Christian Living
A former magazine writer and editor, John Shore’s life as a Christian writer began the moment when, at 38 years old, he was very suddenly (and while in a supply closet at his job, of all places) walloped by the benevolent hand of God.
John's most recent book is Midlife Manual for Men, which he co-authored with Stephen Arterburn, author of the best-selling Every Man series and host of the nationally syndicated Christian radio show, New Life Live. Midlife Manual is the first of four books John and Steve will be writing together for Bethany House Publishers; the next, Being Christian, will be out in September 2008. John is also the author of I'm OK--You're Not: The Message We're Sending Non-Christians and Why We Should Stop (NavPress); Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang (Seabury Books); and co-author, with Richard Lederer, of Comma Sense (St. Martin's). Both Penguins and Comma Sense won San Diego Book Awards for best books in their respective categories (Religious/Spiritual, and How To/Reference).
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Tuesday, May 13, 2008How To Earn Respect and Power, Kids
Yesterday, at Jamul Intermediate School, in Jamul, California, I spoke to fourth and fifth graders about writing.
If you are one of those kids: Hi, kid! Thanks for having me out at your school yesterday! Not that you had a choice! Still, you were very polite, and laughed at all my jokes, and asked intelligent, fun questions, and in general helped me to have an all-around fabulous time.
DON'T FORGET THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING!
Here's the gist of that again:
Power and respect. That's what writing well can get you -- and nothing can get you more power, and more respect, from more people, than knowing how to write. That's why you've been learning about writing from the moment you started school: It's that important. If you don't know how to write well, it will be way too easy for people to think you're stupid. Not knowing how to write well doesn't make you stupid, but people can't help but think that it does. If someone sees something you wrote that's sloppy, difficult to read, and filled with mistakes, they will think you're stupid. At the very least, they'll think you're uneducated. And in your life, you do not want people thinking you're stupid or uneducated. Because then they might not respect you as much as you want them to.
It's hard to get people's respect; that's one of the main reasons respect is so valued. You really have to earn respect. When you write well, you show people that you've already done the work it takes to earn their respect. And they'll willingly give you their respect, too, because what your good writing proves to them is that you have a good mind.
If people can't respect your mind, they can't respect you at all. The only way people know you at all is through what they know of your mind. Even if you want to be a famous athlete, it's not what you can do with your body that people will respect: it's what, through the power of your mind, you made your body do that people will respect. The quality of a person always comes down to the quality of their mind. You want people to know you've got a good mind, a mind that's done things, a mind you're proud of, a mind they should respect. The best way to communicate that is through writing.
There are only two ways to let people know what you think: talking, and writing. You've learned how to talk. Now you must learn how to write.
If you write well, you can have any future you want. You can go to any college you want. You can have any job you want. You can live anywhere you want. If you don't know how to write -- if every time you write something it comes out looking like something that someone who is stupid or uneducated wrote -- then, as soon as you're out of high school, you're going to end up doing what people who can't write well always get stuck doing, which is having to take a terrible job working terrible hours for terrible pay with a terrible boss.
You don't want that. A rotten job is an awful thing. But that's what you will be stuck with if you don't give people a very clear reason to know you deserve better.
Being able to write -- a good school essay, a good college paper, a good email, a good letter -- gives you power in your life. And you want all the power in your own life you can possibly get, so that you have all the choices in your own life that you could possibly want.
A person is as free in life as they have choices in life. That's why prison is so bad: Prisoners have less choices in their lives than anyone else in the world. That's what makes prison so punishing: No choices.
You want choices! You want freedom! You want respect! You want power!
Knowing how to write well is the only thing you can do that guarantees that throughout your life you can have as much of those three things as you want.
(If you know of a kid whom you think could benefit from the above Big Advice, please forward the url of this blog post to them and/or their parents. Thanks.)
Comment here.
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Saturday, May 10, 2008Blogging; Writing A Play
Every blog post I write appears in three places at more or less the same time: on Christianity.com, Crosswalk.com, and on my WordPress blog. Together the three bring me some 40,000 "views" per month. I have no idea how many people that number represents, but I'm guessing I couldn't fit them into my living room at once.
I've been blogging for one year now. It's become one of my two primary creative outlets: I blog, and I write books. Both are dear to me.
