pantser writer descriptions, God is not a pantser. He’s a plotter, and he’s got this whole plan. 

I feel like for writers, we need to take comfort in that. Nothing, nothing is happening in your life apart from God’s will. Nothing’s happening in your writing world that is apart from God’s will. He’s working everything to your good and for his glory. 

Not only that, but he’s our king. He’s sovereign. We owe submission to him. I don’t think it’s an accident that when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, Jesus said, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Hallowed. Because he’s sovereign. And, “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” (Matthew 6:9-10)

Another thing I think we need to think about with this is that it’s not okay to be complainers and grumblers. Yeah, we know in the Psalms, like king David, he poured out his heart, and there was some complaining in there, but that wasn’t the rule of his life. He always acknowledged God. Even though we have these human feelings of displeasure with what’s happening, that’s not to be the rule of our lives. We’re still always to be submitted to his sovereign will. 

I think we need to be reminded of that. In Habbakuk 2:20, and this is a verse I found recently and I’d love it, it says, “But the Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before him.”

I think that needs to be our attitude often. Silent submission, not grumbling and complaining. That’s a way that we can show we’re submitted to God’s sovereignty. 

Karen: God through Christ is also the Man of Sorrows. Anything that we have experienced on our journey, whether it’s our faith journey or our writing journey, any sense of pain or struggle, any sense of betrayal by those that we thought we could trust. And too often, we place our trust in men. We place our trust in publishers. We place our trust in other writers. We even place our trust in friends and family. The sad fact is people are broken, and people will always let you down. 

I’ve heard writers saying things like, “And they call themselves Christian publishers!”

Well, let me just dispel that myth for you. Today there is no such thing as a Christian publisher. There are publishers that are peopled by employees who are Christians and doing their best to follow God. But even they will make mistakes and make missteps. And it may cost you. 

You may feel betrayed when a contract is canceled. When a series is stopped after the first book. When you think for sure that they’re going to contract your book and suddenly they’re like, “No, we’re going to go a different direction.”

Guys, any of that, any of that has come to God through Christ and all that he suffered. I mean, talk about betrayal by those you trust. Yet he continued to love, and he continued to move forward, and he continued to sacrifice everything for us. 

Sometimes when you’re in a difficult time you think to yourself, “Nobody understands what I’m facing.” Then a writer friend, or a family member, or somebody will come and put their arm around you and say, “I understand.”

I just had this happen recently where I was frustrated about something, and somebody wrote me a really sweet email and said, “I understand what you’re facing.” 

My immediate human response was, “No, you don’t. You don’t have this situation and this situation and this situation.”

God stopped me right in the midst of that, and he said, “That person understands portions of it. I understand it all. I know sorrow. I faced sorrow and betrayal. I was cut to the core by my creation turning its back on me. You can trust me with all your sorrow, all your pain, all your sense of betrayal.”

I just hit my knees, and I thought, “I’m so sorry, God. I’m so sorry that I got so wrapped up in my emotions that I lost track of the fact that you are in control and nothing comes to me but by your hand, and that you understand. You understand every pain, every sorrow, every sense of betrayal or loss.”

We can trust him and be grounded in that truth of his character. 

Erin: Yeah, and everything that comes to us by his hand, we need to understand that it’s God’s loving hand, because God is loving. He loves with a perfect love, and he’s not going to stop because God is eternal, and love is part of his attributes. So his love just doesn’t stop.

I love what A. W. Tozer says. He says, “God’s love for us is uncaused and undeserved.” That’s important because we can’t earn it. And we can’t ever be less or more loved because God’s love is already perfect. Nothing we can do is going to change that. God’s love is without limit. 

Then I sit down and wonder what does perfect love even look like? That is so hard for us to get a grasp on. We can’t experience that in human relationships, because as Karen said, we’re fallen, and we’re broken, and we’re flawed. We can’t love each other perfectly. From God is the only place where we can experience this perfect love. 

How many times do we NOT turn to him for it? How many times do we turn to other things, other people, for a love that’s more than they can give? Or something that they’re not meant to give?

I think about us as writers, we want our readers to love us. Yes, we’re there to serve them, but we’re not there to get love from them. We can’t find perfect love. We can’t get our acceptance and our validation there because God is the one who gives that to us. God is the one who loves us perfectly. That’s what we need to be thankful for.

I think, too, we need to remember to give grace to each other because God gives grace to us and still loves us. He gives us a model for loving others: his love. Not that we can do it like he does. 

But his love… sometimes guys, just take five minutes. Just take five minutes and sit down and dwell in God’s love. Think about it. Meditate on it. Or just let it flow over you. It’s well worth it to consider and to take time to live in that place. 

Karen: God is also our counselor. Proverbs 2:6-8 tells us, “For the Lord gives wisdom. From his mouth, come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright. He is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice and watching over the ways of his saints.”

My husband, Don, and I have always had a difficult relationship. Still do sometimes. We went through 20 years of marital counseling. When we first started going to counselors, we went through like four of them, and all four of them quit counseling. They all said it didn’t have anything to do with us, but you know, you never can be quite sure. 

Then God led us to a man who was a true counselor. He was a godly counselor. We learned that real counselors, counselors who are doing what they’re doing because God has led them to it—and God is our Counselor—they do more of than just listen and give advice. 

They don’t just sit there and, like you know, all these things we see on TV where the way that counselors are depicted there are like, “And how does that make you feel? And how does that make you feel?”

That’s not what God does. God enters into whatever we are experiencing. Whether it’s a good thing, whether it’s a hard thing, whether it’s confusion, whether it’s not knowing what the next step is, we can take it all to our counselor, to our God and just pour our hearts out to him and ask him to grant us guidance. 

He doesn’t just give advice. He shows us the way we should go. He listens not just to our words, but to our hearts and to our spirits. He helps us to understand ourselves and others. He gives us insight and revelation so that we can understand situations better. He helps us to see our own weaknesses and to deal with them if we will submit them to him and place them on his alter. 

I had a terrible time, and still do at times, dealing with pride. I’m an abled person in many ways. I’ve been able to do a lot of things without a whole lot of effort to do it. I let myself believe in my own press for a while, and then I was just flattened by something that I couldn’t deal with. 

I realized I have nothing to be proud about. The only thing, like Paul says, that I can take pride in is Christ and him crucified. Nothing else. I can take pride in the fact that I trusted God. I told him I can’t. So God helps us see our weaknesses and to deal with them. 

He’s the one true catalyst for change within us. As our counselor, as our holy guide and the one who grants us holy revelation, he’s the catalyst within us that will change us into a better reflection of Christ in the world. In our writing, in our relationships, in everything that we say and do.

If you’re not reflecting him in what you’re writing, seriously, what’s the point? Don’t go through the pain. But if you want to do it and you want to reflect him in the stories and the nonfiction books that you’re sharing, then recognize who he is to you as your counselor. 

Erin: Right. And as your counselor, think of him also as your guide on your writing journey. Sometimes we get so caught up in wondering what we should do. We talk to everybody, and we read books about writing, and we read blogs, and we do this and we do that. We ask all these things, and we forget to ask God. So be sure that you’re looking to God for his counsel in what you do each day and every step you take on your writing journey.

Erin: The next attribute we want to talk about is that God is just. His judgments also are perfect. It says in Deuteronomy 32:4: “The Rock, his work is perfect for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without inequity, just an upright is he.”

I think that understanding the justice of God helps us to better appreciate his great mercy. We cannot forget that what we deserve in this world is death. We are not perfect people. We are sinful people. What God gave us is not what we deserve. He gave us a Savior, Jesus, to pay the penalty, to pay for our willful defiance, our inability to submit. Jesus satisfied the just wrath of God.

I think we as writers, we need to remember what we deserve and how we got mercy instead. I think this helps our attitude every day to be one of gratitude and humility. We need that as writers. 

We need to practice mercy toward each other. I’m not saying that you should be a doormat, but practice mercy. Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.” Matthew 6:7 (ESV)

As Karen was talking earlier about the publishing industry, I mean, guys, it’s not fair. Publishing is not fair. We need to avoid seeking our own vengeance. That’s something for God to deal with, because God is just. All we need to do is approach God with complete trust as our just vindicator and the one who’s in control. 

Karen: God is also our refiner. I love this idea of him as our refiner. You’ve all heard the Scripture where he tells us that he will test us and refine us like silver (1 Peter 1:7). Where it gets melted and the impurities rise to the surface. The person who’s doing the refining scoops that off and just keeps going through that process. 

I think, too, of a sculptor who works on a piece of granite and inside that piece of granite is this beautiful creation, but he has to chip away at everything that is not the refined piece. Being refined is never easy. It’s painful. 

My husband and I, as this is being recorded, have been preparing our home to sell. With everything that we do, I think to myself that I just want to put it on the market the way it is. Just take it as is. I don’t want to go through all this. 

We tend to be like that in our faith. “I just want to write my books. I just want to do the speaking. Why can’t people just buy it the way it is?” 

There is refinement that has to take place in order to lead us toward excellence in what we’re doing for God. That painful process of being refined, of being thrown into the fire and burned with all the dross coming off, of having the chisel set to those hard parts of us that are hardened against God—none of that is fun. 

But God is a master refiner and a master sculptor. What you will become is a masterpiece that will reflect him. We’re told in Scripture, in 1 John 3:2: “We are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” 

We will be the reflection that he has been making us into for him. To stand beside him and glorify him. Our refinement is not about us being better and perfect. Our refinement is about being more obedient, more submitted, and glorifying God for who he is. To let the world see us, glorifying him, raising our hands to him, and letting him shine through us. 

Erin: I love that metaphor of the sculpture. I don’t know if any of you have ever seen Michelangelo’s sculpture called David, but can you just picture this sculpture of this man halfway done? People will be walking by going, “Hmm, I don’t have a lot of faith here, Michelangelo. He doesn’t look too good right now…” 

It is not a pretty process. And yet the end result! Now, maybe we’re not going to see that end result until heaven. And maybe it’s not going to be 100% pretty along the way, but Karen is right. It’s all about patience. It’s all about being willing to go through that process.

Erin: The next thing is that God is relational. Think about the Trinity. That’s probably always going to be a mystery to me, but it also makes me think that there is a perfect fellowship in this three in one. Perfect fellowship among God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That tells me that God is relational.

Then there’s the fact that God says he’s going to make man in his own image to walk with him in the cool of the garden. That’s relationship right there. Now, God doesn’t need people because he’s self-sufficient. He’s perfect without us. We can’t make him better. We can’t complete him by, like, knowing him or loving him or anything. But we become better people for our relationship with him.

As writers and people, sometimes we forget just how much God desires to have relationship with us. Just because he doesn’t need us doesn’t mean he doesn’t want us. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t desire that relationship with us and enjoy that relationship with us. 

One of my favorite verses is Jeremiah 31:3. It says, “I’ve loved you with an everlasting love…” that’s relational. It goes on, “Therefore I have drawn you with loving kindness.”

There’s even more relational language in Hosea 2:19-20. This is the New King James version, but I like the way it says, “I will betroth you to me forever, yes, I will betroth you to me, in righteousness and justice in loving kindness and mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness and you shall know the Lord.”

That’s all about relationship. And the writing journey, we’ve said this so often, the writing journey is all about relationship with God. It’s the carrying out of life, of mission, in God’s presence with him. 

Karen: Right. And in that same spirit, God is the giver of delight. I mean, all you have to do is look at the world that he created. This isn’t even the perfect world that he first created. This is a broken world that we’ve allowed sin and corruption to come into and bring decay. Yet, even as we look at this broken world, there is so much delight. So much beauty. 

Even just the flowers. They’re starting to bloom here. It’s spring as we’re recording this. My mini irises have just come up. My daffodils and jonquils are starting to open. They were buds yesterday. Today, they’re flowers. How does that happen? 

I keep looking at all of this around us. All of the beauty in the birds, in nature. All of the beauty in the people that we know and that we see. I’m not talking about what’s on the outside. I’m talking about on the inside. The beauty of that spirit submitted to God. The beauty of those who step out in courageous movements to spread God’s gospel. 

