#293: Writing Success in an Overloaded Life with Dr. Tim Riordan

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelli Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

I'm so excited for you to listen to today's episode. So when we were planning for the Kingdom Writers Conference and recording the sessions ahead of time, we had one of the most interesting situations happen. I have never had this happen, and I've been doing online business since 2004. But. But two of the presentations disappeared from my computer. They weren't even on the cloud recordings. We couldn't even recover the backup recording. We did have an audio, but that was it. So those two presentations were Dr. Tim Riordan and Dr. Sandra Dalton Smith. And so they both graciously agreed to rerecord their presentations. But this first recording is actually different in some ways than what they ended up presenting at the conference. And so I wanted to still be able to share this with you and I hope that you get encouragement from it. If you didn't get a chance to join us in the conference, I encourage you to get the All Access pass. You can get it@th kingdomwritersconference.com battleplan with this, you'll get all 15 presentations, plus 13 bonus trainings, all for just $47. We've had so many testimonials and feedback and great responses from this conference that we wanted to keep it available ongoing. So definitely check it out if you haven't yet. And I'm going to allow you now to listen to one of these presentations. You know what the enemy meant for evil, God can use for good. And so we're going to still let this original recording reach you today, wherever you're at. Enjoy. Welcome to the Kingdom Writers Conference. This year's theme is Battle Plan, where we will help equip you to move forward in the calling God has in your life related to writing. And we're your host. My name is Shelly Hitz.

And I'm CJ Hitz.

And we've been mentoring writers for over a decade. Between the two of us, we've written and published 68 books. And so we're in the trenches with you. And now we dedicate our lives to helping writers like you write words that outlive you, self publish books that fulfill your calling and reach more readers with your message. Inside our online membership, Christian Book Academy. So one of our speakers. Speakers today is Dr. Tim Riordan. Welcome, Tim.

Thank you, Shelly. Thanks for the opportunity to be here.

You bet. Well, Dr. Tim is actually going to be sharing a topic today on writing success in an overloaded life. How many of us can use that?

Just a little description here. Many people want to write and publish a book but feel they don't have the time to succeed. Learn productivity principles that will help you accomplish your writing goals regardless of how full your calendar is today. A little bit about Dr. Tim. He's a best selling and award winning author of 13 books, including Wisdom, Life Lessons from Proverbs and the next best seller book Marketing for Success, which was a finalist in the 2021 Sela Awards. He's also consulted with authors on topics of writing, publishing and marketing, has published a number of books through his publishing company, Green Tree Publishers. He serves as the senior pastor of Sunrise Baptist Church in Newman, Georgia and is an avid backpacker. We share that in common. Scuba diver. He and his wife Sandra have six children and four grandchildren. So we're really thankful to have Dr. Tim Riordan with us today.

Yes. And I know how busy you are, Tim. You're a pastor, you're a writer, you're a publisher, father and grandfather and you know so many things. And so I really thought this would be a great topic for you to share because you've in the midst of everything, you've published 13 books. So we're excited for you to share and just encourage the writers today.

Thank you. Thank you, Shelly and C.J. i'll tell you, when I was 19 years old, I made a list of 100 things that I wanted to do in my life. I was just sort of processing, thinking about where am I going? What would I like to accomplish and do? And one of those things was I wanted to write 10 books. And I had a lot of other things. I wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail, I wanted to dog sled across Alaska, wanted scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef, a lot of different things, but one of them was write 10 books. And Shelly, you were a big part on helping me get rolling with that years ago and I'll be forever grateful for that.

