by James Webb
I’ve heard it said that there’s no such thing as bad press. I’m not sure Prince Andrew would agree, but there you go.
In a way, Paul certainly thought so. I’m reading through Philippians at the moment and right at the beginning Paul claims that some are preaching Christ to make trouble for him, but he doesn’t care as long as Jesus is being preached. Read more
One of the problems with having written a weekly blog for nearly three years is that you begin to lose track of what you have and haven’t already written. I’d love to not repeat myself, but the chances of that are pretty small. For example, have I written about motivation before? I feel like I have, but I can’t rightly recall in what context, and even after three years I still don’t know WordPress well enough to do something like a keyword search of all my previous blogs.
I was thinking about motivation because I was wondering (again) how much motivation matters if the outcome is something good and worthy. I’ve written before about what a lazy writer I am, but if there’s one thing guaranteed to motivate me it’s reading a bad book that has been well received. It’s happened to me on countless occasions; I pick up a book with the ‘New York Times Bestseller’ seal of approval and find that it’s a bad book. I don’t just mean a book I don’t like, I mean a BAD BOOK, as in it’s horribly written. Nothing motivates me to sit down and write like seeing someone get paid lots of money for doing something I think I can do better. I think that all I really need in order to actually write a thousand-page novel is a steady supply of poorly-written bestsellers, though I’ll probably have gone insane by the time I have written chapter 6.
What I was wondering is, does it matter anyway? If I actually sit down and get something constructive done, does it matter if my motivation is hardly noble? Perhaps it’s actually God’s way of subverting my laziness, cheekily harnessing my own pride and greed? Maybe it’s really a self-destructive base for my writing – after all, can I really claim that my work is worthy if it’s initiated by something unworthy? And having thought about all that, what if my motivation is not really “I can do better” but actually “Readers deserve something better”? No answers today, just thoughts, but I can’t shake the feeling that God would rather I wrote than didn’t write. That’s enough for me at the moment, and I’ll let Him sort out the tangled weave of my motives when He gets round to it.
Hmmmmm. This definitely all feels familiar…
I saw a man throwing a child at the sun.
“Why are you doing that?” I said.
“I’m helping him. He told me that he was cold,” the man said.
I looked at the bruised child on the floor.
“I think he needs to go to the hospital,” I said.
“Sure,” said the man, lifting the child above his head once more. “Which direction is the hospital?”
I’ve recently been thinking about Ruth’s motives. No, not my Ruth – the Old Testament Ruth. What was it that motivated her to commit to her mother-in-law, leave her country and start all over again in a strange land? The conclusion that I came to is that perhaps it doesn’t matter what her motives were. The important thing was that she put herself at God’s mercy – why she did it might not be important. Read more
