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Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

2 Corinthians

When You’re Looking for an Endorsement

November 20, 2013 By Michelle

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been emailing Christian authors to ask if they would consider reading an advance copy of Spiritual Misfit to offer a possible endorsement. [endorsements are those snappy statements praising a book, usually on the front and back covers, and usually by other authors and leaders. Truthfully, I think the only people who read endorsements are other writers.]

Can I just tell you how humbling and awkward this feels to me?

Granted, some of the people I’m asking I know well, so that’s all fine and comfortable. But then there are the ones I call the “reach asks.”

These are authors I read and admire but don’t know personally – people who I think might find something that resonates in Spiritual Misfit and therefore be willing to say a kind word about it; people who are a little more well-known than the crowd I typically run with (that crowd being my Moby Dick-loving husband, two boys and a pet lizard). This process is a little like cold-calling in the olden days – except now you do it by email. You craft what you hope is a well-worded compelling email about the book, you shoot it into cyberspace, and then you wait. And sometimes wait and wait and wait.

Awk. Ward.

Some people accept (and you do a cartwheel in your living room). Some people decline graciously (and you understand but somehow still feel snubbed). And some people don’t respond at all. And those are the ones who keep you up at night. Because you wonder. Do they think I’m an annoying schmuck? Do they think my theology is all whacked out? (I don’t have a theology, just in case you’re wondering). Did they peek at my blog and think, ho hum, whatevs, no thanks, I’d rather get a bikini wax than read that?

You can drive yourself crazy with the wondering.

Until you read this:

“Are we like others, who need to bring you letters of recommendation, or who ask you to write such letters on their behalf? Surely not! The only recommendation we need is you yourselves. Your letters are written  in our hearts; everyone can read it and recognize our good work among you. This ‘letter’ is written not with pen and ink, but with the Spirit of the living God. It is not carved on tablets of stone, but on human hearts.” (2 Corinthians 3:-1-3, NLT)

I understand why it’s necessary for me to get endorsers for my book; I get the nature of the process and how publishing works. But I also know these endorsements really don’t matter in the end.

What matters isn’t the pithy praise or awesome accolades someone else might offer about my book, but my life itself – what I say, how I act, how I love, how I encourage, what I do in the name of God. What matters in the end is what my living, breathing, everyday, ordinary life says about God. My own life is the praise. My own life is the accolade.

Because the thing is, friends, your whole life, and mine too, is an endorsement of God’s holy power. Your whole life is an endorsement of God’s love, hope and redemption. You and I are endorsed by God, have been from the get-go, from before the beginning of time. And this endorsement, this “letter” as Paul says, is not written in pen and ink or pixels, but with the Spirit of the living God. It’s not carved on tablets of stone or penned onto fancy embossed paper or shot into cyberspace, but emblazoned on our hearts, on your heart and on mine.

A changed life is the only endorsement we really need, and let me tell you, once and for all, my life has been changed by God. My life is a living endorsement of the power of God to change one lost, wayward, hopeless, desperate soul into a woman on fire for God.

And just the fact that I wrote that sentence and didn’t flinch  is one loud, bold, living testament to the fact that God transforms people in big, bold, beautiful ways.

God transforms us, he endorses us, and we, in turn, with our very own lives, endorse God. Our lives are a testament, an endorsement, of his mighty, mysterious, life-altering, wild power to transform. That’s it, the be-all and end-all of endorsements: the way I live, the way you live.

Let me give you one little piece of advice, because you know I always learn this God-stuff the hard way, right? This is what I learned these last two weeks:

When you go looking for endorsements, look no further than God, your own self and the people around you. Look at what he has done in you, and look at how that has impacted others. And then you’ll know, without any single shred of doubt:

A holy endorsement  is the only one you’ll ever need.

