Accidental Tradition

               Nearly forty years ago, I crafted a Santa piñata for my husband’s nephews and niece. Since I had no children and consequently abundant spare time back then, I could afford the long hours necessary to create him. I covered balloons and tubes with papier-mâché, slathered more paste on top and waited for everything to dry. Several days later, I sculpted boots and a face from paper pulp and waited for them to dry. Then I painstakingly glued on string for the beard and hair and, after finishing, filled the Santa with candy and closed up the hole in the back.

        Done.

I stood Santa on the fireplace and admired him during the days leading up to Christmas. I imagined how the kids would love pummeling that piñata. I saw the candy spilling out and heard the squeals of delight.    
But when we took him to the family Christmas celebration, both children and parents refused to beat on him.

I was disappointed.

I insisted. 

They said no, he was too beautiful to ruin. They absolutely would not pound on him. Eventually, we compromised by cutting a hole in his back so my niece and nephews could reach in and grab handfuls of candy. 
I had to admit we had even more fun than I had anticipated. 

I don’t remember whose idea it was for me to fill him with candy on subsequent Christmases, but our papier-mâché Santa quickly became a family tradition. I added inexpensive toys and small stuffed animals that I collected during the year to the candy inside him, and every Christmas the kids took turns reaching in up to their armpits to pull out goodies.

 The tradition continued naturally when my own children were born. And this year Santa is standing on the fireplace in our living room waiting to be filled for our grandchildren.

Poor Santa looks a little tattered after all these years, but since he’s just paper and glue, I repair him when an arm falls off or one of his boots comes loose, and he just keeps on giving.  I wonder which of my children or grandchildren will want him so they can continue the tradition when I'm gone?  

Got a Higher Power? Name Him.

          During Portland, Oregon’s Friday morning show on Channel 12, I heard a reporter change the facts of a story right in front of me! In her intro to a piece featuring a surfer telling of a shark taking a bite out of his board, she referred to what the surfer called “prayer” every time he enters the water as his “pre-surfing ritual.” During the clip he gestured toward the sky and thanked “God” for helping him. I assumed he was talking about the God of the Bible, our Christian God and I was thrilled the channel would allow a mention to God. But . . . well, paste this link in your browser and watch the clip. 

     http://www.kptv.com/story/15771405/oregon-surfer-shark-encounter-was-the-most-intense-feeling

Did you notice how the reporter changed the name of the Being the surfer identified as “God?” She changed the surfer’s “God” to “higher power!” That is not what I heard the man say.

Now I don’t believe she deliberately misled her listeners. I understand what she was attempting to accomplish since I’m a writer and do my best not to repeat words any more often than necessary as I write, but names matter.

My name is “Jeannie,” pronounced with a long e sound Jee’ nee. Like the mythological genie in the bottle. However, it’s not unusual for someone who doesn’t know me to call me “Jenny” like the mule. (My apologies to any readers named “Jenny.”)

So when the reporter changed “God” to the more politically-correct “higher power,” it mattered. There are a lot of “higher powers” out there who are not our God of Love and they are really, really bad dudes. The Bible calls them “cosmic powers over this present darkness . . . spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). Whether you believe in them or I believe in them or anyone else believes in those evil beings is not the point.

They exist.

They’re malevolent.

They are your enemies.

They all work with Satan who “goes about like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8). That means they all want to destroy that surfer. And they want to destroy you.

So if you have a “higher power” know who he is and use his name. Saying “God” works fine,  just don’t be vague in your own thoughts about his identity. Know that your higher power is 
the Creator of the Universe, 
the King of Kings, 
the God of the Old and New Testaments, 
the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
And if someone calls him your “higher power” don’t let them get away with it.

How to Use the Bible to Help You Pray

 Since this is the day I post a prayer on my Weekly Prayer blog, 

I thought I'd include ways you can use the Bible 

to teach you to pray and enrich your prayers. 

• Change any scripture into prayer by personalizing it.

“Help (ask this for yourself or insert a loved one’s name) begin to understand the incredible greatness of your power for us who believe you. This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead” (based on Eph. 1:19).

• Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal how you should pray. That’s based on Romans 8:26, which tells us the Spirit helps us in our weakness when we don’t know what to pray for.

• When praying for the younger generation, pray Psalm 119 which tells how to live a godly, successful life. (It’s a long chapter so it may take several days or weeks to get through it. Pray only the verses that strike you as you read.)

