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Equals A Life

March 11, 2011 in Blog with 2 Comments

The other day at some friends’ house, somebody mentioned that because the United States is now sending troops to the region of Libya, the general schedule of Marine Corps deployments is being sped up. In reacting to this I tried to appear collected and calm, but in spite of myself I felt my face flinch and tighten, and somehow it seemed that the sound of that common piece of news was actually, physically, punching me in the gut.

I like to think of myself as a fairly sympathetic person, and people who know me will tell you I’m easily moved; still, I never used to have this sort of response to headlines and CNN tickers.

My husband is a Marine Captain, infantry. My younger brother is a Marine Corporal, newly discharged but with years left in the reserves. I live on a military base, with every home on the block representing at least one person who’s active-duty. These are people I see playing outside with their kids, walking their dogs, having barbecues. And at some point in the nearer-than-we-thought future, many of them will be crossing an ocean to enter a place where bullets and rocket-propelled grenades and IEDs cut into people every day.

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A Writing Process, By Photo

March 10, 2011 in Blog, Photos with 4 Comments

A little less than a year ago, I had a looming book deadline, lots of writing attempts, and no book. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to make two storylines (one past, one present—you’ll understand when you read it) jibe with all the themes they attempted to illustrate. Later I came to refer to this experience as “writer’s block on Speed.”

After several useless problem-solving attempts, finally I fished out a Sharpie, some paper, and scissors from my desk drawers, and for a few hours I cut and wrote and arranged little snippets all over my bedroom floor. Yellow represented the past-tense storyline, pink the present-tense, blue the main divisions, and white the themes. Finally, it was something useful and focused.

So—two previews in one week!—the final draft of Craving Grace looks a lot like this, minus the gloves and the foot:

(Click image to view larger)

Yes, I have blurred out some key notes, including one about the wedding. It’s blogger-cruel, I know. But it makes you want to read the book, doesn’t it?

Ash Wednesday Sneak Peak! Excerpt from “Craving Grace”

March 9, 2011 in Blog, News with 10 Comments

Lisa’s note: Last I checked, not even Amazon.com had posted any internal content for Craving Grace. Also, today is Ash Wednesday. This means: today’s post is timely and also a first. Below is an actual excerpt from my new book, verbatim and with only one sneaky marketing omission. (The two portions in brackets are notes added for clarity.) Come May 1st, you can find the whole story in chapter five. Enjoy!

To Ashes

Ash Wednesday, though a noted date on the traditional Church calendar, is not formally observed by many evangelical churches. In my West Michigan neck of the woods, for instance, most Christians think this day is for Catholic types only. Most of us grew up without knowing what Ash Wednesday is about. We’ve never practiced it, and we have no problem finding it odd and a little creepy.

Before Mars Hill [then my local church and my employer] became part of my life, my only formal experiences with the Church calendar had been the more or less standard observances: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter. Sometimes not even Advent and Lent. None of the churches I had been part of in the past had been big on liturgy—when it came to practicing sacred rites and rituals, we were willing to light purple and pink candles around Christmastime each year, but that was typically as wild as we got.

Me on Ash Wednesday a few years ago.

There is a practice on Ash Wednesday called the giving and receiving of the ashes. Traditionally the ashes are burned fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday—those who come to receive the ashes expect to have that fine, gritty palm dust put on their foreheads. They wear it all day in the shape of a cross, given in two small smudges by someone else’s ash-covered thumb. This is a way of remembering and mourning. We remember Christ’s time of temptation in the wilderness and we mourn his death. And we remember and mourn our own dying: the fact that death and sinfulness rule us finally, that even at our best we are full of the deceit and ingratitude and arrogance and self-motives that put holiness on our own strength permanently out of reach. It is a fine, gritty reality.

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Frustrated In Fasting

March 8, 2011 in Blog with 2 Comments

Here’s an appropriate question on Fat Tuesday: “…I’m curious to know what–if anything–you learned while fasting and abstaining. Sometimes, in this culture of instant gratification, I wonder if we miss out on the depth and wonder of God’s mystery when we fail to deny ourselves anything at all.”