Again, as this is being recorded, Russia is invading the Ukraine. I just saw a picture of a street overflowing with Ukrainians who have stepped into the street and are praising and worshiping God and calling on him for protection as the Russian army is coming against them. 

That kind of beauty, friends, comes from the Spirit of God that comes in a washes over us and helps us to be brave no matter what’s taking place. God delights in us and over us. He gives us delight. Little ones. Big ones. 

In Zephaniah 3:17 it says, “For the Lord, your God is living among you. He is a mighty Savior. He will take delight in you with gladness. With his love he will calm all your fears. He will rejoice over you with joyful songs.”

The Creator of the world is rejoicing over you today in this moment. And as writers, God has given us this incredible invitation into creation. When we craft our books, his hands rest on ours. His words flow through us. Whatever we’re writing comes to life because of him and his love, not just for us, but for those who will read our words. God is the giver of delight and you can come to him and be praising him and thanking him for that attribute.

Erin: Amen! 

Karen: There’s so many things for us to know about God. There are so many pieces and parts and intricacies of who God is that our human minds can’t even begin to understand. Yet he comes to us with patience and with great love and opens our eyes at the perfect time to see whatever we need to see of him and to embrace the things that he wants us to embrace of him.

Not because we’re perfect. Not because we’re worth it. But because he loves, regardless of all of that. God is so big. We are so small. Yet everything that he is is there for us. To draw us into relationship with him, to draw us into becoming a better reflection of him. 

Friends, God delights over you. God loves you. God brings you justice. God will guide you. God is perfect. God is omnipresent. God is! 

Just stop for a moment and think about that. God is. And he’s for you. Let’s rejoice in that and savor that today, as we think about the work that we are doing, as he has called us to do it. 

Erin: Amen. 

Karen: Amen.

Has God been showing you more about one of his attributes lately? Which one? How?

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

Thanks so much to our March 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 Do You Really Know Who God Is? Part 2 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

As writers, we hope and pray that our words will reach readers’ hearts and minds. That our work will influence them to go deeper with God. But there’s another way we can open ourselves for God to use us, and that’s to use our words in prayer. Guest Lenora Worth shares how God has blessed her through being a prayer influencer.

About Lenora Worth

A member of the American Christian Fiction Writers Honor Roll, Lenora Worth writes romance and romantic suspense for Love Inspired and sweet romance for Tule Publishing. She also writes for Kensington Books. Three of her books have finaled in the ACFW Carol Awards. She received the Romantic Times Pioneer Award for Inspirational Fiction. Lenora is a NY Times, USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestselling writer and a 2019 RWA RITA® Finalist. With one-hundred-plus books and novellas published and over three million books in print, she enjoys adventures with her retired husband and loves reading, baking, and shopping … especially shoe shopping.

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

Erin: Welcome to all of you, our wonderful listeners in the deep. We’re thankful that you’re here with us. We have a guest, and we’re thankful for that, too!

Karen: Our guest is Lenora Worth. She and I worked together years and years and years ago. When I was heading up fiction at Multnomah Books, she was one of my authors when I was the managing editor there. I always enjoyed her books and loved her humor. 

She’s an ACFW honor roll member. She writes inspirational fiction for Harlequin’s Love Inspired and sweet romance for Tule Publishing. She also writes for Kensington books. This is one very busy lady! She helped launch the Rodeo Nights Western Romance imprint. Her Love Inspired Suspense novel Body of Evidence made the New York Times bestseller list. She’s also a USA Today and Publishers Weekly bestselling author. 

She is amazing! In 2016, she received a Romantic Times Pioneers of Fiction Award, and when her 75th book published, she received the ACFW milestone pin at the same time that Debbie Macomber received the same pin. Lenora said she was more excited to share the stage with Debbie Macomber than anything else. I don’t blame her! Debbie is amazing, too. 

Three of Lenora’s books have been nominated for the ACFW Carol Award, and she is an RWA Rita finalist. She’s written a hundred plus books and has an estimated 3 million books in print. She loves cheesecake, shoe shopping, walking on the beach, and reading. And she has an amazing prayer ministry, which is what we’re going to talk about today.

Erin: Yes! Thank you, Lenora for being here. Welcome! 

Lenora: Thank you for having me.

Erin: So, we love to ask everybody, what does the deep mean to you? 

Lenora: The deep. You mean this deep we’re in now, or any deep? 

Erin: You can decide. It can mean whatever you want. 

Lenora: Well, with you two, it means fun, I’m sure! Deep into fun. But I think when I hear the words in the deep, it means going to those places you might not normally go and exploring the fiction you might not think you can write. And taking up on the challenges that you’re afraid to step into. Sometimes we go in the deep and we get in trouble, but most of the time we go in the deep and we find exactly what we’re looking for.

Karen: I love that. 

Erin: And since you’re speaking as a person who obviously has taken on a lot of challenges with your hundred plus books, those are good words. 

Lenora: Thank you. 

Karen: Lenora and I belong to the same online group of published novelists, and we have always had what they call a Monday morning prayer time, or a Wednesday morning prayer time, where one of the members posts a prayer for the requests from the whole group. Lenora took that over…how long ago was that, Lenora? 

Lenora: You know, I was trying to remember that the other day. I think it has been about a year now. 

Karen: I think so. I’ve always loved reading the prayers from the different writers who have shared them, but there was something different about Lenora’s prayer ministry. She made it so personal and so encouraging. Yes, it was the prayer requests, but it was also things deep from her heart to share with these other writers. It was just moving. The first time I read one of her posts, I just, I almost wept. It was so moving and so personal. 

What led you to doing that? I mean, obviously you’re a very busy woman. What led you to taking on the prayer ministry for this online group?

Lenora: I really don’t know what happened to me. I mean, I just thought somebody needs to do this. You know, we started it out as prayers for our children, and it would go from one person to the other. We would gather the prayers and then we would repeat them in one long prayer post so we could pray over these people. 

But sometimes when I was in charge, it took longer for me to get it together. And I thought, well, prayer is urgent. If it’s a small prayer, a big prayer, it’s urgent. Why not just do it once a week, like almost live, as live as possible?

Karen: Right. 

Lenora: That’s what made me volunteer to do it that way on every Wednesday. Because you know, I grew up Baptist. Now I’m a Methodist. But we had Wednesday night prayer meeting and vespers and things like that. I thought midweek, you know, we’re rushing through the weekend and it would be a midweek uplifting time even during urgent prayers. 

So, that’s how it started. And Karen can tell you, once I get to talking, I don’t want to stop. Once I get writing, I don’t want to stop either. So it just kind of organically happened. 

I was really shocked when people started responding to it. I’m like, well, what did I write? I mean, I put thought into it, of course, because I really deeply want these prayers to be answered in one way or another. It’s just really whatever’s in my head that morning. Something grabs me that I can relate to the prayers that people are asking us to pray. 

Karen: It was amazing to me because I always respond to prayers. I used to say I’m praying, but I wasn’t really. I mean, you know, if God brought it to my mind, I would pray. But these were so personal. It’s like you brought us into each other’s lives in such a way that it reminded us, “Oh, this isn’t some random prayer requests. This is a prayer request from someone we know, we like, we respect, we care about.” 

It humanized the prayers in such a way that as soon as I started reading your requests and the things that you added in to help us to do that, to step in the other person’s shoes, I would pray right off. And that’s what I do now, when I read your prayer. I pray right off. I’m like, “Yes, Lord. I agree with that in the authority you’ve given us.”

You have done that for so many of us. You have spurred us, through what you do in humanizing this, into intent and serious prayer. And into rejoicing. It is like a worship service. It is like being uplifted. That’s really phenomenal. 

Lenora: Well, as usual, the Lord just let me stumble into it because he knows me. He’s like, “You can do this.” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t think I can, but I’ll try.” 

You know, when I walk on the beach, I talk to God. I guess that’s where it stems from, too, because that’s my private place to have talks with God. A lot of things have happened on the beach that I knew God was involved in.

So when we do our Wednesday prayers, and we’ve known each other for so long, probably 20 or 25 years, and it is all women. We’re all mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, daughters. All the things that women go through. The men made us kind of leave the other group. We scared them with some of the things we were talking about. 

We talk about health issues, and children, and moving, and not being able to move, and losing a job, or not being able to write that next book. These are things that we as writers all identify with. I think that’s why to me it became more personal because, you know, prayers are urgent. We need them right now. So, everybody can know that on Wednesday morning, I might be a little late, but I’ll get there, and we will have a prayer meeting. 

Erin: What’s so fascinating about this, too, is that you have that time on the beach where you’re talking to God, but this is just another medium when you’re writing out this prayer. I think that’s really a neat thing for especially writers to think about. If they’re feeling like their prayer life maybe is lacking or could stand some expansion, you know, that’s true for all of us probably, it would be neat, you know, do we write out our prayers? That would be fun and could be an exciting new way to connect with God. 

Lenora: Well, it’s how I’ve always connected with God. I grew up on a farm and I was the last of seven children. I was more like an only child because they were all up and grown, and they had given me such wonderful examples of what to do and what not to do.

I would go down to what we call the branch. It was like a little stream, and there was a tree there that would wave. I called that my God tree, and I would talk to that tree and then I’d feel better about things. I did that all through high school until I left there. 

So to me, talking to God is very personal. I’m not a biblical scholar, but I love Jesus. And so, I like to put that in when I’m talking. When I feel like I’m talking to this group as a woman to other women, I like to put that in there. You know, he’s here with us always.

Karen: Yes. It’s the encouragement, it’s the affirmation that you share with us. It really is like we’ve all gathered together in a living room, and we’re sitting there, and we’re together. I know for those of us who are writers, we spend so much time writing our books or whatever, and we can look at prayer sometimes as an add-on, you know? Like, “Yeah, I’ll pray for that when I have time.” Or, “Lord, I’ll pray for that when you bring it to mind.”

And yet this is stopping and taking time to get personally invested in praying for each other. To get personally invested even in the words of encouragement and what for me are encouraging devotionals. Just short little devotionals that you give us to remind us of who we are in Christ and of what prayer means to us and to each other.

So my question is, what have you discovered about yourself in this process as a writer? 

Lenora: Well, that I can do things if I let God lead me. I mean, with every book I send out, I think, “Oh, this is the worst book ever, but God led me to write it.” I feel like, “Well, if God led me to write it, it’s going to be okay. If it doesn’t sell a million copies, it’s going to be okay. If one person reads it and it helps that person, it’s going to be okay.”

That’s how I’ve written every book. I always start, before I even write one word, I just hold my fingers on the keys and let God flow through me. I ask him, “Please, give me the words.”

As writers, words are our life, and why not expand that to our prayers, too? Use the thing we love the most to talk to God in a way that God can feel it, and you can feel it, and you can help someone else. 

Karen: Very cool. 

Erin: How do you feel like you’ve been impacted personally through what you’ve been doing on Wednesdays with these prayers you’re writing?

Lenora: Well, it helps me to get grounded and settled, because we all have problems in life. With the last few years with everything that’s been going on in the world, it all becomes personal sometimes, and you’re like, “I just can’t do it anymore.”

This has helped me know that I have a place to go, that I can share things in confidence with people who understand, because they’ve been through the same things, and they’re dealing with the same things.

Karen: Right. 

Lenora: It’s important to me, myself, to be there, to show up because God wants us to show up. Like Karen said, to actually pray for these people. Pray for the new requests that come in, ask people about the requests that have passed, you know, “How are you doing? Are you doing better? Would you like to update us?”

There’s some people on there that don’t want to talk about anything, but they’re included because we know that he is with them, too. So I always try to include them and say, “If you have unspoken prayers or requests, we’re listening. We’re here.”

Erin: I think that’s so important, what you’re talking about, this need for connection for us as a body. I believe that God made us that way deliberately. He made us a body and built into us that need for connection. I love that it can take a lot of different forms. You guys have this great online group that works for this connection. 

I have been a part of writers groups. I currently am a part of a mastermind. These women are where I go for that connection and that prayer and, oh my goodness, what a difference it makes. So I just want to encourage everybody out there. Find a connection, find a group. 

Karen: Even if it can’t be face to face. This group is very large that Lenora and I are part of it and it can’t be a face-to-face thing. I’ve seen now that just doing a prayer list or posting the prayers that are needed and the requests that have come in, that that can be a very personal, intimate thing. You find yourself drawn to God’s throne as you’re petitioning for the people that you care about. 

