The Pitfalls of Praise and Criticism

“Give someone a book, they’ll read for a day. Teach someone how to write a book, they’ll experience a lifetime of paralyzing self doubt,” Lauren DeStefano tells us.

The psychological, spiritual, emotional pitfalls of writing a book are so numerous and varied it is amazing a word is ever written. And if you do finish and publish, you face a whole new set of issues instigated in equal measure by success and failure, by praise and criticism.
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How Did He Make It So Suspenseful?

Eric Larson achieves the drama and suspense of a political thriller in his book on the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. This is a remarkable achievement because everyone knows how it ends before they start–a German U-boat sinks the ship. How was he able to do this? When I read the acknowledgments at the end of Dead Wake, I found out. He listened to his editor.
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Prophetic Lament

Throughout my life I have attended worship services in a variety of traditions, but they tended to have one thing in common–they began with praise to God and then moved to confession. This is an appropriate model to follow with much merit. When we see how holy and good God is, we see more clearly by contrast that we are not, and so we confess.
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Unlocking the Book of Job

Here’s what many people know about the book of Job.

1. Job is on trial.
2. The book is primarily about suffering.
3. Job’s hope for a redeemer foreshadows Christ.
4. God puts Job in his place at the end of the book, telling Job that God is God and Job is decidedly not.

All of those points, however, according to John Walton and Tremper Longman are quite mistaken.
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Happy with the Process

When employees are unhappy with a decision that leaders have made, often they don’t react against the decision. Instead they complain long and loud about the process.

“All sides were not heard adequately.”
“There wasn’t enough time.”
“We didn’t know how the decision would be made.”
“Key discussions were behind closed doors.”
“The right people weren’t involved.”
“Clearly some ulterior motive was at work here.”

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The Vaccine Hero

My sister died because of a vaccine . . . a vaccine she never received. On a September morning in 1952, at the age of seven, Lucy Rae Le Peau contracted polio and died that afternoon. The vaccine that would have saved her life would not be developed for another year.

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It was a vaccine my grieving mother prayed for desperately, especially because her three other children, including me, were still vulnerable to the terrifying disease. Every year thousands of children across the United States were struck with it, peaking the year my sister died with over 57,000 cases, of whom 3,145 died.

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Kenneth E. Bailey, 1930–2016

In the 1970s a friend gave me a copy of Kenneth Bailey’s The Cross and the Prodigal. I was blown away. It transformed my understanding of how to read the New Testament. Later I devoured Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes. Bailey’s basic thesis was that Middle Eastern peasant culture changes only very slowly. So if we want to understand the world that Jesus lived in, we should get to know Middle Eastern peasant culture today.
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