Tim Stafford's Blog, page 29

Personal God

FYI I’ve put out a new ebook edition of Personal God: Can You Really Know the One Who Made the Universe? 

It’s available on Amazon here for $2.99. It’s also on Smashwords.com and (through them) should be on most other bookselling sites soon.

Personal God has an interesting history. Years ago (in 1986, to be exact) I published a book called Knowing the Face of God. The best way to summarize its success is: a few people liked it a lot. It sold only modestly, but even today I occasionally hear from people who tell me it was very helpful to them.

Just a few years ago, John Sloan called me. John is a friend and a long-term editor at Zondervan. He was editing  Philip Yancey’s book Prayer,  which included some extensive quotes from  Knowing the Face of God. That made him go back to Face and re-read it. John is a man of enthusiasms, and his call to me was very enthusiastic. He brought the idea of a simplified, condensed edition that eliminated some rabbit trails and concentrated on the main ideas.

I was skeptical. Editors and writers often feel that a book should have been better received, but it’s notoriously hard to revive a book. With so many good new books on the market, why would someone give a second chance to an old one? Nevertheless, John was insistent, and he convinced Zondervan to get behind the idea.

I ended up thoroughly re-writing the book. In doing so, I became moderately excited all over again. The book examines the classic evangelical phrase, “a personal relationship with God.” I raise doubts about whether that’s just talk, and whether there is anything really personal possible with the God who made the universe. I try to bring a new perspective and understanding to “personal relationship,” one that is both hopeful and truthful. That’s why a few people like it a lot. It poses questions that rarely surface in Christian circles, and it offers some answers. For people with doubts and questions, that can be very significant.

Then disaster struck. My friend Scott Bolinder was overseeing books at Zondervan, and he got fired. All of a sudden this special project, Personal God, became project non grata. Having lost its chief in-house supporter, it became an orphan. I knew the book was in trouble when two cartons of signed books arrived at my house, without explanation. When I had visited Zondervan in Grand Rapids, they had asked me to sign 100 copies to use in promotion. Now, having no use for them, they posted them to me.

All that work, and all that excitement, for nothing.

That’s why I’ve brought it back as an e-book. The book lives on.

One Data Point on Obamacare

Tuesday I signed up for Obamacare at the Covered California website. My wife and I are both self-employed and, unlike many Americans, have never been without health insurance. We have been able to buy insurance by keeping a  catastrophic-care policy with a well-known major insurance company, but we were locked in to that provider because (though we are both quite healthy people) we have “pre-existing conditions.” (It’s hard to reach 60 years of age without a pre-existing condition.) That meant  the price kept going up and up and up, to obscene levels.

The good news is that I purchased a comparable policy that lets us stay with our present physicians for less than half what we have been paying. Applying online took me about half an hour. I will save a lot of money, and–also significant–if I don’t like it I can switch.

I know it’s just one person’s story, and proves nothing about the future of Obamacare. But it does provide a glimmer of hope.

The Difference Between War and Peace

My community, Santa Rosa, California, is in turmoil after a 13-year-old boy was shot and killed by the police last week. The boy was walking to a friend’s house carrying a pellet gun made to look like an assault weapon. The police saw him, thought the gun was real, and ordered him to drop it. He had his back to them, and instead of dropping the gun he swung toward them. An officer put eight bullets into him. (Read more here.)

There’s some question of racial profiling, as the boy was Hispanic from a tough neighborhood. But the more prominent issue is over whether the police are trigger happy. We’ve had quite a few deaths at the hands of the police recently, sometimes when an unarmed person made a gesture that was interpreted as reaching for a gun. According to an article in the local newspaper, police are trained to respond almost instantly to a perceived threat. With modern weaponry, there’s no time to think so they shoot for the body to disable the possible shooter.

Just because you’re only 13 doesn’t mean you’re not dangerous. The day before this incident, another young teenage boy in another state killed his teacher and shot two friends at school before killing himself. The police have reasons to fear.

I’m wondering, however, whether police procedures confuse war with peace. Soldiers at war have a  primary duty to defend themselves and eliminate the enemy. Police officers, on the other hand, have a duty to protect citizens. They put themselves in harm’s way for that purpose. The citizens they are sworn to protect include all the people they encounter–innocent until proven guilty.

Though police accosting a boy carrying a rifle has similarities to war, it is subtly but fundamentally different. The main difference is that a police officer should value the life of that boy more than his own. Not more than the lives of bystanders or potential victims–if there are any, as there were not in this case–but more than his own.