Lately I've been doing neither. I'm between books -- the editing of one done; the exact structure of the next still in the works -- and my last blog post was on May 6, four days ago. Four days isn't much time in real life, but in Blog Time it's about four months. My view numbers have plummeted like a toddler on a tight-rope. Posting to a blog is like drinking water: If you don't do it all the time, you pretty quickly expire.
I like to post a new piece at least every other day, because I know people are showing up to my blog, and I hate the thought of not giving them something for their trouble and precious time. It kills me that people come to my blog. I feel it as an honor. So I want to do my best by the people who show up here; I want to show them, via the quality of what I give them, the same respect they show me by coming here in the first place.
Lately, though, I've been having one of the most exceptional writing experiences of my life. I'm writing a three-act play. I figure it's at most ten hours' work away from being finished. I expect to have it done by the time my father arrives here this Thursday. (I wrote about my pop's upcoming visit on my last post, My Dad, My Book, and the 2008 San Diego Book Awards.)
I won't bore you with why, exactly, I've found writing my first play such an ... enveloping experience (especially since I know I'll never fully understand it myself) -- but it has meant that lately, whenever I sit down to write a blog post, I instead open the play and work on it. Which is so bizarre I can barely think of it without making funny Martian noises. I never don't blog. At this point, I don't even know how not to. I think in blog segments. I've felt destined for a daily column since I first learned there were such things. Blogging for me is like swimming for a fish.
Except that lately I've been being Joe Playwright.
I'm afraid all I'm saying is that I may not post anything new here until my play's finished. That might be tomorrow. That might be in two weeks. I have no idea. But somewhere in there, for sure.
You'll wait for me, yes?
Comment here.
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Wednesday, May 7, 2008My Dad, My Book, and the 2008 San Diego Book Awards
My book, "I'm OK--You're Not: The Message We're Sending Nonbelievers, and Why We Should Stop", is one of three finalists for a 2008 San Diego Book Award, in the category of Spirituality. (My book "Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang" won that award in 2006.)
If, on the evening of Saturday, May 17, I attend the SDBA awards ceremony/ schmooze-fest, my 80-year-old father will be with me. To me, this is like saying I'll be accompanied by Popeye, or that on that night I'll sprout wings and fly to the affair. It's that unimaginable. As it happens, my father will be visting me that weekend. My father hasn't stayed overnight in any town I've lived in since I moved out of our family home when I was 16 years old, which was 34 years ago. From then until I was 45, I don't think I saw him five times. I grew from a teenager to a middle-aged man without him.
I became a Christian when I was thirty-eight. Then I wanted to be closer to him: Honor your father, and all like that. So I started writing to him. One day he wrote me back. Then I called him. Then I called him again. Then he invited my wife and me to come to his home for a week and visit with him and his wife, my stepmother. So we did. The following year, he invited us out again, and of course we went again. A lovely time, both times, was had by all.
In February of this year, my dad's wife of 40 years, my stepmother from way back when, succumbed to cancer, and passed away. (I wrote a little about that here.) Since that sadness, my father and I have grown considerably closer; I would say we have become good friends. My wife and I would like him to come live with or near us. It's for the purpose of exploring that possibility that he's coming out to stay with us the weekend of the San Diego Book Awards.
My dad -- who is straight from the 1950's school of Responsible Living -- thinks it's Beyond Bizzare that I'm a writer. To him it's like I make a living making balloon animals, or ... I don't know ... stacking rocks. (Wait. Writing is a lot like those two things....) He doesn't understand how I can possibly make a living doing something so nebulous and ... weird, basically.
And, of course, all I ever wanted my whole life was for the guy to take me seriously. Same as all sons want from their fathers.
I don't know if my father's going to be in the mood to go the San Diego Book Awards. I don't know if I will be. But we'll probably go. And if we do go, and I do win, I could see, once I'm back in my seat with him, having to take more time than I really should to stop smiling.
Comment here.
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Monday, May 5, 2008Backstage With The Blind Boys of Alabama
The Blind Boys of Alabama. Jimmy Carter's on the far left. The guy who looks like he's yawning, Bishop Billy Bowers, has a voice of such arresting intimacy it stops their shows.
My wife Cat and I recently went to see The Blind Boys of Alabama. The group's lead singer, Jimmy Carter, has a voice like a mint julep infused with the rawest moonshine. (Yes, it is that Jimmy Carter: in between hammering away for Habitat for Humanity and solving the Middle East crisis, our former president is an old blind black man who fronts a gospel singing group. How he pulls this off is a mystery known only to God and Jimmy's make-up artist.)
