I sat down with my Bible, a stack of commentaries on the Gospels, my journal, and a mug of black coffee. I began reading the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, making notes on each character. Next I turned my attention to the commentaries and searched for historical clues about the Christmas witnesses. It didn’t take much time to discover that one of the earliest recorded responses to Jesus’ entry to earth was cynical disbelief and faithless rejection. The witness who gave Heaven a derisive eye roll wasn’t a heathen but a member of the religious order, one of God’s own, a career priest.

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About a month ago I believed I was nearly finished with my work-in-progress. I took a break from editing by playing with the outline to the sequel. I discovered that there was a minor character in the WIP that I wanted to develop more fully in the second and third books. There was no strong female character in the story and I wanted to remedy that.

Toward the end of the WIP I had introduced a young slave girl who aids the antagonist by spying on one of the heroes. I had a sense she might end of being a more important character, but I wasn’t sure. By the end of the work, she ends of aiding the heroes. But I didn’t give the reader enough information about her to care if she continued into the next book or not.

I also felt like I was cheating by adding her so late into the book. Her presence in the book felt contrived, as if the only reason she was there was to advance the plot for the “real” characters.

It felt that way because it was true.

I knew I could add her story into the book fairly easy. The two main characters spend much of their time apart. Many of the chapters ping-ponged between characters. Weaving the heroine’s story into this mix would not be a difficult.

The issue was how to give this two-dimensional character interest. Here’s what (seemed) to work for me:

I connected the character to one of the book’s themes:

I’m exploring the idea of estrangement and alienation this is book. I’ve built a world in which people find themselves estranged from family, society, and nature. I created a vague deity in this world, but did little to explore what it would be like for a character to feel estranged from it. I gave the girl a nagging spiritual longing to connect with the supernatural, but no assurance that such a being existed.

I gave her strong ideals and then made her violate them:

I created the character to be a spy. In order to make her interesting I introduced her as someone who would never spy for the king no matter how desperate she was. I wrote her having a deep hatred for the king and his guard. One I established this unwavering opposition to the king, I was able spend multiple chapters driving her to be desperate enough to betray her principles and to work for the king. I was able to create a story arc for her that made her character likable, sympathetic, and complex.

More importantly, it felt like she was indigenous to the story from the beginning.

One of my writing heroes, Cathleen Falsani, invited me to submit a column at www.sojo.net. Her book Sin Boldly: A Field Guide to Grace is one of my favorite works ever. So when she asked me to try my hand at a column, I jumped. Here’s my partial answer toward a definition of an evangelical. Enjoy.

My friend, Jeff, started a blog  where he writes about buying and restoring old motorcycles. I’ve never seen Jeff as animated as when thumbs through his Iphone and finds pictures of the last old bike he rescued from rust and neglect. His idea of a good afternoon is to drive to an old barn in some forgotten part of Ohio and to sift through mountains of defunct bikes. He’ll find a handful of motorcycles with promise and negotiate with the owner until man is willing to part with his treasures. Jeff, then, spends months nursing the old bikes to their former glory, pouring time, money, and parts into his projects. Once he’s finished, Jeff photographs his prizes, and sells them.

Then its back to the junk heap to do it again, simply out of his love for motorcycles.

This is, I think, why God is so committed to our change. It’s easy for us to get frustrated with God tinkering at our lives all the time. Didn’t Jesus or George Beverly Shea sing the words “Just As I Am” at a Billy Graham Crusade? If he loves us so much, why he is discontent with our current condition?

We tend to get insecure and imagine that God is critical and angry at us. Or that his love is somehow conditional, based on our ability to jump through a series of rings aflame with holy fire.

The truth is that God is a bit like Jeff, or vice versa. He loves us and recalls what we looked like before corruption and decay pocked the sheen on our lives. He is committed to changing us because he know who we really are.

At the end of Moses’ life, he stood in front of his nation and reminded his people about the terms of their covenant with God. Moses reminded his people that God didn’t choose them because of a stellar track record of getting it right. They never were able to mind their spiritual P’s and Q’s. Instead, God loved them… because he loved them (Deuteronomy 7:4-7). He forecasted that just as they had not kept the terms of the covenant in the past, they would not be able to do so in the future either. Even with this glum assessment of Israel’s fidelity to God, Moses lays out the content of what we now call the book of Deuteronomy. The very act of his preaching the covenant in the face of that truth served as a reminder that God’s commitment and love for his people wasn’t connected to their moral condition.