Filed Under: conversion, New Testament, publishing, writing and faith Tagged With: 2 Corinthians, Imperfect Prose, Jennifer Dukes Lee TellHisStory

4 Steps to Living a Spacious Life

May 17, 2013 By Michelle

When Holley Gerth asked us to put our dream down on paper a few weeks ago at the Jumping Tandem Retreat, I didn’t do it. After all, I figured I already have a dream, this writing/publishing dream. I’m still working on that one, right? I don’t need another dream, do I? So I sat quietly in my seat with my pen in my lap and watched as everyone else in the room wrote out their dream on paper.

Later that weekend I listened in the third row as Jennifer Dukes Lee spoke about the feeling of not being “enough.” She asked us to write a word on a rock – a word that signified what was holding us back, what was gripping us with fear like a gloved hand around our throats in the dark of night. I wrote “comparison” on my rock.

Comparison.

Comparing my words with others’.

Comparing my number of readers, my number of Facebook likes.

Comparing how many speaking engagements I have lined up on my schedule compared to her or her or her. 

Jennifer told us she and her daughters were going to hurl each of those rocks to the bottom of an Iowa lake. She would drown my comparison beneath ten feet of water, bury it under a mound of pond sludge. I was good with that.

Home from the conference, I cracked open my Bible. It had been a while. I’d left off in Second Corinthians.

“I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life,” I read. “…The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way … Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively.”(2 Corinthians 6:11-13)

And there it was: my dream. The one I didn’t even know I had, laid out in black and white where I never expected to find it.

I wanted what was written right there on the pages of my Bible. I didn’t want to live in a small way anymore. I wanted to live openly and expansively. I wanted to enter the wide-open, spacious life. THAT was my dream.

I’ve been living small, friends. Cramped and crumpled into myself, turned inward, caught up in comparison, crowded by expectations, lured by the enticements of this world: sales, success, being known, being valued.

This inward-focus? It’s not a spacious place. It’s not a wide-open, expansive place. It’s a small, cold, lonely, bitter place.

After I read those verses from Second Corinthians and I stared my dream in the face, my dream of living not small and crumpled inward, but openly and expansively, I wondered what that might look like and feel like, in real, everyday life.

Here’s what I came up with. Here the list I made in my journal that day:

Wide-open, spacious living feels: Free. Secure. Joyful. Light. Unburdened. Enough. Content. Not heavy with guilt or “not enough.” Hopeful. God-focused. Like an open prairie, rather than a crushing crowd.

And then, beneath that, I made second list: steps to take when I find myself turning inward again, when I revert, as Paul says, to living life in a small way:

1. Turn off: from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and all social media. Physically shut down the mechanisms that are fueling comparison and smallness and “not enough.”

2. Turn outward: Shine the spotlight via praise or kind words on someone else, either online or in real life.

3. Turn to now: Focus on the right now — your family, your husband, your friends, the small moments. Enjoy the beauty of your place right now. Enjoy what’s happening in your writing and publishing journey right now. Focus on what you can do today and know that it is enough.

4. Turn to God: In gratitude, prayer and thanksgiving. Thankfulness is the seed of satisfaction.

That’s it. My four steps to living a wide-open, spacious life:

Turn off.

Turn outward.

Turn to now.

Turn to God. 

I’m trying it. I’m committed to it. This wide-open, spacious life sounds too good to miss.

So what about you? What’s keeping you from living the wide-open, spacious life God wants for you? Can you make your own list of steps to take when you find yourself living small and cramped? Do you want to be brave and maybe say out loud, right here, what’s holding you back from living wide-open? I’m with you. You know that, right?

Filed Under: comparison, New Testament Tagged With: 2 Corinthians, how to live a spacious life, New Testament

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a Triple Type A, “make it happen” (my dad’s favorite mantra) striver and achiever (I’m a 3 on the Enneagram, which tells you everything you need to know), but these days my striving looks more like sitting in silence on a park bench, my dog at my feet, as I slowly learn to let go of the false selves that have formed my identity for decades and lean toward uncovering who God created me to be.

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