Who Are You?

By: Dennis Bates

Who are you?

That was a question a speaker asked at a writers’ conference I attended last week. His topic was marketing, but by the time he finished his series of classes, I was certain that his question was relevant to much more than marketing.

Who am I?

Many authors have web pages and a good many of them start out the same way: Welcome to my web page. The speaker contended that rather bland first line bores a lot of people and they move on to other pages before they even look at the second sentence of our page. If that’s true then a lot of us are wasting our time and money.

The purpose of a web page is to draw people in and get them to stay and read what you have to say. If you sell books from your web page, as I do, you want people to take a look at your books and perhaps buy one. If you write a blog like this from your web site, you want people to turn to it and read it.

You want potential readers to read your first sentence and say figuratively, if not literally, tell me more. Your second sentence should lead to the third and so on, but a reader won’t go anywhere if you don’t draw them in from the very beginning.

The speaker suggested that our first sentence should tell the reader in a compelling way who we are and why they might want to listen to us. Before we can tell a reader who we are, we have to be able to answer the question our self, briefly and in an interesting and compelling way.

If we have only 10 to 15 seconds to tell somebody something that makes them want to know more, how are we going to do it? The world and the people in it move too fast these days to give us any more time than that. Perhaps they shouldn’t be, but the fact is, they are.

In writing circles that’s called the elevator pitch line. It assumes you are riding in an elevator with the agent or editor who can change your writing forever, get you published and on the way.

You have from the first floor to the third floor to tell that person one or two short sentences that will make them want to know more about you and your writing projects.

What will you say?

Less is more. The same thing applies to our web pages, and I think to our Christian witness. To develop your elevator pitch to witness to others, you need to first know who you are and who He is. What does He mean to you? Then you need to know what you will say about that,  keeping in mind that the first sentence is the crucial one and even after that less is more.

You have just punched the elevator button for the third floor and you are headed up. You have 15 seconds at most. Quick. Who are you? What will that say about Him?

Learn the Lesson, Move Forward

By:  Staci Stallings

I’ve been listening to a song the past couple of days.  I have no idea when it came out or where my mom got it, but it’s a great song called, “Wine Back Into Water.”  The man in the song has a drinking problem, and he says he’s prayed a lot about it.  Now he’s gotten to the bottom of everything he can do and it’ s not worked.  The hook line is, “So on my knees I’m turning to You Father, can You help me turn the wine back into water?”

It’s a sentiment many of us have felt at times even if our issue is not drinking.  Things have changed in our lives.  Something happened–maybe it was a choice we made, maybe it was a choice someone else made, maybe it was just dumb luck, but our world changed forever, and our instinct is to want to go back.  We want to go back to the way things were when our loved one was here or before the fire or the flood or our marriage went sour.

I think that is a very common response, but I don’t think it’s what God had in mind for us.

I was talking with my mom yesterday about my growing up and how I viewed life.  For many reasons, I got the message growing up that I had to be perfect to be worth anything.  And I worked and worked and worked, always pretty sure that someone was going to figure out that it was all a farce.  I wasn’t perfect.  My accomplishments gave me peace for about two seconds, until I figured out they still didn’t make me happy.  They were not the “end,” they were just a stepping stone.  Because there was never an “I’ve arrived” point, I could never slow down and enjoy life.  The time to slow down would be the NEXT goal.  Except that never came.

In “Forgiven Forever,” there is a great line that says those who are living on a law/works system are two things:  1) very busy and 2) very frustrated.

Boy, was that ME!

But as we talked and I shared how God had pulled me up out of the mire of that thinking, I told my mom that I wouldn’t trade having gone through that.  She was surprised, I think.  Most people would like life to be as easy as possible (and I’m not saying I wouldn’t), it’s just that in this case, having gone through that gave me such insights into how badly a person can be feeling even if they look great on the outside.

Having gone through hell to figure out that God is on my side and to figure out that He loves me anyway, to me, was worth it.  I would not have learned that lesson as deeply without going through that hell.  Had it just be “a little bad,” I would not be so grateful for God showing up.  Had it been just “a little painful,” I might not have appreciated the removal of that pain.  As it is, I am shouting praises grateful every day!

