My First Project, Draft #1

     When you start off writing, "They" will tell you to write what you know.  As much as I would love to write about how to eat a large chocolate bunny in one sitting, I do not think there is much of a market for that piece.  I have an idea that has been bouncing around in my head for a couple of weeks now.

       I have a lot of experience in teaching and encouraging people through the use of Scripture.  I have a lot of experience in parenting and the special needs community.  What if I put those together?  What if I were to write a devotional for the parents of special needs kids as a way to bring a few minutes of encouragement and peace into lives filled with chaos and exhaustion?  That would be a population that I would be proud to serve in a format that has very few options at the moment.

      Here's what I know:  Parents of Special Needs kids are all a little bit crazy.  I say that with no shame and no hesitation in the slightest.  Parenting is hard to begin with.  Then you add physical complications, developmental delays, poor communication and education/medical systems that seem to fight you at every turn and "overwhelming" does not begin to describe the experience.  We are always the exceptions.  We can't come to your social gathering.  We need to sit near the back or near the exits of concerts or church services because we don't want to make too much of a scene.  We are almost always sleep deprived and every small health issue has the potential to escalate into a full-blown medical emergency very quickly.  Look closely into the eyes of a special needs parent and you will see flashes of panic mixed with fatigue.  I tell my staff at Morning Star that you cannot expect parents of our participants to be calm and logical all the time.  They have spent years, sometimes decades, fighting everyone in order to get what their kids need.  If they snap at you it is probably because you are the final tiny straw in an enormous mountain of challenges that they have faced for their children.

     So I thought that I might look to write a devotional for that population in the hopes of speaking peace and encouragement into their lives.  Maybe if I can figure it out and put out enough content, I would even create a mobile app that would have 1 entry per day.  That would be an enormous project, but the first step was creating one devotional.  One day's worth of content.  I decided to start with the Sermon on the Mount.  Here's what I wrote:

"Blessed are the Poor in Spirit...

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.  The he began to speak, and taught them, saying:  'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'-Matthew 5:1-3

This passage has tripped up a lot of people that I know and respect.  Who is Blessed?  The Poor?  The Intellectuals?  Everyone?  No One?  Jesus goes up a mountain in order to see who will follow him.  Those who choose to follow and hear what he had to say are rewarded with the following amazing teaching.  

He starts with blessing those who know that they are broken, as opposed to those who are living under the illusion that they have it all together..."

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I stopped and read what I had written.

And then I deleted it all, closed my computer and left my desk.

It was boring and bookish lecturing that did not come anywhere near connecting with my target audience.  There was nothing about the chaos of their lives.  Nothing about the sacrifices that they made for their kids.  Nothing with any theological meat on it.  And since it is a devotional, it should not be very long so every word has to count...every sentence is valuable grammatical real estate and if it doesn't add to the value of the entry it must be purged.

That entire passage had to be purged.

I came back to the computer to try again...but that is a story for tomorrow.