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Today I’m guest posting over at The House Studio, one of my favorite places and publishers in the world. They’re creating all kinds of quality books. And I’m not just saying that because they’re nice people, or they let me guest post every once in a while. My post over there is entitled “Jesus: Shepherd or Chicken Farmer?”:

About a month ago I bought nine chickens and two guinea fowl. Four of them have black feathers – they are the layers. Five of them are white – those are the boilers. The guinea fowl are just there to eat ticks and, hopefully, live long happy lives.

The kids understand the difference between the layers and the boilers, the practical application being that they have named the black-feathered chickens after their favorite cousins, while the white-feathered variety, destined for our dinner table, remain nameless.

To read the rest, click HERE (this link goes live at 11:04am EST, or if you’re catching this before then, go HERE to check out the cool books they offer).

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If this is your first time here, you may notice that this week I’ve been asking a lot of questions:

“Are artists generally melancholy people, or is that a stereotype?”
“Imitation: The Sincerest Form of…Art?”
“Does the Bible Have a Monopoly on Truth?”

There’s also two of my most read posts of all time: “Confessions From the Guy Standing at the Back of the Church” or “The Opposite of Love is not Hate”

Thanks for stopping by.

“Early in our corruption we are taught that fiction is not true. Too many people apologize when they are caught enjoying a book of fiction; they are afraid that it will be considered a waste of time, and that they ought to be reading a biography or a book of information on how to pot plants. Is Jane Eyre not true? Did Conrad, turning to the writing of fiction in his sixties, not search there for truth? Was Melville, writing about the sea and the great conflict between a man and a whale, not delving for a deeper truth than we can find in any number of “how to” books?”
– Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water

What truths have you learned from books or movies or television shows?

Each day this week I’m going to post a quote from a book on writing and then a few questions. If you have any thoughts regarding the quote or the questions, leave them in the comments. On Saturday I’ll highlight some of my favorite responses made throughout the week.

“Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev…Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E.M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, ‘Nobody’s.’ In his youth, he has not yet discovered that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role…” (Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life)

What do you think about imitation? A helpful tool for aspiring artists? A poor excuse for plagiarism? Which writers or artists or musicians do you like to learn from?

Each day this week I’m going to post a quote from a book on writing and then a few questions. If you have any thoughts regarding the quote or the questions, leave them in the comments. On Saturday I’ll highlight some of my favorite responses made throughout the week.

“My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.” Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird

Is this just a stereotype, or are artists generally melancholy, dissatisfied people? If so, why?

The other day I was weeding the garden and I found two $1 bills stirring in the breeze, caught under the potato plants like fidgety birds. Immediately I knew whose they were: our youngest daughter, 3-year-old Abra, had been carrying those things around with her all morning. She must have left them in the garden when she had been banished there with her older siblings to remove potato bugs from our potato plants.

I shook my head and smiled. $2. No big deal. But I certainly wouldn’t be giving her a $50 bill to tote around anytime soon.

Then I wondered, Is that why God doesn’t give me money? Is it because I would be irresponsible with it? Continue reading “The Problem With Prayer Requests”

I once read in a business book that the main reason people aren’t able to save money is that they pay themselves last. By the time they pay their bills, their mortgage, put money into their vehicles and spend a little here or there on whatever else they spend money on, there’s nothing left to save.

On the other hand, the writer of the book said, if you put money into savings first, then you still figure out how to cover the payments you have to cover. It’s a matter of priority.
Continue reading “Pay Yourself First”