In early 1993, I pitched a book idea to Thomas Nelson Publishing and a movie concept to a producer on the set of Iron Will, and within a month both offered me opportunities to move forward.
While working full-time, I created a tight eight-month plan with two critical deadlines: August 1 for the book and October 1 the screenplay. But then my wife Susie threw me a curveball. She'd had enough of living in town and wanted us to go house-hunting so we could move to the country that year. To do all three felt like more than I could handle. I countered with this: she could go house hunting with a friend and after August 1 I would go see what they found.
Sure enough, she brought me to look at a house on August 2, and by the end of the week we were owners of 8+ acres, a house and two garages--his and hers. By October we moved in and the screenplay was completed as well.
Here are a few select entries from my journal that summer.
Seeds / Journal Notes
Proverbs 17:3
The crucible is for silver,
the furnace for gold.
The Lord tries hearts.
D.H. writes of our tendency as grapes to complain about the instruments God chooses when crushing us to produce holy wine.
June 23, 1993
Monday Ralph had a dream that I brought him two Bibles. Afterwards he said, “Who gave me this dream?” I suggested that when he reads the Bibles, he’ll find out.
June 30, 1993
We remember our dreams to our own peril. June 30, 1993
At root I am depressed by the thought that I am not going to “make it” as a writer. That is, that I do not have the drive, the “neurotic passion” that is sufficient to make it. That is, I allow other things to distract me, diffuse my energy, divert me from my course. I am not writing every day, every night. And even though I am far more productive than my peers, it seems that I create illusions that give the impression that I am much more than I am. Do I have what it takes? Or am I just a small peeper making big noises that carry with the wind?
July 2, 1993
Our lives are written in time like words upon a scroll, with none of it to be erased.
July 3, 1993
I have labored these many years to produce a body of work. Today it seems so small… with so many stories yet to tell. July 5, 1993
There were four of us, brothers… till the four winds scattered us ‘cross the wild unwatered plains while the seeds of future dreams are nourished by private wells.
Once upon a time there lived a poor widow and her son Jack. One day, Jack’s mother told him, "You need to get a job. We need money and you just sit there on Facebook all day."
"No, I don't. Sometimes I'm on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube or Tik Tok," he replied.
"Well, listen up. If we don't find an income stream we'll have to hawk your Mac. I'd like you to take our cow into town and see what you can get for it."
Jack headed to the market, and on the way he met a man who wanted to buy his cow. Jack said, “Great! What will you give me in return for my cow?”
The man raised his hand, spread his fingers and said, “I will give you five magic beans!”
This sounded like a bargain to Jack, who took the magic beans in exchange for the cow. Both were chuckling to themselves as they went their own ways after the transaction. "What a steal," each was thinking.
When Jack got home and told what happened, his mother exploded. “You bonehead!" she said as she threw the beans out the window.
Jack was confused. He went online and found a chat room where he could get his head straight on whether it was he or his mother who was right. His online friends comforted him and one suggested that in the morning he should find the beans and place them in moist soil under grow lamps.
The next day, when Jack awoke and looked out of the window, his eyes popped out of his head. A huge beanstalk had grown from one of his beans. It climbed higher than the stratosphere. He was grateful to have haggled for five instead of three, since only one of the five was really any good. "What if I'd gotten only rummy ones," he said to himself.
He, being still young and able, decided to climb the beanstalk to see where it went. To his surprise, there was a giant kingdom up there, and a giant castle with giant doors. Even though the door was shut and he couldn't reach the handle, he had no trouble sliding under it.
As it turns out, the giant had a wife who was busy in the kitchen. Jack went there and said, “Could you please give me something to eat? I'm so hungry I could eat a cow.” The kind wife gave him a sliver of seven-grain bread and a delicious bowl of stew.
While he was eating, the giant came home. The giant was not only huge, but looked terrifying. He'd been a fighter when he was young so his face was scarred and one eye swollen and cloudy. Jack trembled and his knees knocked as he scurried to find a place to hide.
The giant bellowed, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread!”
The wife said, “There's no boy in here!”
So, the giant ate his food, then lumbered off to his room to pursue his favorite pasttime, counting his money. First, he started with his bags of gold coins. Then he turned on his computer and reviewed the status of his investments. Finally, he fell asleep.
That's when Jack crept out of his hiding place, snuck in and took a small bag of gold coins and climbed down the beanstalk. Once home, he gave the coins to his mother.
"You're such a clever boy, Jack," his mother said.
A week or so went by, whereupon Jack decided to visit the giant's castle again and see the giant's wife. Once again she brought him food, but while he was eating the giant returned and Jack ran through a door into the bedroom where he hid under the bed.
"Fee-fi-fo-fum," the giant bellowed once more. "I smell the--"
"Oh knock it off," his wife said. "You’re just imagining things."
