Getting Started

Well we all gotta start somewhere. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a first step. Do not despise the day of small beginnings.

Sometimes I feel like these are great encouragement on any journey where I know where I am going and what I am doing. Like when I go on a hike, or decide to take a ten hour drive to visit family. I find them more annoying when I am starting on something that I have no earthly idea how to do. Right now I clearly fall on the annoyed side of things. I have no idea how to use this blog. I "know" that what I am typing will appear somewhere on the blog as soon as I hit post. I also see that there is an edit post button, so I can fix grammatical errors and spelling mistakes that I find later. Beyond that, this thing is a mystery.

My hope is to have a working blog where I can write about spiritual formation and especially spiritual warfare. You see I recently wrote a book called Foundations for the Battlefield. -Back to my frustrations, my keyboard shortcuts won't let me underline my own book title, instead the pull up a window that displays, what I am guessing is the html code that tells the server how to publish this little snippet of an article.- Anyway, I am hoping to use this blog to answer the inevitable questions that will arise as people read the book and try to process and apply what they learn. If the book does well (as in sells enough to make it profitable to write another one, or maybe just do a second edition), I would like to use the feedback garnered here to create a much better 2nd book or edition or what have you. I started researching spiritual warfare, many years ago and could never find a book that could answer even half of my questions. To make life more frustrating, for quite a while I wasn't even sure what questions I should be asking. To this day I still know that there is much that I don't yet know, but I finally feel like I have a framework to work from. Foundations for the Battlefield (again in italics not underlined) is the book I wish I could have read ten or twenty years ago. I deliberately wrote it at a level where the complete novice could pick it up and understand it, and the experienced veteran could still get a lot out of it. We'll see how well received it is when it comes out. For now, my few friends and family that have read it (and helped edit it) appear to like it, and Strang (my publisher) seems to concur.

Other uses for this blog:
Every so often I write articles for our local paper (the Bryan Times) I would like to reprint them here (after they have made their circulation, not before -- I don't think the Times would appreciate my stealing their readers). As I am a pastor, these articles are always about spiritual issues, so they seem appropriate here.

I intend to put out general spiritual thoughts. Some to be discussed (I'm constantly tinkering with concepts to try to better understand them), and some to just be read and understood.

I may also put personal news on this 'blog' thing, mostly important life altering events. The birth of a child would make the cut for inclusion here. Just for clarity, we are not expecting any little packages in the next 9 months. Doesn't mean we aren't open to them, we just aren't expecting any at this time.

My current plan is to grasp how this little blog program works so I can start organizing it to make it easier for others to use.

Blessings,
David Falls