Pray for My Publishing
I apologize that this writing is
so wordy. But I do not know how to better communicate the width and depth of
the challenges I face.
I need your prayers. I have been
struggling to publish online an ebook about prayer. I guess spiritual opposition
would not be a surprise. I mean it is not like I am teaching another way to
make an omelet or how to better organize your closet.
Soon I will face an important set
of challenges. Next week I will be taking a long Word document and then using
an online service I will convert it into an ebook. I have attempted to publish
like this several times before in the past and I did not succeed. The fault was
not the online service but my own mental, emotional and spiritual issues. I got
about this far and quit or got distracted.
Let me provide some context to
this issue.
God graciously led me to a loving
church community in 1975. There Jesus Christ gradually performed my drug rehab
over the course of 18 months. There I learned to pray earnestly. I sought God
to reveal His will for my life. I had made a mess of my life at 21 years old. As
an answer to prayers I clearly felt that the will of God was for me to become a
writer. That impression came to me when my mind was still scrambled due to the
side effects of the drug abuse. God worked in me to give me back my right mind.
Over the course of these decades I
have been writing steadily. There are those who must play their musical instrument.
There are those who must draw or paint. For me, I must write nearly every day
or I feel out of balance mentally and emotionally. Every week I write many
pages. Others have said that they noticed the improvements.
After my drug rehab, God led me
to hear the gospel message on a Christian radio station. I came to faith in
Christ on January 16, 1977 at 23 years old. Shortly after that I felt the call
of God on my life and I responded positively. What followed was another season
of intense prayer to seek His guidance. All I wanted then and now is to know
the will of God and do it well. Then I felt strongly impressed that it is God’s
will that I would become a publisher as well as a writer. That answer to
prayers was super clear.
If a person seeks to become a
dentist or a nurse, then there are career paths need to be followed to get the
training and get the legal approvals. But to become a writer and a publisher
the career path is not well defined.
At first I sought to get a job in
the publishing industry. But those doors were closed. As I prayed, I felt God
reply that I need first to learn about people and the Bible. I have been
learning about those for decades.
Along the way I kept practicing writing.
Most of my writing for years was to request prayers. It has been a wonderful way
for me to learn how to be open, honest and unpretentious. I recall during the
1980s I used electric typewriters and photocopy machines. The amount of prayers
I could request was limited to the amount of money I had for copies and
postage. So you can imagine my delight when email came along. I did not have to
spend so much time, energy and money to mail out 7 to 12 letters every few
weeks. Gradually my requests for prayer included Bible teachings or words of
encouragement and exhortation as short articles.
I recall when my brother told me
about blogs for the first time. My reaction was, “Who would want to use that?”
Well it turns out that I have been using them steadily ever since. I have many
blogs that are basically collections of useful links with my comments. I also
have many blogs that archive my emails and lessons.
Besides blogs I also have many
websites and some online videos. And I consider all of these as forms of
publishing.
Nearly all my material online is
Christian centered. I seek to inspire, instruct and equip others.
All along the way I have been mostly
self-taught. I did take some courses at this community college to learn the
basics when the Internet was brand new in the mid-1990s.
I continued to pray and request prayers.
Little by little God revealed His vision and game plan for ministry. This changed
in minor ways over the years. But at the core it always involved sharing resources
with Christians so they could find and fulfill their ministry. It included ways
to weave together the various digital technologies to make a way for people
online to collaboratively create educational modules. Besides Christian education
materials there will also be practical lessons about agriculture, animal
husbandry and literacy to serve those in developing countries.
The Lord led me to invest many hundreds
of hours over the years to learn about Internet marketing. This will prove
useful for the ministry. And it could have proven useful for me to earn an
income online. But that is when I discovered that I have had some a deep seated
fear of success as well as a fear of failure.
I fear success because it is
possible that I might compromise my Christian values and go back to the drugs,
alcohol and promiscuity that dominated my life before rebirth. I fear failure because
after becoming successful and ministering to many I could relapse. That would
be shameful and painful. I would hurt many that had trusted me. These dual
fears are in me because when I was a very young and impressionable believer a
few ministers were caught in blatant sins and lost their ministry. I was hurt
then and I do not want to hurt others.