It appears that some officers consider their own lives inviolable. If somebody is going to die, it won’t be them. That’s how warriors act. It’s not how peace officers act. Is it?

I’m not blaming police officers. I know they are put into extraordinary conditions that require split-second decisions. Apparently they are trained to shoot at the first hint of threat.

I am questioning the mindset behind that training. It seems like one more aspect of a society that has become increasingly adversarial, that admires the OK Corral of the Old West more than the towns that replaced them–places that valued libraries and churches and mothers’ societies. In those towns, I believe, a police officer would rather die than shoot a 13-year-old boy.

Drive, Ambition, Zeal

I have been thinking about drive because I’ve lost some. Not that I’ve ever been a very driven character. I know people who are. And when I read biographies of famous people I’m often struck by their obsessive qualities. Some of those qualities are obviously problematic. Norman Mailer was driven to write but also to attract attention and to take women to bed. Vincent Van Gogh was driven to paint but also to quarrel.

More positively, though, obsession and ambition create focus and motivate work. Some people are born with talent, but very few successful careers are built on just talent. You have to work at it. Driven people work at it long after other people have taken a break, gone out to dinner, or gone to bed. I have no doubt I would be a better writer if I were more driven.

I don’t think I have it in me. At any rate I’ve never wanted to be like that, never saw it as a good thing. My father-in-law, a successful surgeon, sometimes cited three factors that made a recipe for success: ambition, participation, and hard work. I wasn’t fond of the first of those. I saw ambition as selfish. It meant thinking too much about yourself and how you could advance yourself. It went with self-importance.

With the benefit of a few years I have revised my views. I now see that ambition does not have to be selfish. I have little doubt that Mother Teresa was driven. So for Augustine, Luther, Francis. The Bible word is “zeal.” Jesus had zeal. So did Paul.

I don’t know many people who would put themselves in that category, though. Can you make yourself zealous? Can you manufacture drive? To a limited extent, I think you can. You can determine that your goals demand a certain level of intensity, and you can bind yourself to that intensity. However, I think most driven people are born that way, or maybe made that way by a certain kind of ambitious parent. Driven people don’t usually choose to be obsessive, it’s just the way they see the world. They can’t help themselves.

Here’s where it gets a little subtler, though. We usually think of drive and ambition relating to the public world–to politics, business, the arts, to fame and achievement. But I know mothers who have little interest in the public world, yet will drive themselves to the limit as mothers. In fact, I myself never had to decide to pour myself into fatherhood. It was simply the most engrossing thing I knew, and nothing would stand in my way. I was more driven to fatherhood than I ever was to my writing, to judge by my willingness to go on when exhausted.

Something of the idea of “calling” comes into play here. Someone who finds a “calling” just naturally devotes himself to the work–whether it is gardening, bird watching, coaching basketball, or fixing cars. Nobody has to remind him or her to work at it. The hard thing is to get such people to stop.

As I review my own life, I see that I had such a calling to write. I loved it, I never got enough of it, I was ever eager to do more and I was zealous to write well. The same with parenting. Yes, other people were more driven than I. But it’s relative, and I suppose my ambitions in those areas would rank fairly high.

I’m now in my sixties, and I can feel quite clearly that I do not have the drive I once did. I’m pretty sure it’s related to hormones. But it’s also related to circumstances. My kids are grown and married. It feels as though I’ve found my level as a writer–I’m probably not going to be published in The New Yorker or win the National Book Award. If I were a more driven character this might drive me to ever-greater efforts to transcend, but instead it leaves me just content to keep doing what I do and love to do. I don’t have much ambition any more. And I miss it.

I miss it like a gap in my teeth that my tongue keeps finding. A force in myself that I relied on–I just had to write–isn’t really there any more. It’s as though you sat down to breakfast one morning and found you didn’t have much of a taste for food. You still eat. But it’s something you choose to do, not something that comes automatically.

My mother, who had lots of sayings we repeat fondly, used to say that when you are young, your great temptation is sex; when you are middle-aged, your great temptation is money; and when you are old, your great temptation is grumbling. I’m thinking that grumbling comes in because life isn’t providing built-in gusto for you; you miss it, and you tend to think someone or something must be to blame.

If God is behind the aging process, as I think he must be, then he pays us a great compliment, disguised as a challenge. We have reached the stage of maturity–or should have–when we must provide our own motivation. We don’t find ourselves seized by a vocation. We aren’t driven any more. Not the longing for sex, nor money, nor fame, nor achievement, nor love makes us live and breathe. We have to decide what is worth pursuing, and do it.