I mentioned in a recent post that my new memoir tells of a six-month period I spent fasting from from sweets. “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” says Psalm 38—my fast was an attempt to recalibrate, if possible, some physical and spiritual taste buds. I wanted to discover that God could be sweet. So I took a new look at food and at God by denying myself processed sugar for half a year. For the most part I did not enjoy the experience, though probably for reasons other than those you might expect.

Coming in at the top of the Why People Don’t Like Fasting list is this obvious fact that fasting is denial and deprivation, and that we are not generally the sort of people who look to give ourselves less. We are indulgence, extravagance, and instant, sweet thrills. So it would make sense for one to assume that the big difficulty of my fast was the way it halted self-gratification and stopped me from putting away chocolate-chocolate-chocolate. But it seems my understanding and insight and faith were all stunted and frustrated earlier in the game than even that. What fasting taught me was more elementary, more basic.

The embarrassing truth is that for a period of at least months, my cravings had me shocked. Shocked and terribly mystified, I’ll admit—indignant for a while too. I wasn’t sure how to accept the reality that my stomach and my blood sugar levels could revolt so totally and rudely. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.

How could a simple thing, fasting, be difficult to this degree? How could it be this much of a battle for someone like me, spiritually devoted and eager? That second question especially was where I kept getting stuck.

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Your Questions for Craving Grace

March 4, 2011 in Blog with 10 Comments

Hey, hey! One whole week of posts—look how much fun I’m having as a blogger! It’s almost as if that earlier confession of mine barely holds weight anymore.

No, really, I’m enjoying this. Hope you are too.

What’s especially exciting about blogging right now is that Craving Grace isn’t out yet, and telling people about it is like introducing two friends when you’re pretty much giddy that they’ll get along.  So while the hard copies wait behind their all-important May 1 release date, I’m going to keep making my introductions. To do that, I’d like your help.

In coming days and weeks—who knows? maybe months—I’ll be continuing to give sneak peaks here about what you’ll find in Craving Grace. To do that well, I’m practically itching to know:

What do you want to know about it?

When you read the back of the book, what does it make you want to find out?

If you had to guess, what do you think you’ll find in it?

Go ahead and leave your questions/thoughts in this post’s comments, and I’ll use them in telling you more about the book. If you guys come through here, I’ll choose one and make it my next post. Happy Friday!

A Book By Its Covers

March 3, 2011 in Blog with 14 Comments

The first time I saw the cover design for my first book, it was on a printed flyer promoting the book. As in: the deal was done, and it didn’t matter how I felt about the design or anything. Good thing I like it, I thought. I was a newbie author, sure, learning publishing from square one—still, the pace of the design process and my total lack of involvement in it was alarming.

That experience wasn’t a standard one, I found out later. The publishing house (now nonexistent) that had contracted with me was at the time being purchased by another house, and in leading up to the handoff, some communication items had flopped. However, I discovered through working on several more book projects (not always as the author), that a cover design process isn’t necessarily something an author participates in or is privy to.

Enter Craving Grace and Tyndale House. This time around, I saw my publishing team’s favorite cover design well in advance of a final decision being made. I was told that they had tried a few design varieties, that this was the one they were recommending, and that they hoped I would like it as much as they did.

Loved, loved it.

The book is about a fast from sweets; it’s about how honey became a symbol of what God can be to a person. So this picture of honey filling up and pouring out from a jar clutched tightly—it said practically everything to me. It made me want to read and live the story again.

THEN a few months later, I saw the three other cover designs that had been considered for Craving Grace. It was so fun for me to see the different concepts that I thought you might get a kick out of it to. Check them out and weigh in: Did we make the right decision? What does a cover say about the book? (As always, click any image to view larger.)

#1 (The one we picked.)

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Welcome and Re-Welcome

March 2, 2011 in Blog, News, Photos with 0 Comments

LV.com 1.0, image #1

For the six of you who remember the old days and the original lisavelthouse.com, which went up sometime around 2002 promoting Saving My First Kiss, welcome back to a whole new bit. For everyone else, we’re glad you’re here too.

Facebook links!

A Twitter feed!

Current info and photos!

The initial rendition of LV.com was lovely for its time. It worked out of Blogger and included 2 photos. It told people that I was in college and had never been kissed, and its bio picture included not only lipstick but also pearls. At age nineteen, yikes.

