One thing I always want to do is explore and develop my writing and creative gift. One area that’s always fascinated me is the concept of parables – I’ve not really written much fiction in my time, but a good friend recently challenged me to spend more time on some parables and to share those with people, to try to grow in my faith and develop my written and creative gifts.

So over the next few months I hope to be sharing some parables I’ve created with you here. A good parable, for me, is a story which answers some questions and leaves us with more questions, which communicates truth in a way we can understand – I will share more on that topic in a future post.

In the meantime, enjoy my first attempts at a Parable. We begin with ‘The Parable of the Perfect Church Service’: (more…)

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…)

Christmas has now been and gone. It’s less than a week and we’ll be into the new year – which is only two months away from my next birthday.

It’s a time where you naturally come to reflect on what God has been doing in you in the past year, what might lie ahead in the year to come and begin to get some perspective on things. It’s a natural process and one I tend to go through in the last couple of months of every year.

It’s strange, looking back, just what God has been doing. To be honest, it’s nothing like I expected at the beginning of the year. I realise now looking back, that I had all these plans of what God was going to do this year, how I was going to grow, what was going to happen.

It hasn’t happened anything like I planned – and I thank God for that.

One thing that I am feeling overwhelmingly right now though, at the end of the year, is thankfulness.

I have seen people I love pass on to be with Jesus this year. I have seen good friends lose their jobs, homes or in some cases loved ones. All this has happened in my immediate community, and impacted my world. I have been praying this year for people to find jobs, find homes and for God’s comfort in their grief. I have also had the privilege of seeing people I care for make a public commitment to Christ and be baptised, which has been a source of great joy.

At the same time, God has been taking me on a journey inside myself, into my own heart. He’s been exposing truths about me – some I knew existed, some I didn’t, and it hasn’t been pretty.  (more…)

I’ve been loving talking about the theme of Advent the last few weeks in my blog series. Many of you will also know that last year I did a guest post for Christine Sine’s blog, ‘Godspace’, which was then more recently published in a book of Advent reflections.

Well this year, I’ve been at it again.

I’ve written another guest post for her site for this Advent – this time it’s on the theme of ‘Jesus is coming, what do we expect?’, which all the posters on her blog throughout Advent have been posting on.

I have guest-posted a blog in relation to this theme entitled ‘Have we lost Jesus at Christmas?’ which has gone live today! You can find this post here, so feel free to go have a look and leave a comment! (more…)

Those who have read my blog recently will know I’ve been writing a lot on the theme of faith in the digital realm. I’ve written on how I believe the digital realm and interactions we have there are real, true & meaningful and how the digital realm can help us understand truths about ourselves better, and therefore help us deal with those issues. I’ve also written on how important it is to find a balance between digital and physical interaction. Of course many of you will be followers of mine on Twitter (@JamesPrescott77) and know I love social networking, and discussions on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks – indeed you may have been involved in some of those discussions!

I also love to write, and many of you know that I guest blog from time to time. But now these two parts of my life have come together in more clear way.  (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…)

Hi people! As many of you will know (some of whom because I met you there), I attended a conference a couple of weeks back on Christanity and social media. It followed an awards ceremony the previous day so the whole weekend was called ‘Christian New Media Awards & Conference 2011′, or more simply, CNMAC11. At the conference were several guest speakers from the Christian, digital and creative realms alike, speaking on many different issues around how we as Christians deal with the digital media, how it can impact our lives & culture and its power to change the world. There were seminars on how to navigate twitter, to write code for your blog, how to do handle self-promotion and balance that with being a Christian and pointing away from yourself, and about the importance of retaining a balance between interaction in the digital world and non-digtial world.

One thing that became crystal clear to me is that there no such thing as the ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ worlds, because the online space, the digital realm, is part of the real world – it’s just as real, although different, from physically interacting with someone – and that was abundantly clear by the number of ‘Twitter-friends’, who I’d only known online, that I met and felt like I’d known them for a long time.

There’s a lot to discuss coming from this conference and I have a lot more to share. But for now, I want to share with you a little audio recording I made whilst at the conference with Dr Bex Lewis of the Big Bible Project and #digidisciple (more on that in a future post!). There will be a link down the sidebar eventually but I wanted to share it with you here first, so listen (carefully, the beginning is a bit muffled!) and enjoy me talking about the conference!

As some of you know, I occasionally write blog posts for other sites. Not long ago I was asked to write a blog post for Christine Sine on the theme of ‘Worshipping God in the real world’. I was struggling as to what to write and it was about the time for me to write it, and then we had the riots, looting and violence in London and the rest of the UK last week.

As I prayed and reflected on those events God really spoke to me and it became very clear precisely what I had to share. It also became clear it wouldn’t be easy to share.

So I wrote the post anyhow, and sent it off, and today is published a blog post on Christine’s site entitled ‘Worshipping God in the reality of riots’. It’s one of the most uncomfortable and challenging posts I think I’ve ever written, and I would love you all to read it.

Christine and her husband Tom live in Christian community in Seattle and head up an organisation called ‘Mustard Seed Associates’, and I’ve met them and heard them speak a number of times, their blog is worth a read in its own right. I would recommend to you all that you add it to your blogroll, they have so much to teach us about what it means to live intentionally before God, and a lot to contribute to the ongoing discussion of what means to follow Jesus in the everyday.

Anyhow, my blog post is now up on their site and you can find the post here, go have a look and reflect on it – and let me know your thoughts. I’d love to hear your responses…

I occasionally write posts for other blogs, and one of these is Godspace, written by Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates – see links to the right. Each Lent and Advent she invites bloggers from all over the world to write posts appropriate to the season, and I was asked to write a blog post for her on the the question of ‘What difference does it make?’, which is the theme of her Lenten season blog series.

In it I write a little about the rhythm of Lent, and how Lent and giving things up – and taking up new habits – for it is about surrendering control to God.

It’s just been posted here. I’d highly recommend you go and have a read, and share it with others.