 

Real Culture

For inspiration in these dispirited times I would recommend this interview with Ted and Dana Gioia. They are remarkable brothers: raised working class Catholics in southern California, educated at Stanford,  Oxford and Harvard, seriously and professionally dedicated to poetry and jazz, MBAs with terrific respect for and experience in business, serious Christians. Reading this bucked me up considerably.

The Real Meaning of Tolerance

I’ve been thinking about the meaning of tolerance, a virtue that I believe in very deeply. I’m not quite sure I have this figured out correctly, and it’s very sensitive subject matter. Bear with me and correct me (tolerantly) where I’m off.

I’m troubled by the expansion of tolerance into a demand for celebration. The obvious occasion comes when a friend or relative comes out as LGBT. This news may come as quite a shock, especially to people who cling to traditional sexual mores. They may struggle to react with kindness, to accept the person and to accommodate his or her new sexual identity. From what I’ve observed, though, kindness, acceptance and accommodation are often not enough. What is required is affirmation, genuine celebration of the LGBT self. And if the relative or friend can’t truly celebrate? That is felt as a deep offense.

Hardly anyone would insist that all must celebrate their political opinions, tastes in food, and choices in child rearing. But sexual and gender identity is a matter of discovery, not choice, say those who come to a new understanding of themselves. This is who I am–and you must embrace who I am.

No doubt this insistence is also based on the experience of being discriminated against. LGBT people often feel battered. Someone who has painfully found the way to a new self-understanding may say: if you can’t rejoice with me in my new-found freedom, I want nothing to do with you. It’s too painful.

I’m focusing on LGBT, but the demand for affirmation extends to others. Oddly, I think people of orthodox faith often have similar feelings. When they encounter those who think they are fanatics and nuts, some cry foul and complain that they are persecuted. It’s hard to be part of a misunderstood minority, especially when identity in that minority means life to you.

We want to be loved, and in some sense we deserve to be loved.

I think, however, that the insistence on affirmation demands too much. For one thing, you’re insisting that your new self-understanding is the only way to interpret your identity. Yet it’s far from unknown for people to declare a sexual identity and later change their mind. (It’s the same with religious identity.) LGBT identity requires interpretation of feeling and experience. Someone else can question the interpretation–particularly someone who knows the person well, such as a parent. And those doubts will make that person less than celebrative. That’s not necessarily intolerance.

There’s also the extension of identity into lifestyle–as in, I’m LGBT, therefore I must live an LGBT life and you must affirm it. (Or, I’m Catholic and don’t believe in birth control, so you must treat my beliefs as inviolable in public policy.) But one may disagree about what lifestyle should accompany a certain identity. In an entirely different realm, some deaf activists insist that signing, not lip reading or speech, is at the core of true deaf identity. They revile those who teach deaf children to lip read or to speak. Others consider them wrong, though, because (among other reasons) they prevent deaf children from communicating with their own parents and siblings. One can acknowledge that there are good arguments for the signing-only point of view, without accepting that it’s necessarily part of deaf identity.

Most fundamentally, however, no one is required to celebrate every aspect of another person’s core identity. It’s possible to regard a state of life as irreversible, and yet unfortunate. One may love the amputee but regret the amputation. One may celebrate the life of an autistic child, rejoicing in unusual gifts, and yet still wish for a cure. Some may find my white skin and blue eyes creepy and off-putting. I regret that, but I cannot insist that they learn to love white skin before I will have anything to do with them. If they will treat me respectfully, I will do the same to them.

Tolerance, that essential virtue for civility and civilization, is not a virtue for the New Creation. It is for this messy, troubled and sinful creation. Tolerance doesn’t help people who see the world in the same way, it helps people who have core disagreements. Its work is not to obliterate those differences, but to enable us to live together in peace and with dignity despite those differences.

Someone who comes out as LGBT should be honored as a human being made in the image of God, should be treated fairly and without discrimination, should be, in fact, loved. And vice versa. Those who hold the wrong ideas about LGBT should be honored as human beings made in the image of God, should be treated fairly and without discrimination, should be loved, difficult as that may be. Tolerance speaks to our relationships with people whose views we abhor and whose nature we cannot appreciate.

Bombs Away

In the original version of my last post, “Why Hope? How Hope?” I had a sentence suggesting that the Republicans had adopted the mindset, if not the tactics, of suicide bombers. A friend wrote (charitably) asking whether that was any different from calling those who affirm the legal right to abortion “baby killers.”

