Some of you have heard about it, some of you have not.  Here’s the skinny!

Since the beginning of my spiritual transformation in 2008, I have been writing daily blog posts/ bible study updates.  In working through the Celebrate Recovery program at York Christian Church, I realized that it was time for me to truly start seeking God’s truth and better understanding His Word.  In trying to study the bible and make notes, I quickly learned that I did not have enough room in the margins of my bible to annotate all my thoughts.  It quickly progressed from typing in a word document to finding a way to share my thoughts on Facebook and eventually starting my own website to organize them and subject them to public scrutiny.  After all, the only way we can learn is by testing our thoughts to see if they are true.

As time has gone on and I have continued this method of studying and sharing, I have developed quite a storehouse of bible study posts covering different topics and almost 30 books of the bible!  A close friend of mine once told me, “geez man, you have enough material to write a book or two!”  This thought has always stuck in my head and I have been slowly developing and writing my thoughts down for a very open and challenging book.  I feel as though the Holy Spirit has gifted me with an inquisitive mind about how things work that is accompanied by my faith and a desire to see others experience the wonders of God in their lives as I continue to experience personally.  As God continues to reveal to me the things He wants me to ask and reveal in this book, I have been researching how exactly I would go about publishing and advertising it.

My friend’s words kept resurfacing in this process and as I prayed about it, I asked God to show me if He wants me to pursue this and how.  I have learned that the most important part about putting out a book is advertising.  As missionaries, we are on a limited budget and certainly do not feel it would be appropriate to use money we have received from sponsors to publish a book!  I discovered that thanks to advancing technology and the increasing realm of the digital world, there are websites that can help anyone publish a book and the only cost is a percentage of the sales!  Now, I’m sure you’re wondering why then I would give this book away for free.

As I mentioned, advertising is key.  To sell books, you need a good advertising team/plan and a fan base.  If you don’t have a fan base, you need to create one.  Enter my free eBook.  The idea is to create a following of my books.  Since I already have the base material for devotional books, the meat of the work is done.  All that is left is revision, formatting, and publishing.  Granted, this also is a lot of work but at least I am not starting from scratch (like the book I hope to publish in the future).  My hope is that by publishing my first book for free, I can gain enough publicity to be able to sell my next devotional book at a nominal price and get some sort of return out of it.  In the long run, I hope to build enough capital and readers for when I release “the big one”.

In missions school, we learned about business as missions.  Generally, this is a topic that includes using business as a way to minister to others whether they are customers, staff, associates, and anyone else running a business brings you in contact with.  A side benefit of business as missions is being self sustaining.  As you learned through our recent Furlough Fifteen letter, we are still trying to build our monthly regular support to fulfill our budget.  One way we hope to offset this deficit is by doing whatever we can to earn some money on the side so as not to be wholly reliant upon our supporters.

So, without further explanation, here is the link to find and download my devotional eBook centered around the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Enjoy!

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