After the giant ate, he went outside, fetched a goose and brought it to his room. "Lay!" he commanded, and the goose laid a golden egg. It was immense, the size of three chicken eggs, but solid gold. When the giant fell asleep Jack began to pick it up, but hesitated and went for the goose instead.
It was a challenge climbing down the beanstalk carrying a goose, but it would have been impossible to carry both the egg and the goose. He was glad he made it down at all.
"What's this?" his mother said.
Jack told the whole story about the kindness of the giant's wife, about hiding under the bed, and watching the goose lay a golden egg. Jack then proceeded to build a small pen next to the house. After spreading a little hay for the goose to build a nest, he began looking forward to the next morning.
Meanwhile, his mother had other plans.
When Jack awoke the next morning, the aroma coming from the kitchen was unfamiliar to him. As he entered the kitchen he noticed a can full of goose feathers. And knives with blood on them. And...
"Mother! How could you?"
"I knew those gold coins didn't come from a goose, and whoever heard of geese laying golden eggs?"
His mother had always been a wonderful cook, but for some reason the goose meat and goose confit tasted flat that day. Jack finished his milk, stood up and left the table.
# # # #
Illustrated version of the story, courtesy NotebookLM:
Yesterday I began listening to the audio lectures of Professor Peter Conn on the theme American Bestsellers. It's a set of lectures in The Great Courses Series. If you're not familiar with The Great Courses, I strongly encourage you to consider checking them out at TheGreatCourses.com. Essentially, the series was developed to give people an opportunity to hear great teaching on various topics that they may or may not have heard when they were in college and not paying attention, or perhaps failed to value because they had not had enough life experience to understand the significance of what they were learning.
The first lecture by Prof. Conn lays down the rationale for studying bestsellers. These are not necessarily the best books ever produced in America, rather they are some of the most influential, and for that reason worthy of our study. In this initial lecture he also points out the various ways bestseller lists have changed over time, whetting the appetite for what's to come in the series, including Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and a host of other familiar titles, familiarity being the operative concept here.
Which is why the Bay Psalm Book seems like such an unusual first book to dissect, because I suspect very few of us today would add this to any bestseller list of any kind.
The reason Professor Conn selects this starting point is two-fold. First, the little volume could be found in a full one-third of the households in New England. And two, this book of Psalms reveals much about the character of these first settlers in America.*
Can you imagine if there were a best-selling Stephen King book that was in one-third of all homes in America today? That would be tens of millions of copies, and if read regularly it would be one highly influential story.
Professor Conn doesn't really suggest the Psalm book is the greatest. He only suggests in passing that a case could be made, albeit a weak one.
His lecture, then, uses the Bay Psalm Book as a lens to study the mindset of the Puritans, whose ideas were indeed influential.
The book was published in 1640, two decades after their arrival in what is now Massachusetts. The Puritan pilgrims had a number of idiosyncrasies, besides being a bit stiff as regards their devotion. One of the features of this volume is that it is a rigorous attempt at extreme accuracy with regard to translating the "Word of God." If you recall your history, the King James Bible was produced in 1604, and a beautiful translation it turned out to be, despite being produced by committee.
The Puritans, however, found the King James Bible to be a stumbling block. Its aesthetic features might tempt Believers to appreciate worldly literature more. This they deemed a bad thing.
This attitude brought to mind a story I heard in a lecture on St. Augustine, the most influential Christian writer of the first millennium. Augustine was an intelligent man and quite scholarly. He avidly studied Greek philosophy and was especially enriched by the beautiful writings of Cicero, beauty both in the concepts and the language, so much so that when he encountered his first Bible it was such a poor translation that he gagged on it. That is, if this book is really from God how could it be so poorly written?
In short, Augustine was put off by his first encounter with Christianity and he did not return to it for another ten years.
Alas, the Puritans had a mindset quite contrary to Augustine who once wrote "the gold of Egypt is still gold." The stilted translation they created was just the medicine they needed to keep them from becoming worldly. Professor Conn proceeded at this point to compare the beautiful language of Psalm 23 from the King James Bible with the clumsy verses of the Bay Song Book.
Translations do say things about the people. Prof. Conn talked about the Reformation's efforts to undermine Papal authority by means of translating the Bible into the language of the people. John Wycliffe was martyred for translating the Scriptures into Middle English, and a hundred years later the Tyndale Bible resulted in John Tyndale being strangled and burned.
Tyndale's translation took deliberate pains to undo the Catholic stranglehold on truth. He translated the words presbyteros and ecclesia as elders and congregation, as opposed to priests and church. This was a direct assault on the ecclesiastical systems that dominated Western Europe at the time.
All this to say I'm looking forward today to Prof. Conn's insights on another influential book from early American history, Thomas Paine's Common Sense.