“He loves you… because he has loved you.” 

In our day, another man, no less a patriarch, stands at the last chapters of his life and offers his final thoughts to a band of ragamuffin believers. In the 1970′s, Brennan Manning began to capture our imagination by describing a God “who loved us, not for how we should be, but because of how we are, because nobody is as they should be.” Brennan is a former priest and a recovering alcoholic who had the audacity to believe that none of his failures repulsed God to point of breaking intimacy with him.

Now, after years of silence Brennan offers us a memoir revealing intimate details of his ragamuffin life. Brennan’s mind is weakened  by the effects of a life-time of alcoholism.”Wet brain”, he calls it. Even so, Brennan looks back, with the help of his co-writer, John Blase, and recounts episodes from his story. Brennan offers the details of growing up with his cold and critical mother (If she’d been born in a later era, she might have been described as having an attachment disorder), and his time in the army and seminary. The reader is introduced to his great romance with Rosalyn,  his decision to leave the priesthood for her, and her patience in waiting for him. He recounts how his addiction tore at the fabric of marital love until it frayed beyond repair. Brennan’s transparency tells a story that runs counter to those our Evangelical subculture seems to adore: Tales of moral misfits who encounter Jesus and quick and permanent freedom from their vices. Brennan’s “Abba experience” and vibrant faith was powerless to loosen the grip of addiction over his body. Brennan’s Jesus is not a spiritual commodity that improved his life, but a companion that loved him in throughout his life, such as it was.

Philip Yancey makes a sole complaint about Brennan’s memoir in his forward: He tells no stories that cast him in a good light. He is content to let his audience see his brokenness. This creates another similarity between he and Moses. Moses incriminates himself when he describes the faithlessness of the people he has been called to lead. His best efforts weren’t enough to change the character of the people God charged him with leading. His sense of inadequacy was enough to drive him to strike the rock in frustration. And yet, Moses ended his life with convinced of his core message, that God “loved them because he loved them.” In the same way, Brennan’s life-struggle left him with the hard earned knowledge that the worst of our failures cannot separate us from the love of God.

“God loves us as we are, not as we should be.”

…

I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer a note about Brennan’s co-writer. John Blase is a gifted author with a rich and distinct voice of his own. His blog, The Beautiful Due, has become required reading for the maintenance of my soul. He writes poems about being ambushed by grace a midst the weariness of life. I closed All is Grace impressed his humility. He did what a good co-writer should do in this situation and subjugated his voice and style to another. John served Brennan’s message and style like a veteran waitstaff at a fine restaurant. The diners leave remembering the fine meal but forget their waiter. Do yourself a favor and visit his blog. John is a master chef in his own right. You won’t be disappointed.

On Sunday, my good friends Dave (far left) and Russ (far right) took and passed our black belt test in the Zanshindo fighting system. It’s a mixed martial arts system and took me about four and half years of training to earn it. Will is our instructor. He’s a former cage fighter and a great friend. It was fantastic that he took the time out of his travels to administer the test. My first black belt is in taekwondo. I can honestly say that the white belt test in this system was more grueling than my tkd black belt.

I’m  fixing to take up a sport more suitable for a man of a certain age. I’m thinking shuffle board is next.

This Friday I sat down and watched The Tree of Life, again.  I had heard about this film, loosely based on the Biblical book of Job and wanted see what the fuss was about. I found myself riveted by the imagery and story telling. The Tree of Life is a slow movie, but one that rewards the viewers’ patience.

The film is set in the 1950′s in Texas. Brad Pitt plays the driven father. He’s both the provider and nurturer of his family and their tormentor. His desire for his children to become great at times takes the form of being a harsh disciplinarian. His brand of love drives conflict into every relationship within the family system. The most troubled of the sons dies at the age of nineteen and the movie becomes theodicy. The mother, played by Jessica Chastain, wrestles with God, simultaneously expressing grief and trust. The tension between the local nature of the family’s grief is contrasted with the vastness of God through lengthy but awe inspiring shots of nature.

The movie jumps between the ’50′s family, senses from the Jurassic age, to Jupiter, to deserts, to close ups of butterflies, to the modern age in looping orbits and somehow captures the message of Job: In spite of our deepest pain, there is reason and order, and a God who reconciles. I highly recommend this movie. Without giving away spoilers, the last ten minutes of the film touched me deeply. I still can’t talk about it without tearing up.

