More New Products Update

It has been a very busy year and I am excited to tell you about a bunch of new grace study material that I’ve been creating since the beginning of the year.  I’ve dedicated a whole new product page on the site for you to seek up to date one what has been happening.

Weekly Grace Lessons

For those of you who are infrequent visitors to the site, I’ve been running a daily grace study since Jan 1.  Those lessons can be accessed on the Grace-filled Thought page.  Additionally, due to the enormous about of material which these lessons cover weekly, I’ve began to provide a weekly podcast which is an overview of what was covered during the week.  It comes automatically on the last lesson of the weekly series, but can also be found on the Weekly Update page.

New Books

Here is where the real learning is located.  I’ve published several books over the last few months which can be found on Amazon.com and Books.by.  They come in paperback, hardback, and Kindle format.  Go here on Amazon to see what the book catalogue now looks like for both printed and Kindle.  Go here on Books.by to see what the printed catalogue looks like.  Here is brief description of the newest books you’ll discover.

Cooking for the gods

The meal does not create the sacred. It reveals what was already there.

Cooking for the Gods is not a devotional with recipes attached, and it is not a cookbook with a Bible verse stapled to the front. It is a single, sustained argument, made one meal at a time: that grace was never something you had to earn your way toward. It was already the ground under the kitchen floor. You just hadn’t noticed.

Structured across a single day — Morning, Midday, Afternoon, and Night Watch — the book moves through the ordinary hours of an ordinary kitchen and names what has actually been happening there all along. A pantry becomes a place of quiet spiritual practice. A drive-through order becomes a confession. A cocktail hour becomes an altar. A midnight refrigerator light becomes a small, honest reckoning with what you actually want and why.

Each section pairs story with recipe, memoir with theology, dry humor with real weight. You’ll find a grandfather’s Weber grill treated with the same seriousness as scripture — because in this book, it deserves to be. You’ll find the case, made plainly and without hedging, that the sacred was never rationed, never earned, and never dependent on getting the ritual right.

This is a book for anyone who has grown tired of a spirituality that requires performance. For anyone who has felt something real happen around a table and had no theological language for it. For anyone who suspects — correctly — that the most ordinary parts of the day were never as ordinary as they were told.

You were never as far from the table as you thought. Come hungry.

The Pew Whisperer

When Tate Wyecomb’s truck dies outside a half-restored church in the middle of nowhere, he expects a few hours’ wait for a part. He gets five days he never saw coming.

Wes Conrad is the church’s only occupant — a defrocked minister who spends his mornings talking to an empty room and his nights reciting Alan Watts over bourbon he doesn’t bother hiding. Tate is a ranch hand raised on the belief that love has to be earned, confession before restoration, one honest reckoning at a time. Neither man is looking for what the other one turns out to have.

Over five days — two churches, a stranger’s headstone, and a lot more silence than either man is used to — the careful architecture each of them built to survive their own grief starts, quietly, to come apart. Wes is still trying to rebuild the one thing he actually lost. Tate is still carrying a debt to his brother that no apology will ever cover. And somewhere past the edge of town, a church Wes fled two years ago and never finished has, impossibly, come back to life without him.

The Pew Whisperer is a quiet, unflinching novel about the difference between the love you have to earn and the love that was already there before you did anything to deserve it — and what it costs a man to find out, too late or just in time, which one he’s been living inside of.

The Long Faithful – The RV, Grandkids or a Pew

Forty-six years of marriage. Two thousand miles of Route 66. One road trip neither Walt nor Carol Dunn saw coming.

Walt and Carol are what researchers are now calling “the Dones” — lifelong, faithful
churchgoers who’ve quietly stopped attending, not out of anger, but because the church that shaped their whole adult lives never quite figured out what to do with them once they got old. When their two weeks with the grandkids ends in Chicago, their longtime pastor and his wife peel off for an open-ended loop of the Great Lakes — and Walt and Carol, instead of heading home, turn the RV south onto the old road.

Their destination: Los Angeles, and an Army friend Walt hasn’t seen in fifty years, who has spent his life studying the revival that started in a converted livery stable a few blocks
from where they’ll finally meet again.

Along the way, the Dunns meet a whole country’s worth of people carrying the same quiet weight in different shapes — a Baptist deacon who’s never once trusted his own salvation enough to stop re-earning it; a Catholic couple who kept their devotion and lost their church in the same breath; a young deconstructing family who still pray in secret, ashamed of their own hunger; a woman running a diner at the literal geographic middle of the country who built an entire, solid ethic without ever needing an institution’s permission to do it.

Nobody gets a tidy answer. Nobody needs one.

THE LONG FAITHFUL is a novel for anyone who has ever loved an institution that stopped knowing what to do with them — and for anyone who has ever found, on the emptiest stretch of highway, that the ground was there long before they thought to look for it.

The Letter – The Forbidden Sermon Series

Eight years after The Forbidden Sermons, Leon Scheffield is sixty-eight years old and still driving between dying churches, still delivering the sermon that changes things, still carrying the letter his mentor left him about a table he hasn’t found yet.

Then a stranger writes to him using words from that letter.

Words he’s shown to no one.

The Letter follows Leon through one year and six traditions — Reformed, Pentecostal, Progressive, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist/Wesleyan — each one in a specific form of collapse, each one asking him something the sermon he already knows cannot reach. A dying man in Asheville whose hands are shaking. A worship leader in San Antonio who knows the difference between the real thing and the manufactured thing. A deacon in
Memphis who is furious at God and done with being handled. A priest in Portland
who has been sitting on the truth for six years.

And running alongside all of it: Marguerite Fontaine, a music teacher who has been through every tradition Leon is visiting and belongs to none of them, who appears in cities she wasn’t told about, who has been composing a piece of music for seven years that she cannot finish because the final movement is in a place she hasn’t been able to reach alone.

What Leon has been calling the prior grace is not the destination of the sermon. It is the ground the sermon was always happening inside of. That discovery requires a year, seven encounters, and a kitchen table in a small town in December.

A continuation of The Forbidden Sermons.

There is much more available that this post doesn’t have room to bring to your attention.  Head over to the New Product Update page to see what is available for your grace study.

Thanks for your support! Charis and shalom to you.