An Encouraging Word

I don’t write about it much here, but I’m a small author. My first published book is God Knows What It's Like to be a Teenager, which came out in 2001.

Sales have been mildly disappointing. I wasn’t expecting it to be the Prayer of Jabez, but I was expecting to need a second printing. But that looks unlikely. The irony is that the book sold fairly well, but very few stores took on my book and reordered once they sold out. But I don’t want to get started on the Christian bookstore industry.

Anyway, this past weekend I went to the Denton Jazzfest. I love it because I can just walk over to it whenever I want, and I always see a lot of friends there, including people I haven’t seen in a while.

Well, one of those people was Adam, a Freshman kid I know from my days of volunteer youth ministry at Denton Bible. He’s a great guy. Even though he had a girl friend with him he stopped and talked with this old youth leader for a bit. That’s the kind of guy he is.

He’s a very encouraging guy, too. And he encouraged me in a big way. He talked about how excited he was about helping lead his older brother to Christ and about sharing with others.

And he mentioned that he uses my book and its website and the stickers that go with them in sharing with friends.

Walking around afterwards, I was happy that I heard about my book and its site being used in a way I didn’t know. And I thought back to other scattered times, especially when a guy I didn’t know sent me an e-mail out of nowhere telling me God Knows What It's Like to be a Teenager was a big reason he decided to become a youth minister.

And I thought that when you’re faithful and use the gifts and abilities God gives you, the visible results might not be much for a while -- maybe a long while. But God uses our faithfulness and work beyond our knowing.

And no telling how He’s used my very backlist book.

Thanks, buddy, for the encouragement and the reminder.