I'd like to talk about what it is to actually be productive in a very busy life. I do have a very busy life. A lot of things going on in my world, as I'm sure it is in everyone's world that is listening and a part of that. But you know, even though I said When I was 19, I want to write 10 books, I didn't get going on the 10 books. Right away. I went into college, of course, and got married, went to seminary, got my master's, my doctorate, and ultimately we started having children. One, two, three. And we had six kids. I'm coaching Little League baseball and my life was just busy. It was a blur. And doing good things, important things. But I had not quite gotten to that one goal of writing 10 books. Now I worked on some of the other things. I am. Matter of fact, in two weeks, I'll do the next section of Appalachian Trail. I'll do New Jersey, New York, Connecticut. So I'll make it all the way to Massachusetts in just a couple of weeks. So I'm excited about that. I've been scuba diving in some amazing places. Haven't made it to grand to the Barrier Reef yet, but will one of these days not dog sled across Alaska? I've stood on a dog sled in Alaska, so maybe that's getting me close. But I never seem to get around to writing books. And I. I'm not exactly sure all the reasons why, but I think I discovered maybe subconsciously I had embraced some myths that just weren't true. And if you're going to overcome the challenges to the hurried life and be able to fulfill your calling as a writer, you may have found yourself embracing some of these myths, too. And I want to mention some that I had to deal with in my own life. The first one was, I can't do it. I think somewhere deep in my mind there was this idea. Even though I said I wanted to be a writer, I wanted to write books. And I really felt called to do that. There was something in me that said, I don't think I can. I don't think I have it in me to be able to pull that off. And people say to me all the time, I don't know how you write books. And, you know, it is a daunting thing to say. I am going to sit down, I am going to write this book. It is overwhelming. So even though I said I wanted to be an author, I just couldn't seem to pull the trigger on it. And when I did my doctorate, I had to do a doctoral dissertation. We called it a doctoral project, which technically was a book, but it was a book that nobody would want to read, including me. So, you know, how do I write this book that somebody would be blessed by that would encourage them in their life? Now, a few years before I started writing, I did a wonderful Bible study called Experiencing God by Henry Blackaby. It's an awesome Bible study. On encountering God and serving God in your life. In that book, he made this statement. Some people say God will never ask me to do something I can't do. I've come to the place in my life that if the assignment I sense God is giving me is something that I know I can handle, I know that it is probably not from God. That kind of shook me a little bit as I began to think about the task of writing. I felt like, this is big. I'm not sure I can do this. But I thought, you know, that's exactly where God wants me to be. I sort of adopted this motto that said, I can't, but God can. And I think that's important motto for us as writers because I just tell you, we feel overwhelmed. Even after you write your first book, your second book, your third book, you feel overwhelmed about the task and the challenge, not only of writing, but marketing and everything that goes with it. So if we are going to be effective, if we are going to deal with the stuff that hinders us, we have to say, I can't, but God can. A second myth that I think I had sort of adopted was I don't have enough time.