He was right. I deleted the sentence. I made a mistake and I apologize. I’ve tried to avoid incendiary language, but I slipped up.

It prompted me to rethink the comparison, too. In essence the point is that people (Republicans in this case) feel so compelled by their position that they are willing to risk hurting innocent people in order to uphold it. They will do deliberate damage in order to make their point.

I’m not the only one to compare them to suicide bombers. They have been called “hostage takers” and “arsonists.” On reflection, though, I realized that a whole range of behaviors use those same kinds of tactics. Take the protestors who marched in Birmingham, Alabama, fifty years ago. White Southerners called them “troublemakers,” and they had a point. The protestors wanted to disturb the peace of the segregated South. They were willing to inflame racial tensions in order to expose the oppressive violence that kept the peace.

Labor strikes also “disturb the peace,” trying to shut down businesses that people depend on in order to win advantages in negotiations.

So it’s hard to say that Republicans are in the wrong just because they are willing to shut down the government and default on our debts in order to oppose Obamacare. Such protests lie on a spectrum, depending on how much damage you are actually doing, and how important the goal you want to achieve.

Civil law takes note of that spectrum. A union’s right to strike, and its strike methods, are regulated by law for exactly the reason that innocent people can get hurt. Nor can anyone protest whenever they want regardless of the circumstances. When Martin Luther King, Jr., went to Chicago to lead protests against unfair housing, and sought to march through white ethnic neighborhoods, there was extended legal wrangling about whether such marches would be permitted, on the grounds that they would be striking a match in a bomb factory. Where to draw the line wasn’t clear, but clearly there was some kind of line worth discussing.

Personally, I think King was right to march in Birmingham, even though it did disturb the peace and lead to violence and death. (Those four innocent girls blown up by the Ku Klux Klan in their Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Sunday school weren’t given a choice.) But I only think it was right because King was fighting for the most precious principles in American life, freedom and equality for all. He risked a great deal but he was fighting for a great deal.

It’s hard to say that same about fighting Obamacare. It’s health-care regulation, for heaven’s sake! It may or may not prove effective, but our sacred honor is not at stake.

 

Why hope? How hope?

This is a bleak time to read the news. I’ve been closely following the terrorist assault in Nairobi, Kenya, because I have many friends there (though apparently none were hurt) and I’ve visited the Westgate Mall, where the attacks took place. It’s familiar territory to me, a factor that always makes disaster more real and penetrating.

It’s not just Kenya. After the Navy Yard killings a number of commentators in the U.S. asked whether we are beginning to accept mass murders as the new normal. You could ask the same question about suicide attacks on the international scene. I remember as a child learning about Japanese kamikaze attacks in WWII. The idea seemed bizarre and impossibly inhuman to me then–to deliberately kill yourself as an act of war. Now, it’s a rare week when some suicide bomber somewhere in the world doesn’t slaughter civilians attending a wedding or shopping or riding a bus. What are we coming to? Is the world gone mad?

Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., Republicans have reached the conclusion that they will go to any length to stop Obamacare. They have attained the mindset, if not the methods, of suicide bombers, wrecking anything to make their point. It may be all bluff, the sound and fury of politics, and I hope it is; but our global experience with ideological extremism makes me queasy. It’s hard to see a good outcome coming from Washington these days.

Which brings me to hope. Why hope? How hope? Can hope be more solid than wishful thinking, more than emotion and pluck?

A famous text addresses that topic. Romans 5:2-5:

“We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”

I’m struck that hope is not attained on intellectual grounds. Paul undoubtedly believes and will argue for the future historical realities of the kingdom of God. But he doesn’t say, “We rejoice in hope because the promises of God will come true in a decisive, historical victory for Jesus.” He portrays hope as a moral achievement, not an intellectual one.

I was talking this week to a friend who is struggling in the midst of some very hard times. It came to me that his greatest asset is his experience as a long-distance runner. He knows that you can run while in pain. He knows that not only can you stagger over the finish line, you can actually run a strong and triumphant race. Time and again, both in practice and in competition, he has run while suffering. If you do it enough, perseverance in pain becomes so much an attribute of your personality that you can call it your character. Such characters will not win every race, but they will run every race with hope.

“And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love….” Note that Paul does not revert to a historical assertion, that hope will not disappoint because it will all turn out for the best in the end. He stays on the moral and relational plane. We are not disappointed because we experience love.

