Judging

The Messengers books are based on the Bible as you can tell. :) I was thinking about something this week. Words have power. Proverbs 18:21(KJV) Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.

What I was thinking about specifically was that demons can use the words we speak against us as a weapon. When Nathan confronted David over killing Uriah the Hittite, Nathan told him a parable. David judged the bad man in the parable but was really judging his own actions.

Luke 11:53-54(CJB)  53 As Yeshua left that place, the Torah-teachers and the P'rushim began to oppose him bitterly and to provoke him to express his views on all sorts of subjects, 54 laying traps to catch him in something he might say.

They were trying to trap him with his own words. I think we tend to trap ourselves by our words and release spiritual hindrances without knowing it. If we speak judgment against someone else, demons can use the verdict to lay traps for us. I try to speak only blessings into my life and no curses. It's a lot harder than I thought it would be. A lot of our common expressions are self-condemning.

So, how can I convey something like this in a book without being preachy? If you pay attention to what full Messengers say, you'll notice that none of them says something like, "I'm afraid that's not possible." or "I can't do that, I'm afraid." They never say, "That just kills me." Other characters use those kinds of self-cursing expressions but not Messengers. They don't invite fear spirits and spirits of violence into their lives. It's not an obvious or in-your-face kind of a thing, but it tries to be Biblically consistent.

Combined Edition

This is going to be short today. My 30 days of letting the sequel book rest ended yesterday. I started going through it last night. So far so good.

There's an intrepid reader who really, really wants a combined paperback edition of the series. While I was letting the sequel rest, I got most of the work done on that. It's like a thousand small steps. There's not much left except going through it and correcting formatting changes that had to be made to combine them into a single volume. The biggest thing is font size. In order to meet page count restrictions, I had to use a smaller font, which I applied globally that affected chapter title size. I have to manually change them all back. Easy but time consuming. Same thing with the beginning character of each chapter. After that it's little stuff. Except for the cover. I'd like to have better cover art.
A combined Kindle version is pretty much automatic.

I could always use prayer. The roadblocks seem endless. I need a breakthrough.

Words of wisdom: The journey of a thousand steps is less than a mile.