When You Pray, Close the Door (Shadows and Scars: Update 03)

Day 101: June 18, 2011

9:46 pm

Location: Hamburg, PA

Listening to: Red, End of Silence and Innocence & Instinct

I've been working on gathering all my unpublished poems and poem fragments together in one place so I can sort through them and figure out which ones will end up in this book. Once I've gone through this process, I can work on writing new material.

Most of my writings are sufficiently organized on my computer, but I had to search through a number of various folders to gather up a few wandering sheep. The search turned up a few amusing results:

• A parody of Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" that I wrote during the summer of 2006 when I was preaching an evangelistic series in Alabama, and yes it is about preaching that summer with my fellow field school classmates. Lol, good times.
• A document/poem entitled "Now I Will Tell You What You Mean To Me"... the document, except for title and date, is empty.
• A document created at 1:18 am on August 15, 2008 and entitled "224" contained only the following:
  "110
  10
  40
  =
  
  160"
  Something isn't adding up here... lol.

Besides that, I did find some good material, too. But it is a lot to sort through, both in quantity and content. Which brings me to something I've been thinking about for a while in regards to this book: I want/need prayer support. As some would say, I want this process to be "bathed in prayer." As I mentioned last time, I expect this to be a very challenging book to work through, and I'd appreciate all the prayer support I can get.

So I'd like to have a group of people dedicated to praying for me for the next number of months (hopefully not more than a year), at least once a week. I'll leave it up to you whether you set aside a certain day/time or whatever. Let the Holy Spirit lead you as to what to pray for, and also keep reading these updates to get an idea of what I might need specific prayers for.

But here's the catch: I don't want to know if you've decided to pray for me or not. God is not calling all of you to pray for me, and I don't want you to feel pressured or obligated to pray for me or say that you're praying for me, so I don't want to know one way or the other. Keep it to yourself. :-) I trust that those of you who God is calling will pray for me and knowing that God has chosen some of you is enough encouragement for me.

Now, of course if you want to pray for me randomly for whatever reason, by all means go for it... but what I'm talking about specifically here is dedicating yourself to at least once a week until the manuscript is finished. It is a big commitment and I hope you'll take the time to ask God before deciding, because it is not for everyone. But to those of you who do decide to be a part of the official Shadows & Scars prayer group, I thank you in advance.

~Jason

P.S. In my searching through documents I also found a document I forget existed: a poetry suite entitled "A Return to Purity." This collection of poems, put together in October 2006, would eventually become Unspoken Confessions. I'm not sure when the title changed, but it was sometime between then and when I turned in UC as my final project for Advanced Creative Writing at the end of that school year. Actually, I think the idea for UC came after this collection, but that many of the poems fit so well with my plans for UC that they were transferred over. The leftovers were either discarded or saved for later... some of which will end up in S&S, and some of which still await a future project. So there is your random bit of trivia for the evening.