Lenora: I think that’s what helped me, to still answer that question, it has helped me to be closer to Christ. That’s something I needed. And with the pandemic, we don’t get together as much as we used to. 

Karen: Right. 

Lenora: Hopefully that will happen again. But to gather as women, because women, you know, women follow Jesus. They believed in Jesus. They held these things in their hearts and pondered them. So we as women, it’s our time to be us and to be females who are dealing with difficult situations or joyous situations. We can talk to each other, honestly, without knowing that the whole world is listening. It’s just us and Jesus.

Karen: I love that. 

Erin: Well, the honesty part, again, we live in a curated world, even like, look at social media, people are just seeing what we choose to put out there. We’re losing that place where we can drop the mask. Where we don’t have to fear being seen, because really we all want to be seen. 

It’s such an interesting paradox. We’ve been talking at our church about a book by Curt Thompson, I think it’s called The Soul of Desire. But he talks about how we want to be seen, but at the same time are afraid to be seen, because we’re thinking we’re imposters or we’re worried about what others are going to see.

So this kind of connection, and especially prayer, there’s something about prayer, that helps us drop the mask and be authentic with each other. It is so needed. I think it helps our writing too. 

Karen: It definitely does. It informs our writing because especially in today’s publishing world where publishers are bringing in sensitivity readers, and suddenly we find ourselves in the hot seat for writing the stories that God has given us to write and not using the right terms that we’re supposed to be using.

It gets so frustrating, and it gets so debilitating for writers, where we’re afraid to put our hands to the keyboard. But when we’re grounded in this sense of prayer for others and even for ourselves, and when we remember that God is with us and we don’t have to be afraid, we can let go of trying to be “politically correct,” and instead focus on being “God correct.” 

Be correct according to what Scripture tells us, what God is moving you to say. Write what God tells you to write. Put your fingers on the keyboard, like you do, Lenora, and just let him fly through what you have to share. Through what he’s given you to share. I think we spend way too much time trying to do the right thing in the world’s eyes, rather than doing the God thing. 

Lenora: Well, you’re right. You know, one of my recent posts was about being a prayer influencer. That’s the new catch word. “Oh, one need influencers.” There are social media influencers. Why not be a prayer influencer? You know, help people who need the prayer, want the prayer, understand the prayer. Spread that while you’re spreading your books. And your social media platforms, use that, too. So that’s one thing that I realized. We have such an influence. 

Karen: It’s an influence that God has given us by his blessings and his guidance over our careers. Definitely we need to be using that to share our hearts about Him.

Lenora: Yeah, that’s right.

Erin: I love that phrase: “prayer influencer.” That needs to catch on. 

Lenora: We can make it happen. 

Erin: So do you feel like what you’re doing has also impacted you then as a writer? Speak a little bit more about how writing these prayers out has impacted you personally as a writer. 

Lenora: Well, it really has. As I said, it grounded me, and even when I’m having a tough time writing, it brings me back to the core. “Why are you here? What message do you want to give? What is the core of the story you’re trying to write?” 

When you go through a difficult time with a book, the edits might be horrendous, or it’s just not coming together, or you’re rushing toward a deadline, I find that now, I just sit there and calmly bring myself back to my center. I focus on what has to be done and take it one step at a time. 

I think the post I posted yesterday was about how our pastor taught about “God math.” God has a different math than we do. God’s already calculated everything and he has the answers, and we’re frantically typing and trying to calculate, “How many words do I need to write a day to get to this deadline?” Or, “How many chapters do I need to finish this book?” And, “How am I going to get dinner done? I need to be done here so I can go there.” God knows all that. 

Karen: Right. 

Lenora: And so I thought, “Why do I get so frantic about these things? He knew me before I was born. He knows the hairs on my head, which are not as many as there used to be. He knows it all. So just relax.”

So now if I have a problem with edits, I talk to somebody. It might be my editor or some friends who can help me through it. And pray, of course. Always pray. 

I started this little blog called Read, Write, Play, Pray. You can find it at askelnora.com. I think I’ve had about five posts so far, and I talk about that there. You know, we write, we play a little bit, we pray a little bit, we read a lot. These are the things that we love as people who write. I hope to keep developing that. 

That was another thing that I thought. I needed to blog again. I’d stopped blogging because I got overwhelmed, and I thought, “I just need to blog again.” It’s not for a social media platform. It’s not to gather numbers. It’s just the place for me to write, kind of free write. You know, freestyle. 

Erin: Yeah, I love it. We’re almost out of time. It’s gone so fast. Out of your wisdom of a hundred plus books, do you have any final words of wisdom you want to leave with our listeners?

Lenora: Well, if you’re a writer, write what your heart tells you to write, and don’t compare yourself to other writers. 

Karen: Amen. 

Lenora: Let God lead the way. If you’re a reader, read the books that can teach you a message and help you heal and help you enjoy life. You want to have joy, because you know, there’s darkness and then there’s light. We want to give light to our readers. That’s important. 

Karen: Amen. 

Erin: Yes. 

Karen: Well, Lenora, thank you so much for coming here and sharing with us. I so appreciate everything that you’ve talked about and how you’ve shared your heart with the listeners here on our podcast, but especially in the prayers that you share and in the prayers that you do for the group that we’re both a part of.

You’ve reminded me of the foundation, of being conditioned to turn to God. This has clearly helped you to make your instantaneous response to struggles and obstacles and joy and all of that, to be to turn to God. May we all learn that. May we all be so conditioned that we can relax. We can rest in him and we can let him take us where he wants and know that our only job is obedience and he handles all the rest.

Lenora: Amen. 

Erin: Amen.

Guest @LenoraWorth shares how you can become a prayer influencer for readers and other writers! #amwriting #christianwriter
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What do you think about the idea of being a prayer influencer?

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

Thanks so much to our March 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 161 – Be a Prayer Influencer! with Guest Lenora Worth appeared first on Write from the Deep.

We all rejoice when that amazing call comes telling us someone is offering a contract for our work. What a wonder! And it’s easy to think we’ve made it. That it’s all downhill from here. And yet, there are times when that wonder—and the contract—are canceled. Whether you know the why or not, that is a HARD hit. Guest Chase Replogle knows exactly how that feels, and he’s here to help you prepare not just for the hit, but for getting up and moving forward afterward!

About Chase Replogle

Chase Replogle is the pastor of Bent Oak Church in Springfield, Missouri. He has a degree in Biblical Studies, an M.A. in New Testament, and he’s currently a D.Min. student in The Sacred Art of Writing at Western Theological Seminary. He’s written for Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, Ekstatis, Bible Engagement Project, and Influence Magazine. He also hosts the Pastor Writer Podcast, interviewing Christian authors on the calling and craft of writing.

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

Karen: Welcome friends. It’s time to go into the deep again. We are so looking forward to our conversation today with our guest, Chase Replogle. Chase, did I say that right?

Chase: Close enough. That qualifies. 

Erin: I stumble over that, too.

Chase: A great author name, right? 

Karen: We’re delighted to have you here, Chase. 

Erin: Yeah, and I get to introduce him. Yay! Now that we all know how to pronounce his last name, we’re good. Chase Replogle is the founding pastor of Bent Oak Church. He holds a degree in Biblical Studies and an M.A. in New Testament. He hosts the weekly Pastor Writer Podcast, which you can find pastorwriter.com. On the podcast, he interviews pastors and authors on writing, reading, and the Christian life. 

I’ve got to tell you, I’m a fan of the podcast. I learn about new books to add to my ever growing reading list. But that’s just the way it is, right? The podcast and the website, they also chronicle Chase’s ongoing writing projects and that’s one of the things we’re going to be talking to him about today. His first book, The 5 Masculine Instincts, comes out in March of this year, and we’re super excited for him.

That’s actually just in a couple of weeks if you’re hearing this when this first airs. Chase is a native of the Ozark woods. He enjoys being outdoors with his wife and two kids. They sail, and Chase says he likes playing the mandolin—he says badly—and quail hunting with his bird dog, Millie. Chase, it is great to have you here with us today. Welcome. 

Chase: Thank you so much. I love listening to your guys’ show as well. It’s good to be amongst friends. 

Erin: It is indeed. Well, Chase, we definitely want to ask you first and foremost, what does the deep mean to you? 

Chase: I love this as your guys’ tradition. I knew it was coming, so I thought a little bit about it as well.

For me, so about writing is bogged down into strategy. What do you do if this happens? How do you approach this? How do you write that query letter? How do you write that proposal? How do you get that agent? What do you do in this situation? You know, you’re probably even thinking, what would I do if my contract got canceled? 

I think this deep work that we’re doing means you have to do that stuff. You have to learn that stuff, but there should be something motivating you at a deeper level that sustains you through all of that. Don’t ever allow yourself to turn it into just strategy, just tactics. 

Really fight to keep hold of that thing in you that is for me the faithfulness to what I believe God has called me to. Hold on to that. Even when you have to do the tactic conversations, the strategy conversations, remember the reason why you’re doing it. I think if you hold on to that, that’s the kind of deep work, the deep writing that I really want to do, that I want to be true.

Erin: Cool. Love it. Chase, I want people to hear about your experience getting a contract and what happened to that contract. Let’s just start there.

Chase: It’s funny, there’s all these sort of steps, as you know, in the publishing process. You have to be able to put together a proposal and find an agent and then usually they help with that proposal and then start pitching. 

For me, that process started pretty quickly. I was lucky enough to find a great agent pretty quickly and cross that off the list and moved on to the next step. Like so many writers, we had some waiting and lots of hard conversations about platform and trying to continue to grow that. With time we sort of made it over that hurdle, and I was thrilled.

I signed a contract with Zondervan with the acquisitions editor Mick Silva, who I had gotten to know through my writing and the podcast. It was just kind of a dream. I loved working with Mick, and so it was just the best that I could imagine. 

We signed the contract, and in talking with Zondervan, we had updated the proposal and they kind of pitched another concept. So I reworked the idea. It was going to mean going back and writing the manuscript again and changing some sections. But I was actually really excited about that. I felt like the collaboration with them was really good. 

I set out to work on a new manuscript. I got about two thirds of the way into that process. I had about eight to ten months to finish that manuscript and got about two thirds of the way into it. 

I remember very clearly that it was middle of summer and the middle of the pandemic, the first year. We were home during that season, and I got a phone call from my agent, which was kind of unusual. Normally we corresponded by email. She said, “I’ve got some bad news for you.” 

She’d just received a very short email from the legal department at Zondervan that basically said due to COVID and a reprioritizing of their projects, they were terminating the contract that we had signed and that I was well underway writing. So it was unexpected. 

Erin: Tell us about your reaction. That’s the worst news for any writer to get. I’m interested in your first reaction, because how I learned that that happened to you was that I heard you announce it on your podcast when it happened. I specifically remember I was painting windows. I remember what I was doing and I remember thinking, “That is just the best explanation. The most kind, humble explanation.” 

But I want to know if that was your first reaction. I’m thinking maybe not? But maybe. 

Chase: Let’s see if I match up to what I said then. I had two very distinct feelings. I remember very early the number one feeling sounds a little immature, but it was like, “This figures! This seems to be how it goes!” 

Like anybody who’s tried to go down the publishing road knows, it is so confusing, and at times, so overwhelming. Things never go how you expect. It just felt like, “Well, okay, here we are. This is it.”

But I also had a very distinct feeling that I had to keep writing. I knew intuitively, “I’m two thirds of the way through this manuscript. If I stop now, like, I don’t know what that would mean. I don’t know if I have it in me to stir that all back up again.”

I remember even telling my agent on the phone, “We’re going to work on what comes next, but I’m kind of also going to pretend this didn’t happen, and I’m just going to keep working on what I’ve been working on.” 

Erin: Wow. I think that’s super interesting. You actually then completed that book even though the contract went away?

Chase: Yeah, I did. I was two thirds of the way into it. I kind of knew where it was going. I had a plan on how I was going to get there. And it just felt like to lose the contract was a blow, but to lose the contract and stop writing felt like, I don’t know how I would’ve put it back together. 