In the book “Heaven is Real” (the sequel to “90 Minutes in Heaven”), the author talks about bridge moments.  His moment of change came when a truck on a narrow bridge hit him in his car head-on.  He says that he entered that bridge as one person, but he exited as someone completely different.

That’s the way I feel about the time in my life when I was so attached to the approval of others, my grades and accomplishments.  Without that time in my life, I would not understand the things I do now.  I was one person going into that meat grinder, I was a different person coming out.  I was also different going into the Spirit Led Bootcamp God sent me through (and sometimes I think I’m still in), and another person when I emerged.

But the lesson of Bootcamp could not have been learned without the pain of the earlier period.  How was I to know how desperately I needed to be saved without knowing anything was even wrong?  Because of the pain I went through trying to get others to think I was worth it, I never would have appreciated to the depths I do today what God did for me.

All of our situations are different.  Your issue may be completely different than mine, but I would be willing to bet that the answer is the same.

The answer the difficulties we face in life is this:  God loves me.  Right now.  Without qualifications.  Whether I’m lovable or not.  And He’s willing to reach out to me, even in hell, and lift me out into His light if I will only accept what He has done for me.

So stop wishing you could go back.  If God has used this painful experience to teach you to a deeper level about His love, be grateful.  Realize the experience has made you a different person and let that different person be a better person, a more healed person, a person who KNOWS deeper that God loves them.

Then move FORWARD as your new, healed self.

You cannot go back.  Wanting to will keep you stuck right here.  And here is no place to be if you’re in spiritual misery.

Just Like the Peter

By:  Staci Stallings

I think sometimes we Christians get into the mindset of thinking the saints and more specifically the apostles were “super-Christians.”  We believe that they had super strength in themselves to follow Christ perfectly.

Of course, even a cursory reading of the New Testament should convince us that this isn’t the case, but it just seems so right.  They HAD to be “more than” after all many of them died for Christ, many of them made great sacrifices to follow Him.  That would surely take an act of will that we don’t have.

But look again.  Look specifically at Peter.  Look at how many times and in how many different ways Peter just simply got it wrong.  Jesus even told him once, “Get behind me, Satan.”  That’s pretty strong language against someone you dearly love.

Peter’s faith such that it was or wasn’t was tested over and over again, and the truth is that over and over again, he failed.  Sometimes he failed miserably.  Sometimes he failed even worse than that.  For example, there’s the sinking when he tried to walk on water thing.  Then he betrayed Jesus.  He cut off a guy’s ear.  He abandoned Jesus.  He even went back to fishing (as if nothing had happened) after the resurrection.  Then he holed up with the other apostles in the Upper Room in fear for his life.

For one Jesus called, “The Rock,” he was more the shrinking violet or the hot-headed coward than a pillar of how to live a Christian life.  And yet, he WAS a pillar of how to live a Christian life.

We as Christians often think we are Christians because we don’t mess up.  But look at Peter.  Really look.

After he denied Jesus, he didn’t even want to have breakfast with Him.  No, Peter walked some steps away.

I know why he did that, and so do you.

Have you ever messed up and had this burning desire to get as far away from God as possible?  Have you ever just “known” in your heart that this was it.  This time He was not going to take you back?  Have you ever  not wanted to face Him because of something you’ve done?

There was a brief reference to another of Peter’s inglorious moments in “Forgiven Forever.”  It featured Peter and the other disciples up on a mountaintop with thousands of people and no food.  The disciples’ solution was to send the people away.  Why?  Because they didn’t want to be bothered with the effort it would take to feed them.  The people’s problem was THEIR problem, not the disciples’ problem.

Then there was that whole telling the mothers to take their children away thing.

No.  The truth of the matter is that Peter messed up. Repeatedly. He didn’t understand God’s love.  He took some things for granted, made horrible choices, and even walked away from God who wasn’t some concept but a living, breathing human being standing right there with him.

