Close the Book on 2013

As the Member Care Coach at MBT, I have the privilege of ministering to you during times of need. I know many of you have faced adversity during 2013. And, I’m sure there are untold others of you who have suffered through your tragedy in silence.

I know of deaths, illnesses, disappointments, financial hardships, emotional pain and life that has gone south. We’ve prayed for so many this year, I dare say more than any other year since the MBT prayer ministry began.

The good news is that this year is rapidly growing to a close. In just a few short hours you can put the period at the end of the year and start a brand new year with a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter of life.

No matter what has happened to you in 2013, you can declare it over and start again on Wednesday. Regardless of how disappointing the events of the year turned out to be, it is now history and you can begin again with a brand new year.

I believe that 2014 will be a year of:

The Greatest Storyteller Ever Sold

Long, long ago in a land far away, a child was born. No ordinary baby, the Christ child had come to save the world from sin.

The prophecies had been fulfilled. What hadn’t been mentioned in those prophecies was what a great storyteller Jesus would be. The Bible is full of the amazing stories He told. And all were spoken in a natural, easy-to-understand format.

Jesus came that we might have life. No doubt about it, but for writers, He also came that we might have stories… lots of them and a marvelous template of how we should reach the masses with our prose.

How Do We Appreciate You? Let Me Count the Ways!

Thursday night at the Team Member webinar, I ended the broadcast by telling our team members how special they are to us and how we appreciate them. Afterwards, my email inbox filled up with members thanking me, many saying they were brought to tears.

As writers—and human beings—we need to know how much we are appreciated. And what’s more, you’re so important to us, we could tell you every minute of every day from now until eternity and it would still fall short of expressing how much you mean to us.

With that truth in mind, I thought I’d tell you just a snippet of how much we appreciate each of you. As we sit down at the Thanksgiving table and bow our heads, we’ll give thanks for you. Here are just some of the reasons:

Five Reasons Why You Quit

I’ve done it. I’m sure you have too. You get a great idea and dive right in. Somewhere along the way, you chip away at your enthusiasm until one day you suddenly realize you haven’t pursued that thing in quite a while. You quit.

That’s fine if you started watching season one of Castle or took belly dancing lessons. There comes a time when those things naturally come to an end. But when it comes to quitting your writing dream, it will leave you empty and utterly unhappy.

There are any number of reasons why individuals throw in the towel on their pursuits, but here are ones I have found to be the top five:

Take a Deep Breath

You’re six days into the NaNoWriMo and MBTWriMo writing marathon. You started out great. Thousands of words flew from your fingertips and onto the computer screen. Your writer friends envied your massive word count.

But today, the cursor on the blank screen taunts you. The blink-blink-blink flashes your zero word count to the world. When you finally force words to come out, they resemble your “See spot run” sentences of your first grade reader.

Ahhh… to be a writer.

Okay. Sit back, take a deep breath and relax! It’s all good. Your creative juices come in waves just like the tides in the ocean. Sometimes they come crashing in with the force of a tsunami and words flood your work in progress. Other times you’ll walk a mile just to reach a trickle.

You can’t hammer out word count every hour of the day. It’s unnatural. Unhealthy. It wouldn’t be wise for you to any more than you should eat constantly for all those hours. Your body has to have time to process what you’ve consumed. So it is with your word count.

When words won’t come and the contest pressure is sucking the life out of you, these things will help you get back on the right track: