A few months ago, I sat in a little room for two days and read my book into a microphone that was essentially bigger than my face. I kept saying words incorrectly. Easy words. Like “rediscover” and “understand.”

My voice started getting rough and I thought I began to sound like a man.

The producer assured me I didn’t.

But you can decide for yourself.

My book (read by yours truly, in quite possibly a manly voice), is released through ChristianAudio.com and today through Friday (at noon Pacific Time), you can download it – yes – the entire audio book for only $2.98.

Click here to download the audio book for just $2.98 (make sure and use the promo code JACKSON7210 to receive your discount!)

Thanks, ChristianAudio.com for offering this nifty discount to celebrate the release of Permission to Speak Freely!

Yay!

So, you’ve made it to the end.

But it’s not really the end.

You’ve just read six essays of my new book Permission to Speak Freely: Essays and Art on Fear, Confession and Grace. This is the final one…for today anyway.

There are still 22 essays you haven’t read, plus all the art and poetry and other things that have been compiled into this lovely four-color book.

But fear not, you can pick up a copy of the book here. Or if you’d like an autographed copy, or a T-shirt, you can click here.

Or you can leave a comment below and tell me how you landed here (whose blog did you first stumble on?) and I’ll choose two people to each win a copy of the book on Friday.

Now, without further adieu…the seventh essay.

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Essay #7 – Listening

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Julie and I both had some friends in the Kansas City area. Two of them, Eric and Chris, were in a band, and they drove down to Dallas in their band’s van to help us move. We trekked nine hours back up to the Midwest, where we rented an apartment we had never seen before with a roommate we didn’t know very well.

A few weeks after we moved, Eric and Chris’s band played at a youth group event at a local megachurch that was Baptist but pretended not to be by calling itself a “family church.” It wasn’t too far away. Since moving, I had developed a huge crush on Chris.

We walked in, and Julie went up toward the front. I stayed in the back, with an overwhelming since of panic gripping me. Taking a seat, behind a partition, I rested my head in my hands and attempted to get the sense of dread from overwhelming me. My heart was racing, and I could feel it pulsating through my body.

More clearly than I have heard God in my life, He said, “Remember the letter you wrote to Me when you were sixteen? Remember the times you’ve wondered where I am? I’m here. This is My church, and it’s time for you to be a part of it.”

I told the Voice in my head to shut up. I was probably going crazy. Surely God doesn’t speak like that. I thought back to the last time I had taken one of the many pills I would take to feel normal and wondered if it was still in my system.

But then it happened again.

More loudly.

“HEY! Remember the letter you wrote to me when you were sixteen? Remember the times you’ve wondered where I am? I’m here. THIS IS MY CHURCH, AND IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO BE A PART OF IT.”

Go away! I silently screamed back.

Maybe it was time for another pill. I started to dig through my purse.

A girl with bright red hair who was about my age came up to me between songs. She introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Kristi. I work here. Can I pray with you?”

For some reason, my panic turned into anger. My skin began to crawl, and I wanted to run out the doors of the church and never stop. I didn’t want to let this random girl in on the dialogue that was unfolding between the voices in my head.

Or the fact that I had voices in my head, for that matter.

What? Why? Who is this girl? No. No, you can’t pray with me. I don’t think I still believe in your God anyway. Just because I’m in church doesn’t mean I have to buy into this crap like you do. Seriously!

But acting nonchalant, like people offered to pray with me every day, I shrugged, casually pushed my hair back from my face, and calmly responded, “Sure. I guess so.”

She took my hands, but I pulled back. Instead, she put her hand on my shoulder, which tensed up at her touch. She began praying for me, for my friends, and then she said something that made my pounding heart stop dead in its tracks.

“I pray for Anne’s involvement with church. With this church.”

She wasn’t trying to manipulate me. Her prayer was very genuine. She was very genuine. I started to get a little more nervous as I wondered why in the world she would pray such a thing for a complete stranger. Later on, I asked her. She simply said she felt like that’s what she needed to pray.

Growing up in the South, I learned that even if you don’t agree with someone or like them, you could still be nice. So I responded nicely and said thank you. She asked if I’d be up for getting coffee with her sometime. She gave me her phone number, and a few weeks later I called.

Kristi and I became friends, and eventually I started attending the Baptist Family Church (known from this point on as “the BFC”) with her. Chris and I began dating, so he started coming along too.

She worked on the student ministry staff, so Chris and I started volunteering at youth functions. Slowly, I began to fall in love with these teenagers. They made me think of myself when I was in junior high and high school. They were seeking a God and a faith they truly believed in. And through them, I remembered what it was like to be found and loved by God and to chase Him on a crazy adventure where anything was truly possible.

I can’t recall a specific moment when I finally chose to surrender my heart to God again. That makes me even wonder if there was a specific moment. Maybe it was just a lot of little moments stacked up on top of each other. God didn’t prove Himself trustworthy to me in one big burning bush. He didn’t guarantee my happiness or take away all my fear in one fell swoop.

But He did find me again.

Or perhaps, maybe I just allowed myself to be found.

——

To read all the essays, you can take the below route. Thank you to each blogger who so generously opened their virtual doors and shared part of the story with you today.

