Regular readers will have seen part 1 of my interview with writer and blogger Jeff Goins earlier in the week, where we discussed his journey so far, his new book and the difference between writing a book and writing a blog. Today we move on to discuss the creative process overall and how Jeff experiences that. So here goes.

James Prescott:Jeff, what have been your biggest struggles overall when it comes to creativity – not just on your book, but overall, and how have you dealt with them?

Jeff Goins: Yeah, I definitely appreciate what that struggle is. The biggest struggle I feel and experience as a creative person is finding my harmony in the tension of what Seth Godin calls ‘shipping’, getting your art out there to the world, and getting it to good enough.

I tend to have these two opposing extremes when it comes to my emotions. One side is perfectionism, like nothing feels good enough, and that’s what keeps me working on something for months and months and years and never sharing it with a soul, because I’m afraid – of failure and what people would think, and there is something holding me back from sharing this with the world.   (more…)

Recently I had the privilege of interviewing author and blogger Jeff Goins. In the space of the last 12 months, Jeff has grown his blog ‘Goins: Writer’ from almost nothing to getting thousands of readers daily. He guest posts for various blogs and periodicals, and recently signed his first book contract. His first book, ‘Wrecked: When a Broken World Slams into your Beautiful Life’ (Moody Publishers), will be published later this year.

As someone who is passionate about writing and creativity, I felt he had a lot to offer both myself and you, my readers, on these subjects, so asked him if he’d like to be interviewed, and he graciously accepted.

In this blog post and the next, I’ll be sharing our discussions here. I hope they bless you as much as they have me.

James Prescott: Hey Jeff, its good to see you. Thanks for accepting my invitation

Jeff Goins: Hey James, no problem, my pleasure.

JP: For those who might not have encountered you before, tell us a bit about who you are, what drives you, what you’re passionate about, what you do. (more…)

Earlier this week I posted a short blog post promoting a new book of Advent reflections I’ve contributed to. But even before beginning writing the blog, I felt an inner conflict. A conflict I’m sure many of the creatives reading – and many more of us – have experienced at some point or other.

A conflict between wanting to share something I’d helped create with people, in order to help bless them – because I genuinely believe the book can and will do that in so many ways – and my own pride and ego, which is desperately wanting people to read it and give me great responses to boost my confidence.

It’s a conflict between healthy ambition and selfish ambition.

A conflict between that part of me that wants to honour God with what I create and see it help others in their walk with Him, and my own ego which wants success for selfish reasons.

It’s also about my own insecurities – that I can’t quite believe that I have had even moderate success at something I love doing and might actually have a gift for, because some part of me just won’t accept that I can be successful, or that God might actually have made me for a purpose and that this might a pointer to what that might be.

Promoting something you’re a part of or have helped create feels a bit selfish, and not very Christian – and certainly, it’s very tempting, especially in the self-centered ‘i-culture’ we live in, to simply promote things for those reasons.

We all want to be loved, and something we often do is look for that in people, rather than simply embracing the unconditional love & grace of God, which doesn’t value us according to our achievements, but sees us in all our nakedness, all our fear, doubt and all our sin – as well as our achievement – and loves us anyway.

A love that would love the same if we lived our whole lives and achieved nothing and got it all wrong every single moment.  (more…)

As many of you know, I occasionally guest blog for a few other sites. One of these is Christine Sine’s Godspace, for which I have written several guest posts. Last Advent I wrote a seasonal devotional for the site. This year Christine and a few others decided to compile a book of devotionals for Advent, and mine was selected to be part of this. The book has recently gone to press – you can see the cover in the picture to the left/above – and is now available from their site.

It’s called ‘Waiting for the Light: An Advent Devotional’. Having seen a provisional copy of the book I can tell you it’s packed full of quality devotionals, one for each day in Advent, written by a variety of different – and very good – authors, including Tom Sine and my own pastor Jason Clark.

Believe it or not Advent is only about three weeks away now – time does move so quickly doesn’t it? –  and over the years I’ve come to value it as much as, if not more, than Christmas Day itself. It allows us to prepare ourselves fully for the coming of Jesus, and reflect more fully on His coming and it’s meaning for us. It also allows us time to reflect on what God has been doing in us over the last year, as we prepare for Jesus coming at Christmas, and then the new calendar year ahead.  (more…)

Last time I talked about Steve Jobs, about the process of death and resurrection and how in order to live a full, free live in tune with the way of Jesus, that we need to learn how to embrace the process of death and resurrection in order to truly live.