I started reading Chuck Palahnuik’s latest novel, Damned, last night. Palahnuik’s protagonist is thirteen-year-old Madison, who will not be patronized by anyone, not even the Prince of Darkness. Early on, Madison realizes that her parents instilled a quality in her that has no purpose in Hell. Madison complains about her parents:

“No, it’s not fair, but I guess the worst thing they taught me was to hope. If you just planted trees and collected litter, they said, then life would turn out okay. All you had to do was compost your wet garbage and cover your house with solar cells and you’d have nothing to worry about. Renewable wind energy. Biodiesel. Whales. That’s what my parents considered out spiritual salvation. We’d see approximately a quatrillion Catholics throwing incense at some plaster statue, or a billion-zillion Muslims all lined up on their knees and facing New York City, and my dad would say, “Those poor ignorant bastards…”

Her biggest complaint about Hell, other than the constant airing of The English Patient, is hope:

“In Hell, hope is a really, really bad habit, like smoking cigarettes or fingernail biting. Hope is something really tough to give up. It’s an addiction to break. “

The chapter ends with the readers realizing that she’s addressing Satan:

“Who Do I Think I Am? In a thousand words… I don’t have a clue, but I’ll start by abandoning hope. Please help me, Satan. That would make me so happy. Help me give up my addiction to hope. Thank you.”

Madison realizes that hope is a universal drive, whether it shows up in the environmentally conscious form of her “secular humanist” parents or the way the “bat-sh__-crazy” Baptists express it. Hope is needed on earth, but is an unscratchable itch in Hell.  The placard at the entrance of Dante’s Hell, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” was a warning. Madison sees these words more as a coping skill.

Hope makes Hell a bit more hellish. On this side of death, however, its the lack of hope that makes Earth more hellish.

At least that was true for Zechariah. An emissary from Heaven met him with a hope filled message and he responded with an eye roll. There was a point in his life, after witnessing Roman armies march into Galilee and burn villages to the ground and enslave the strong and install a cruel warlord to be the regional king and after that king filled the temple with pagan art and idols and after Zechariah and his wife came to grips with the fact they would never hold a baby in their arms, that Zechariah gave up hope and life on Earth became a bit more hellish.

One of the most common mistakes I see new writers make is to  declare victory after finishing the draft of their work-in-progress. To be sure, getting a book down on paper is a huge accomplishment. It’s worth a minor celebration: A few days off from writing, an extra scoop of ice cream, or a night out. However,  I see far too often is a Facebook statuses and blog posts about being finished with the work and agent shopping.

The truth is that, unless you’ve been channeling F. Scott Fitzgerald at your laptop, your work really isn’t good. Not yet. All you’ve accomplished is  creating the clay that you’ll begin to mold. You’ve yet to shape the sculpture. All you’ve accomplished is the creation of the raw materials you need to begin writing. You’ve got rickety sentences and elliptical paragraphs to tame. Sure, your work is filled with gems. But there’s a lot of bad writing in need of editing.

Lots of it.

If this isn’t true you, keep it to yourself. Otherwise, nobody will like you and you’ll never get invited to parties again.

Here are — things you should be doing instead of shopping your newly finished manuscript:

• Take a vacation from your manuscript. Set your manuscript aside for a week or two. After being immersed in a work for months, you’ll need time and space before you and interact with the writing objectively. A passage that seemed genius in the moment often looks natty with fresh eyes. You might realize that ideas that came easy to you were actually borrowed from other authors.
• Share it. Give your work to a few beta readers. Get their honest critique. Some of those readers should be other writers. Some should be readers in the audience you are trying to reach. Why give the opportunity for an agent to find fault (and reject your work) when you can find people willing to volunteer their services? If you find critical readers who can help your manuscript find its next level.
• Read it out loud. There’s something about reading your work out loud that exposes grammar errors and clumsy sentences like no other disciples.
• Read a book on writing. During your vacation from your manuscript, read a book on writing. Choose one or two suggestions in the book that give you opportunity for growth. Then edit your manuscript with an eye for improving those two things.

Dear Small Group Leaders,

Our web team is valiantly working to restore the resource section of the church website. In the meantime, Here is the small group curriculum for the next two weeks:

Thanks for what you do.

11-20-11studyguide

11-27-11studyguide

Best!

Larry