• After you’ve failed miserably, pour out your grief to the Lord with Psalm 51. Then claim Romans 8:1, “So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus . . . “ and Romans 8:38, 39, “ . . . Nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus . . .”

• For loved ones in danger, or for all soldiers and American civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, pray Psalm 91 daily. It is also a great Psalm to pray during natural disasters.

• Pray along with any prayer in the Bible. Start with Paul’s prayers in the early chapters of Ephesians and Colossian then, changing the specifics to fit our own nation, pray Daniel 10: 7- 19.

• Anything God says is a promise. When you find a promise as you read, claim it for yourself. Thank the Lord for it. That sort of grateful prayer delights him.

• Below is a “wrecking ball prayer” to pray daily for yourself, your family or your friends. Written by Barb Martin, based on a concept in Intercessory Prayer by Dutch Sheets:

“Knowing God’s weapons for fighting the stubborn problems (strongholds) in my life are spiritual (see 2 Cor. 10:3 – 5), in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I destroy you, strongholds of (see below).  I declare no weapon of Satan will prosper in _____________’s life.”

(Ask the Holy Spirit to identify strongholds for you. Some possible strongholds: fear, feelings of worthlessness, rebellion, pride, control, defiance, procrastination, laziness, denial, passivity, rebellion, selfishness, lying, intellectualism, strife, self-sufficiency, contention, competition, domination, manipulation, hiding, negativity, anger, lack of wisdom, skepticism, workaholism, god of science or sports, hedonism, self-indulgence, materialism, resentment, occult, religious spirit, stubbornness, adultery, lust, other sexual sins, etc.) 

The above suggestions barely make a dent in the many ways you can turn to the Bible for help as you pray. There is nothing better than praying God’s own powerful words back to him. You can’t go wrong when you do that.

© Jeannie St. John Taylor

Prayer Request.

    People from several countries around the globe are reading my novel  City of a Thousand Gods on my blog and on the online newspaper The Cypress Times. Many of them are from strict Muslim countries where converting to Christianity could result in death. For their protection, I choose not to name the countries. I have no idea if these readers are seeking the True God or are already Believers or if they just like an exciting read. Even if they come from the latter group, I believe that by opening themselves to a story about God they open a path for him to speak to them.

• Please pray that more people from those countries would hear about or stumble onto the book.
• Pray they would feel drawn to the oft-stated theme of the book --  there is ONLY One True God.
• Pray that God would strengthen them and increase their desire and willingness to know the God whose story appears in the Old Testament and continues into the New Testament with the revelation and subsequent death and resurrection of his Son. 
• Pray that the One God would be understood for who he is and not confused with another god.
• Pray for their protection. 
• Thank the Lord for them. They're your brothers and sisters.
• Pray for them to obtain a Bible if they don't have one.
• Pray for the Holy Spirit to flow into and through them. 
• And please remember to pray for the young pastor in Iran who has been sentenced to death for converting to Christianity. Pray for his wife and two children and for the people he ministers to in house churches. Pray for protection, courage and determination that the name of the Lord will be glorified.

Thank you so much. 

New Blog Talk Radio Show -- KRVR, The River

    Monday September 19 marked the third episode of the new blog talk radio show Maxine Marsolini and I host as a team at The River www.blogtalkradio.com/krvr

   I interviewed Jan Coates about her new book Attitud-inize, 10 Secrets to a Positive You. After hearing her stories about a childhood spent with a mentally-ill mother, how she was beat with hangers, locked in closets and sexually abused at age nine while her hair was still wet on the pillow following her baptism at church, I couldn't believe the sparkling forgiving attitude I saw in her. 
    
    Not long before we went on-air Angela Breidenbach, Mrs. America 2009, emailed to say that though she knows Jan Coates, they had never talked about their mentally-ill mothers. So after Jan encouraged listeners for half an hour, Angie came on the line and the two of them shared stories about their mothers. Both mothers had been bag ladies. Both mothers found the Lord before they died. I choked back tears. 


   You can still listen in the archives by entering the site and clicking on that program at www.blogtalkradio.com/krvr. You'll admire both women. I promise. 
   

Views on the Bible Change because of CITY OF A THOUSAND GODS

            One of my goals in writing City of a Thousand Gods was to encourage people to begin viewing the Bible as a book about real people. I hoped they would decide they might enjoy reading. So I was thrilled when a woman in Michigan told me the novel helped her see the Bible as more than the ho-hum collection of Sunday School stories that bored her for years. Before she even finished reading, she delved into the first verse in Genesis, has already made her way to Leviticus and plans to read all the way through.