Love is, of course, closely related to our end in the glory of God. For love and glory go together. Out of all my life the closest to glory I ever came was on my wedding day, watching my bride come down the aisle all smiles. I am sure I gave off measurable luminosity. It is for such glory that hope exists; and it is through such glory that hope does not disappoint.

Hope is not a way around suffering. It comes with suffering. Just as the long-distance runner cannot escape pain, but must fiercely embrace it, so we cannot escape the woes of international terrorism and political dysfunction and mass killings. (Nor, I should add, the woes of our personal lives.) We live in a world filled with woes, and it is only through such woes that we become people of hope. We must keep running with the pain. Sure enough, we will reach the finish line. But it is not the ability to visualize the finish line that grounds our hope. It is the experience of being surrounded by love as we persevere.

 

Creating the World through Words

I thought you might be interested in reading the opening pages of my newly issued ebook. 

Our words matter. The book of Genesis portrays God’s creating the world by speaking. In a related way we humans create the world we live in through our words. The way we talk to each other makes a world full of love and security, or a world of bitterness and anxiety.

Take a married couple. The man doesn’t talk. To compensate, his wife talks too much. In particular, she shoots off her mouth about his mother. If you press him, he would admit that his mother is far from perfect. But he simply doesn’t want to hear it all the time, even (especially?) from his wife. To him, the running down of his mother is like a dripping faucet. It’s not any particular drip that kills him; it’s the wearing effect of the whole thing.

Of course, he doesn’t tell his wife this. He knows that would just start a fight, and he doesn’t want to get into that. He figures he can hunker down and live with her complaints. But they wear on him.

What wears on his wife is his silence. She wants to hear that her husband loves her, and likes the way she looks. He does compliment her cooking, but that doesn’t help. She knows she is a good cook. Her attractiveness is what she needs affirmed.

Her husband is not a sentimental person, and she knew that when she married him. She didn’t know how wearisome it would be. She is tired of taking the initiative; she wants him to bring a little romance to the marriage. For a long time she tried to wheedle it out of him, but she’s given that up. He just won’t listen to her needs, she says.

Can anyone help these two? A moralistic approach won’t work; they both can give you nine yards of reasons why they’re justified in their behavior. Anyway, neither one is doing anything obviously wrong. The woman isn’t lying about her mother-in-law. The man isn’t disobeying a commandment that says you have to talk to your wife all the time. If you try to preach to them (as they would call it), they’ll reject the message and maybe the messenger.

You could take a more psychological approach and try to delve into their past. Maybe the husband is silent because his father didn’t show love to him. Maybe the wife complains about her mother-in-law because she lacks self-esteem. If you turned over enough rocks in their past some bugs would crawl out. But there’s no certainty you would ever get to the basis of why they behave as they do, or that they would be able to change their behavior if you did. How is self-esteem built in a grown woman who lacks it?

Without taking anything away from either the moral or psychological approaches, I would offer another way. It would help a great deal, I believe, if they both learned how to talk. The woman needs to learn to carefully limit her critiques of her mother-in-law. The man needs to learn some ways to say, “I love you” so his wife can hear it. Both of them need to learn new ways of bringing up sore subjects without starting fights that make everything worse. If they learned such skills, it might not put an end to all their troubles, but it would be a very big and helpful start. It would stop the bleeding and begin to let their love flow through.

Such training in talking you don’t get in school. You get it—if you get it—at home. It is typically transmitted mother to daughter, father to son. Unfortunately, a lot of people miss out. Such training takes time, and it requires confidence on the part of the parents. If they themselves don’t know how to talk, they can’t very well pass it on.

I am peculiarly and painfully aware of this need for training because I missed out on so much of it. I grew up in a wonderful family, but it was the kind of family where, if you thought someone’s opinion was stupid, you said so. We had great debates around the kitchen table, my sisters and brother and parents and I. I learned how to think in my family, but I can’t say I learned how to talk. Perhaps this had more to do with my personal makeup than with my family makeup. For whatever reason, I was well into my college years before I learned that when you say to someone that his favorite movie is “incredibly dumb” you may hurt his feelings.

In addition, I was shy. Oftentimes shy people retreat into themselves and give the impression of unfriendly aloofness. I did, and nobody taught me how to compensate for that shyness.

I never had very intimate friendships in high school (can you guess why?), but when I got to college I began to experience closeness in a way I never had. The sheer loneliness of being freshmen far from home drove us together, and I made some wonderful friends.