This is a little bit of a lesson with the whole process of publishing. One of the things I just continually keep learning is there’s so little of the process you actually can control. At the end of the day, the writing is one of the only things. I just held on to that as the thing that I could do. How do I keep making this manuscript better? How do I just keep the actual work in front of me? 

Karen: We talk on our podcast quite often about the fact that writing isn’t about getting published. Writing is about obedience. God has really given you this task to perform. The important thing is being obedient to that task and then leaving the details up to him.

I love that you are connected with the agent that you have. She’s a great agent. And I love that it happened fairly early and easily for you. It was a good start, and it gave you a confirmation that this is where God wanted you.

But then to follow up on that and be obedient and continue the writing, that’s exactly what we need to do when things seem to just implode. 

Chase: Yeah. It’s also important to remember that we were in the middle of the first year of the pandemic. As a pastor, it was already a very complicated time trying to lead a congregation and seeing people with very different views. 

In some ways that season also, I felt very strongly, there was a lot changing for a lot of people in the world. And this is not as big as what it could be. It felt very big because it had been something I had spent so many years working toward. But it was a season where so many of us were having plans changed, and expectations dashed, and learning to do things in new ways. So it just felt like, okay, this is a part of that. 

Erin: I love that, too, because that whole first time, the whole first few months and year of the pandemic, was such a season of loss for everybody. And you dealt with that loss by not really losing. I respect that. That you just went and kept writing that book almost like therapy, even. You know that this is who you are. You’re going to be a writer, and you’re going to finish and not throw it across the room in frustration. I love that. Tell us what happened next.

Chase: As I continued to write, my agent and I had a conversation. It was not a good time to pitch. We later found out that there was more going on at the publisher. They were changing some acquisition strategies and changing some parts of the leadership team. My contract was one of actually several that got caught up in that. 

A lot of publishers were still uncertain about what sales would look like and how they should approach acquisition during the pandemic, and so it was just not a good time.

I think in the podcast episode you alluded to, I’d put out on the podcast just saying where I was because I’d been updating people along the way. We actually had a couple of publishers reach out to us through that process who’d had heard the episode. Publishers I’d connected with earlier on the podcast.

It started a couple of conversations. Those took a little bit of time, but we ended up signing a contract with Moody Publishers. Luckily they felt good about the concept and where the direction was. It got me back into it and set the trajectory for the book being released March 1st.

Erin: Did you end up having to make a lot more changes for Moody? Or was it just, you know, kind of the basic editing stuff? 

Chase: I did some. Originally there were a couple of chapters at the beginning of the book that, to be honest, I probably would have ended up cutting even in the previous contract. In the writing process, the idea sort of condenses and tightens. Sometimes you write just to figure out what you think about something, and then it can get cut. There were some chapters that got removed, but for the most part, Moody seemed really on board with the concept and they’ve been great to work with.

Erin: That’s cool. In case our listeners are interested in reading the book, tell us a little bit about what the first book was and then what it turned into. 

Chase: The first book was based on the story of Samson. I saw a lot of parallels in the life of Samson and myself as young man, and also in a lot of the young men I was pastoring in that there can be a kind of restlessness for adventure. The cultural narrative right now is often to know who you are. To find your identity, you need to leave home and traditions and go find yourself in this sort of adventurous quest. 

I saw the way that was really weakening commitment in a lot of the men’s lives that I knew. So I worked on a whole book just based on Samson. When Zondervan and I first began talking, they, from a publishing perspective, wanted to see if we could expand the readership beyond just millennial men to men in general.

They had said, “Is there a way to cover multiple biblical characters? Sort of like which man type are you?” At first I didn’t quite resonate with that. I spent some time thinking and praying about that. Then I stumbled across Shakespeare’s stages of a man. That’s from the monologue, “All the world’s a stage, each of us players, and a man in his day plays several parts.” 

Shakespeare goes through these stages and I immediately recognized, “Oh, Samson is like this particular stage Shakespeare is describing.” That gave me a framework for then recognizing stages. You can see these other stages at work in biblical men as well. That turned into the five masculine instincts that look at five biblical men across these stages that Shakespeare identified.

Karen: That’s very cool. 

Erin: What I love is that transformative process. How we as writers need to hold those ideas, yes, but we have to hold them loosely and be open to suggestions and changes. Things that could push the book maybe not where we first thought, but push it into something that can be better. Or can match better with where the audience is for that publisher. They know their audience. It’s not like you’re selling out, it’s that you’re pushing to see where this book can go to better meet the needs of more people. So I like it.

Chase: I had a lot of people recommend I self publish after the contract fell apart. I thought about that for a little bit, too. We actually talked, my agent and I, about whether this was the season, whether that was the right next step. 

But for me, the reason I’ve always wanted to go down the traditional route was I wanted to work with the best team that I possibly could. And to your point, I really value that. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have some core conviction you’re trying to hold on to through the process. I mean, even as I sort of alluded to how part of that idea was not exactly resonating with me. But I also respect them enough to know they bring a certain expertise that I should be listening to.

So is there a way to sort of take all of that expertise and to sort of see if I can work that conviction, that thing I’m trying to do in the context of what they’re bringing to the table? For me, that’s the real benefit of working with a publisher. You can do that with self publishing, but for me, traditional publishing answered how I could build the best team around this book that I could.

Karen: As I listen to the whole process that you went through, it reminds me of Psalm 62:1-2: “I’m at rest in God alone. My salvation comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold, I will never be shaken.”

Quite a few translations say, “I will never be disappointed.” When you have your focus on God, and when you’ve submitted what you’re writing to God, and you trust that whatever is coming your way is coming through his hands and by his will, you can never be shaken. You can never be disappointed.

I mean, we’ll have emotions. There’s no way of stopping those emotions. We’re made in God’s image, and he has emotions. But we can put our trust in God. Not in a publisher. Not even in an agent. Not in other people. But put your trust in God and you will never be disappointed because you can know solid gold is the foundation. That he is doing what is best, not just for your writing, but for you. 

Chase: Yeah, I think that’s well put.

Erin: I’m wondering, Chase, if given where you are now, the eve of your book releasing, is there anything that maybe you would have done differently if you could have? Or like what you would tell yourself if “future you” could go back to “old you” and tell you something, is there something you wish you knew or did differently or anything like that?

Chase: I alluded earlier to how I was thinking of the process as sort of boxes you checked, and then you move on to the next one. I think I had in my mind, like, “Okay, I’m going to do this next step the best possible way I can, and then I’m done. I’ll move on.”

I saw it very linearly, and I now recognize it’s more complicated than that. And to your point also, maybe you’re not supposed to rush through some of those steps just as quickly as you can to get to the next. Maybe there is something of the messiness, or the complexity, or just the passing of time itself, that can actually make the work richer than it would if you just rushed through the process.

It’s easy to say retrospectively, but I would’ve told myself, “Just keep focusing on the right work. Because there’s so much work that can be done, but what is the actual work in front of me right now that I’m supposed to be doing? The thing I actually can do? Stay focused on that.” 

Erin: I love that. One of the things I also wanted to ask you about was your podcast. I’m thinking that you started it in general because, as we all know, writers need platforms. So I’m thinking that was kind of the reasoning behind starting it. But I was going to ask you, how does it now help your career?

You’ve already given an excellent point: Hey, those editors heard about my situation and they got back in touch with me. But I’m sure there are other things involved in why you chose to podcast and how that’s influenced your career. 

Chase: It’s a really interesting question because initially, you’re exactly right, I wanted to find a way to build platform. I’m a small church pastor. You know, I’m a Midwest guy. There’s nothing, there’s no celebrity. So how do I build a platform that doesn’t feel like it’s me just promoting myself?

Well, I love this sort of thing. Just having conversations felt very natural to me. The other part was just sort of trying to hack my way into professional relationships. When I started, I didn’t know a single published author. I didn’t know a single literary agent. I didn’t know a single editor working at a publishing house. I mean, literally no one. My dad’s a cop, that sort of thing. Like, I didn’t grow up in that circle. So it was, “How do I just hack my way into these relationships?” 

But looking back, if I was going to say the biggest thing the podcast has done—because it’s kind of evolved now, I don’t just talk about writing, we talk about books in general—I’ve come to realize how valuable relationships are. And to your point, editors heard about the opportunity through my podcast, but really it was because I had tried to build lots of relationships with editors even before I was pitching. I’d have them on. Talk to them. Figure out what their publisher is looking for and what they’re doing. 

Many of them are writers themselves, so just talking about writing. How do I just build relationships? And over and over and over everything that has happened for good has been because of relationships. Not because I lucked into it or happened to really impress someone. It’s usually existed because I’ve taken the time to try to get to know people. 

Erin: Yeah, that’s wonderful. I love how we think we’re networking, but then we realize the real gold is the actual relationships that we build. It’s some of the best, best experiences to get to know writers and editors and publishers. It’s one of my favorite things.

Karen: It’s amazing to me because some of my best friends are the people that I have met, and I’ve known for years now, in publishing. Yeah, it started out just as a work relationship, but it goes so far beyond that. Not just because we share a love of writing and publishing, but we share a love of the Lord and we’re able to come together in that and to support each other and pray with each other.

Erin and I are a prime example. We met at a writer’s conference, and I signed her as a client when I was an agent. But it’s gone so far beyond that. One of the first people I want to contact if something happens in my life is Erin. Not because I was her agent and she’s an author, but because we share that love of the Lord and he’s built in us a love for each other. Those are the gifts that are tucked away in the hard work of writing. I think God is just so kind to do that for us.

Chase: I feel that even in conversations like this one, we write in very different genres and I don’t know, maybe our lives wouldn’t have crossed paths outside of this writing, but the truth is writing is really hard and publishing is really hard. So when you find other people like this conversation shows that are struggling their way through it, there is a camaraderie in the midst of that suffering that I think forms pretty quickly, and you need it. 

Erin: Exactly. 

Karen: So from all of this conversation and all of the experiences that you have, do you have any final words of encouragement for our listeners?

Chase: Yeah. For me, it would just be, and I know this sounds like such a cliche and glib answer, but I think you have to enjoy the process. I know that it is so frustrating and so painful, but celebrate when you have even little wins. Like just know going into it, you should be thinking in terms of decade, not months, and just give yourself patience and time to see where it goes.

Enjoy that you’re doing it. Trust me, I know that it’s easy for me to lose that, but that’s the thing when I know I’m doing it at my best, it’s just, God’s doing something here. I get to be a participant in it and see where it goes. And I’m just going to enjoy every step of it. 

Karen: Yeah. Enjoy the journey, and the detours are the journey.

Erin: Exactly. 

Karen: Thanks again, Chase, for being with us. We really appreciate it and appreciate you sharing from your experiences, and here’s hoping God blesses the launch of that book with just massive amounts of sales!

Erin: Indeed.

Chase: Thank you very much. You guys are the best. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for the opportunity.

Erin: Thanks, Chase!

Have you taken any hard hits in your writing career? How did you move forward after that?

The 5 Masculine Instincts by Chase Replogle

Guest Chase Replogle shares how God helped him get up––and move on––after a hard career hit. @thepastorwriter #amwriting #christianwriter
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We’re so grateful for the sponsorship from the Novel Marketing Podcast, with host Thomas Umstattd Jr. It’s the longest running book marketing podcast in the world. We know and trust Thomas, and his podcast is full of great information and advice—like Novel Marketing’s 10 Commandments of Book Marketing, which we’ve been bringing you.

Today we’re covering commandment #10: Thou shalt not be false to thine own brand.

What Thomas means by this is, and this is a quote, “Be true to who you are as an author. Your brand is not a photo, logo, genre, or collection of fonts. It is the story you tell about yourself. More importantly, it is the story others tell about you.”

Your brand is what readers expect of you. It’s your promise to them. Readers who read your first book and love it want to buy your next book, because they expect it will be like the first book. And they already know they like it. Now they want the same experience from you over and over. Commandment #10 ensures you give it to them.

So, think carefully about the type of book you want to publish before you ever publish anything, and make sure you’re willing to stay true to that brand. For more book promotion and platform help listen to Novel Marketing in your favorite podcast app or at NovelMarketing.com.