LV.com 1.0, image #2

The moral of that story is: It’s good to grow up a little. It’s really good to be here.

Without further ado, I present phase 1 of the Website Update Project. Other phases will be happening in the near future. For instance, some of you proposed I add a few interesting details to my bio—favorite foods, anyone?—so I’m planning to include “pizza, any kind of PIZZA” and a few other fun facts sometime soon. I’ll be updating my calendar and contact info as well. In the meantime, feel free to rummage around and enjoy what’s already posted. New info includes never-before-posted endorsements for Craving Grace on this here Books page.

Taste for Faith

February 28, 2011 in Blog with 2 Comments

One day in early December a few years back, I placed, like a gauntlet, a jar of honey in the center of my apartment. It was a big jar in a small space, which left me no choice anymore but to stop ignoring it. This was my goal, for two reasons:

  • first, a handful of weeks earlier, one of my favorite Bible scholars had preached a sermon that was leaving a sour taste in my mouth;
  • and second, things in general were not going well.

In his sermon, the scholar had emphasized Old Testament verses that describe God in sensory language. He had pointed out the way those verses evoke sight, touch, and sound: God is a rock, a shepherd, and a flame, his name is a tower, and he is in a whisper . For good measure, the scholar had offered several more examples, but then he had centered on a particular one. It was a familiar metaphor, yet that day it became also new—it became what irritated and drove me for weeks and months afterward.

God is sweet, the scholar said. His ways taste sweeter than honey.

Sweeter than honey. Such poetry! And oh, the thought! Part of me wanted to believe it wholly, with conviction, especially on account that it was biblical. There was a hitch, however: much of me wasn’t sure I was willing to buy the idea.

It was the dead of Michigan winter. I was in debt and strapped for cash. There was the distinct possibility that my career was going nowhere. I was single, single—despite being enamored by all things romance, in all my life I hadn’t been asked out on one bona fide date—and I was drowning in summer wedding invitations, including one each for all three of my siblings. I had been lately rejected by a guy whom I liked a lot. Whom I had practically thrown myself at weeks earlier, which made the situation additionally awkward. I was anxious and bored and jealous and disillusioned and embarrassed by my life. It had been that way for a long time. But the deep and real problem, the one running down the middle of everything else—I could see it, suddenly—was that God seemed anything but sweet.

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Reluctant Blogger, Blogging

January 4, 2011 in Blog with 19 Comments

My first blog began circa 2003, back when blogging was newly cool. It tanked only a year and a half or so later. By “tanked,” I mean that at some point I admitted to myself the reason why I had written only seven posts in eighteen months. The reason was, still is: I don’t like blogging.

I’m an introvert, mostly, and the public-ness of a blog has a way of turning me uptight. My stark raving perfectionism about writing—always, always edit the posts! make them pristine and error-free! make them charming and funny and thought-provoking and winsome, all!—doesn’t help either. But it’s a handful of years after Attempt One flopped, and I know now that some things are worth doing, even if it means dragging your feet.

This Spring I have a new book coming out, Craving Grace. It’s the story of how God swooped in and unexpectedly changed my whole perspective on faith. He used honey to do it, and he used fasting and my failure. He used friends too, and family, and first kisses and a farm. Good thing “honey” doesn’t start with an F, because the list would be almost annoyingly poetic that way. The point is: it’s a pretty incredible story. I can say that because I don’t deserve any credit for putting the story together—that was divine stuff, no question. Hopefully the writing is good too, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Smart people like the editing and marketing folks at Tyndale House have told me that if I want people to be interested in this book, I should blog about it. And I really, really want people to be interested in this book. I want them to read it and find God in it. Find grace, like I did. I’m trusting that if they do, then maybe they will. I’m trusting that God is interested in swooping down and better-defining grace in their lives—in yours, too.

So below is the first sneak preview of many that I hope to post here. It’s the full cover spread (new this week!) of Craving Grace. You can find it in bookstores beginning May 1, or if you don’t want to wait that long, you can pre-order it now at one of the following:

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

Books-A-Million

Christianbook.com

 

 

 

 

 

(click image to view full-size)

There, that wasn’t so bad after all. Next time, I’ll tell you the reason why I’m so excited about this book. That reason is, among other things, a story about my hairstylist.
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