A Prayer Request

It is amazing to me, but it was almost eighteen months ago that Crossway published my book The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment. I finished writing the book nearly a year before that. It all seems so much more recent. The reality is, though, that it has been a long, long time since I’ve actually been involved in writing a book. I did not intend to wait so long between books but, to be honest, I just did not have a topic that I thought was worth a year of my life. I read a lot, considered a lot, but honestly, I could not find just the right topic.

Well, over the past couple of months I think that problem as resolved itself and I am currently in the midst of crafting a proposal for a new book. I have a soft deadline of the end of May to finish up this proposal and get it submitted. One difference between this project and the last one is that I now have an agent working for/with me. So I will hand the proposal to him, he will work his magic by making it look all pretty and professional, and will then share it with a few different publishers. If all goes well, one or more of those publishers will be interested in it, leading to a contract. At that point I will get writing in earnest. I’ll tell you a bit further into the process why I decided to pursue representation by an agent.

Why am I telling you all of this? I am hoping you will be willing to pray for me as I begin creating this proposal and as I begin turning my attention to a new book. This new topic, which I hope to tell you about soon, is one that is important to all of us, but one to which I think Christians have not given enough time and attention. I expect my research to first help me think rightly about the topic so I can then help others think rightly about it. It is a huge topic—my initial reading left me with forty or fifty books in a big stack beside my desk. And it is a critical one.

And so I am asking if you’d consider praying for me over the next few weeks. Though I am excited about the topic and though I’m convinced that it is a topic I can (and should) write about, I have had a good bit of trouble formulating my thoughts on it and actually getting them committed to paper (or pixels, as the case may be). In particular, I need the Lord’s help in finding my “angle” into the topic, in coming up with an outline that can best lead readers into the subject, and with wisdom to know whether this really is the subject I can best write about right now.

I really felt that prayer was the lifeblood of my last book. Many readers of this blog prayed for the book and I still remember the most encouraging comment I’ve received at a conference: a woman introduced herself to me and said, “I pray for you and your book every week.” It was such an encouragement to me, I hardly knew what to say. As the book progresses, I will be sure to give updates to let you know what it is about and how it is coming together. But for the time being I am asking if you could just spare the time to pray for it as it comes to mind. Please accept my thanks in advance.