Unashamed Studios

FYI: I’ve decided to split my personal blogging from my fiction writing projects, keeping this blog (Unashamed Studios) devoted to the fiction projects.

The new personal blog is called A Thousand Photons (you can find out more about the name in the introductory blog post).

It has been fun to do personal blogging again (4 posts so far!) and I really encourage you to go check it out and — if you like it — to subscribe (there’s an email subscription link on the home page sidebar or you can subscribe with your favorite blog reader).

‎Limitless You put limits on me… By Your grace, help us see, this is Your design

– “Limitations” by Trip Lee (one of my favorite songs)

All my life I’ve struggled against my limitations, trying to accomplish more than I was able. This song has helped me to really internalize that these hated limitations — perhaps what I’ve fought more than anything else — have been placed on me by my Lord. It forces me to choose between the ambitions so close to my heart and Him. Will I continue vainly struggling to accomplish everything my heart runs after? Or will I raise my hands in surrender and humbly accept the limitations He has placed on me?

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

– 2 Cor. 12, NIV

“If I raise my hands will you grab me by the wrists
And will you try to pull me from the fray?
And even if my fingers join together into fists
Will you hold me firmly anyway?
‘Cause I would try to escape you but for every day I’m sure
That You’re on the huge side of big and the holy side of pure

“Ok, hear what I say
As I raise my hands and surrender today
Ok, here I will stay
Hands in the air, singing have Thine own way”

– “Hands in the Air” by The Waiting (another of my favorites)

Looking out my hotel window overlooking Boston this morning and listening to Trip Lee’s song Twisted:

Everything is under Him: planets, countries, cities, ‘hoods. Don’t get it twisted: God did it, done it, got it? Good.

The Boston metro area is home to 6 million people; the city: home to 600,000 — and all in less than 90 square miles (Seattle has the same number of people, but they’re spread over 142 miles).

The city is a mixed bag, but one thing is for certain: this mass of humanity is not united in worship to the One who sustains them. Even believers don’t give Him the respect and honor He’s entitled to. And yet:

Somebody keeps them breathing, keeps their blood flowing and keeps their hearts beating. God keeps them eating and it ain’t no secret — don’t get it twisted — God gave them what they needed.

Consider in how many ways they are dependent on Him and yet most are totally unaware. Some puff their chests in pride as though they sustained themselves; others raise the voices He has lent in defiance. Yet He continues to exercise such mercy toward them — every breath, every heartbeat. Where would we be without such a patient, merciful God?

I’ve always loved this promise from Isaiah 11:

They [the cobra/viper] will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

But it wasn’t until recently that it was linked to God’s directive for fathers (Ephesians 6) by a visiting friend from Germany:

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

He was saying (if I remember correctly) that in the original language this has a flavor of helping them to see the glory of the Lord in everything around them. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but it helped me make a link between my directive as a father and the coming pervasive knowledge of the Lord in Isaiah 11. Actually, I prefer the wording in Habakkuk 2:

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

This clarification (“knowledge of the glory of the LORD”) reminds me that the goal is not a dry intellectual or academic knowledge, but a knowledge of His glory — the kind that inspires worship. Like when I help my kids see God’s glory in how a collapsing star goes supernova and forms a neutron star or, if it’s very heavy, forms a supermassive black hole — the kind found in the center of most galaxies. Or to see God’s glory in the gospel: the unthinkable condescension of the creator towards our rebel human race in killing His beloved Son for our crimes.

May our homes (and the Lord knows how far I have to go in this) be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as a faint preview of what we will soon witness: the submersion of the entire earth — every city, every inhabitant — in the full knowledge of His glory.

Two years ago (Sept, 2009), I stepped down as Director of Teens For Christ, reduced my work hours to less-than-full-time and devoted Fridays to writing my first novel. Three weeks later, I reported:

In a way, it seems like things have been going painfully slow, yet there have been some very crucial changes.

Today, two years later, I am doing roughly the same thing. I recently stepped down from leading the youth group at Grace Church Bellingham and switched to working four ten-hour-days so that I can devote Fridays to the novel.

Two years ago, I put a lot of hours into the novel… on and off. Throughout the first year, I did work on it on Fridays, but I also worked on leading a local writers’ group, pouring into a youth group, and creating signs and a website for Grace Church. A year ago, I made an agreement with my employer to work full-time at computer programming for 3 years, saving money so I could take 1 year off to focus on the novel.

This summer, Jessica & I realized that a third of those 3 years were over and I hadn’t made the progress I had hoped for on the novel. So I decided to make some significant changes, cutting back in church leadership and disciplining myself to write in the mornings. But writing a little bit each morning is hard and not as productive as consolidated chunks of time, so I changed my work schedule this week to four-tens so that I could once again focus on fiction on Fridays.

It is difficult when people ask me how the novel is progressing. In a nutshell, the answer is the same as two years ago: “things have been going painfully slow, yet there have been some very crucial changes.” I did create an initial 40-60 scene outline, but I ended up making “crucial changes” that left much of it obsolete.

However, there is (I think) hope. I committed to Jessica to have a “final” 40-60 scene outline finished by the end of the year, at which point I will transition and begin working on full treatments and the actual writing. By “final”, I mean no more “crucial changes” that require the whole thing to be scrapped. I fully expect additional changes as I get into the guts of the full treatments and the writing itself.

I don’t expect to have the entire novel complete in the next two years, but I do hope to have it complete enough to send to literary agents and, through an agent, to publishers. Once I have landed a contract, Lord willing, I will be able to step down from computer programming and focus exclusively on finishing the novel.