Finally! Yesterday I reached my goal of 50,000 words in my new Kregel Publications book, tentatively titled Hey, Mom and Dad! Is It True Christians Hate Gays? (Thankfully I was writing the last full chapter when I hit that mark.) I need to write a short afterword yet.
The purpose of the book is to help parents help their kids think through the issues surrounding homosexual activism. Kregel tells me it will come out sometime between March and June of next year. I don’t know what’s ahead in the editing process, since no one but me has laid eyes on most of it.
It’s time for my life to balance out, anyway. I had figured on having more time to write. I hadn’t counted on certain work-related issues to arise, or the addition of a few full days of meetings last month, or another foot surgery nine weeks ago. I’ve learned a lesson from this, one that seems obvious in retrospect: don’t count on things being what you expect. I had my time planned out practically to the hour, and if nothing unexpected had happened, it wouldn’t have been much of a challenge to meet my deadlines. As it was, however, I’ve been living a badly unbalanced life for about two months.
My wife, Sara, and I have decided we’re going to undertake an experiment in living very intentionally according to our beliefs. The idea is to bring life back into balance, and into harmony with what we really believe. (I don’t believe in working as many hours, living with as little margin, as I have been lately.) I don’t know this for sure, but it’s possible we might decide to report a day-by-day account of the first several weeks, including the good, the bad, and the stinky.
I have another project coming up that I’m excited about: a new Sunday School class at church I’ll be teaching on “God is greater than you knew.” I’ll be writing my own material for it, and it will definitely be an ebook (at least) when I’ve finished it. What I’m really looking forward to there is focusing on the very positive, very good nature of God and his work in the world. It will be a welcome relief from the book I’m just now finishing.
One more thing–I just spend a few days in Atlanta, with my True Reason co-editor Carson Weitnauer and some other friends meeting at the offices of Ravi Zacharias International Ministry, to do some work on apologetics strategy. You can count on hearing more about that, beginning in about six months or so.
We live in a world of contrasts. Westerners’ belief systems are polarizing against each other, as Ordinary Seeker noted here on this blog a few weeks ago. I’ve been working a lot on understanding and dealing with that polarization: Is it true that Christians hate gays? That’s a short question with a long answer. What makes it long is trying to encourage Christian believers not to act so polarized, while also not giving up on we know is true. It’s a challenge. I’ve been learning how to do that myself. I think I’ll be learning for a long time.
On the topic of Is it true that Christians hate gays?, it occurred to me recently that perhaps part of the historic difficulty has been that Christians have been guilty of family-idolatry. That is, instead of being committed to God alone, the Church has turned it into “God… and family”. For example, a few weeks ago, a fine Christian brother suggested that the right priorities in life are “God, then family, then everything else.” Except that there is very little Biblical support for such a position. Instead, Jesus words concerning Earthly families are hardly a glowing endorsement. I suspect that if the Church had had a more heavenly perspective on families, her history with homosexuality would have been considerably less troublesome.