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

Thanks so much to our February sponsor of the month, Bobbi Updegraff! You can find out more about another important cause she sponsors at friendsofrenacer.com. It’s a wonderful ministry for orphaned children in Honduras!

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

The post 160 – Guest Chase Replogle Helps Writers Move Forward After a Hard Hit appeared first on Write from the Deep.

We’ve heard it before: “God is my everything.” It’s true, but do you really know what that means? He’s so much more than we can imagine. So come go deeper into just a few of the attributes of God and learn what those particular attributes mean to your writing career and your life.

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

Erin: Welcome listeners. We’re glad that you’re here with us in the deep. It’s still pretty early in the year, and we want to encourage you to make this year one where you deliberately seek a better and more accurate picture of who God is.

I’ve been reading, very slowly, a book called Knowledge of the Holy by A. W. Tozer. I just love what he has to say. I think it’s so wise. He says that he thinks that the church has a problem. It’s the “loss of the concept of majesty from the popular religious mind. The church has surrendered her once lofty concept of God and has substituted for it one so low, so ignoble as to be utterly unworthy of thinking, worshipping people.”

Ouch, right? He goes on to say, “This, she has not done deliberately, but little by little and without her knowledge, and her very unawareness only makes her situation all the more tragic.” 

Karen: We can’t be still and know that God is God if we have a wrong concept of who God is. We wanted to share some attributes of God and why they matter to us as individuals and as writers.

Erin: Right. So Karen and I were having fun with this. We’ve been just thinking of different attributes and pondering over the course of the last couple of weeks, so we’re just gonna go for it. 

The first one I thought of is that God is transcendent. I realize that’s a fancy word. I’ve always kind of wondered what it meant. But for me, the idea of God being transcendent, I like to define it as “totally other.” It’s like with our human thought, we can’t truly comprehend or imagine who God is. Or what. 

He’s not us. He’s so totally different from us in his substance. We can’t minimize him. We can’t make him like us. I think we have a tendency to try to anthropomorphize God too much, make him too human. But he’s not. He’s beyond.

Then I start thinking about how crossing the gulf of who God is to who we are is completely unattainable, except that God crossed that gulf for us. He reached out to us. It’s because of who he is that we can even relate to him. 

Then I start thinking about what does that mean for a writer? For me, it brings up awe. It brings up reverence. It brings a sense of humility that this God would reach to us. And it brings a sense of gratitude. I don’t want to forget how dependent I am. That he reaches out to us. That he draws us to him. I want to keep acknowledging my need for him to keep doing it. I can’t claw my way to him. It’s him who reaches out to me and to us. 

Karen: God is also the Alpha and the Omega. I love this for a number of reasons. Revelation 1:8, I’m sure you all have heard it before: “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning, and the end’ says the Lord, God. ‘I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come. The Almighty One.'”

The reason that I like this so much is that when we consider God being the Alpha and the Omega, not just of the world, but bring it down in a macro sense and think about it in our own lives. He is the God of our beginning, the God of our end, and the God of everything in between. 

We never have to feel as though God was with us when we were born and growing up and suddenly he’s not there anymore. Or in the beginning of our career, and things went one way, and then suddenly it changes, and we’re wondering where God is. If we have those feelings, they’re false. They’re from the enemy.

God is there for the beginning, the end, and everything in between. He is our Alpha and Omega for us as individuals and as writers. 

Erin: I love those words. There’s another verse that I like. It’s Isaiah 44:6, and it says, “This is what the Lord says—Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.”

What do I like about that? First and last. It’s just constantly giving us a sense of who God is. He’s the only first and last. There is no other first and last.

When Karen and I were thinking about the attributes, it was fun to think about how similar some of our attributes were. I’d thought of that God is preexistent, which reminds me of the Alpha and the Omega. He has no beginning and he has no end. My little brain struggles with that. He has no beginning. He just always was. That’s what it means to be God: to be always. Who was, who is, and who always will be. That’s who God is.

People, we’re the ones with the beginning. We’re the created things. God’s timeless. He’s outside of time. He made time. He’s been there, done that. He purposed us into existence. One of my favorite verses Hebrews 1:3, where we learn that Jesus is sustaining all things by his powerful word. He’s holding everything up. He started it all. It starts with him. It ends with him.

For writers, I think about God’s integrity. It’s his moral code that matters because he started it all. He started us. He created us, and so he has that right. He can set the rules, and it’s our job to submit to that, because he’s the beginning.

Karen: I also like the idea, the attribute of God, that he’s the Rose of Sharon. That’s from one verse in Song of Songs when the bride is telling her husband that she’s the rose of Sharon and a lily of the valley. It sounds like she’s boasting, but she’s really not. She simply telling him this is who I am. This is the beauty of who I am with you, and the beauty of our love.

I have two rose of Sharon bushes in my yard. I absolutely love them. When the buds come on, they’re really kind of nondescript, but then the flowers start to open. First, you see this little bit of deep burgundy coming up out of the green. Then it starts to open up. It opens in stages, and with each stage there’s something more intricate and more beautiful to see from the coloring of the flowers, to the statement, it’s just, it’s amazing.

There are so many of them, they’re abundant. It reminds me that with God, he is beauty, and he wants to reveal himself to us, but he does it in stages so that we can take it in.

If it was all at once, it would blow our minds and we’d just be sitting there babbling. He lets us see him and meet him and see the beauty in who he is and all the different facets. He does that in his timing in the way that’s best for us so that we can absorb it. 

That’s the way that we communicate with our readers in our books. We unfold the truths that God has given us in the words that we get on the page. We don’t try to beat them over the head with it because that’s preaching. That’s not good writing. But if we share with them the reality and the beauty of who God is and the many facets of who he is, we do that with an understanding that they can only take in so much, and God will take those words that we put on the page and show himself to our readers.

Erin: What I was thinking about, too, Karen, when you were talking about the buds being nondescript, that’s how our writing looks at the beginning. What a perfect metaphor for writing a book or anything. Whatever you write, it just starts in this sort of nondescript way and slowly through the process of creation, it becomes a thing of beauty. 

One of my favorite things about the rose of Sharon is that I see little hummingbirds. These birds feed on this beauty. I just, I love that. 

The next attribute is that God is omniscient. Sometimes I think we can be flippant about that. “Well, okay, he knows everything.” But it’s not just that. It’s that his focused attention is on every single thing all the time. Every second. Every single second. 

My son is studying physics, and I think about the little things at the quantum level. It’s like this tiny little system. God is still focused on tiny atoms and electrons as well as 2 trillion galaxies of planets out there. God is doing that. 

For writers, I think it’s easy sometimes for us to think that God is not paying attention. But he has to. That’s who he is. He is always paying attention. Not just “you’re there.” But focused attention. Probably the kind of focus we all strive for.

I was telling Karen that it’s hard for me to focus sometimes. God doesn’t have a problem with focus, and his focused attention is on you, and your situation as a writer, and on every word you put on the paper, and on every issue that you deal with. Nothing is too big or too small for God to be paying attention to because his attention is just there all the time. 

I wish I could always remember that. I wish my attention was as focused on him 24/7 as his is on me. That’s something that I want to work on this year. For the new year, I think that’s my word: Focus.

Karen: That’s great. What I love about that is with God being omniscient, he’s also our advocate.

I watch a lot of legal procedurals, police procedurals. One of my favorite shows of all time, and I watch it over and over and over, is the original Law and Order. I just love that show, and I love how smart the attorneys are, the advocates, and how they have to know every little facet of what’s going on in order to do the things that they do. 

God is all-knowing, like you said. He’s omniscient. He knows not just how to speak on our behalf, but he knows what’s going on inside of us. He acts on our behalf, not just for us, but in us. He works inside of us, giving us the desire and the power to do what pleases him. But remember, because he’s all-knowing, he knows everything about us, and he does the work of refining us because of that core deep knowledge. 

He supports us. He defends us. He intercedes for us. He does all of this because he knows us, and nothing in what he knows about us is discouraging or disappointing or frustrating for him. He understands, because he created us, and he knows how to lead us into what he wants us to be. 

In anything that we do, whether it’s writing, or as a parent, or as an individual, his knowledge of us is complete. We never have to be afraid to go to him and say, “I’m struggling with this,” because our God who knows us will intercede for us, and he will speak for us. He will do the refining work inside of us.

Erin: I love the notion of advocate because, I mean, we have an accuser. We constantly are buffeted by what Satan wants to do to us. But who shall bring any charge against God’s elect, right? Why is Paul saying that in Romans 8? He’s saying that because God is the one who justifies us.

God is the judge. God is our advocate. God is God. There’s no one else that can step in and do, or take away, or take us out of his hand. That is my favorite thing. Listen to this, guys.

“Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Can anything ever separate us from the love of Christ? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity? Or are persecuted? Or hungry or cold or in danger or threatened with death? Even the Scriptures say, ‘For your sake we face death all day long. We are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For, I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” Romans 8

Our advocate. 

Karen: Amen. 

Erin: And that brings us to another attribute. God is all powerful. He’s omnipotent. I don’t know how often we spend just dwelling on that. All the power there could be in existence, he has. That’s who he is. 

I don’t know what the most powerful thing is that you have ever seen, but we used to live in Oklahoma. There’s tornadoes down there quite a bit. You can see the storm chasers, they’ll go out there, and you can see tornadoes on TV forming. I once saw a small tornado turn into a mile-wide F -5 tornado that just gouged a hole in the ground for miles.

It was maybe one of the most frightening things I’ve ever seen. Just that power. But God is more powerful. God can do anything. 

When I think about that as a writer, God can do anything. You guys, what is your impossible situation right now? That situation you think is impossible that you’re facing? God did the virgin birth. He opened the eyes of a man born blind. He can get you a contract or cancel your contract. He can sell books or not sell books.

What is your impossible situation? He knows it, and he’s already he got it covered. He’s taking care of it. His best work in us, the all-powerful God, in my opinion, is always the transition of making us more like Christ, and that’s what’s happening in your lives, too.

That’s why he’s more powerful. That’s what he does. One of my favorite verses is Jesus saying, “My Father is always at his work, to this very day, and I, too, am working.” John 5:17

I think that work is him, not only holding the universe and sustaining all things by his powerful word, but continuing to conform you and me to Christ every day, every moment. 

Karen: In conforming us to Christ, we start to see him more clearly and with a better understanding of who he is.

I love it that he’s called both the Lion of Judah and the Lamb. Think about that. That’s again that Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.

Lions. I love the big cats. Whenever I go to the zoo, I go to see the big cats. Lions are just so powerful and strong and fierce and regal. Whenever I see them, they put me in mind of God because they’re just so majestic.

One day I went to a zoo and they had this huge viewing area with really thick glass. The lions could come right up to the glass. There was a little girl who was kneeling on the sill of that viewing area. 

All of a sudden, the male lion who had just been, you know, sitting there and looking stunning, he turned his head and he fixed his gaze on that child. He just kind of flowed up onto his feet and BAM! He came at that window. He had his paws on there. This girl was like teeny tiny on the other side of the glass with this enormous, powerful beast that had just burst forward. Everybody in that viewing area was like, whoa! And they backed up really fast.

We have this inbuilt sense of awe and fear at that kind of power and that kind of energy. It was clear, this is the king of the jungle right here. Of course, the little two-year-old was not even aware of what was going on, but her parents grabbed her up and ran her out of there. 

So I think of God with that kind of power, that fierceness, that majesty, and yet at the same time, he’s the Lamb. That puts us in mind of innocence and sacrifice and purity. God is everything to us. He is everything. He is the power and the protector and all of those things. 

Yet at the same time, through Jesus, he’s the epitome of innocence, of sacrifice, of purity, of sacrificial love. It’s just amazing to me. What seems to be contrasts in Christ and in God, they’re not contrasts at all. They’re just the many facets of who he is. 

Erin: I love that because had he not been the Lamb, he would not have gone to the cross. Can you imagine what it took to stay there on the cross when he could have just blinked it all out of existence? And yet he didn’t. Then the lion comes back with the resurrection. 

Karen: Something else happened at a different visit. I visit zoos a lot when I travel. I was on the opposite side of the zoo from where the lion enclosure was. All of a sudden this roar echoed all around. This time instead of people backing off, everybody, myself included, ran to get to the lion enclosure to see what was going on. 