And she’s loving every word.

What has my Michigan friend discovered now that she’s seeing the Bible through fresh eyes? A book packed with exciting stories of flesh and blood real people she can identify with.

But I have even cooler news for her. The Bible is one single continuously-unfolding narrative with fully-developed sub-plots and beautiful imagery. Written over a period of 1,600 years on three different continents by forty different authors, the story begins with God’s creation of the world and weaves through thousands of years to the end of time -- yet never contradicts itself. Not once.

Even better, the story ends with a twist. We find out that the Jesus, the protagonist who defeats the villain by giving his own life to save all of Mankind, was present in the very first verse of the book. Jesus was the Word who spoke Creation into existence!

The Bible gives me the I'm-thrilled shivers. 

And every bit is true!

Were there Dinosaurs on the Ark?

Okay.  Brace yourself.

Yes. I believe there were dinosaurs on the ark. And I’m not alone. Back in the

1700’s Matthew Henry said, “Notice the beasts going in each after his kind . . . to intimate just as many as were created at first were saved now, and no more” (see Gen. 1:21-25).  

  Google Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis Series: Dinosaurs in the Bible on the Internet. It’s free and convincing. He says there were only about fifty general types of dinosaurs that would have been on the ark. The average size: sheep-sized. Some were no bigger than chickens so there was plenty of room for all on the ark.

  However, he believes there are numerous references to large dinosaurs in God’s Word that indicate they lived after the Flood. The Bible refers to them as “dragons” or “leviathan” since the word “dinosaur” wasn’t coined until the 1800’s. If the concept of huge dinosaurs on the ark startles you, check out the references to them for yourself by looking up these scriptures:

• Job 41:1
• Psalm 74:14
• Psalm 104:26

If you still can’t picture them on the ark, think of them walking onto the ark as

youngsters.

So where are they now? What killed off the dinosaurs? Ham believes they died off just as numerous creatures of the past have disappeared and like the animals mysteriously facing extinction today may do.

The fossils we find were formed during the Flood.

How was life different before the Flood?

Stunning Details from the Bible

•  It had never rained; a mist came out of the ground to water the plants.
• Humans lived nearly 1,000 years. (The Bible doesn’t explain why, it may be that the ocean of water in the heavens somehow protected people.) After the Flood, rain and life expectancy declined within a few generations (see Gen. 11:10-25).We know the length of those pre-Floodyears was the same as our years because genealogies and time lines can be traced through the Old Testament. When Jacob (Israel) and his sons entered Egypt, he told the Pharaoh that he had lived for 130 years, but his fathers had lived much longer (see Gen 47:9) . If you do the math in Gen.11 you'll find that Shem was still alive at that time.
• Many years before the Flood, people already forged weapons and musical instruments from brass and iron (see Gen. 4:21,22).
• Only eight righteous persons were rescued on the ark. Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives. 
• Noah was 600 year old when his family entered the ark.
• His sons were all in their nineties yet still youthful. We know that because none fathered children until after the Flood. Shem’s first child was born when he was one hundred years old, two years after the Flood. (Since it seems only likely that the only surviving eight people on earth would have wanted to have as many children as quickly as possible to repopulate the earth, Shem and his wife likely suffered infertility as did others later in his direct line, i.e. Abraham and Sarah.)
• The Nephilim (singular Nephal), probably fallen angels, were on the earth in those days. They were supernatural giants who mated with human women and produced what the Bible refers to as “heroes of old”(see Gen 6:1-4) (There are those who hypothesize that stories of Roman and Greek gods and goddesses were based on these fallen creatures.)

The Talking Sky

THE SKY SPEAKS

© Jeannie St. John Taylor

“The heavens tell of the glory of God.

The skies display his marvelous craftsmanship.

Day after day they continue to speak;

Night after night they make him known.

There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard.

Their message has gone out to all the earth,

And their words to all the world.”

Psalm 119: 1-4

            For thousands of years mankind has lifted eyes to the heavens knowing the sky would BE. 

Never changing.

A constant. 

            Constantly changing. 

For thousands of years never once exactly the same.  Not for five minutes.  Not for five seconds.  The sky moves continuously as it fulfills its purpose:

DECLARING GOD’S GLORY.