I really believe I am the busiest person I know, which is probably not a good testament to me. I do allow myself to get out of balance in my life, and things are not always as they should be, I'm afraid. I do have a lot going on. I pastor an awesome church. I'm so blessed to be here. This is my 13th year here, and it's just a wonderful place to be. We just finished a big construction project here. It's a growing place. God's blessed the church and blessed me for being here. I have a lot going on. I have six kids. I have four grandchildren. I do enjoy doing a lot of different things. I'm very busy. So whenever I said I want to write 10 books when I was 19, I had to deal with the issue of why haven't I started yet? And I no longer could say because I'm too busy. One of my writing heroes back in the day was Chuck Swindoll. Maybe you've read some of his books or certainly you've heard of him. I think he's written at least 65 books. I tried to count it up. It's around 65 or more books, which is amazing, I think. Here's Chuck Swindoll. He's got to be busy. He's a pastor of a very large church, and he's got to be busier than me. But somehow he was able to write 65 books. So how did he do that? I read an interview one time a few years ago, actually before I started writing, that said that someone asked him, how do you write so many books? He said, I get up an hour earlier. When he said that, I took that away in my mind because I wanted to be a writer. I just hadn't started yet. And here's Chuck Swindoll, one of my pastor heroes, saying, I get up an hour earlier. That's how I write. See, the fact is that we all have the same amount of time. It's not like we can get more time. We don't. We all have 24 hours and that's it. It's just an issue of managing that time as a steward and figuring out what is the best way to accomplish my goals and my purpose and my calling as a believer, but also my calling as a writer. So it is not that I don't have enough time. That's really not an issue. It's what am I doing with the time that I have? There was a third myth that I had to get rid of, and that was I need a publisher. See, when I wrote these, these goals at 19 years old, that's a long time ago. I'm 59 now. Okay, so that's been a while. Back when I wrote those goals, there really wasn't a whole lot of self publishing going on. At the time. If you did self publish, it was really considered vanity publishing. It was not regarded as a thing that, that you should do or wanted to do. One thing. I couldn't afford it. I couldn't afford to publish my own books back then. I didn't have the money to do it. Nor did I want hundreds of books or thousands of books sitting around in my house somewhere that just wasn't going to work. Not to mention the fact that back then, if you self published, there was a stigma that said the reason you had to self publish is because you're not good enough. I've experienced in my life, maybe you have as well. Satan loves to whisper that in our ears, you're not good enough. You can't ever do this. You won't ever accomplish goals. You are not a legitimate writer. And I'll tell you, sadly enough, there's enough, let's just say, traditionally published authors out there, even traditionally published Christian authors who help promote that sometimes in our lives. I remember the first book I wrote, which was not the first one I published. I was dealing with publishers. I was trying to jump through those Hoops at the time. And so it took me a little while to get that one out. And I remember talking to a very well known, traditionally published Christian author about endorsing that book. And he agreed to do it, which was thrilling to me. And then he asked me who was publishing it. But when I told him I was self publishing it, he backed out of the endorsement. It's almost like he's saying you're not really an author, you're not a real author, this is not a real book, this is something you're doing on your own. So I had to, had to work through all of that and get over this thing that says you got to have a real publisher or you're not a real author. And you know, I had to come to grips with the fact it was really a pride issue. Say I got to set that aside. God's called me to write and it really doesn't matter how I get the book out there. All of it's a legitimate reason or a path. One thing that struck me, it dawned on me that King David, I know God inspired him to write the Psalms, but King David was a self published author initially. So when I thought about that, I thought, you know, it's all right, it's all right to self publish because God can use that in my life and maybe in other people's lives as well. So I had to get over that, that I don't need a publisher, I can be a self publisher. I've actually talked with some publishers a couple years ago and I've decided I want to stay on the self publishing path. I just feel better about that and I think I can better accomplish my ministry that way. There's a fourth thing that I had to overcome, a myth, and that is I can publish by myself. The first book I published was a novel, which is hilarious because I never thought I was going to be writing fiction. That was not my, you know, what I really wanted to do or felt called to do. I really did it for fun. I was just wanted to see if I could write a novel. So over four years I wrote this like bedtime story that wouldn't end, but I was just doing it at lunch. It was just playtime. It was mental break time.

