How the Sausage is Made
It fills me with great joy when I walk into a bookstore or library and see shelves overflowing with old and new manuscripts. I love the electricity of ideas in the air, the smell of paper, and the wonder of what each aisle holds.
That’s been true since my childhood days. But I know more now than when I was a boy. As the publisher of more than 500 novels and a content creator for thirty-plus years, I’m quite familiar (to use an old phrase) with how the sausage is made. I’ve witnessed first-hand what happens behind-the-scenes to influence the final product—both good and some bad.
Not all books are created equal. Each is an empty vessel waiting to be filled. Their power (or lack) comes from what we fill them with. Our creations, if untethered from the Creator, will always be less than they could have been. And much of what bookstores and libraries are filled with are ideas and worldviews meant to draw us away from God and reality as he created it.
It would serve everyone well to spend less time on screens and more time in physical copies of tangible books. Doing so shifts us from the artificial to the real. But even then, it depends on what you’re reading.
A book isn’t automatically good. It comes down to the content. And content is never neutral…because the people writing content and the industry publishing it and the retailers selling it aren’t neutral. As C. S. Lewis said, "There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan."
It matters how we live as we create. Those decisions are the ingredients that shape us and our art. How something’s made makes all the difference in the world. With sausage and—exponentially more so—with content.
This reading was crafted to encourage your pursuit of story and creativity with God. Your donation makes this crowd-funded initiative possible. You can support it via PAYPAL (or by check to Allen Arnold at PO Box 62841, Colorado Springs, CO 80962).