Today I want to take that discussion on. Because if this process of death and resurrection is true for us in our own individual faith journey, then it is certainly true for us as a church – a community of believers worldwide, and individual churches – and even possibly true of religion and maybe Christianity itself.

I’ve never been a fan of religion. To me it always seemed like a moral version of politics. The Oxford definition of religion is:

“the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power , especially a personal God or gods; a particular system of faith and worship ; a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion”

Contrast that with the unofficial definition of it in the picture above:

‘An organised system  or institution of belief based upon the traditions of men instead of the pursuit of friendship with God – or the act of playing church, exchanging internal truths for external performance, substituting spiritual realities with carnal rituals’

I wonder, which of those is truly most accurate about the Christian religion and what the church of Jesus looks like today? Many would say there’s a bit of both, others would point largely to the latter one and still others would ignore and disregard the latter one as cynical and dismiss it completely. Such is human nature.  The real question is, does the church today and the Christian religion accurately reflect what Jesus originally intended – and what are we willing to do to ensure we continue to be faithful to the way of Jesus? (more…)

Have you ever had one of those ‘eye-opening’ moments? Those moments where something that maybe you knew as head knowledge, or had heard from someone, but didn’t really get, became clear to you? When you suddenly got it.

I like to call them ‘oh yeah’ moments. Because whenever I see people have those moments they pause, and then go ‘oh yeah’, starting at a lower octave and then raising the pitch as they get into the yeah. It’s actually quite a funny thing to see, especially when you do get it and have done all along.

I suspect God must have a right laugh at us, seeing us finally get things which He’s known all along – and I mean that in a good way, you know the way you laugh at something in hindsight which you couldn’t at the time. I think that’s often how God laughs – with us, not at us, but He can laugh whilst those things are happening because He already knows the outcome.

Anyway, I had one of these moments the other day whilst reading my Bible and looking at some of the teachings and sayings of Jesus. It got me thinking about heaven & hell in a brand new way. (more…)

Last Saturday was just a regular Saturday. I was at home, chilling out, doing some work on my computer after a nice lie in. I had just seen the video below from Rob Bell about his new book. All in all, I was feeling pretty good. Take a look at it yourself, its pretty cool:

After watching and enjoying the video above, and getting excited by this new book (the release date has now been brought forward to March 15th, such was the resulting demand), I go check Twitter, and I notice the phrase ‘Rob Bell’ is in the top ten trends on the whole of Twitter.

Then I see a tweet by John Piper, saying ‘Goodbye Rob Bell’ with a link to an article on a well respected website by a well respected Christian on Bell’s new book, someone who by their own admission has only read snippets of the book themselves. I read the article – because I like to read things I disagree on, and get a balanced view – and back on Twitter I see a tweet from Josh Harris, the man who kissed dating goodbye – later qualified by a blog post – which I felt the need to reply to, because it made me angry at the heart and attitude behind it. (more…)

Last Advent you may remember I was asked to write a blog post for Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates, a Christian community in Seattle, USA, which was published on her blog Godspace. This year I was asked to do the same, and today my blog post ‘Know the reality’, about the reality of the Advent/Christmas story, is published on her site and you can find it here.

It’s part of a series being published on the site throughout lent about how Jesus can become real to us in this advent season, and there will be new blog posts published on the site every day of lent by various authors with their own take on this topic – obviously this started nearly a fortnight ago now, and all the other reflections can be found merely by looking at the ‘recent posts’ section of the site . (more…)

Change.

It happens all the time, it’s inevitable. No matter what you do, your body is going to age and eventually it’s going to die. Your body is never the same, it’s always creating new cells to replace old ones. You get a new skin every 30 days (which also happens to be the moon cycle for months, and the length of the female menstrual cycle – strange coincidence, it’s almost like it’s all designed…). Things have to change. If they don’t then they become dated, they stand still and get left behind. Our character and personality changes all the time too. Every day we gradually become different as we experience different things. We are never static, we never stay the same. Many changes we don’t notice are happening until a period of time has passed, because many are small or internal changes where the fruit only comes out later.

I’ve said many times we are all on our own individual journeys with God – whether we know we are or not – and a lot of what appears on this blog is about my journey. God has really been putting me through some big changes in the last four years, and this site and my own writing has developed along with it. (more…)