After four years or so I've been writing and had this crazy story, adventure, action, all kind of stuff. And my daughter wanted to go to Cambodia on a mission trip and she needed some help raising funds. I was dealing with publisher about my real book and I decided to self publish this novel under a pen name. And just use it as a way to help my daughter. I wanted to target a secular audience with biblical principles about relationships. I turned it into a romance, which is hilarious. I've never even read a romance. And so I turned it into a romance, Spence and all that. And I thought, well, I better use a pen name. Nobody wants to read a romance written by a pastor. So let me, let me make up a name. And so I did. And I wanted to target unbelievers with biblical truths as best I could. So I did. The only thing is, I had no idea how to self publish. I knew nothing about publishing and I really didn't know anything about writing. Honestly. Been working on it for a little bit by this point. But that's when I began trying to do some research on how to publish. And that's how I came across Shelley. I needed some help. I had no clue what I was doing. And I came to understand, I better figure this out or this is going to be a total flop. And so, Shelly, I came across your website way back then. This would have been 2013. And with some helps and matter of fact, I downloaded your ebook template and I used it for my digital book. And so I put that out. Well, while I was still waiting on the publisher to approve. It's just crazy how long it was taking. I was going to preach through the book of psalms in my church during a summer, which is impossible because you only have a few weeks. And I decided to write a book on psalms as just a resource for my church. And so I did ordered several hundred copies for my congregation, and that was that. Of course, it went for sale on Amazon and it started selling a lot and it won some awards, it started selling some more. I started getting emails from people around the world and I thought, you know, this is amazing what God is doing through this book that I wrote for my congregation. He's using it to impact people that I will never meet, that I will never know. And it's God using it to change people's lives. And so I realized then this path of self publishing is a good path to take. And I felt pretty confident at this point. Shelly helped me get rolling. I knew all the stuff I had to do. I published two books by this point. I kind of had it down to a science. But God taught me a very important lesson about self publishing. Just because you self publish doesn't mean you publish by yourself. It was an important lesson for me because God showed me how important it was to develop a team to help me. A team to help Me write a team to help me publish, a team to help me market. There's a lot of people out there that God will bring around you to help you accomplish not just your publishing goals, but the ministry God's called you to do. That's how we do it in church. God brings volunteers, people serving everyone using their gifts, and people loving doing that. We have hundreds of people here every week just serving and serving and serving because it's their call. There's people in my life who help me as an author because God has placed them there. And I had to learn the really important lesson. I've got to build a team, a team of people, teachers and mentors for one thing, like Shelly was for me back in the early days. Not only that, but people helped me do research from time to time. Editors, I learned the hard way. You better get some professional editing going on in your book. You got to have some beta readers. You need fellow marketers, you need collaborators as you work together on other projects and so forth. So you can't self publish effectively by yourself. You got to do it. These myths I had to conquer in my life, and I'm grateful that I did it helped me to be able to move to the next chapter as an author. There's also some truths I had to embrace. These might be obvious to you, they seem obvious to me. But you know, an important part of our battle plan as we deal with the enemy and as you deal with Satan, trying to disrupt what we're trying to do as we serve the Lord, he is such a deceiver. And the only way to decide to fight deception is with truth. And so, one I had to know. God calls us to ministry, to the ministry of writing. It's an important calling. It's an essential calling. And I found there are times in my life that I write only because I'm called. I'm called to do it, and I've got to be obedient. I want to fulfill that calling. And you need to understand that in your own writing ministry that God has called us to do this and he wants to use it for his purposes. I love the book of Jeremiah. God told Jeremiah, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you. I have appointed you a prophet to the nations. God knew us. He shaped us in our mother's womb. And he gave us this unique personality, these special gifts, these abilities to be able to fulfill the purpose for which he's called us and made us. And so that was important truth for me. To embrace. But the second one is that ministry success