But Jesus would have none of it.  How many times did Jesus take Peter back?  70 x 7?  That sounds about right.

God’s love for Peter was unconditional because He chose to see past Peter’s faults, his impetuousness, his willfulness.  God chose to see Peter as innocent rather than to call him out and condemn him for being weak and impulsive.  And in the end, Peter came to believe so fully in that love–not because he got it right all the time, but moreso because even when he got it WAY wrong, Jesus never said, “Okay, that’s it.  You’re not worth this.”

When you find a love like that, a love that loves even when (maybe especially when) you most don’t deserve it, it might take awhile but eventually, you begin to believe what that Love is saying about you and about Himself.  You believe that He will never leave, that He will always take you back… 70 X 7 times.

I like that about Peter because I’m so much like him.  I say I won’t sin again, and then there I am again.  I say I trust God, and up come the waves and I sink.  I say I love people, and then I’m trying to figure out how to get them out of my hair so I don’t have to deal with them.

But just like Peter, I’m learning about God’s unconditional love for me.  I’m learning He will always take me back, and that because of that, I don’t want to stray very far anymore.  I want to feel that Love, to be near it, to cling to it when the whole world goes nuts around me.  Why?  Because I’ve learned to trust that Love.  I’ve learned it will never pitch me aside because I’m too much trouble.

I think Peter eventually learned to trust that Love too.  In that way and so many others, I’m just like Peter.

Diet Update

By: Dennis Bates

It’s been a while since I reported back on my battle with the bulge. There’s a reason for that. The bulge is winning the battle. The good news is that I’ve lost about ten pounds. The bad news is that isn’t close to enough for someone of my size. In fact, it’s barely a beginning. I am also having trouble moving any further. Plateau is the diet friendly word for that I believe. I’ve been through this process before and I know these things happen. I just wish they would happen a little higher up than the number 10, if you know what I mean.

Quite a few years ago there was a minority college fund ad campaign that used a slogan “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”  I don’t mean to disrespect that slogan because I always found it to be powerful and compelling, but if I might add a slightly less serious spin on that slogan for a moment, I would add that “A waist is a difficult thing to mind.”

I’ve never been a small person Short, but not small. I’m not ever expecting to get skinny. My mother used to use words like husky, big-boned, heavy framed. Aren’t mothers great! I would settle for plump, healthy, or even slightly overweight, so in the interest of holding myself accountable, I’m reporting in as I said I would. And I have a long way to go.

Losing weight is important to me for so many different reasons, health being a big one. I have a knee replacement date with a surgeon in the not too distant future and recovery will be a lot easier if I am a lot lighter than I am now. I also want to take walks and do simple things like go to the grocery store and not skip items that are in the other end of the store.

When what you do in life revolves around how many steps there are to get there, it is time to take some action. I have always been an active person, and I want to get back to being more that way, no matter how many steps are involved.

I think there is a spiritual issue involved here too. Being overweight tends to make me focus on self more than others. Can I participate in family activities? Can I sleep with my knee hurting? Can I eat that and still lose weight. Can I…You see what I mean?

A certain amount of that is understandable. I have to take personal accountability for doing what I need to do to correct my behavior, but when that’s all I think about, I don’t have time or the energy to help others the way I should. So, I’m going to try a new, bold approach. I can’t, but He can. That should sound familiar. It’s the method I learned from my blogging partner for a lot of things. I can’t, but He can.

Once again, I’ll keep you posted from time to time about what He is doing.

Revising the First Draft

By: Dennis Bates

There are basically two steps in any fiction writing project no matter how long it is. First the rough draft gets written and second the rough draft gets smoothed out. Rewrite, edit, revise, and then do it all over again. Different writers like different parts of the process, but a successful writer can do both steps with some degree of expertise.

From what I’ve read about other writers there are some who love to research and read about the historical era used in the story. Others research key elements to their story or geographical locations where the story takes place. Some writers even live in those locations for a while so they can develop a familiarity with the location that lends authenticity to their stories.