The closer we got, the louder it was. I felt that roar in my chest. They were at feeding time, and the lions were like, “Get that food in here. I’m hungry.” 

But the roar! We have this instinctive fear of that kind of unhindered power. And fascination. We’re drawn to it, and we’re repelled by it. So when the Bible tells us that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, he’s not a God, he’s not a lion, who’s going to come up and just kind of rub his little head against us and we get to pet him. God is powerful, the kind of power we can’t even understand.

Erin: Yeah. 

Karen: Another thing that God is: God is the amen. If you know what amen means, it’s like, may it be so, or let it be so. He’s the ultimate let it be so. The final word. Amen is used fifty-four times in the Bible to show agreement, to acknowledge God’s word and truth, to align with God and Jesus. 

I did a little bit of research and amen, the word itself, is what’s called a transliteration because the word is pronounced pretty much the same way it was in the original language. It’s just given one or two letters that make it make sense in a new language. So the word amen is one of the few words in existence that’s pronounced almost exactly the same way in every language.

When we say amen, we are saying the same exact word that has been uttered as a confirmation of belief for thousands of years. We’re speaking the same word spoken by the priests and the prophets and Jesus himself. 

God is the amen to everything. God is the let it be so, amen, it is finished. In Revelation 22:20-21 we read this: “He who testifies to these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon.’ Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.”

So I encourage you this year: Amen. Amen, that we align ourselves with God. Amen to aligning ourselves with Christ. And amen to digging in and knowing who God is and all the facets.

Erin: Amen!

How do God’s attributes affect your writing?

Do you know God? Really know him? Come listen in and hear what writers need to know about God! #amwriting #christianwriter
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We’re so grateful for the sponsorship from the Novel Marketing Podcast, with host Thomas Umstattd Jr. It’s the longest running book marketing podcast in the world. We know and trust Thomas, and his podcast is full of great information and advice—like Novel Marketing’s 10 Commandments of Book Marketing, which we’ve been bringing you.

Today we’re talking about commandment #9: Thou shalt not publish thy first book first.

This is the most controversial commandment, but think about an athlete. Your first race is never in the Olympics for a gold medal. You have a lot to learn before you can get to that level. So it is with writing. Your first book isn’t gold medal quality. It’s the training ground.

Writers too often feel that any word they write is wasted if it’s not published. But you can’t get better at writing without writing. That means that lots of words are going to be practice, and that’s okay!

We’re not saying that your first book can never be published, but do it later, after you’re better. Too many writers get overly focused on their first book and become discouraged when it doesn’t get published. Or they publish it themselves because they think it’s ready, and it’s not.

For more book promotion and platform help, listen to Novel Marketing in your favorite podcast app or at NovelMarketing.com.

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

Thanks so much to our February sponsor of the month, Bobbi Updegraff! You can find out more about another important cause she sponsors at friendsofrenacer.com. It’s a wonderful ministry for orphaned children in Honduras!

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

The post 159 – Do You Really Know Who God Is? Part 1 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Most of us procrastinate, but not all of us are procrastinators. Periodic procrastination is one thing, but constantly putting off things you need to do can have a negative impact on your writing, health, and relationships. If you let it. But there is hope for chronic procrastinators!

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

We developed this podcast in response to something shared by a listener who said one of the hardest things for her in the writing journey was battling procrastination. Now, you want to know something funny? When we decided to buckle down and actually do this podcast, we discovered we had started it already. Twice. Once several months ago, and again a month ago.

The next podcast should be on irony!

If there’s one thing all writers absolutely MUST do, and I’m talking to every writer, everywhere, no matter who you are or what you write, it’s this: Put your backside in the chair and write. 

We lovingly refer to this as BIC. But while we all understand the necessity of BIC, we struggle, sometimes every day, to DO it.

Unless, of course, you’re the kind of writer who has no problem with BIC. You write every day, meeting your word goal. You have no trouble turning your projects in on time, or even early.

That’s all great! But even if you don’t procrastinate in your writing, there may be other areas—personal, spiritual, emotional, financial—where you keep saying to yourself, “I know I need to deal with this. And I will. Soon.”

But soon never seems to arrive. And more often than not, the damage from procrastination will sneak into your writing as well. 

Let’s dive in. First, let’s make sure we’re all talking and thinking about the same thing. According to Webster’s Dictionary, procrastination is intentionally putting off something that needs to be done. And you’d be amazed how common it is to procrastinate.

In his article “Why Wait? The Science behind Procrastination,” author and researcher Eric Jaffe points out that, “The Greek poet Hesiod, writing around 800 B.C., cautioned people not to ‘put your work off till tomorrow and the day after.’ The Roman consul Cicero called procrastination ‘hateful’ in the conduct of affairs… For all we know, the dinosaurs saw the meteorite coming and went back to their game of Angry Pterodactyls.”

Don’t you love it when a scientist has a sense of humor? But when it comes down to it, procrastination really isn’t very funny. Or fun. I (Karen) know. 

And that’s why I (Erin) asked Karen to put this podcast together because, in her own words, she is a “master procrastinator.” 

I (Karen) have always been a procrastinator. Even as a little kid, I often put things off ‘til the last minute. Because I could. Looking back, I’ve realized I was too smart for my own good. I could do what I needed to, when I needed to, in very little time.

As I got older, I actually enjoyed the last-minute pressure of meeting a deadline in a fraction of the time I was given. I’ve always been competitive, and was in a lot of sports. I loved the rush that came on game day. Everything was on the line, and the pressure upped my game. I excelled in the face of pressure. 

So was Karen an adrenaline junkie? 

More or less, yes. And it worked for a long time. 

But not anymore. True confession time. I (Karen) put this podcast together on Monday. Two days before we were supposed to record it. And the only reason I did it then was because I thought we were recording it on Tuesday! But the cool thing is that, as is so often the case, God was at work. When I finished the podcast Monday evening, I was happy with it. I’d had a fun idea, and wrote the podcast accordingly, with a sense of humor. Yay, me. Good job. Go to bed. 

But was that the end of the story?

It was. Right until I woke up Tuesday morning. And realized something wasn’t right. As I came awake, it was clear that God was nudging me. Convicting me. Telling me I needed to—surprise, surprise—go deeper in the podcast.

Yes, I’d created something fun for our listeners. But I hadn’t created something true. Not really. I’d hit on the positives I’d experienced through procrastination, and skipped right over what really mattered. The cost. The deep, disturbing, damaging cost of being a chronic procrastinator.

I apologized to God, got up, and reworked the podcast. And you want to know the real irony? If I hadn’t gotten confused about when we were recording, if I’d followed my tendency for last-minute work, I wouldn’t have had an extra day to make this podcast what God wanted it to be. How’s that for a pointed lesson?

I love God’s graciousness in working with us, even in our weaknesses. How come we so often wonder if he truly loves us?

So if procrastinating can be so harmful, why do we put things off? Why don’t we just settle in, put our nose to the grindstone, and do what we know we need to do? 

After all, logic tells us that if we’d just spend a little time on those things each day, they’d get done. And then we’re free to move on to something else, without any sense of guilt or shame.

Some people do exactly that. Some people are amazing in the way they know what needs to be done and just do it. 

I (Erin) can sometimes “just get it done,” but I definitely have put things off. Especially when what I have to do is hard, and I don’t know how to do it. For example, with the staircase in my house, the bannister and the spindles need refinishing and updating, and that’s a whole thing. I’ve got to cut newel post caps off, figure out what gel stain is and how to use it, figure out how to deal with the carpeting, and on and on. So yeah, I’m guilty of procrastination.

Most everybody is. But in the article by Eric Jaffee, he shares a quote from Joseph Ferrari, a professor of psychology at DePaul University. Ferrai, a pioneer of modern research on procrastination, said, “What I’ve found is that while everybody may procrastinate, not everyone is a procrastinator.”

In fact, Ferrari’s work has found that only around 20 percent of people are chronic procrastinators, who, for the sake of this podcast, we’ll call CPs. And contrary to what a lot of people think, Ferrari says being a CP has nothing to do with time-management. Or with being lazy. Which is why, he says, telling a CP to just do it would be like saying to a clinically depressed person, cheer up. Get over it!  

Many people believe CPs are just lazy, and that’s why they keep putting things off.  But that seems like an oversimplification of a complex issue. There are lots of reasons people procrastinate.

Fear, for one. Fear that you can’t do what you thought you could do. Maybe the project, when you get into it, feels too big. It’s overwhelming and you don’t know where to start. 

Or you realize you don’t have the knowledge or skill you need to do this thing, so again, where do you start? You just put it off and put it off. But doing that can have terrible effects on our reputation. We become known as people who don’t do what we say we’ll do.

Procrastination has a bad effect on our relationships. Something has to give when we’re working hours upon hours to get something done last minute, and too often it’s time with family and friends.

Procrastination can even make our health suffer, which makes more sense than you may realize. When you constantly put something off, then have to scramble to do it, you trigger stress in your body. When you’re stressed, your cortisol levels spike to give you the energy to face whatever crisis you’re in. And even if we don’t consciously see it as a crisis, our body reacts to the pressure. That’s no big deal when it happens off and on, but if you’re a CP, then the stress and cortisol spikes become chronic as well, which leads into all kinds of health issues. 

Then there’s perfectionism. That’s a great reason to put something off. I mean, if we can‘t do it the way it should be done, why even start? Perfectionism can also contribute to the fear we talked about earlier—we’re afraid we can’t do it perfectly, or even well.

Another reason we procrastinate is that the project just isn’t a high enough priority. There are so many things we can focus on, invest in, and that project is way down the list of what’s most important to us. Unfortunately, the deadline is still there, which ultimately forces us into pressure mode. 

What’s especially hard is when you find you’ve lost your passion for what you’re working on. How often, as writers, do we hit a point in our manuscripts when we’re convinced it’s the worst thing we’ve ever done? That what started out with such promise is now a convoluted mess. It’s easy, especially for a CP, to set aside something when you’re feeling “meh” about it.

I (Karen) have been involved in projects that, at the beginning, I was SO excited about. But then something happens, and suddenly that excitement fizzles. And those somethings can be internal, like we talked about with fear. Or they can be external, like an illness or a boss changing your priorities or a loss of funding.

So all of that, fear and scrambling and stress, has to stir up self-doubt, which then ushers in things like guilt and shame and anxiety. And now the real damage of chronic procrastination sets in. You may have put off the work, but not the deadline. And as that deadline draws closer, anxiety deepens. And self-recrimination. And negative self-talk. “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get this done?” I’m betting a lot of CPs wake up in the middle of the night fighting guilt and anxiety.

I (Karen) sure did. And it’s been proven that a lack of solid sleep leads to things like a lack of focus and mood swings. Not to mention health issues, such as heart problems and stroke. So it’s no wonder that creativity suffers, so that even when we finally try to do the work, we just sit and stare at the blank screen.

I remember feeling at times like my brain was seized up, so much so that my head hurt. Which left me feeling stupid or worthless. And, worst of all, disobedient to God, who gave me this task. Which just made me depressed, which made me put things off until it wasn’t just last-minute work to meet a deadline, but I missed deadlines. Which made me spiral even deeper into guilt and shame and…well, you get the idea.

No wonder we continue to put things off when we feel that way. What’s that old quote? “Being defeated is a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent”?

But here’s a much better quote, and it comes from the Apostle Paul’s second letter to Timothy: “Fan into flames the spiritual gift God gave you when I laid my hands on you. For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline.” 2 Timothy 1:6-7

Power, love, self-discipline. Those are the tools to use when self-doubt tries to derail you. 

God has not given us fear. He has not given us a spirit that gives up. He’s given us power. Not our own, but HIS. Nothing can stand in the face of that. He’s given us HIS love, for him, for our readers, for those we encounter, for ourselves. He’s given us self-discipline! Even if you don’t feel like you have that, He’s given it to you. It’s there. You just need to start tapping into it. God never intended for us to be shackled by fear. 

Chronic procrastination is about a lot more than putting things off. It’s about letting ourselves be sidetracked. It’s about focusing on circumstances and not on God. It’s about rebellion: “I don’t want to miss out on the fun stuff, so I’ll just do this work God gave me later.”