Donald Miller (Essay #1 – The First Brick)
Jon Acuff (Essay #2 – The Final Brick)
Carlos Whittaker (Essay #3 – Losing Faith)
Pete Wilson (Essay #4 – Finding Love in All the Wrong Places)
XXXChurch.com (Essay #5 – Shattered Pixels)
Catalyst Conference (Essay #6 – Ghosts of Churches Past)
FlowerDust.net (Essay #7 – Listening)

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a retreat with a handful of people who earn their living from the platform. That platform could be writing, public speaking, or doing music professionally.

At one point early in the retreat, somebody said something along the lines of,

“Self-promotion is the opposite of the character of Jesus.”

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Given I had just written about my hesitation on how to market and promote a book, this statement made my stomach churn.

The group shared some thoughts on that – the difficulty of realizing the complete truth of that statement (I mean, how many times in Scripture did Jesus actually say, ‘DON’T GO AND TELL ANYONE I DID THIS‘…um…a lot!) and also feeling the tension of having to let people know about whatever message and platform we have to share.

My confession: The last two weeks I have not been healthy. I have tucked myself away for twelve, fourteen, and at one point seventeen hours in my little office. If it weren’t for the one window I have, it would be like a casino and I’d never know if it was day or night and would probably somehow grow a beard (or more likely really long leg hair) and look like a lesser tanned version of Tom Hanks on Castaway.

Tomorrow, my book Permission to Speak Freely: Essays and Art on Fear, Confession and Grace OFFICIALLY releases. Yes, I realized Amazon shipped it two weeks ago and I can’t say thanks enough for your kind feedback.

But tomorrow, it’s official. There will be blog tours and I’ll probably tweet a few times more than normal and then, over the course of the next three or four months, will be traveling almost every week to talk about it at a church or a conference or a retreat or over coffee. (More coffee? Really? My hands are twitching because of the amount of espresso I have consumed in this two week period.) There are interviews and airports and hotels and shaking hands with strangers and wearing my grown up clothes in order to look my age.

I still battle.

I love this book. I love that people are responding the way they have so far and the message of it, the redemption of the broken pieces of my past and my present, are being used to help others find confession, transformation, healing, and hope. People are learning they are not alone. And if any statement was one my heart beat for, it would be that:

You are not alone.

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People often imagine a book release day is a grandiose day and that you get flowers and balloons and as you walk down the street people stop and say, “Congratulations!” Or maybe I give too much of my guilty pleasures away when I say the illusion of being on a street in New York City and seeing a bus go by with your face and your book on it (i.e., Carrie Bradshaw) is what we authors dream of. But nothing could be further from the truth.

I’ll wake up. Shower. Put on my jeans and probably a grey tee-shirt (my summer wardrobe), battle myself on how much coffee I need, give in to a double, drive to my office and walk up the stairs. I’ll check my email, wish there were more messages from people with names instead of “Google Alerts” in the sender’s field, and keep tabs on my Amazon sale ranking – which means absolutely nothing in the publishing world. It’s simply a time-waster for authors who need their egos fed. I’ll work on editing a project, writing an article, making some phone calls, and check my Amazon sales rank again. And again. And then I’ll lock up my office, walk downstairs, get in my car, and go home.

Having a book release is a special thing. It’s a privilege I don’t take for granted. At all.

But, is it the end all? The one thing that fills the void when you close your eyes and go to sleep?

No way.

Does it even help fill that void?

Nope.

As poet and author Mary Oliver says,

“Writing is only writing. The accomplishments of courage and tenderness are not to be measured by paragraphs.”

Referring back to my post earlier, the measure of a man is the love by which he engages with humanity. I suppose in a small way, sharing words from my heart with others is a simple act of that. But just know, the tension is there. It’s a tension I’ve yet to understand or even be able to balance in a healthy way all the time.

All of this semi-sensical rambling to say I would love your prayers for the launch of this book.

I would also love for you to buy it. But I’m not going to hold a social media gun to your head and blast you in the face with that very often.

So, more than anything, your prayers.

That people will be helped.

That people who are hurt will be able to open up and share and have their weight lifted.

And that people will realize they are not alone.

That it’s okay to speak freely.

I appreciate each of you.

Thank you.

The measure of our identity, of our being (the two are the same), is the amount of our love for God.

The more we love earthly things – reputation, importance, pleasure, easy and success – the less we love God.

Our identity is dissipated among things that have no value, and we are drowned and die in trying to live in the material things we would like to possess, or in the projects we would like to complete to objectify the work of our own wills.

Then, we we come to die, we find we have squandered all our love (that is, our being) on things of nothingness, and that we are nothing, we are death…

Let me then withdraw all my love from scattered, vain things - the desire to be read and praised as a writer, or to be a successful teacher…or to live in ease in some beautiful place…

My life is measured by my love of God, and that, in turn, is measured by my love for the least of His children.

And that love is not an abstract benevolence: it must mean sharing their tribulation.

(Merton, Journals, September 3, 1941, I.398-99)

Can you take 3 seconds to leave a comment and vote on which shirt you’d buy (if any?) of the five options below? If you can leave your gender and age, that would be super helpful. Any other commentary is optional but would come in handy if you have, say, thirty seconds to spare.

Feel free to share too, if you like “Shirt C” but would like it better in grey. And how much you would pay for a shirt like this…you guys are my heroes.

Thanks!

In keeping with the theme of my book, I present to you…

Special thanks to Our Shirts Don’t Suck for the design and printing of these shirts. I can honestly say they truly don’t suck! I’m totally thrilled with how they have turned out so far!