The sky whispers God’s quiet beauty as

the rising sun paints white puffs with pinks and lavender

azure melts into the deep blue of a cloudless summer sky

filmy orange stripes stretch across the horizon at sunset 

the cobalt night sky twinkles with specks of light.

The sky sighs God’s presence in the warm breeze that swirls around us, embracing, caressing faces.

The wild sky calls out the wonder of a wild God.

It roars God’s power in the storm that pulsates brilliant orange and yellow, then darkens. It lifts birds and drives them backwards. Jagged fire shoots east to west. Thunder shouts.  Clouds swirl and collide then descend as tornadoes, snatching up houses and massive oaks. 

After the storm, the sky murmurs God’s love, arching His rainbow-promise of protection through lingering droplets.

The sky’s beauty beckons us, stirring a longing in our hearts—we long to merge with God’s glory.  We ascend in metal shells.  The sky encloses us, shaking tons of steel traveling through clouds as easily as it flutters an aspen leaf. We scale the tallest peaks to touch the sky.  Its heights freeze us.  Thin oxygen sucks the breath from our lungs.

No one can survive the naked embrace of God’s sky.

Yet it reaches down to touch us and utter comfort.

It settles to the earth as fog, obliterating massive mountains.  It blankets cities with white, halting human activity. It grants permission for the sun’s warmth to pass through and coax food from frozen ground. It releases water that paints flowers with brilliant color and rushes over waterfalls.

The sky ceaselessly speaks God’s glory.

It will never pause until the day it trumpets the glory of Christ’s return,

then melts with fervent heat.

How big was Noah's ark?

The unit of measure in the Bible was the cubit. We know that a cubit is the distance from a man's elbow to his fingertips. If men in those times were the size of humans today, the cubit would have been about 18 inches. But since we don't know of the size of people in ancient times we can't know the cubit's precise length. (It's possible people were bigger than today since they lived closer to the perfect humans God created in the Garden of Eden.)

If we employ the eighteen inch cubit, the ark was 

• 450 feet long (approximately one and one half football fields in length), 
• 75 feet broad, and 
• 45 feet high (approximately the height of a five story building)
• According to the Ryrie Study Bible, the ark's carrying capacity equaled that of 522 standard railroad stock cars. Only 188 cars would be required to hold 45,000 sheep-sized animals, leaving three trains of 104 cars each for food. Today it is estimated that there are 17,600 species of animals, making 45,000 a likely approximation of the number Noah might have taken into the ark. (I read other estimates of the number of animals on the ark that was much higher. I used the lowest number of animals for the book to make the story easier for readers to comprehend.) 

We Still Pray!

I was startled to discover that hundreds of people visit my Weekly Prayer blog. The surprise resulted from the fact that I haven't advertised the blog in any way whatsoever and, for the most part, didn't even tell friends about the site. I simply posted each prayer after I sent it out to my email list each Wednesday. As far as I knew, I was the only person aware of the blog. (Though of course Google knows all.)

Yet, when I finally got around to checking stats, there they were, hundreds of people praying together! Thrilling. 


So I googled "Weekly Prayer" wondering if Google had listed the site and that's how everyone found out. 


I did not find a listing for my blog, but what I did find made me weep with joy because it was more wonderful that I expected. I found page after page of listings for "Weekly Prayer". The thoughts of all those people praying still brings tears to my eyes as I write this.  Groups and individuals all over our wonderful nation and the world offering to pray for you or with you. People who still call out to God and his Son Jesus. 


We are still a Christian nation!

Better than that, we're still a praying nation. There is yet hope.


Thank you Lord!

Next Week -- TWO Chapters

I’m hearing great things about my novel City of a Thousand Gods from readers:

• Chris from Florida, who is reading chapters on my blog, added her own thoughts to my last Weekly Prayer. “And please help Jeannie hurry up and post Chapter Fourteen.”

• One Kindle reader from Illinois said the novel is the second best book she’s ever read. I didn’t ask for the name of the very best book because I really want to believe she means the Bible.

• The mother of one of our Freshmen Congressmen in DC said the novel should be a movie. She could “see” the story as she read and pronounced City the “best” novel she ever read. (Take that, Kindle reader.)

• A television host from Alabama called the characters “compelling” and said she stayed glued to the pages.

• Patti on the Oregon Coast expected to be bored, but is fascinated.

• Sandy in Michigan complained that the chapter about Elika (my favorite character in the novel) was shorter than she wanted. I agreed. You’ll find two more Elika point-of-view chapters later in the book.

