Encouragement From Success and Encouragement From The Trenches

To pay my bills, I work as a janitor. And I hate it with a passion.

Monotonous, and doing the EXACT thing day after day with no accomplishment or anything that really gets "done." And it doesn't really use much brain power either. Which is hard when I have 180 credit hours from college and I'm not
using a single one.

When you find your passion, and are prevented from using it, everything you do tastes like ash.

And it's in this situation that I feel God wants me to write a book, a devotional workbook for artists.
Most of these kinds of books are written by people who work at art as a living, or at least full time, maybe even through church. And I would think there are a lot of artists who don't.

This book would be written by one in the trenches. By one who hasn't had the "success" of profit through art, or the joy of being able to do it full time, and is not writing it out of that confidence. Also, I don't have that kind of success to validate what I am saying. But if God wants me to write this, why should I need ANYTHING else to validate my credibility? Worldly success won't validate it more than God does. Noah didn't have a degree in ship building. If you don't listen to me just because I don't have the resume that you think I need to qualify to write this, you are dismissing God's truths based on worldly value. So I won't tell you what I have that would remotely qualify me to write all this.

It's more important right now that I'm not, and that I haven't seen success yet, and that I am writing out of a place in the trenches, with the rest of you who also have not seen the success you want. It's easy to take the "advice" of a Christian artist who is successful and rich, apply it, and get happy or angry depending on how much that advice "worked."

It's easy to make faith based decisions when you see them physically rewarded.

But I write as a challenge to you to faith in the times when you aren't "successful," and have no confidence that you will ever be. That is where faith is tested. And we are very much in it together, I have no guarantee that this book will make any money. Maybe it can be free.

I wanted crowd funding to take time off to write the book. I have two jobs and don't want to quit either of them.But

I think God wants me to write this as janitor me. 

Not as a person working in the ministry full time, but someone who still struggles. On the other hand, if I don't depend on this for income, there is a lot less temptation to make it look and sound pretty just so it sells more. I'm after excellence and impact, not popularity. And I have the freedom to do that and my job isn't at stake. In a way, it's less of a risk. 

 Yes, I'm scared of being mediocre and amateurish. I'm scared of it being too big and my ideas getting in the way. I'm scared of all the permissions I have to get just to quote the Bible in my book.

I will do the thing. 

Now I actually need to do the thing.




I have already had opposition to the thing, which I take as a sign that its a good thing.