I would imagine most of those people – people, not bots looking for blogposts to attach inane comments to – who find my site do so because of one of my novels. It would make sense, then, that most of the people who read this post might think of me as a novelist, a fiction writer. Of course, even when you successfully get a novel into print, very few people who jump that hurdle make enough money from their writing to do it full time, and certainly I never did. My point here, is that while I am a guy who has long enjoyed writing on the side, it has never been my day job.
For most of the time I was writing, my day job was teaching. I spent 20 years as a high school teacher at two different schools. For the last 7 years, though, I have been a hospital chaplain. I work at a very large, level one trauma center, where I am the staff chaplain who covers our ED (emergency department), our SICU (surgical intensive care unit) and 2 different oncology floors.
Spending a lot of time in these two contexts has driven home for me the importance of tending to the roots of our faith. I often wondered about students graduating from our school, about how they would fare, not just at college but in life beyond school, and if the roots of their faith were sufficiently deep to hold them steady when challenged. Now that I work in a hospital, I see plenty of adults who are in the midst of life’s storms and struggling with their own faith. In fact, if being a chaplain has taught me anything, it is that sooner or later, the storms will blow. The time to tend to the roots of your faith is now, not then while you are in the storm.
This brings me to Further Up, Further In, my working title for the book I’ve been working on for a while and recently finished. It is a book calling the American church out of the shallows and into the deeper waters of our faith, inviting all to pursue a deeper walk with Christ. It is a very different kind of book than the others I have written, but in many ways, my work over the last 30 years has been preparing me to write it. I have not yet tried to find a publisher for it, as I’ve been focused on writing it, as well as a second, corollary project, which I will talk about when I post “Part 2” on this topic.
For now, I just wanted to mention the book, which has been rumbling around in my head for a few years, but which I worked pretty steadily on from August of ’24 until I finished the initial draft in February of ’25. The writing flowed pretty quickly when it came right down to it, but that’s likely because I spent quite a long time thinking about what I’d write and tinkering around with the chapter by chapter outline and the sub-outlines for those chapters. For those who have followed me for a while, this part of my process hasn’t really changed: I’m a planner at heart when it comes to my writing.
Finally, for those who have enjoyed my other books and supported me on this writing journey so far, thanks for that. I’m grateful for you. I’ll have more on what I’m working on soon.