So Sandy and Chris, just for you -- and because on Monday we’ll be talking about the themes and purposes of the novel on the radio show I co-host with Maxine Marsolini – I’m going to post two chapters next week. The first on Monday and another on Wednesday. Watch for them.

Meanwhile, next Monday go to www.blogtalkradio.com/wlgt and listen to Maxine and I chat about City of a Thousand Gods, why I wrote the book and how I think Noah’s end-of-the-world story parallels our time.

That’s Monday, May 23, at 6 PM Eastern and 3 PM Pacific. I’m afraid other time zones will just have to figure out show times on their own because my math skills are limited. 

Not to worry, however. You can go to the site and listen to the archived show any time after we leave the air.

See you then!

Uh. . . 
Well, maybe I won’t actually see you, but I’ll know if you’re listening or not. I mean it. I’ll know. I will!

So if you know what’s good for you, you’ll listen.

Board Book in Three Days!!

I returned home last Friday, after approximately a week helping with my newborn granddaughter and fifteen-month old grandson. Even though writing and illustrating a book customarily takes me several months, I managed to get a board book called Color Cows together in three days. Three days!

I'll admit the project left me feeling a little unsettled since it isn't my best work, but doing it in that short time still felt like an accomplishment. I was forced to rush because my husband goes in for kidney cancer surgery tomorrow, Friday, and I had limited time to get it written, illustrated, assembled by hand and mailed.

Gray cow
Purple cow
Chewing cows
Moo! cows






What was my motivation? Titus has recently come to love cows. LOVE them. Though he speaks in garbled words and rudimentary sentences, the word he says most often -- Mooooo! -- is not difficult to understand. Practice makes perfect.

At bedtime he chooses board books with cows in them so he can do his "Moo!" thing. During the day he often goes to the computer, points and begs for Youtube videos of cows mooing. He's standing in front of the computer in his jammies here. See the pleading Moo! on his lips?

I wanted to give him the pleasure of saying his moos while learning his colors. So as soon as I got home I wrote and illustrated rapidly.

Brown cow

Light green cow
Waving cows

Moo! cows    

 




Pink cow

Yellow cow

Juggling cows

Moo! cows

Final spread -- my husband's idea since cows are all female:

NO BULL!

The Nephilim

© Jeannie St. John Taylor

“When men began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. . . . The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came into the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.” Genesis 6: 1, 4

Who were the mysterious Nephilim of Genesis six? Who were the sons of God? Who were the mighty men of old? Theories abound on the topic. One such theory holds that the “mighty men of renown” refers to the beings who the Greeks, Romans and Norse revered as gods.

Only a couple of things are certain.

• Since the Bible, which is the inspired Word of God, says those creatures walked the earth before the Flood, they did. They actually existed even if they feel like fantasy to us.
• The word for Nephilim means “bully” or “tyrant.” So life on earth couldn’t have been very pleasant with them taking any woman that caught their fancy.
  

For purposes of this work of fiction, I gleaned additional details from the Book of Enoch which was written many years before Jesus walked the earth. New Testament writers seem to believe the book accurate. We know that because several NT writers refer to it and Jude 14 – 16 even quotes from the book when he says, “It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied . . . ”  

Enoch adds details that fill in the gaps in the Genesis account, making the pre-Flood world easier to understand. John Klein and Adam Spears do a good job of summarizing Enoch’s main points in their book Lost in Translation, Discovering the Hebrew Roots of Our Faith. “A group of 200 of Satan’s fallen angels, led by one Samyaza, made a pact whereby they took on human form, seduced the daughters of men, and produced giant offspring, a hybrid of devils and humans called nephilim. One of these creatures, in the singular, would be a nephal.. . . And they did produce offspring that were not created by God.”

Additionally, Enoch says

• This race of giants, because it was not created by God, was to blame for much of the evil that forced God to destroy the world.
• These beings taught humans things they were never supposed to know – sorcery, incantations, and the dividing of roots and trees.
• After the giants ate all the food produced by humans, they consumed human beings. 
• Since the Flood destroyed their flesh, the giants now roam the earth as evil spirits.

I simplified my novel by referring to the sons of God as “Nephilim” and to their offspring as “giants,” the uncreated beings who walk the earth as evil spirits today. You can download the Book of Enoch from the Internet and read it for yourself, though it can be a little difficult to muddle through in places.