But think about it. If God didn’t give us the spirit of fear, who did? Pretty clear what the answer is there. So the first and most powerful step in dealing with chronic procrastination is to realize a few things. 

We have this work because God gave it to us. It’s not our work, it’s his. It’s not that we’re putting off our work, we’re putting off God’s work. When I (Karen) realized that truth, it pulled me up short. Who was I to tell God I didn’t feel like doing HIS work? 

Our focus must be on the God who gave us this task of writing. Pray. Read his word. And confess your fears to him. Surrender them. Then ask him how to move forward. Remember Isaiah 35:4: “Be strong, and do not fear, for your God is… coming to save you.”

With that as our foundation and motivation, we can deal with the other causes of procrastination, such as when a project is overwhelming in size or scope, or when we realize we need to gain more knowledge or skill.

In his article, “How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule,” author James Clear writes about the “two-minute rule,” which is designed to help you stop procrastinating and stick to good habits. We talked about this when we did a podcast on building healthy habits, but it’s relevant here as well.

Clear says that starting a new habit should never take more than two minutes to do. The idea is to scale any job down to a series of two-minute “bites.” Then organize those bites in order of importance, and then tackle them one, or rather, two minutes at a time. 

So “write 300 pages” or “write 1000 words” becomes “write for two minutes.” When I (Karen) did this, I learned how many pages or words I could write in two minutes, then I gave myself a range of two-minute slots for the day. Shoot, even I can get my backside in a chair for two minute at a shot.

When we’re faced with what seems like a gargantuan task, we can take to heart what David said to those preparing to build God’s temple in 1 Chronicles 28:20: “Be strong and courageous, and do the work. Don’t be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you or forsake you. He will see to it that all the work…is finished correctly.” 

When you need to learn something new, instead of “read that book,” it can be “read the first 5 pages of that book.” When that’s done, read the next five. 

I (Erin) will tell you, dealing with my staircase has been about at that level. How do I get a spindle off? What kind of spray paint will work on it? What tool cuts off a newel post cap?

As for perfectionism, folks, “perfect” is a lie. It will never be perfect. So before you start, remember only God is perfect. That’s part of what it means to be God. Not one human is perfect. Nothing humans do, in and of themselves, will be perfect. The key isn’t perfection, but obedience. 

It helps me (Karen) to ask God each day what he wants me to accomplish, then I focus on doing just that. Every day, get your working orders from Him, then do your best with the time you have. The real time, not the stolen time from putting it off. Putting off a project until you miss the deadline is stealing time that isn’t yours. Time from your co-workers, or your friends and family. Time from God. Don’t do it.

Then at the end of your agreed-upon time, let it go. Turn it in. Trust that if God brought this project to you, he will equip you to do it, and to finish it.

What do we do when a lack of passion makes us put something off?

A lack of passion says a lack of motivation. So with any project that comes your way, before you ever agree to do it, understand your motivation. If you had a great motivation at the beginning, but find your excitement dimming, go back to the motivation. 

These questions work as a solution for when the project isn’t high enough on your priority list, too. Why isn’t it high enough? Figure out the motivation and the value of this project, and ask how that compares with whatever else you’re doing, and make sure the time blocks you spend match your priorities. 

So, has Karen stopped being a CP—a chronic procrastinator?

Not entirely. Remember, she likes working under pressure. 

Does that mean procrastination is good for a person? 

What we’re saying is that it can be helpful for some people when they do it right. How do we do procrastination right? Here are Karen’s secrets that work for her: 

First, I have to be realistic about what I can do and the amount of time it takes me to do it. I’m not as fast at writing as when I was younger. What used to take me days or weeks now takes me weeks or months. There are a lot of reasons for that, health reasons, unexpected life events, memory issues, and so on..

As we age, we’ll have new challenges and hindrances to deal with. Life changes, too. Writing when you’re single is different than when you’re married, or when you have kids, and so on. I don’t like that I’m a slower writer or editor now, but I’ve accepted it because I can’t change it. So step one, be realistic about my timelines based on what I can do now.

Second, I plan for procrastination. I break the project down into small, achievable goals (like the two-minute rule!) and then I add “in case” days to my schedules. 

Days “in case” of what? In case I can’t work because my house gets robbed. Or I break my shoulder. In case I’m sick, in case I’m dealing with brain fog, or even, once in a while, in case it’s the first sunny day in a month and I want to work in the garden. Whatever.

I plug those “in case” days in, and then I plug in rewards for meeting my mini-goals. My love language is gifts, so when I meet a goal, I give myself a gift. Nothing big or expensive, just something that brings me joy. 

Third, I remember my foundation in God. As a CP, how do I avoid putting things off, going through all my “in case” days, and ending up in trouble? Well, I can’t say it will never happen. But I remember that the foundation is the realization that God gave me his work to do, and my focus is him, not circumstances.

With that in mind, giving myself the freedom to use an “in case” day reenergizes me. As often as not, when I spend a day away from a task, my mind is still processing and pondering that task, so when I return to it, I’m ready to go. And I’m motivated by the thought of my reward.

Bottom line, it’s about balance. Balancing freedom with responsibility, goals with rewards, work with fun. When I strike that balance, everything works. When something happens to throw that balance off, I’ve got my “in case” days. 

When everything goes out the window, for whatever reason, say, a rampaging fire forces me to evacuate, or I get a concussion from falling on a poorly marked wet floor—I mention all these because they’ve actually happened to me—I’ve got God’s promise in Romans 8, that he is there to “cause everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And having chosen them, he called them to come to him. And having called them, he gave them right standing with himself. And having given them right standing, he gave them his glory.” Romans 8:28-30

So in whatever we do, however we do it, let’s remember we’ve been given God’s glory. And let’s do the work He’s given us with excellence and joy. 

What helps you overcome procrastination?

If you procrastinate, there’s hope for you! #amwriting #Christianwriter
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We’re so grateful for the sponsorship from the Novel Marketing Podcast, with host Thomas Umstattd Jr. It’s the longest running book marketing podcast in the world. We know and trust Thomas, and his podcast is full of great information and advice—like Novel Marketing’s 10 Commandments of Book Marketing, which we’re going to be bringing you.

Commandment #8: Thou shalt surround thyself with savvy authors.

Thomas says, “There are some things you can only learn from other authors. The savvier your friends are, the more you will learn.”

I (Erin) me agree with this. I’ve had a number of wonderful author friends throughout my career who’ve taught me plenty. First in my local ACFW chapter, and several years later, I joined a mastermind group, and that’s the one thing I wish I’d done 5 years sooner in my career.

I (Karen) agree with this as well, having worked with so many different writers and having so many of them become friends. I’ve also been blessed with a brainstorming group. We meet in person once a year and stay connected online. We talk about our experiences and share what we’re learning, and we understand each other and the unique ways our “writer minds” work. Surrounding yourself with savvy writers is a huge value and benefit all throughout your career.

For more book promotion and platform help listen to Novel Marketing in your favorite podcast app or at NovelMarketing.com

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

Thanks so much to our January sponsor of the month, Wendy L. Macdonald. Not only is Wendy a writer, she also produces a weekly, short, inspirational podcast on Spotify called Hope Walking with Wendy.

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

The post 158 – Hope for Procrastinators appeared first on Write from the Deep.

The new year is here! Which means a lot of us are thinking about what we want to do and be in 2022. But are you taking time for you? More important, for your soul? Guest Edie Melson is here to help you do exactly that!

About Edie Melson

Edie Melson is a woman of faith with ink-stained fingers observing life through the lens of her camera. She’s a writer who feels lost without her camera and a reluctant speaker who loves to encourage an audience. And she embraces the ultimate contradiction of being an organized creative. As a popular speaker, she’s encouraged and challenged audiences across the country and around the world. Her numerous books, including Unruffled, Thriving in Chaos and the award-winning Soul Care series reflect her passion to help others develop the strength of their God-given gifts and apply them to their lives. Her industry blog, The Write Conversation, has been recognized as a Writer’s Digest Top 101 Sites for Writers. She’s the director of the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference, and a board member of the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association. Connect with her on her website, www.EdieMelson.com and through social media.

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

Karen: Hi, everyone. Welcome into the deep this new year. Amazing to think that it’s a new year already. We’re so glad you’re here with us to start out your year, and we are so excited to have Edie Melson here to talk about soul care for you and how you can accomplish this wonderful thing in the midst of this new year.

Erin: I get to introduce her! I’m so excited. I have known of Edie Melson for a while, but I got to meet her in person at the Florida Christian Writers Conference a while back. That was just a delight. 

While Edie happened to be teaching at the Florida Christian Writers Conference, she’s actually the director of a different conference. The Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference. Doesn’t that sound great? Blue Ridge Mountains? They have some really exciting things going on there!  

“Find your voice, live your story” is the foundation of Edie Melson’s message. No matter if she’s writing for readers, parents, or fellow creatives. As an instructor, she’s encouraged and challenged audiences across the country and around the world. Her numerous books, including the award-winning Soul Care series, which we’ll be talking about, reflect her passion to help others develop the strength of their God-given gifts and apply them to their lives. 

She lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains—again, amazing—where she spends time off hiking with her husband and her camera. Sounds just like what Karen and I would do! You guys can connect with Edie at her website, ediemelson.com or through social media. 

Edie, we are delighted to have you here. Welcome! 

Edie: I am so excited to be here. As I was sharing earlier, this was kind of a bucket list moment because I’ve loved Write from the Deep podcast since it began. So, I’m really excited to be here. 

Erin: Since it began way back when! I hope, Edie, you are prepared to tell us what the deep means to you. 

Edie: I am. I actually, several years ago, wrote about the deep and what it meant to me. I was really glad that you guys were going to ask me that. I was at the beach. My husband and I love to go to the South Carolina coast every year. And I love to get out, past where the waves are breaking, with a float and just sort of bob along and spend the afternoon out there. 

But I always hate getting out there because the waves are crashing, and I’m usually knocked over. As I was doing that, it hit me that this is so much like my spiritual walk. When I feel like I’m staying safe and close to shore, I am constantly buffeted by all of these waves that just hit me. 

Sometimes they can swamp me. And yet when I decide it’s time to go deep with God, and I move past those waves, instead of being in a scary place, I find myself in a place where I’m cradled, and where I’m at peace, and where I’m really able to spend time reflecting and renewing my soul. So that’s what the deep means to me. 

Karen: Wow. That is so cool. I love that imagery. We have the Oregon coast out here and that’s just a very accurate description of what it’s like. 

Erin: Bumping along, bumping along. 

Karen: Right. As we talk about all this, your focus is soul care. So what exactly does soul care mean? How do you define it? 

Edie: For me, soul care is a deeper and stronger connection with God.

One of the things I’m asked frequently is what’s the difference between self-care, which is really kind of a buzzword right now, and soul care. While soul care can provide us with energy and renewal and just a more peaceful way of living, it is not about me. It is about making that soul tie, that connection with God that cannot be broken no matter what kind of chaos is whirling around and what circumstances I find myself in. 

Erin: Yes. I like that. That’s a really huge difference. You know what? The interesting thing to me, though, is that ultimately soul care does help you. I mean, it is self-care eventually. You know, that connection strengthens with God and it helps you become a better you, it helps you become a better self. But it’s funny. You can’t, you don’t get there through you. 

Karen: Right. I think that’s clearly the difference in self-care. At least as the world sees it. That it’s all about me. In soul care, as Edie has talked about it, and as it means to us as believers and as writers seeking to spread God’s Word, it’s all about God. It’s about going deeper and knowing God better and having that foundation. 

Erin and I read Streams in the Desert every day when we’re having our meetings, before we start our meetings. The reading for today, which we’re actually recording this November 24th, the day before Thanksgiving. But the reading was talking about how we need to be so anchored in God that even when there’s chaos or devastation going on around us, we’re focused on him. We’re not focused on circumstances. We’re focused on him. 

Erin: Right. So what do you think, Edie, as far as, like, how does this apply to writers? Why do writers need soul care?