Some writers research the recesses of their memories to develop their stories about those feelings and emotions that caused them to be who they are. Other writers use a combination of the above factors, but point is that they love toe story formation process more than any other facet of writing.

I am not one of those people. I know the formation and rough draft portion of the exercise is necessary and even important, but I endure it; I don’t embrace it. For me, the most difficult part of writing fiction is writing the first draft. Almost always I hit a point somewhere into my story where I stop and say to myself, I know where I want to end up with this; I might even know how I intended to get there. I just don’t want to take the trip

I love writing beginnings and I love writing endings. It’s the infamous sagging middles that slow me down. If you saw me, you’d know there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but let’s not go there for these purposes.

For me, the writing begins once I have the first draft. Most writing instructors will tell you that all first drafts stink. A majority of successful writers will agree with that. I am neither of those, but it’s nice to know I have at least one thing in common with them. My first drafts reek. There’s simply no other way to put it However, I get so excited when I type those two magic words: THE END. I know after I type those, I can get down to the writing I love.

Once I have the bare bones first draft finished, it’s time for revision, editing and rewriting. That’s the second step I referred to above. For me, that’s where the raw materials get polished, shaped and turned into a finished product. Sometimes at the end of that process there is very little of the original story left, and that’s okay. Without the original story, there would have been nothing for me to shape and polish. So I needed both.

I think life is a lot like the writing process in that way. God creates us and we write  the rough draft. He allows us to develop our story, our plot, our major characters, and to some extent even our genre. He even allows us to suffer through our sagging middles. But if we stop there, we have a first draft that stinks. We have to allow the author of all things to rewrite us. To edit, revise, and change the parts of us that need to be. Only after that do we emerge polished and perfectly shaped so we are fit for publication.

Living Forgiven

By:  Staci Stallings

Well, I finally got to the part in “Forgiven Forever” (Getting Past the Guilt) that goes into the solution to our guilt.  It blew me away.

It opens with a story that I will only summarize here.

A man had a sin that he had tried to get rid of for 15 years.  He had prayed, had others pray, asked God for forgiveness, etc.  Still, this sin was eating him up.  So he went to the pastor for advice on how to get past this sin.  The pastor tells this story…

The man with the sin had a young son who was about 10 named Jeff.  Now one day the man leaves for work and he tells his son to feed the hunting dogs, but when he comes home, the hunting dogs are not fed.  So he goes to his son.  His son tells him that he didn’t get to it that morning and in the evening he forgot.  The father is upset but they go together and feed the dogs.  All seems okay until the next day.  The father comes home and there is Jeff sitting under the tree moping as his friends play in the yard.  The father says, “Jeff, what’s wrong?”

So Jeff tells him how bad he feels about not feeding the dogs.  The father says, “Well, Jeff, we all make mistakes.  It’s okay.  I forgive you.”  But a couple days later he comes home and same thing, only this time Jeff is in his room.  He goes to ask what’s wrong, and Jeff says, “Dad, I just feel so bad about not feeding those hunting dogs.  You told me to.  I knew I was supposed to, and to tell you the truth, I willfully didn’t do it that morning.  I mean I thought I would later, but then I didn’t do it later either.”

The father says, “Son, I forgave you.  You made a mistake, yes, but I forgive you.”  Couple weeks later, the same scene.  Again, Jeff just can’t let it go about not feeding the hunting dogs.  It happens again five years later at Jeff’s graduation.  “Dad, I just feel so bad about not feeding those hunting dogs.”  “Son, I forgave you for that a long time ago…”

When the son brings his wife and new baby home, the father realizes he’s sad and asks what’s wrong.  “Dad, I just feel so bad about those hunting dogs.  I mean, I know you trusted me to do it, and I really let you down…”

Now, you, like a friend of mine, may not get where this is going.  She was like, “Sheesh!  He forgave you.  LET. IT. GO!”  And then in the next breath she’s telling me how guilty she feels for sins she’s committed and how she’s just been thinking how she’s let God down and how she’s angry with God for being so judgmental by writing in the Bible, “Judge not lest ye be judged.”  Then when she judges someone else, she thinks, “Well, there I go again.  I can never get this right, God.  I can’t live up to what You want!”