Age to Age

     I'll wager that you read the first chapter of my novel and immediately decided, "Fantasy!" I understand completely. Who has ever heard of humans living hundreds of years or the mysterious Nephilim? They don't exist anywhere in our experience. It's easy to come to the "fantasy" conclusion when you read about them.

     Except . . .


     I found the often-overlooked details mentioned above in the first book of the Bible. The novel City of a Thousand Gods is not fantasy. The novel is biblical fiction based on solid fact.


     Where did I get the preposterous idea people ever lived upwards of 1,000 years? Genesis chapter five outlines the life-spans of pre-Flood men from Adam to Noah. Adam lived 930 years; Seth 912. Noah's grandfather, Methuselah, hung around the longest -- until age 969. Enoch was the youngerster who did not have to die, because God took him alive from the earth at age 365. Genesis 5:24 says so.


     Noah didn't even become a father until after 500. Then he had three sons in quick succession.


     And that tidbit about Noah, combined with the fact that the majority of those men fathered first sons somewhere in the vicinity of 100 years of age, tells us that they were all still young by our standards and enjoying good health when their chornological ages rivaled that of our California redwoods. (Don't you wonder how old they were at the onset of puberty?)


    Did the writer of Genesis (Scholars believe Moses wrote the book as God directed.) have a different way of reckenoning time?


    No.


     If you do the math in Genesis Chapter 11, you'll discover that Shem's pre-Flood body out-lasted  many of his descendants and was still around when the Israelites followed Joseph to Egypt. I assume that's why Joseph's father, Jacob, told Pharoah that the 130 years he had "sojourned" had been "few and evil" and he had not "attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers" (see Gen.47:9). His great-something grandfather Shem was still alive.

     Which begs the question: Why did men live so long back then? There are several theories.


    One group of vegetarians today teaches that men began living shorter lives after the Flood because no one ate meat until then. And meat shortens one's life.


    While I don't know if meat shortens lives or not, I think people ate meat before the Flood.

• When God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he killed animals to provide clothing for them. And God never wastes anything. (Remember the baskets of leftovers Jesus gathered when he fed the 5,000 in the New Testament? No waste.) So I doubt God wasted animals just to make a couple of cute outfits for his rebellious kids. I think it likely that Adam and Eve ate the meat.
• Later, Abel's sacrifice to the Lord consisted of the "firstborn of his flock and their fat portions."
• We know Abel killed his sacrifice because one can't bring "fat portions" from a live animal. Abel's pleasing sacrifice foreshadowed the sacrifices God commanded throughout the Old Testament where he instructed his people to eat the sacrificed first-born in his presence. I believe Abel and his parents were eating meat long before Noah's Flood.

     For those reasons, I think it unlikely that eating only fruit and veggies gave those people long lives.


     Another theory to explain pre-Flood longevity is based on the sixth verse in Genesis where God created an "expanse" (the sky) to separate "waters from the waters." We know the waters below the expanse eventually became oceans. Some theologians speculate that the waters above the expanse formed a protective canopy that prevented people from aging until it fell to earth when the "windows of heaven were opened" during the Flood (see Gen. 6:11).


     I subscribe to that theory since it sounds the most logical to me. After the canopy disappeared, all bets were off and now it's wrinkle city for the rest of us during our "few and evil" years on this planet.


     Fortunately, eternal life is just around the corner.


     But before any of us depart, I hope you'll meet me here again in a day or two and we'll discuss the Nephilim. Very interesting stuff.

Read the first two chapters of the novel at

http://cityofathousandgods.blogspot.com/ 

  

The Cement of Routine Plus a Sneak Peek

As I get older, I sink further into the cement of routine. It holds me fast. Alluding to the movie starring Bill Murray, my husband refers to our lives  -- his and mine -- as Groundhog Day, which is unfortunately appropriate.

Every morning, I wake up early, make myself a skinny sugarfree haznut hot latte and drink the coffee while I read and underline three chapters of the Bible. That finished, I pour another cup of coffee, add liquid Coffee Mate and chat with my mother who lives in a darling apartment in a retirement home across the country from me. 

Each day she answers my call with, "Hello, Jeannie. Your brother already called." Then she tells me she didn't want to go down to breakfast so she brought a cup of milk up from the dining room the night before and ate a bowl of flakes (not dry cereal, flakes) in her room for breakfast. "Because a few flakes don't cost that much." Next she tells me she went to bed the night before at seven-thirty and read for a few minutes to help her get drowsy so she could sleep.

