The Heat Is On

Greetings Everyone,

Thanks to those of you that responded to last weeks blurb. It’s nice to know that the things I write still strike a chord with people now and again. I don’t know what your schedule has been like so far this year but mine has been jam packed. What with people breaking into work just to watch glass break and remodeling projects that have to be finished (and I use that term loosely because there are only 24 hours in a day) tomorrow, well, lets just say with Glen Frey, The heat is on.

I’m ready for a break. But it’s not just work; somehow in all of this I managed to finish the rough draft of a new book that I started back in 2008 and turned down an opportunity to write a horror flick about spontaneous combustion even though the money would have been nice. The new book, whose working title is Just Business, deals with the subject of Modern day slavery and given the topic, well, it makes my other books look like Disney stories, even I cringe as I read some sections. It is not a topic I would have chosen on my own but three years (I cannot believe it has been that long) I was asked by friend named Joel S, to write a screenplay on the topic which I did. Don’t know that the movie will ever be made but in the process of writing the screenplay there was so much detail lacking that I asked to retain the book rights. I couldn’t stand not knowing the details which are pretty rough at times but not as rough as they could have been. It also gave me the opportunity to expand some existing characters and fill in back story. So while it can be rather gut wrenching and honest; overall, it is a theologically, philosophically sound piece of work (in my opinion of course). Like I said it ended up being a prequel of sorts to the Corpus Christi Chronicles filling in background on some of the characters we’ve all come to know and love and creating several characters who thankfully I will never have to develop any further because they all die in the course of this book, though there is one mean and nasty Russian mobster that still lives somewhere.

It took so long to write because I got stuck in the middle. I got to a place where I didn’t know how to unfold these people’s lives and it took me nearly two years to figure it out. Once I jumped that hurdle the rest of it came rolling out in a couple of days. No, I don’t know where the words come from but when they start coming they don’t stop until I finish or I get stuck.

I really enjoy developing characters lives on the written page. I think part of the reason for that is that I get to see a large section of a person’s life unfold in the course of a couple hours or at the most in couple days. That is so different from the way I watch my own life develop. I have to watch my life unfold in slow motion. I have to wait for meaning to unfold on events sometimes decades after they happen. ‘Why,’ is continually a part of my vocabulary. It’s hard to see the why sometimes when you are surrounded by broken glass, construction glue, and toilets.
And so writing is a bit of a reprieve from the slow unfolding of life, yes life is slow to develop even though it rushes by at the speed of light: one of the mysteries of life.

I’m looking forward to seeing what has been written for my life in the New Year. It seems I always fall back to the Counting Crows song Long December when the New Year rolls around. “It’s been a long December and there’s reason to believe that this year may be better than the last.” I think I’ve quoted that every year since I started writing these things and I guess that’s pushing six years now.

It continues to ring true because this is God’s world and he is unfolding his plan. My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. It is certainly not based upon me and the mythological plans that bounce around in my head. One thing that I am understanding clearer every day is the vital necessity of staying on the path of life, the path of righteousness if one is to truly live anything else will eventually turn into destruction.

Now I will admit that sometimes the path of life feels like dying but that is because it is dying, to truly live one must die to rebellion against the things of God. I heard a quote this week accredited to Oliver Wendell Holmes which said: If I had a formula for by passing trouble, I wouldn’t pass it around. I wouldn’t be doing anyone a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it….Meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and you better be on speaking terms with it.
I would make one change and say that it is God that gives us the capacity to handle trouble and not trouble itself I still believe that the basic statement is true. I have spent too much of my life trying to avoid what I thought was trouble and now at 50 I am finally beginning to learn to be on speaking terms with trouble, embrace it as what is necessary to take me to my destination and walk through it like an open door. That doesn’t make it easy; it makes it necessary for the journey.

And so I walk on, I walk the line, the path of life by the grace of God heading for the destination which is: Well done faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Master. Motivated by knowing that It is the Joy of my Master that is my strength.

Grace and Peace,

Brad