Edie: I think it boils down to the fact that you can’t pour water out of an empty bucket. And if we aren’t connected with God, with the wellspring of our creativity and our very life, then we don’t have anything to draw from. Our creativity dries up. Our inspiration dries up. Our very energy dries up. I think we’ve got to be connected to that source of living water so that God can work through us and through our words. 

Erin: It reminds me, I was listening to an old sermon that John Piper had done about when Jesus fed the 5,000. And you know, there’s Jesus multiplying this sustenance. But the interesting thing was after it was all done, and I think about how the disciples are there with them and they’re busy and they’re tired, after it’s all done, after they’re spent and tired, Jesus is like, “Pick up the leftover bread.” 

How much leftover bread was there? Twelve baskets. Okay, I think about that, and like, that’s not a coincidence. There’s one basket for each guy. And it’s like God is saying, “I know you’re tired, but look, I just refilled your basket.”

So that’s what I was connecting with as you were talking about that, how we need to stay connected so that God will continually be pouring into us. Because it’s really not us pouring out. It’s God pouring through us, into others. So I think that’s cool. Very cool. 

Karen: I find, too, that one of the issues for us is we want to be able to focus on pouring out to others and focus on drawing deeper and closer to God. And yet…life. Life comes in. 

Don and I are in a chaotic life place. We are putting our home on the market and getting rid of three households of stuff. Mom and Dad’s stuff. Stuff from my older brother, who died almost exactly a year ago, unexpectedly. And then our accumulation of things over the last eighteen years of living in this home that we love.

So, you know, we’ve been going through all that stuff. It’s been chaotic. We took a trip to go up to Washington and look for a possible home. When we got back, we discovered that someone had broken in and they had robbed us. So first we brought ourselves into chaos by trying to put our home on the market. Then we go on this trip, and we come back and someone has broken in. 

I can’t begin to tell you how weary Don and I have been. We were weary before we discovered the theft. But now in the midst of all that, the thing that I realized as these last couple of days have gone by, we got home Sunday night and it’s Wednesday, the things that I realized as we’ve gone through all this and the phone calls to protect our finances, to report the theft, and the police coming in. We went and got fingerprinted for elimination fingerprints. I came home yesterday and I sat in a chair, and I just sat there and put my head back and I thought, “All I want, Lord, is peace. I just, I want peace and I want to be able to sleep.” 

I haven’t been sleeping well. I was looking through the table of contents in your book Soul Care When You’re Weary (Embracing God, Exploring Creativity). And one of the things that you talk about is triage for soul care. Why don’t you unpack that for us, both as in what we do in life and what writers need to do to make that first step into triage?

Edie: I think it’s really important when we’re in a season of busyness or a season of stress that we take a look at the stressors, the things that are causing us to not have peace or that are keeping us from peace. That’s what I mean by triage. I usually take time when I find myself in that place of challenge, and I spend some time with God looking at all of the things that are stressing me out. 

I ask him, “Is this something that I’m supposed to walk through? Is this something that you’re going to build a bridge over? Or is this something that I just need to turn my back on?”

I think once we know what we’re dealing with, and we allow God to speak into those circumstances, then he can help us navigate what’s ahead with peace. Because we see it again and again, in Jesus’ ministry, he had all of these chaotic situations, but he walked into them and he brought peace. 

I think that’s what we do as writers with our words. When we are allowing God to work through us, we have the Holy Spirit who can take those words that we put on paper, and he can speak peace into any circumstance that our readers are facing. But first we have to know how we’re supposed to navigate where we are.

Karen: I think why Jesus took so much time going away and praying was in essence for doing that spiritual triage and going to the Father and saying, “What is this? What do you want me to do?” He was constantly plugging himself into the source that the Father is, not just for him, but also for us.

I mean, God has promised us his presence. God has promised us his power and his peace. And we just forget. We say things like, “Well, at least I can pray for you.” And yet prayer is the most amazing, powerful, effective thing that we can do. 

Erin: I really like that idea of the triage, because I think you’re right. Like some of those things we can turn our back on and we might feel helpless, and going to prayer and getting that, “Yeah, turn your back on that.” You know, that’s okay. It’s like it’s a weight off. Or knowing you have to walk through something. It’s God saying, “I’m going to be with you, though. I’m going to be with you.” 

So I love that as just a way to start moving forward and get stuff off our plate that shouldn’t be there to begin with. That’s genius. We can all do that in the new year. 

What are some other things? I’d love to know, what are some good things that writers can do as they’re starting this new year to put new habits or tactics into place to better do soul care?

Edie: I think my one hard and fast rule with writing, and as you all know, there are no hard and fast rules with writing, but I do have one, and that is before my fingers hit the keyboard, I pray. I don’t care if I’m scheduling social media, if I’m going on Facebook, whatever it is. The fact is that God wants to use my writing to touch others and to work through the words that I put on the screen or on paper or wherever they go.

I can’t be an effective conduit if I am not first connected with God. That is just the one thing that I think every writer can do. Pray first. 

Another thing I think we need to do is I think we need to leave behind the baggage of comparison. I think so often we are comparing ourselves to each other. We’re comparing ourselves to expectations. Comparisons are just a trap from the enemy. I think the only person we need to be concerned about when it comes to our writing is God. And whether or not we’re being obedient. 

Karen: Right. Gee, you’re saying everything right. I love this! 

Erin: Comparisons are toxic. It’s poison. What do you think are some ways we can identify when we’re doing that? Are there key words that might help us identify it and say to ourselves, “Oh, wait, you’re comparing yourself. Don’t do that”? 

Edie: I think anytime that I am looking anywhere but God for confirmation or affirmation, then I have fallen into the comparison trap.

Anytime I'm looking anywhere but God for confirmation or affirmation, I've fallen into the comparison trap. #amwriting #christianwriter @ediemelson
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When I’m looking at how many numbers I’ve got, how many reviews I’ve got, what my reviewers say, whether this person has a contract or an opportunity that I don’t have, I am falling into that comparison trap. 

Karen: Amen. Anytime we look outside, anytime we look at anyone other than the Lord. It’s so easy to get our eyes focused on what God is doing for others and forget what he’s done for us.

Erin: Yeah. “But she… but he… but her…”

Karen: “But, Lord I’ve been doing this so much longer and I don’t have that many contracts…” 

Erin: Right. Are there other things that you can think of that might be good practices for us, besides praying, besides avoiding comparison? Are there other things we could maybe put into practice? 

Edie: I think it’s really important to write regularly. Now I have a real issue with people who say you must write every day. Because I think God calls us to different seasons and different walks, actually. When my kids were young, it was not possible for me to write every day, but I wrote on a schedule and I wrote regularly.

I think that’s another one of those things that we can let happen. We let these voices creep into our minds and tell us that we’re doing it wrong. And I think we need to remember that the voice of the enemy can often use our voice to speak, or the voice of someone we love, to speak lies to us. We have to be careful who we let speak truth into our lives. We can’t always shut up the voices, but we can decide whether or not we’re going to accept what is said as God’s truth.

We have to be careful who we let speak truth into our lives. #amwriting #christianwriter @ediemelson
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Karen: Yeah. Again, looking at the contents in your book Soul Care When You’re Weary, I’m going to have to get a copy of this. I really love what I’m seeing here. Your first chapter, like I said, is triage. Then you talk about rediscovering peace, and then you talk about reconnecting with prayer play. I love that term prayer play, which you also described as worship, and then you move into letting go. 

It’s interesting because so many of us think that we have to do that step, that letting go, at the beginning. That we have to let go. But I think that it’s perfect because as we re-enter and rediscover peace, and as we reconnect with prayer, that enables us then to let go. To let go of things like failure and to let go of those comparisons and to enter into that spirit of rest, enter into dwelling in God. 

But you don’t stop there. You go to moving on to joy. I’ve always felt that too often we stop with surrender and forget that there is joy. When we go into surrender, when we enter into that union with God, where we are focused on him and we stay grounded in him, joy comes regardless. Even if we’re grieving, even if we’re in pain, there is joy because of the knowledge of who it is that is with us and stands with us in the midst of it all. 

Edie: Amen. It’s so important to realize that when God calls us to something, the ability to discern whether or not it’s God’s call is not how miserable we are when we do it. So often we feel like, “If God really called me to this, then it would have to be hard, or difficult, or misery.”

In truth, God wants us to be joyful and to enjoy the gifts that he’s given us. 

Erin: Yeah. Amen. I’m curious about the prayer play. Just describe that a little bit. That’s interesting. 

Edie: I used to be very intimidated by prayer. I was surrounded by a lot of people at my church and in my women’s ministry who were really good pray-ers, especially out loud. I avoided praying out loud because I didn’t think I was doing it right. I was looking for a formula and a way to do it. 

What God showed me is that prayer is what everybody knows. It’s a conversation. And you can’t do a conversation wrong when you’re building a relationship, and when you trust the person you’re talking to.

He showed me that my prayers don’t have to be solemn, wordy, or formal. He showed me that I can go outside and I can sing prayers to him. I can laugh prayers to him. I can just enjoy the conversation wherever I am. 

Erin: I love it. It’s just, it’s a way for us to connect. It’s a way for us to connect with him. That’s prayer. And I’ll just mention, you were comparing yourself, like we all so often do, so no wonder that didn’t go well.

Our time is almost up, but do you have some final words of wisdom you’d want to leave with our listeners? 

Edie: I think the thing I hope everyone takes away from this is the fact that God wants that relationship. There are times in our lives, like when my dad was dying from Alzheimer’s and we were in the midst of a caregiving season when I couldn’t go deep in a Bible study with God. I couldn’t spend hours in prayer or in anything.

But God showed me that as long as I am focused on him, he is every bit as able and powerful in those in-between moments to give me the soul care I need to get me through what I’m going through as if I could become a hermit for a month. 

God is not dependent on my ability to spend time. God is dependent on nothing. But he’s waiting for me to give him the bits and pieces of time that I have in those seasons of busyness that he has called me to. 

Erin: I love that. 

Karen: Those are such great words, Edie. I’m so glad that you’ve been with us today. 

Friends, as you take a look at this new year coming up, and as you consider everything that is being impacted, your career, your family, your life, all of that, I encourage you to take these words to heart. Ground yourself in the Lord. Go deeper with God and do some soul care so that you know you can stand firm in the one who has called you to share with others the words that he’s given you and the one who loves you beyond anything we can imagine. 

Happy New Year to all of you! May it be a year steeped in God’s blessing and peace.

Erin: Amen.

How do you do soul care?

Soul Care for Writers by Edie Melson

Soul Care When You’re Weary by Edie Melson

As 2022 gets started, we need soul care! Guest Edie Melson shares how to do soul care all year long. #amwriting #christianwriter @ediemelson
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We’re so grateful for the sponsorship from the Novel Marketing Podcast, with host Thomas Umstattd Jr. It’s the longest running book marketing podcast in the world. We know and trust Thomas, and his podcast is full of great information and advice—like Novel Marketing’s 10 Commandments of Book Marketing, which we’re going to be bringing you.

Commandment #7: Thou shalt weigh thine options before investing in marketing.

Investing in marketing is a given. Every successful author does so. But how much of which resources do you invest?For example, one resource is time, and another is money. They’re both valuable. But how much do you have of each? And how do you allocate them?

You can’t spend the same marketing dollar on two different things. You’ve got to choose. Nor can you spend the same hour of time on two different things. There is always going to be a cost: a thing you chose and a thing you didn’t choose. The best thing you can do for yourself is understand and weigh your options so you can make the best decisions you can.

 And remember, you also need to be asking the right question when it comes to marketing. Don’t ask: will this tactic or thing I want to try help me sell more books? Lots of things can help you sell more books. Ask instead: Will this help me sell more books than the next best alternative?

For that, again, you need to know what those alternatives are. Listening to the Novel Marketing Podcast is a great way to be informed about those options, which is why we recommend that show. For more book promotion and platform help listen to Novel Marketing in your favorite podcast app or at NovelMarketing.com

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

Thanks so much to our January sponsor of the month, Wendy L. Macdonald. Not only is Wendy a writer, she also produces a weekly, short, inspirational podcast on Spotify called Hope Walking with Wendy.

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

The post 157 – Soul Care for the New Year with Guest Edie Melson appeared first on Write from the Deep.