After fifteen minutes I tell her I need to get to work. At that point she summarizes the call and reminds me that she brought a cup of milk up the night before and ate flakes and  . . . We have the same exact conversation every single morning because at eighty-nine, my mother has sunk deeper into routine than I have.

But this morning was different. When I called at the usual time, she had just gotten up and she wasn't dressed yet. Flakes hadn't even made it to the table. I congratulated her for being able to sleep so long. She agreed good sound sleep was nice, but said she had no trouble sleeping even though she's getting older. Her health must be better than she always thought, she said. We talked for awhile about how wonderful it is to have good health.

Conversation over, I resorted to my usual, "Well, I guess I better get to work." and told her I loved her.

"Oh," she said before I could hang up. "I read a little of your book last night."

I had sent her a hard copy of the manuscript a couple weeks ago. "You did? Did you like it?"

"Yes, I went to bed to read for a few minutes and first thing I knew it was midnight."

No wonder she got up late!

Are you laughing? Because I was. When I explained to her that she may not have gotten as much sleep as she thought since she spent so long reading, we both had a good laugh.

So I thought . . . If my mother loved the book so much it kept her awake rather than helping her go to sleep, maybe you'd want to take a peek at the first chapter. (Yes, I know she's my mommy and required to like it, but that doesn't mean the book isn't as good as she thinks.) I've pasted it onto another blog and listed the blog's address below. If you'll go there, maybe the chapter will whet your appetite for the upcoming newspaper series.

I'm on pins and needles waiting to hear what you think of the chapter so I hope you'll leave a comment either on that blog or on this one. http://cityofathousandgods.blogspot.com/

And I hope you'll like the chapter enough to tell your friends to check it out.

Why My Novel Will Run as a Free Series on the Internet

I can't remember when the idea first sparked in my brain that I might offer my biblical fiction City of a Thousand Gods, The Story of Noah's Daughter-in-Law as a free series on the Internet newspaper the Cypress Times. But I clearly remember ten years ago when several editor-friends tried to dissuade me from writing biblical fiction at all.

Back then I had completed three chapters of the novel. I carried them to an Oregon writers conference where I was teaching a couple of classes. One editor looked over my work and pronounced the writing "strong" but the genre hopeless. "Biblical fiction is a hard sell," she told me. Writing the novel would be a waste of time.

I knew she was right. I should drop the project.


But the notion that God wanted me to write this particular novel for some reason I may never understand niggled at me. So I wrote another chapter -- and subsequently lost it somewhere in the depths of my computer. Then a signed contract for a different book distracted me and over the next few years I forgot about the novel while I worked to meet deadline after deadline.


When I commenced the writing again two years ago, I hoped maybe times had changed. I heard about a best-selling biblical fiction from Barbour. And Tyndale had some really good biblical fiction sellers. And Francine Rivers still sold well. Someone would want my novel, right?


But once I finally got around to contacting publishers I was disappointed. An in-house review at one publisher reported concerning my novel: "Jeannie at her best . . . which is the top of just about anyone's game." But they decided against publishing it because they were afraid of the genre. These days publishers can't afford to publish a book they aren't sure will sell and readers want a biblical author they already trust. Three or four other publishers said essentially the same thing.


That may be when the idea hit. I'd never heard of anyone launching a novel as a serial on the Internet. Would it work? Would modern readers accustomed to sound bites and short articles return day after day for new installments or would they get bored and stop reading? (I still don't know the answer to that, but I did hear that Stardoll ran a novel as a series last Fall.)

After praying more about it, the Lord showed me the ideas had come from him -- the idea for the end-of-the-world topic as well as the idea to offer the book on the Internet. I decided I would follow God's leading and I had just "set my face" to obey when an unexpected temptation popped up. 

A publisher contacted me out of the blue about publishing a book about pumpkins I'd wanted to do for a long, long time. And this at a time when the children's market was slammed tightly shut! Even stranger, I had not told the publisher about the book. I sent the managing editor a card with the above picture just to let her know how much I appreciated her and she picked up on the fact that I had a book with those illustrations.

The story was written and over half the illustrations were finished, but they wanted the book too soon, by Fall 2011. If I stopped to complete the pumpkin book it would be the same old story: Drop the novel I thought God was telling me to write and publish the book I'd been wanting to do for so long.

Isn't Satan clever?

Though I knew I might never have another oppportunity to do Pumpkins Party All Night, I let discussions slide and kept writing about Shem and his wife.

