Daily Help Plus

Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life

Bible Reading Plans

• Plan One: New Testament Only
• Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
• Plan Three: New Testament + History
• Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3

Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.

Extras

Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute

Overflow

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Adolescents

In the last two days, I’ve described to you 1) a problem, and 2) a solution. The problem was my bloated writing. The solution is for me to reduce bloat. But in the process of recognizing the problem and choosing the solution something else came to light. An opportunity.

The opportunity is to meet what I now see as a glaring need. That glaring need is for teenagers to learn the implications of the Second Coming. It’s not that I didn’t know about this need. It’s that I wasn’t focused on it. Being reminded that most adult readers don’t care about words like “turgid” and “stultifying” was a wake-up call. Once I realized that I had been unintentionally writing for graduate school readers instead of middle school readers, I realized that I couldn’t possibly have been reaching adolescents with my writing. I wasn’t intentionally ignoring them – I just wasn’t thinking enough about them.

In retrospect, for example, I can see it was a mistake for me not to direct The Honor of Marriage to teenagers as much as I did to adults. Adolescents are thinking about marriage and marriage-related issues, so their thinking should be shaped by biblical principles. If we wait until they’re adults, their minds have already been shaped. Of course, it’s parents – not me – who have the responsibility of raising up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. But my books should help you in that regard.

My failure to consciously include teenagers in my target audience applies not just to books on the Second Coming and marriage. It applies across the board to all my books. Therefore, I have double the reason to write less academically:

1. I’ve been missing my target audience (average adults).
2. I’ve been missing a group that should have consciously been in my target audience but wasn’t (average adolescents).

Therefore, I’m not just going to write better going forward. I’m going to rewrite all my existing books. Well, not every single one of them. I’ll make each decision on a case by case basis. But I definitely plan to rewrite all the major ideas into smaller, better-written books that can be…

• …chosen more specifically.
• …started and finished more quickly.
• …digested more easily.

The currently-existing books will be archived as the new ones are produced. I don’t want to destroy the existing books because I may fall short in my attempts to imitate Flesch and Leonard, and therefore it’s always possible I could make things worse.

Some of you might have been able to predict all this back when I told you how excited I was about folding some different book ideas into The Implications of the Second Coming as Accomplished Fact. I just had to get this far into to realize that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. It was a logical concept, but it led to a book that was just too large.

I’ve got a learning curve to navigate, and I hope you’ll stick with me. Tomorrow, we’ll start back where we left off on Thursday. I hope the difference will make a difference.

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