She has (in the past, though I hope that’s changing), refused to give herself mercy, and so she doesn’t feel that God has forgiven her because she keeps revisiting all the awful stuff she’s done in her life rather than accepting what Christ did on the cross for her.  Like she said, “I guess I’m still trying to feed all them dead hunting dogs.”

I told her that the secret I have found is to understand those verses for what they are–telling you what works and what doesn’t.

Let’s say that you eat pizza all the time.  I mean, you eat it twice a day every day because you have no idea that pizza is not very good for you.  Now you could go on eating pizza every day not realizing what it’s doing to you physically even as you get sick and feel sluggish.  But then someone comes along and says, “Dude, pizza once in a while is not a big deal, but every day is wrecking your health.”  And you say, “Oh, really?  I didn’t know pizza wasn’t good for you.  I figured, you know it tastes good and it’s got tomato sauce and everything….”

Now once you KNOW pizza is not the healthiest choice, you then have a choice to eat something healthier or not.

It’s the same with sin.  If God never told you that lying doesn’t work, why wouldn’t you lie?  It feels better (on the surface) than telling the truth.  It might get you out of a jam you think you’re in.  It might even get you out of punishment in the temporary.  But you keep telling lies and your world will become unstable and will eventually crash around your ankles.  People will shun you because they can’t trust you.  People will probably tell others about your lying.  You may not be able to keep a job or a marriage long.  Why?  Because lying doesn’t work!

God knows that.  So He was kind enough to TELL US THAT IT DOESN’T WORK SO WE CAN AVOID IT.  But He did not tell us that so we can have a club to beat ourselves over the spiritual head with.

At Easter Sunday Mass, Father talked about us having been in chains, and Jesus by His dying and rising broke those chains so we can live “an Alleluia life”!  But the sad fact is, most of us are still in that damp, dank dungeon pressed up against the wall as if the chains are still there.  Now Jesus came down there and He took a key and He opened the locks on our chains, then He said, “Come follow Me.”

And what do we do?

We stay pressed up against the hard stone of that dungeon as though our chains were still keeping us there.

They are not!

My friend said, “Yeah, but look at all these Bible verses that talk about God’s wrath toward sinners.”  I said, “You’re reading the wrong verses.  Those are good to see where the boundaries lie, but if you stay there, you’re missing the point.  You’ve got to get to that one line as Jesus hangs on the cross and looks down at us… even as He’s dying for our sins.  He doesn’t say, “Father, that’s it.  They aren’t worth it.  Send the lightning and hurricanes and tornadoes and take them all out.  They ain’t worth this.”

NO!  He said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.””

That’s what He says about us when we stumble (again!) and fall into sin (again!).  He says on our behalf, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

In essence He’s looking at you and me and saying, “I opened the chains.  Now come out of that dungeon and start living forgiven.”

If God is in your life, if you’ve been baptized and know what Christ did on that cross for you, then it’s your choice and only your choice that is keeping you in that dungeon.  It’s your choice to choose death over the glorious, abundant life God has purchased for you with His own blood.

Will you get it right every time?  No. Will you make mistakes and “forget to feed the hunting dogs”?  Yes.  You will.  Because you’re human.

But the Good News is… God already knows that!  He knows you’re going to mess up.  He knows there are going to be times, even though He told you not to judge or not to lie, that you are going to do so anyway.  That’s why He’s already answered that problem with a Divine and everlasting solution!

Question is:  Are you accepting what He’s already done for you?  Are you living an Alleluia life?

Are you living forgiven?

Or not?

The Most Dangerous Lie

By:  Staci Stallings

This guilt thing is fascinating, but as I read “Forgiven Forever,” it has occurred to me how when we label something “sin,” some of us shut off the rest of the argument because we’ve never done anything “that bad.”  We haven’t sinned.  After all, we’re trying really hard to get it right.

