Marathon Writing Day

I’d appreciate any prayers you might send my way as I am deep into another marathon writing day on Dave Edling’s and my current book project, “Redeeming Church Conflicts: Turning Crisis into Compassion and Care.”

I’m deep in the thick forest of around 500,000 words right now (exegesis of Scripture, our substantive content, case study examples, etc.), trying hard to whittle them down to the 75,000 word manuscript required by our publisher.

Much to rejoice in! God is so good to his people.
Much that makes me cry. Church conflict is excruciatingly painful; truly “not the way it’s supposed to be.”

But we’re in a bitterly cold multi-day snowstorm anyway, so might as well drink some warm tea and get back to work.

I’ll give Dr. Ryken and Dr. Nicole the last words:

“The Devil has many other plans for running your church, all of them equally insidious. He wants you to get so distracted by internal disputes that you hardly have time to go out and meet people with the gospel.” Philip Graham Ryken

“We are to deal with our opponents in such a way they may sense that we have a real interest in them as persons, that we are not simply trying to win an argument or show how smart we are, but that we are deeply interested in them – and are eager to learn from them as well as to help them.” – Roger Nicole