I saw only one hitch, one more possible temptation. There were still two or three publishers who hadn't replied to my query about the novel. They hadn't said if they wanted the novel or not. What would I do if one of them offered to publish the book, but would not do so if I ran the entire novel at no charge on the Internet?


After a brief mental struggle, I made up my mind that if a publisher emailed to say they wanted to publish the novel I'd be happy. But if that same company stipulated they wouldn't publish the book if I posted it on the Internet, I'd say thanks but no thanks. Because I firmly believe this is the way God wants me to offer my first novel. Even though this novel may be my best writing ever.

I have no idea why God planned things this way and I may never figure out why, but I'm thrilled to be walking the path I believe God has laid out for me. I can't wait for March 7th when the Cypress Times begins running the first chapter. This blog is icing on the cake for me -- an opportunity to chat with you about Noah and his Last Days and how they relate to us.

City of a Thousand Gods

Welcome! I can't wait to chat with you about my novel, City of a Thousand Gods, The Story of Noah's Daughter-in-Law! I just finished the last chapter. Not kidding! If I'd been writing with pen and ink like writers of old, the novel would still be wet. The Internet is amazing, isn't it?

I started writing this novel nearly ten years ago because I felt God prompting me to do so. But book contracts got in the way and every time I began writing, I'd have to lay this project aside to meet  deadlines for other books. Then two and a half years ago, my husband fell ill and for three days we didn't know if he would live or die. I stopped all writing and did nothing but care for him for several months.

Two years ago, with Ray well enough to play basketball three times weekly again, I picked up the novel and I've been working on it ever since. Until last week.

Because I'm an artist, I really wanted to paint my own cover for the book. I had a series of fourteen large oil paintings based on the story of Noah that I painted about fifteen years ago. Those paintings once hung behind glass in the Ape House at the Portland Oregon Zoo for a couple of months. (I'll save the very colorful anecdote of one large ape throwing feces at me while I put up the paintings for another time. Suffice it to say, apes are not art lovers. Or else they have delusions of grandeur and resent the accurate biblical account of Creation.) Later the series traveled to Texas for a show at the Biblical Arts Museum which later burned to the ground. Fortunately, my paintings made it home safely before the fire and I never sold them. Which means I still have most of them and hoped one might work as a cover. Unfortunately most of those paintings looked more like illustrations for children's books than something suitable for an adult novel.

Eventually, I took a detail from one of them and distorted it in Photoshop hoping it would make a suitable cover. But when I sent it to an author-friend in Tulsa, she threw a fit. (In deference to the fact that she is a very-godly-pastor's-wife-Christian-author and otherwise quite sweet, I won't mention Mary Englund Murphy's name.) 

That's the cover she hated. "It' doen't fit," said. "A cover with a female main character has to have that character on the front. Furthermore the image needs the city." I reluctantly agreed with her, complained about her in my thoughts for an hour or so, then tried a cover featuring a woman's face. That attempt turned out so badly I refuse to even show it to you.

My friend Ann Varnum, who's been a television show host for nearly thirty years in Dothan, Alabama said the woman on that cover looked wicked. Very wicked. I agreed with her, too, though I didn't want too. So I tried to find a photo of my daughter that might work on a cover. I have several of her posing with my friend Kim's camels. (If you watch any national news, about Thanksgiving 2010 you would have seen Kim Dilworth and her camel Moses, who fell into a sink hole, all over the news for about three days.) I also have photos of Tori with our own cows and Kim's sheep, and maybe even a little piglet -- all very appropriate for an ark cover. But becauseTori has the nasty habit of smiling broadly in every photo, I couldn't find one that would work. Look at that smile! Tsk. Tsk.

Then I thought of my sweet daughter-in-law and my grandson, Titus. I could include not only the main female character, but her doomed baby as well. I used them as models and added the city with Flood waters just beginning to drown the buildings. When I added the ark to the background I managed a cover I liked. At least a little. And Kirsten didn't complain once that I changed her blonde straight into coppery curls. As a matter of fact, she said she rather enjoys the new look. That cover appears below without text.

Next blog we'll talk about my reasons for deciding to run my novel as a completely free serial on the Internet on The Cypress Times beginning the first week in March. That's right. A free, full length, four hundred page wonderfully exciting biblical thriller /romance. Unbelievable, isn't it? Tell your friends about the book and my blog and I'll see you right here next time.