Yesterday’s post (Cornered by God) is at the intersection of the two books that I have been working on (actually there are three, the third is in French and I’ll get to it at the end of this post). Or perhaps it’s a fork in the road. I have been stalled in my writing for some time and it has become clear to me that it doesn’t work to travel down two (or three) roads at the same time.

The two books are a memoir of my faith journey, for which Cornered by God seems a good working title, and a book about the interconnectedness of the Bible and the misunderstandings that come from taking a verse or a story out of context and trying to decipher what it means. I feel that so much of what we use to help us understand the Bible just leads us in a game of hopscotch over the surface of the book.

I want to give a little background on each book of the Bible, who wrote it and in what circumstances, explain why there are two histories in the Old Testament, point out how Bible story books often get the story wrong and show how minor incidents that we often overlook had a great impact on later events. I haven’t come up with a working title for this book yet, but it is the one that can be completed in the shortest time and is perhaps more important. Thus it will get my more or less undivided attention in the coming weeks.

The first draft of the memoir is written, but needs extensive rewriting and additions. My daughter gave me a book for Christmas many years ago with questions about my life. I never wrote anything in that book, but the memoir is a much expanded version of the answers to those questions. I feel I owe this to her; she was along for the ride since she was a baby but couldn’t understand the reasons or the background for the moves and changes that took place in our family. I intend to finish this book as soon as possible, but it will be on the back burner until I finish the first.

The third book that I mentioned consists of writings from 12th century Anabaptists in southern France. These were written in Occitan, the form of French spoken in that area, and were translated years ago into antique English. I’m not sure that translation is entirely accurate. There is also a translation into 19th century French, plus my first attempt to put most of it into current French that is posted on my French blog. This book will be small and the work consists of selecting the relevant historical accounts and updating the French to the best of my ability.

One of the difficulties with this last book is that those writings have been collected and published many years ago by English historians who made no distinction between the faith of the early non-resistant Albigenses and Waldenses and those of their descendents who united with the Reformed Church in the 16th century and took up arms.

A few paragraphs back I spoke of giving my more or less undivided attention to one book at a time. As you can see, I am still blogging, and I am blogging in French as well as English. Plus I still have a few bookkeeping clients who each need my undivided attention for varying periods of time. Plus I am still chairman of the French editing committee of the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite. Plus there are always things that need attention at home. That still leaves time to dedicate to writing, if I can avoid frittering it away on things of no importance.