Sometime in my second or third year I began to understand that others’ image of me did not match my image of myself. Others—particularly those who didn’t know me well—saw me as stern, aloof, and judgmental. Nobody told me that directly. Once I began to catch on, however, I got the message from all sides.

It pained me deeply, because it wasn’t true. I knew what was inside me. I was as aloof as a puppy dog. I was softhearted, if anything. I cared about people. I craved friendship.

At first I felt very hurt that people misjudged me. How could they? As I thought about it, though, I realized that the righteousness of my position didn’t matter much. In my writing classes I had learned a thing or two about communication. I knew that if you write a piece that people don’t “get,” you can’t say it is their fault. You have to rewrite it in a different way. You have to find a way to get your point across to your audience.

So I began to try to rewrite my behavior. I began consciously to say nice things to people, to let them know that I appreciated and liked them. I tried to act warmly. I began to hold my tongue when I had something to say that might be construed as critical or snobbish.

I hated it. It felt horribly unnatural. I despised having to watch my words, having to mull over every interaction to see whether I’d handled it well and gotten my message across. Why couldn’t I just be myself? I was, I suppose, a true child of the sixties: I believed that simply being sincere was enough. Now I felt that I was acting insincerely, putting on an act.

My changes did bring noticeably better results, though. People told me I was different. They told me I seemed warmer, happier. People opened up to me. People sought me out. I liked those differences. And I found that I got used to the act I was putting on. Over months and years it grew comfortable. Eventually it became liberating. It became me.

For years I have coached youth soccer. Most of the under-ten kids I get only know how to kick with their right foot. They may be fairly skilled at kicking with their right foot, but when they try to kick left-footed, they look incredibly spastic. Usually they give a pitifully weak kick that dribbles the ball a few yards in front of them. Sometimes they miss the ball entirely and fall on their rears.

As their coach, I know that soccer players have to learn to use both feet. So I encourage them to use the “off” foot, the one that’s uncoordinated. There is no magic trick I can teach them. They just have to do it. If they do, they will get better at it, and one day they will feel as natural kicking with the “off” foot as they do with their primary foot. In the end they will become much better soccer players than if they simply continue improving with just one foot.

We ordinarily choose to do the things we’re comfortable doing. Sometimes you have to make yourself uncomfortable and do things differently—strange as that may feel—until you become comfortable again. Sometimes you have to kick left-footed. That’s what I discovered in college about my ways of relating to people. Spontaneity and sincerity aren’t enough. You need to be trained. In fact, it’s only the well-trained athlete who can make the spontaneous play. He’s the only one who has the skill to see all the options.

We talk about lives being changed from the inside out. My experience is that they are sometimes changed from the outside in. As we change our behavior, it becomes possible for us to feel differently, perceive differently, and live differently.

What worries people about such an approach is that it seems calculated and artificial. It seems phony. I am sure that it could be. That wasn’t my experience, however. To the contrary, though it felt phony, it helped me develop deeper and more authentic relationships with people.

When I learned how to stop putting people off with my seeming aloofness, when I learned how to say that I liked people and to show an interest in their lives, I began to make freer and more open friendships. This in turn made me into a far more confident, friendly person—naturally. I can honestly say that learning how to talk changed my life. It enabled me to be myself.

The book is That’s Not What I Meant: Words that Hurt, Words that Heal. I believe it’s the most practical thing I’ve ever written. You can buy it here. 

The Best Way to Change Your Life

What’s the best way to change your life?

Thousands of psychology and self-help books answer that question. Most of them overlook a tool strongly recommended in Scripture.

“When we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we can turn the whole animal. Or take ships as an example. Although they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot wants to go. Likewise the tongue is a small part of the body…..” (James 3:3-5)

The way we talk leverages our unwieldy lives. That sounds implausible to an era that honors verbal spontaneity and self-expression. But try it, and you’ll find that you can transform relationships and improve attitudes simply by learning to think before you speak.

I’ve been trying to live by this advice for a few decades, and the years have not diminished my belief in its effectiveness. It’s the most powerful self-help tool I know, by far.  I once wrote a book on it, probably the most practical book I have ever produced.

That book has been out of print for a long time. But reading it over again, I’m convinced it is not out of date. Quite the contrary. So I have re-published it as an e-book. As of today it is available on Kindle and Smashwords. Within a few days it should be out on other sites as well, such as Barnes and Noble. It’s only $2.99.

That’s Not What I Meant: Words that Hurt, Words that Heal. [Kindle]