Man Plans While God Laughs
“LORD, ENLARGE MY TERRITORY” had been on my lips for months, and I was confident that God would answer. But forgetting the way of things, I made a big mistake.
Just before the launch of one of my novels, a terrible error was made. In the publishing business, the usual path to success lies in building anticipation for a book before it hits the stores, but in this case no advance copies were sent to critics or to bloggers, so for the first time in my career a novel received no print reviews whatsoever.
Most of my fellow bloggers didn’t even have a chance to read the novel and review it until it had already been published. When added to the fact that 2009 was perhaps the worst sales year on record for the entire publishing industry, this meant the novel was pretty much dead on arrival. Not the direction you hope your career will take after seven books in print.
It seemed prayer was the only marketing plan that could possibly yield results. Remembering that prayer of Jabez, I began to ask God for more territory. And here is where I made my big mistake: what I really meant was, “Let me sell more books.”
Over the months as I prayed, I began to ask myself if I was ready. A sad story hit the headlines of a man with the wonderful name of Abraham Shakespeare, whose life was ruined and then lost when he won $31 million dollars. It’s common for lottery winners say the money ruined their life. I began to wonder what would happen to me if God worked a miracle and this latest novel sold a million copies. Could I handle it? Could I withstand the temptation to take the credit? Or would my territory become too large? Would my pride get me lost in all that extra space?
In asking these questions, I remembered why I started writing in the first place. “Write what you know,” as the common wisdom goes, and when you get down to the heart of life, I know nothing that really matters except “Christ, and him crucified.” So I write about the Lord, for the Lord, in the hope that people who don’t know how beautiful he is might be moved a step closer to falling in love with him as I have, and people who do know him as I do might be moved to love him even more. And suddenly one day I realized I had been praying for the wrong “territory”.
I could have asked God to let me spread his love far and wide. I could have asked him to let me share eternal life with people who are lost and dying. I could have asked for those wonderful, amazing things and left the details up to him, but there I was, praying to sell books. Such a petty little prayer!
“Man plans; God laughs” as the old Yiddish saying goes. It’s so easy to forget the way of things, so easy to ask God to bless my plan, instead of asking him to reveal the blessings he has planned.
When I quit praying with book sales in mind and started simply asking the Lord to enlarge my territory any way he wished, some interesting “coincidences” began to happen. A pastor at my church told me the elders want me to start preaching there soon. I was asked to teach a series based on The Gospel according to Moses, thinking maybe ten or fifteen people would come, but when the series was announced, twenty percent of the entire congregation signed up.
One of my novels may be D.O.A. (or maybe not…who knows?) but now that I’ve remembered the true way of things, my territory seems to grow a little every day.
How about you? Are you asking God to bless your puny plans, or are you asking for the kind of miracle only God could plan?
Win a Kindle and Some Great Novels from Athol Dickson
We are just a few short weeks away from the release of the Athol Dickson Christy Collection. In advance of that, I wanted to give something special to those who have visited my new web site and Facebook page. So I’m giving away a Kindle pre-loaded with the first copy of my re-release of They Shall See God. If you already have a Kindle you can register to win one for a friend. If they win I’ll send you the entire collection: They Shall God, River Rising, The Cure, and Winter Haven.
The contest begins August 3rd and concludes on August 27th. The winner will be announced on September 1st. Don’t forget to visit my Facebook Page or here on August 3rd to enter.
When a Cure is not Enough
When The Cure was first published, some people were left with nagging questions about Riley Keep’s decision at the end of the story. Why would he do such a thing and why would I present his decision as if it was a good thing?
For artistic reasons, it’s usually best to let a novel speak for itself. In this case however, with apologies to literary purists everywhere, I think maybe a few words of explanation are in order.
All around the world people say “nobody’s perfect” as if it were a law of nature or a self-evident fact. Some of us may seem less morally flawed than others, but the difference is only a matter of degree. No matter how kind and caring and good we may appear to be, from time to time we all deliberately choose to do something that we know is wrong.
Most religions claim we can live moral lives if we so choose. But if that were true wouldn’t somebody, somewhere, choose the right thing every time? “Nobody’s perfect” is true the same way “what goes up must come down” is true. Like gravity, and like the urge behind Riley Keep’s alcoholism, when it comes to morality there are forces at work beyond our control. Nobody chooses goodness all the time because nobody can.
Much as a drug-addicted mother will give birth to a baby addicted to those same drugs, we are all born addicted to bad choices. Take two toddlers and put one desirable toy between them. Will you see a demonstration of selfless generosity? Will one of them offer the toy to the other? Not likely. Innocent though we’d like to think they are, the bigger, faster toddler will end up with the toy and the other one will throw a fit, as every parent knows.
When I wrote about Riley’s alcohol addiction, all of this was on my mind. The Cure is not just about one man’s struggle against alcoholism. It’s about every person’s struggle against the addiction to self-centered immorality that afflicts the human race.
Most religions focus on the symptoms of our addiction. The assumption is, if one can control the behavior, one has solved the problem. To be a good person, one has only to act like a good person. But every alcoholic knows that isn’t true. The addiction remains, whether one drinks or not.
We also try to sole this problem with science. From time to time the headlines announce cures for various addictions, but there is no such thing. There is only the replacement of one symptom with another. Nicotine patches instead of cigarettes. Methadone instead of heroin. We can “cure” gluttony with stomach stapling; we can “cure” a pornography compulsion with filters on computers, but no human invention could cure us of the reason those addictions exist in the first place.
For that, we don’t need religion, and we don’t need science. We need a miracle.
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This is an excerpt from the new afterward to The Cure by Athol Dickson, soon to be re-released in both eBook and print format.