Being in the show's audience was at times a tad uncomfortable, insofar as it was clear just about no one present came into the show knowing that The Blind Boys are a gospel group. Most thought they were going to see hardcore rural blues---acoustic, field holler, juke-joint type stuff. And in a real sense they did get that. But mostly what they got---what in fact they got with every single song -- was pure, unabashed gospel.
Oh, no! Young, organically-inclined, ganja-friendly white people adorned with hemp-cloth shoulder bags and wearing sandals, macrame-berets, and yoga pants having Christian songs sung at them! Not good. Not what they showed up for. Expecting low-down funky blues; getting hands-up joy in the pews.
When the word "Jesus" first came roaring from Jimmy's reedy, bourbon-cured vocal chords, I could feel people around us sort of freeze in mid-groove. Did he just say, "Jesus"? It was like a record had skipped; for a split second it threw everyone off the rhythm of their happy rasta-hop. Makes sense. If I went to see a gospel group, and they started singin' about pimpin' and robbin' jewelry stores, I, too, would feel a stammer in my step.
But everybody got right back into it. They'd probably misheard the word "Jesus,", or it didn't really have much if anything to do with the song. No worries.
Then Jimmy very distinctly sang the word "Jesus" again. People quit committing so much to the physical expressions of their pleasure, and started listening more, particularly to the lyrics. What the heck was going on? Was this some kind of ... Christian show?!
Four songs into the set, the hemp crowd was looking downright disgruntled -- whereas the previously clandestine Christians in the crowd were now waving their hands in the air like they were at an old-time travelin' tent revival. In no time, they had unexpectedly gone from being the old and square ones, to being the hip ones!
Seven songs into it, nobody cared who was old, or who was hip, or who was Christian, or who wasn't: All any of us knew was that we were listening to music as rip-roaringly, foot-stompingly, soul-rattlingly fine as music gets. No one resisted the gospel that night. I believe some folks were converted that night.
After the show, Cat and I were invited backstage to meet the BBA. "Now remember," their manager warned us, "you can't just stand around and smile. You gotta go right up to 'em, touch 'em. They're blind."
"Cool," I said. "Finally, it's proper for me to touch people I don't know."
Cat, sensing I'd probably say something just like that, was already headed back stage. "Wait up!" I said, waving goodbye to the manager. I totally saw her pick up her pace. "Don't touch anyone without me!" I hollered. She practically started jogging.
Like most backstage areas, this one was pretty dismal: couple of couches, a mini-fridge, a table holding a little spread of cold cuts, chips, veggies, dip. Nothing you wouldn't find at a frat party. I espied Jimmy Carter sitting alone on one side of one of the couches, his folded hands in his lap. He was still wearing the highly stylin' seersucker suit he'd performed in. I sat down beside him.
"Can you tell I'm here?" I said. "Not only that," he said, "I can tell you need to go on a diet. Unless you're about seven-foot eight, you obvious lard***."
No, he didn't say that. He screamed for his manager.
"He told me to touch you," I said. "Should I do that now, or wait for him?"
But I jest. In reality I put my hand on Mr. Carter's arm and thanked him for bringing us all a little closer to God that night. Basically, I went around the room to each one of the guys, and thanked them, and chatted with them a little about the quality of what they do. Cat did the same.
Worked for them. Definitely worked for us.
Comment here.
Related-type posts: My Name Is Not Pato Banton (about the night I went to see reggae star Pato Banton at the same club where we saw Blind Boys) and My Private, Difficult Conversation with Chrissie Hynde.
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Friday, May 2, 2008As "Writer Of The Month," I Field The Tough Questions
Okay, the questions aren't so tough. But on her blog Through My Eyes , Ingrid Moore Curry -- Ohioan, music fanatic, snooty people hater, Ving Rhames rebounder, proud member of The Secret Council Of American Negroes -- did ask me a few questions in the course of interviewing me as her Writer of the Month for May.
It is a mystery to me how, in the course of our short e-chat, I went from talking about the difficult relationship between The Great Commission and The Great Commandment to talking getting hunted down by torch-wielding villagers and beaten to death with sticks. Shows Ingrid's genius as an interviewer, I think.
To anyone else who would like to interview me as their Writer/Genius of the Month (or of the year, or whatever), I'd like to say do it! Right now!
Thank you. Thangyaverymuch.
Share how fascinated you are by me here.
