Three Readers Made Me Stop.
I almost stopped this week. Then the letters came.
I almost stopped writing this week.
The internet has a million Christian books. A million courses. A million pastors with TikTok accounts and reading plans. A former garbage truck driver from a small town does not have much business adding to that pile.
So I went quiet for a few days.
Then the letters came. Three of them in one afternoon. More than three by the end of the week. Several of you pulled me back out of the quiet.
I want to read three of them to you.
One of you wrote me last week:
“For every misplaced criticism you receive, I hope you receive ten more stories of how the Lord has changed and shaped the hearts and minds of his children through your publication. You are doing a good work.”
That is not a fan. That is a sister.
Another wrote:
“Your content has helped me as I try to stay faithful to my wife who has hurt me dearly in the past. We are committed to working on our marriage but I feel like you have a lot to offer...”
I had to put my phone down for a minute.
A man fighting for his marriage. He did not need a course. He needed a brother who would not flinch and would not tell him the Book has changed.
A third wrote me about what his father had done to him as a child. The kind of wound most men carry to the grave without ever naming it.
He did not ask me to fix him.
He thanked me for writing about the rot the way it actually feels.
Heaven is going to have hard questions for Christian publishing about why men like him have been waiting forty years for somebody to write that way.
Most of what is being sold to Christians today is decorative. Verses in cursive on a coffee mug. A devotional that does not bleed. A study guide that asks how the passage made you feel.
I wrote the Plain Bible Manual for the people who are tired of decoration.
The Sunday School teacher faking it for two years. The father, whose son just asked him why God told Saul to kill the Amalekites. The husband whose wife reads three chapters a day while he opens a Bible app and pretends.
It is ten dollars. Here.
“And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony.” Revelation 12:11.
Their testimony is the manual now. Yours is next.
Every copy funds the wall.
The FaithWall is the thing I am building, so the phone in your kid’s pocket stops getting the first word in your house. Not a brand. Not an app. A wall.
If you are reading this for free and felt anything reading those three letters above: paid subscribers on Substack get the deeper father-and-husband audits I do not put on the free list.
Share this with one man who is bluffing.
I almost did not send this.
Then you wrote me.
Adam
Hey man, I wrote to you!
You haven't written back yet...I know you're busy!
But you're correct in that there are a myriad of options out there, many places where Christians can run to for a little bit of literary comfort
People writing to us, telling us not to fear, that our sins are forgiven, that God's grace covers our daily mistakes, our daily rebellion.
And that's all true, but the way it's framed, I feel like it lets us off too easy.
I feel like the way that you write punches you straight to the heart, cuts through all the chaff, through all the fluff, challenges us to see the world as it really is, to refine our worldview to include the pain that we cause our Heavenly Father,
Because we do cause Him pain.
He weeps with us, I believe, sometimes on account of us.
And I believe that without you needing to write me back to tell me so, that whenever I get to the point where my reasons for not wanting to sin anymore are more about what it does to Him than what it does to me,
I'll stop sinning.
At any rate, much of that I've learned from reading from you, so keep going, Adam,
Don't quit.
You WILL reap a harvest if you faint not.