results from God's energy in me. It's not me, it's God. I love the little phrase, anything good in me is God in me. And I believe that's true. Whatever happens in my life, that's good. It's only because God is at work in my life. First Corinthians, chapter 12:6 passage about spiritual gifts. He says, there are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all persons. One reason I love that verse is because the same word is used twice. It's actually a little different form, but it's the same Greek word. There are varieties of effects, energies. It could be translated. There are varieties of energies, but the same God who energizes all things and all persons. It's God who provides the energy in us and through us to accomplish his purpose in our world. So these are some important truths. But I also had to. I had some disciplines that I really needed to sharpen. Remember the passage in 1st Timothy 4, 7, train yourself to be godly. There's some disciplines I had to figure out. Disciplines are really the key to success in a lot of areas. And anyone can learn a discipline. My mother used to tell me, you can do anything you want to do if you want to do it badly enough. And I believed that. I just had to figure out how to do it. I had to figure out what disciplines do I need to incorporate into my life. One discipline was the power of an hour. I had to understand the power of an hour in my life. And I'll just tell you, most of us blow an hour without even thinking about it, without. Without realizing we're doing it. One thing that kept me from writing for years is I kept saying, I don't have enough time. I looked at writing as I want to write this book, this massive book, and I don't know, 200 pages, 300 pages, whatever size book it was. And I just felt like I didn't have time to do it. I did not become a published author until I realized you don't write books. You write sentences, you write paragraphs, and you put them all together and you eventually have a book. And that's what I did. I devoted an hour a day to. Pulled that from Chuck Swindoll. I devoted an hour a day and said, I'm going to do this. I'm going to write these books with a discipline. Hour, devoted time. I calendared it. I wrote it in my schedule, and I said, I'm going to write an hour a Day. And that's exactly how I did it. Now I have people tell me now there's no way I could do that. I can't just write an hour and then quit and come back tomorrow and pick up where I left off and then stop and then come back and pick up and then stop. And people tell me that. But I want to tell you we can do that. That's exactly how I do it. I'm convinced we only use a small little piece of our brain power. And I believe that with God's help we can do that. We can jump into this practice of gleaning from an hour and using it to bear fruit. So the power of an hour, that was a very important discipline that helped me become a published author. The second thing is the benefit of multipurposing, to be able to take something and use it more than once. Now that's real easy for me as a pastor because I preach sermons, right? And it's easy for us as pastors to study and to put sermon series together and do all this research. I mean, we're paid to do that. Well, what I came to understand is that I need to multi purpose. I need to take this that was intended for a sermon and also use it in a book. Why not? And you know, people, people can multi purpose in a lot of different ways. So maybe someone's not a pastor watching this and they're going, yeah, that's good. But you get paid to study. And so you're using that. But the same principle is true for every area of life, like the experiences that we have, the people we encounter, the stories that we glean from our own lives, the illustrations that we see every day. The key is grabbing hold of those things and figuring out how to use them. How we could use a story to set up a chapter, or how a story or an encounter with an individual that we have suddenly opens our eyes to a biblical truth. And we can relate that in our writing. And so multi purposing, always using everything more than once. I do a lot of work in Mexico through missions. And so my. I just published my sixth novel, by the way. I've turned that into a six book series. And in this one I share the gospel. And so my characters go to Mexico of all places, Right? Because that's what I know. I spent a lot of time in Mexico. And so I would go down there on mission work and I would just go a day or two early and I of course would have to scuba dive and I'd have to go check out A shipwreck that I would write about in my book or I would go visit an ancient Mesoamerican city that I would incorporate into my story. And so what I was doing is multi purposing and using what I know and what I experienced to try to incorporate it into my story. So the benefit of multipurposing it was a discipline that I had to develop. Anybody can develop that, whether it's just from your devotions, your Bible studies, whatever it is, you can use it. The third discipline was the necessity of systems. This was really important. You know, having wonderful quotes or great stories means nothing if I can't retrieve them.