Last night I was reading and when I got to the end of one chapter, I spent about ten minutes trying to wrap my mind around something I saw but was having real trouble putting into words.  This is what I wrote:

Original sin is trying to do it on your own.

So you can be sinning (by trying to do it on your own) and still be missing the mark even if what you are doing doesn’t look evil.

The spiral doesn’t begin with “guilt” in this case.  It begins with looking very good to the outside world, and we get complimented and praised for doing so good.  We don’t even have to deceive ourselves into thinking this isn’t that bad because no one including us thinks it is.  Then “good” starts taking over.  We get addicted to the approval of others and it takes more and more and more of it to get a “hit.”  At the zenith of that hill, we begin to get clear signals that this isn’t working, that I can’t keep this up, that the load has gotten too heavy.  But by then we are caught in the trap of our expectations of ourselves (too high) and the expectations of others… and there’s nowhere to go.  We can’t admit we can’t do it (that’s weakness), and yet we can’t, but we keep trying because we believe God and everyone else expects us to.

That’s when guilt enters and eats us alive.

Only God can get us out, and He can only do that if we will admit our weakness (admit that we can’t AND STOP TRYING TO!), fall at His feet, and let Him.  Otherwise, He will let our sandcastles fall.  Only when we renounce our sandcastles and trying to build them ourselves will we suddenly find ourselves at God’s mansion on the Rock… empty-handed, to be finally saved from ourselves by His Grace.

You see, I believe there is sin that looks like sin in the world.  You know, drugs, alcohol, going off the rails, being promiscuous, as well as countless other sins you can probably name.  Those are serious, don’t get me wrong.  But there is another type of sin, a type that snags many, MANY well-meaning Christians.  This type doesn’t look like sin at all, but believe me, it is just as deadly.  This sin is the half of the Tree we don’t really think about… the Knowledge of GOOD.

We get conned into believing we know what is good and then trying to do that on our own.  And oh, what a frightening trap this is.

I remember in “Tired of Trying to Measure Up,” there was the story of a young man who was on drugs.  His parents and church family prayed for him, worked with him, and finally sent him to rehab.  When he came out, he was a “changed man.”  He stopped doing drugs, became a prominent member of the youth group, was in every church organization, and everyone rejoiced because he was “cured.”  Except that he wasn’t.

When he was on drugs, he was on the Give Up wheel, just existing because he was in such despair.  His core was empty.  When he came out of rehab, he did not get on the God wheel, instead he got on the Try Harder wheel.  And though his actions looked “healed” to everyone out there, he was doing it all for the wrong reasons (to gain the outside world’s approval) and on his own strength, but his core was still empty.

I think that story struck me so hard because I was on the Try Harder wheel for so long, and I got so much praise from the outside world for my “accomplishments.”  But as Van Vonderan states in this story, the boy’s inside core was still empty… he just looked really good doing it.  That’s where I was… doing and doing and doing, and actually being very impressive to the outside world when inside I was miserable and empty.  I was scared, and I was angry, and I was confused.  After all, I was doing everything they said I should to be happy, and many of them praised me for being such a success, so why didn’t I feel like a success?

That made no sense to me.

Now it makes complete sense.  God did not allow that empty part of me to be filled up with accomplishments (THANK GOD!).  He wanted it to be filled with HIM!  And until I got that, I stayed quietly miserable.

So if you are doing and doing and doing and doing, even if it looks really good on the outside, but inside you are quietly miserable and empty, I submit to you that this may be the reason why.  You are still eating off the wrong Tree.  This is the most dangerous lie of all because trust me, by the time anyone knows you are in trouble, the spiral of emptiness will have taken over.  Further, they won’t know how to help you.  They will want you to “go back to who you were.”  Or “snap out of it.”  And people who are caught here just can’t wrap their minds around what took them down.  I mean, they weren’t drinking.  They didn’t leave their wife and kids for another person.  They were working hard and had success… Why is this happening?

I will say it again, God can get you out if you’re on that spiral or even if you think you might understand this because you’re living the beginning stages of it now.  God can get you out.  You can’t.  God can.  If you will let Him.

Will you?