Whatever happened to the "H" in deity?

So, my Bible Study is with an editor. (Yay!) A real, live person who is finding all my mistakes and showing me girl, you might have been writing for that past 7 years, but you don't know how to write.

Ahem.

Yeah ok, I usually have editors for that kind of thing. I had to laugh when I was researching editors (I finally picked one I knew, and who I knew had experience with Christian writing so she would speak the lingo). Anyway there was a suggestion someplace that you check out the potential editors for your manuscript at preditors & editors, that you check their references, that you make sure the person you talk to is really the one who will do the work and has a resume you can see. This is all very good advice. The final suggestion was this:

Take an English class.

Well. If I haven't learned it by now (I created my first "book" in the 3rd grade, complete with a hard cover held together by yarn) I am probably not going to learn a whole lot in yet another English class. Not to mention that I've been repeating my mistakes for lo these many years. Also not to mention that there's no way that in the next month I'm going to stop making them, English class or no. I'll just shell out the bucks for an editor.

So back to the title of this post. My editor asked whether I wanted deity pronouns (that's like "Him" or "His" when referring to God or Jesus) to be capitalized. I was taken aback. I thought that's what we did! I thought everybody knew to cap the deities. Not the false ones, but the 2 real ones.

Turns out, that's not even right. The writer's guidelines say not to capitalize. Furthermore, she said only TWO VERSIONS of the Bible use caps for those pronouns these days. Are you as shocked as I am? Did you know this?

Color me stupid. I thought you always capitalized them, out of reverence. That's what I've decided to do, and I'll put some sort of disclaimer [disclaimer! What a word to have to use] in the front explaining why MY God still has a capital H in His name.

Do you have any time stealers?

Yep, time-stealers. Those little things that worm their way in and then suck up your time...or the things you begin to think about instead of what you're supposed to be doing....or the things you begin to obsess about.

The thing is, they can easily turn into idols. But nobody wants to call them that. Idols seem too large, too much, too heavy.....time-stealers are just little annoyances, like no-seeums [tiny gnat-like things that bug you to death, pardon the pun].

Some people call them false gods, or functional gods because they are functioning as your god. Whatever you want to call it -- let's get it outta the way so you can go forward worshiping Jesus! Agreed?

This is a short lesson from my upcoming Bible Study, Come Back to Jesus -- and Don't Bring your Blackberry. It's only a little premature; the book should be out in Feb. 2013 and will be available wherever books are sold. There is also an ebook version.




What you'll need: a Bible, or you can use http://www.biblegateway.com to look up passages

To get the survey mentioned in the video, visit this link and click print page.

We'll cover these verses

Ephesians 55
Ecclesiastes 9:7-10
Colossians 3:5-11
Psalm 1:1,2