Had a wonderful quote in one of my books. This is early on I used the quote because I used it in a sermon. I pulled it out, I put in the book. It was a great, I thought a great setup to what I was saying. But I wanted to be able to document everything. It was very important. I had the endnotes and all that, but I could not find where I'd gotten that quote from. I pulled it from a sermon I'd preached years before. I didn't document it. I had no idea I was going to have to pull it from my book because I wasn't really able to tell where it came from. And it taught me how important it is to document everything. And so at that moment I changed how I study, how I do research, you know, for sermon. I don't have to give endnotes to my sermon. I don't have to tell people where I got a quote from or whatever. But what I do now after that experience, I always put the reference in my notes. I always put the Internet link wherever I got it from so that whenever I'm ready. And thing is, I don't ever know, I might be writing a book three years from now and come back to the sermon I preached six months back and pull something from that and use it in my sermon. And I've got any documentation, any references to where it came from. But I had to develop that system. I didn't have that system before. It was a very, very important system. I've learned I've got to have good systems for research, I've got to have good systems for writing, I've got to have good systems for marketing, I've got to have good systems for networking, for collaborating. Everything that I do, public speaking, as an author, I've got to have good systems. And you know, the fact is systems are important. We have systems in our body that makes us function well and healthy. I Have systems. In my church, we have our front door ministry. We call it Front Door. It's our first connection point. We have a system we follow step by step through the first two weeks of a person coming onto our campus. We have discipleship systems, we have outreach systems, we have weekend service systems. We have all kinds of things that we use to help us be more effective in what we are doing. The same is true for our writing. We have got to have good systems if we are going to be effective. So these were some really important disciplines I had to incorporate. Let me just finally mention some skills I had to develop. One of them is writing. I will just tell you that to go through my master's and doctoral program, I did a lot of writing, a lot of research, a lot of writing. I had to learn grammar, and I felt like I was pretty good at it. But, you know, I'm finding constantly that I have got to constantly be growing as a writer. There's always more that I can do. There's things that I can learn, there's ideas that will come out of additional education, additional training. We don't ever get enough training. We've got to constantly be growing. And I think that would honor the Lord. So the skill of writing is important. The second skill is marketing. I remember when I wrote that first book, that novel came back to me in the mail. Of course, it didn't have my name on it, had my fake name on it. And I was looking at it, but I was still. It was very rewarding. I just wrote this book. I can't believe that I did that, you know, and here it is, I'm holding my hand. And then it dawned on me. My goal was not to write a book. My goal was to write a book that people read. And I'm holding this book in my hand. I'm like, now what do I do? I mean, I got this book. What do I do? And so of course, I went back to Shelly Hits, and that's when I got involved in your author mentoring program. Actually, Shelly, I dug this out of my library. Remember this from 2014? I bought this, actually, I was on your email list. I got your email. You told about this book that you. You wrote along with Heather Hart. And it's a book on marketing. And so I read it. I just absorbed it and tried to apply the principles to my life. And I'll just tell you, this got me going in the early days to help me figure out what is writing involved, what is marketing involved, what does it even mean? Because I had no clue. And can I just tell you? I hate marketing. I hate it. I've got some friends who say, oh, I love marketing. I'm like, no, I think you're insane. I don't. I don't enjoy it. I've had to understand that marketing is a relationship. As long as I can see it that way, then I can embrace it because I have a relationship with people because I'm connecting with them and I can't. They won't be encouraged by my writing if I don't somehow let them know my writing exists. So it was very, very important. I've written a book on marketing, but I'm still working, I'm still learning. I don't know everything. There is no or I don't do everything else say to do in my book. You know, if we could somehow do all of that, we could be effective. So I have skills to learn on marketing. I'm constantly learning that. I just did that thing with you, Shelley, a few weeks ago. She did this little thing at the beginning of the seminar. She said, go on Facebook and choose one of these options and post it on your page. And one of the options was anyone interested in writing a review for my book? So that's one I chose because I just had. Just had finished writing a book. So I put that out there. Would you believe, Shelly, that's been what, two weeks? I've had over 30 people say, I want to write a review for your book. And these aren't people in my church. These are others outside of my church. So it's amazing that it works. So there's always things we can learn and we always can grow. Networking. I think we can learn some skills on how to network better Graphic art we got. Art's an important part of our marketing process. We need to learn how to do that. Some computer programs, learning how to use Scrivener, learning how to be effective with word, video editing, and on and on. We could go so a lot of skills if you're going to be effective. And we've just got to be students and grow in those areas. I've come to learn that God can use our writing to impact the world. It's been amazing thing to see that through my writing I can touch the lives of people that I will never meet. They'll never come to my church to hear sermon. They'll never check in online. I'll never see them, they'll never see me. But they, they pick up my book off Amazon and some bookstore, something somewhere and they read and God impacts their lives. I get emails from people from time to time, and that's. I'm telling you, it's so rewarding. I got an email a few months ago. There was this lady who was singing a solo in her church, and she decided to introduce the solo by reading a selection from my book on psalms. It was just a little something. I don't even know what she read, but she read something. And there was a couple visiting church that day who had. Had not been in church maybe ever, maybe for a very long time. I'm not sure. But she wrote me to tell me that that couple gave their lives to Jesus that day. And that couple told her afterwards that the quote she read that God used that to prick this. The woman used that to prick her heart and to give her a longing to know this Jesus. I say when I read that, it made me want to go into my writing room and get busy and get going and write and write another book. So it's an exciting journey to be on. You know, When I was 19, I said I wanted to write 10 books, and now I've done 13th. Actually, just. Just yesterday, this one came in the mail. This is my newest book, Following Jesus. It's a Bible study that I wrote for my congregation. Just came in the mail literally yesterday. And this is book number 13. And I. I don't want to stop at 13. I want to do another, I don't know, 50 or 60 or 70. I don't know. If Chuck Schwindall did 65, maybe I can do 70, I don't know. But I'm just thrilled that God's given me the privilege to be a part of what he's doing in the world. So I just want to encourage everybody, stay with it, figure it out, overcome those myths that maybe you've embraced, develop some disciplines in your life, learn some skills, see what God will do through a devoted heart.

