Dear CCW family,
It is a joy to write to you this Christmas/New Year time. All of us here wish you the best of New Years, filled with Jesus. “To live is Christ” as Paul reminded us. That kind of year has to be worthwhile to live out. This may be the most useful year for Christ of your entire life. Can you say it will not be?
Among our team, we who write regularly as well as speak often in various places face that challenging job by calling up as much dependence on God as we can ask for. It’s a daunting occupation at times because we genuinely care that what we write and say is valuable and filled with God’s wisdom. We find that the storehouse of our minds, where God has put boxes and boxes of ideas from our Scripture meditations, is a regular source of help, however. We are freshly meditating all the time. For instance, I spent a good time in Romans 1-3 this very morning pondering “the Righteousness of God.” I called a friend as well to talk over and meditate together to gain the best understanding. Sometimes these thoughts are stored away for later use when they have aged properly, like the cured cheese wheels in the Swiss Gruyère factory I once visited. We know the Lord is involved and has his ways to bring things together.
Here is what this process is sometimes like …
The Writer’s Desert
What’s it like to write?
Imagine a desert as your paper. That’s the starting place. On this you will assemble an army.
You sit within that desert and look out at what appears to be illimitable barrenness. All you have is an idea, and maybe just a wisp of an idea at that. The blank page is quite defeating like that at times. There are too many ways to go — too much room.
But then, on the furthest dune the first thought in a set of words appears — dream-like nomads riding camels, barely visible. Or they come up from the mental cave, a storing place for Spirit-guided meditations on Scripture and nature or life, having been deposited there perhaps many years earlier, now sequestered for duty. You align them in rows in the most effective way to accomplish your purpose — to wash the minds of the muddled, to nudge a lonely wife into joy, to bring cathartic tears, or a challenge to a worthy charge, to mold understanding out of disparate thoughts, to scurry up reflections from the reader’s past, or fix a new teaching not known to the average distracted person, or to refresh with sweetness, make laugh, convince, or present questions which cannot be avoided except with peril. There you are, arranging them on the desert floor in front of you, where they will fight for you when you separate from them.
Label, file, send, post, after which they must do the rest — all the real work. You hope you have honored God.
These words will fight, or they will perish. Perhaps they will win one single wilted person to a new view of life, or move a cadre of young men to worthy disciplines, or become unforgettable to some who never will tell you they even read it. This is your hope. Perhaps nobody will read these desert markings as they die a dry death with no eyes upon them, or they will lie dormant only to surface when a new wind is blowing.
You leave it as is, and let it do what God intends. There those words stand, to do or die.
The CCW team and board sends our love and wishes for an amazing New Year. Thank you so much for reading what we write or listening to what we speak, or even asking for and receiving counsel about your lives and ministries. We hope we can write on the desert canvas words that will inspire you. Many of you have prayed for us or sent help in other ways to keep this ministry viable and ready to do God’s will.
This next year will be our 40th year as a ministry, the 50th of my marriage to Pam, and the 60th in my formal ministry labors. God has never failed us. Rejoice with us!
CCW Communicators
Jim Elliff
Steve Burchett
Marco Scouvert
CCW Support
Daryl Wingerd
Eric Summerhill
Tony Barmann
Patty (and Lilly) Burchett
Rod MacDonald
The CCW Board
Jim Elliff
Daryl Wingerd
Dr. Brent Evers
Shane Griffin