It seems that my subconscious has
come up with a clever strategy. If I never succeed then I will never face those
temptations to relapse and I will not fall from success to disappoint others
like I was. There is some crazy logic there. It is a major factor in why I have
remained so poor for so long after researching so much, planning so much,
requested prayers so much and attempting to launch the ministry so many times.
An important part of the vision
for ministry is for future ministers to learn how to earn a passive income online
through harnessing digital media to teach. There are several online teachers
that have guided thousands of people to find their online niche. Then they were
able to leave their boring corporate jobs to work from home while earning much
more than before. There are all kinds of options for delivering the content
including: blogs, videos, online courses, webinars and ebooks.
Today there are bi-vocational pastors
that work a job part time and pastor part time. What the Internet allows is the
opportunity to gradually grow a following online of customers that could pay
the cost of living for future church planters and missionaries. I had told this
to many seminary students when I was there but none made it happen. Then I realized
that I need to lead my by example. I need to learn how this is done through trial
and error. That will both give me credibility and many valuable insights.
What the online teachers say is
to choose a subject that you are passionate about and that you will be willing
to continue doing without any outside motivation. The passion will connect with
others at a deep level and it will keep you going.
My cash flow has been very thin
for a long while. God has made a way for my modest bills to be paid as I have
lived at the homeless shelter for ten months. Frankly I have gotten tired of
barely making it from week to week. I have prayed about getting a job, but I have
not had the motivation to do that.
While considering my current
condition I recalled the possibility of earning income by publishing online.
What I had been motivated to do
during these ten months has been to write prayers. And I have written some
psalms. I have gladly shared copies with friends for free. Yet I came to
recognize that there are those who might value them and could pay me a small
amount for a collection of them.
So I have recently turned my
attention toward gathering these materials into an ebook format. This involved
going back to the archives of the prayers and psalms that I had shared already.
There was far more material there than I had expected. I have been gradually
going through each one to edit and polish it. I have been arranging these using
an excellent software for writers named Scrivner.
When I started down this path
about a week ago I expected to have been done by now. But the volume of
material in the archives was 3 times as much as I expected. That means much
more work for me and more blessings for my readers. I request your prayers that
God will anoint me in this season of editing.
Also I will be including some
images from the public domain to spice up the publication. I had done that
before with a few of my other online publications. Pray for God to guide me as I
seek and find the suitable images. Then I will need to crop them and insert
them into the manuscript.
Then comes the technical hurtle. I
will upload that manuscript to LeanPub. The servers there will convert it into
formats so it can be read on smart phones, tablets, readers and computers. I can
set the price for my ebook and offer discount coupons. The service only charges
10 percent and that is far less than other services.
I will create a basic website
with a simple web address. From there I will link to this ebook and future ebooks.
I have enough materials on my blogs to create 3 more ebooks by just gathering
and editing..
I might create a Facebook page to
promote these too.
Then I can use business cards,
flyers and evites to spread the word about the options.
I must take great care to come
from a place of seeking to serve others and not seeking success. When I have
thoughts and feelings of greed then my creativity shuts down.
By faith I believe this could
gradually grow a passive income steam for me. It is called passive income because
after it is online then the automated systems do all the promoting and sales. The
income gets sent to the bank account without needing to do anything.
Getting over this set of
challenges is important for me. During the coming years I hope to publish many
more ebooks. I already have the outlines and rough drafts for them. Plus when I
will make writing and publishing online a healthy habit then it will eventually
grow and income to pay all my bills. It will give me the credibility and
insights I will use to lead others to do the same.
Lord willing sometime next week I
will complete the ebook and begin to promote it to friends. I will give them
the coupon code to get it for free. Then I will ask for their prayers and feedback.
I will use their comments and edits to make improvements before I promote it to
the public. That is how I can get around my other internal obstacle of
perfectionism.
THANKS for all your prayers.
There is no way I could have gotten
this far except that many have prayed for me over the decades. And there is no
way I will reach those in the future unless I continue to request prayers.
God will answer prayers in His
time and in His ways. He will get all the glory.