Thank you so much, Dr. Tim. So inspiring. And I remember those early days when we first met. And your book on the psalms is just like God's favor has just been on that book. And so, so neat to hear all of your stories and your wisdom. And how can people connect with you if they want to find out more?

Well, I have a website, timridan.com. my last name is a little. Little strange, a little unusual. It's spelled like it sounds R I O R d a n tim riordan.com. if you go there, my books are there. I write some blogs there from time to time. And that would probably be the easiest Way to connect.

Yeah. Awesome.

Well, you know, Tim, it just dawned on me. You know, you said you, you had that daunting feeling when you were 19 years old. How am I going to, you know, write these 10 books? Well, 40 years later, you know, it reminds me of those Israelites that, you know, basically had been freed and little did they know of the 40 year adventure that, that they would be on. And look what God's done in your life over that 40 years and how.

How much glory, you know, he's brought himself through your life and your obedience there and just neat to kind of. It's just a number, but I thought, hey, it's 40 years, you know.

Yeah, I really thought about that.

Running through this wilderness for 40 years.

Yeah. Wow.

So good. Well, CJ, why don't you close us in some prayer and pray for those that are struggling to find the time right or to commit the time to write. And that these things that Tim shared would just be an inspiration and a catalyst for them to find that hour of power, or that power hour, however you want to call it, and just close us in prayer.

Father, again, we just thank you so much for this. These words from Dr. Tim. I pray, Lord, that they would go right to the heart of everyone who is watching. I pray, Lord, that they would be able to take these.

Tips and some of the myths that he lists and really apply the truth to those things. I pray that each person watching would overcome every obstacle that they face.

We know you are a God who brings your people through obstacles in one way, shape or form. You always receive the glory. And I pray that through our writing you would receive the glory that as Dr. Tim said, that anything good in me is. Means that it's been God in me. And so I, I just pray that we would run with that. And we do want to pray, Lord, that you'd pour your blessing out upon Dr. Tim's books, all of his, his current writings, future writings. I pray that you pour your blessing out upon his, his ministry, his congregation. I pray you bring them through, through all the obstacles that churches face ahead. I pray, Lord, that you give him strength and continue to use him, Lord, as a powerful beacon that you shine through. And so we thank you, Lord, for each and every person here and all of the writing, all of the victories that are going to take place as people are encouraged by this, this message. So we ask that you just continue to guide Dr. Tim and his family. We ask all this in Jesus name, Amen.

Amen. And so go get connected with Tim. He has resources for writers and things as well. And thank you all for being here for this session. We'll see you in the next one.

Bye.

So I hope you enjoyed that presentation and if you were able to take notes and write down your biggest takeaway and your next action step. Now our 2021 conference is over. We titled it Battle Plan helping you move forward in God's call to write. But you can still get access to all of the presentations plus the 13 bonus trainings@dommywritersconference.com battleplan and the reason we're making this available ongoing is because we've gotten so, so much great feedback. And if you get it for only the Priestly Pens Bundle, that is a bundle of trainings that helps you integrate God into every part of the writing, publishing and marketing process, you will be blessed. So it's just $47 and you can get it@th kingdomwritersconference.com battleplan and we thank you for joining us today. I will talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you, as a Christian writer, have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom Writers.