Author Archive

In case you missed it, true crime writer Ann Rule has endorsed the upcoming book.

Here’s what she said:

“A Silence of Mockingbirds is beautifully written by a very talented investigative journalist. But, even more, this is Karen Zacharias’s own story too, one of trust betrayed. A tragic book that we should all take to heart. We cannot change the past but we can save children who are in peril now. Karen has given us Karly’s legacy, that of a small, bright spirit who loved and was loved. And yet destroyed by heedless caretakers. A must read. Compelling and heartbreaking.”

- Ann Rule, author of Don’t Look Behind You and In the Still of the Night

Here’s what I did when my publisher forwarded on her blurb to me:

To read the rest of this post click here. 

I’ve been reading Mary Karr’s memoir Lit – her struggle through alcoholism and depression and getting sober and finding something to believe in. In reading her story, I’ve been stuck by how universal the feelings of inadequacy she experiences are. I know I often feel like the bystander watching everyone else who seems to have life figured out. I feel out of place and all alone in it. Too often I compare myself to others in all sorts of ways – in the things we call success, in outward appearances, in accomplishments. I feel like the awkward 13-year-old who never grew into her gangly limbs.

But then I read passages like this:

To finish reading this blog post, click here.

I have a girlfriend who is diagnosed schizophrenic. She and I have been friends for decades. When I was working on my second book she said to me, “I wish I could be a writer so I could keep myself entertained.”

I laughed and said, “What are you talking about? You have voices talking to you all the time. That ought to keep you entertained plenty.”

A fit of giggles erupted from the both of us.

To finish reading Karen’s blog post, click here. 

Usually when we think of the poor we focus on issues related to their daily needs.

What do they need?

A warm biscuit and a cup of coffee.

A coat, a pair of boots, dry socks, wool gloves and a stocking cap.

A place to sleep, a place to bathe.

To finish reading Karen’s post on Patheos.com  click here. 

I have a lot of things to catch you up on:

-the Paul  Young event in Seattle

-the Anne Jackson event in Portland

- the surgery

- Ashley’s car wreck

But perhaps the biggest news of all is something I haven’t yet confided to you — I am moving.

Well, not me physically. I’m staying put. I’ve got books to read and write, a dog to retrain and a husband to ignore.

But this blog site. It’s moving.

A while back the very good folks over at Patheos.com contacted me and invited me to join their staff of bloggers and experts.

I knew of Patheos only because my buddy Scot McKnight at Jesus Creed was leaving BeliefNet and moving Jesus Creed over to Patheos.

I wondered if perhaps he had suggested me. But Timothy Dalrymple claimed to have found me all on his own. He didn’t mention whether he was in the post office at the time, reading the Wanted posters or not. He just said he found me and would like for me to join their team.

They have an impressive bunch of folks there — real scholars, academics, historians and such, which begs the question of why they would want someone like me. But maybe they need friends in low places, too. Somebody who has been behind bars and inside of them.

I explained to them that I’m kind of free-wheeling and that I have never had advertising on my site because I never wanted to worry about pleasing people when it comes to speaking what I’m thinking or observing what I’m observing. They said that was fine and dandy with them. They liked what I had to say.

And they liked what you all had to say, too.

Some of you have been reading my blog since I first started it back in 2004. I appreciate that long-friendship. Of course my biggest fan, Gordon, has passed away and I hate that. I hate that he’s missing out on this. But then again I think well, maybe Gordon put somebody up to this. I imagine he’s poking God in the side all the time telling him to pay attention to me. I’m delusional that way.

I was very reluctant to change to a new site because well, I don’t want you all to throw in the towel on me and think somehow you don’t matter. I worried about whether you’d make the move with me. I worried about whether you’d feel comfortable saying what you thought on a different blog site.

I worry alot.

Too much.

The thing is while I appreciate you all, each of you, making this move will hopefully put us all in touch with a bigger audience.

You all are the faithful few.

A writer’s livelihood depends upon the faithfulness and the devotion of her audience. The bigger the audience, the more her publisher does the happy dance and everyone knows as long as the publisher is deliriously happy, I can write books about something other than vampires.

So we are moving. All of us, I hope, to a venue where the audience will get so big that the Tea Party will desert Glenn Beck and start following me instead.

Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Just so you know, the site isn’t going to look much different than this one. There’s going to be advertising. Hopefully none of those belly fat ads. I take that personally. But the blog page will look identical. We’ll be  using the same WordPress program so you ought to be able to comment just like you always have.

You do need to add this link to your favorites:  http://www.patheos.com/community/karenspearszacharias/

And here’s the RSS feed link: http://www.patheos.com/community/karenspearszacharias/feed/

I’ll be leaving this post up so if you get lost in the transistion you can always come back here to karenzach.com and find me. But starting tomorrow — Wednesday — all the new blog posts will be at: http://www.patheos.com/community/karenspearszacharias/

That’s where we will pick up the discussion on Paul Young, surgery, the car wreck, etc.

We all get an awesome new hood to hang out in and explore, how cool is that?

Blessings, Karen

Last week Hugh Hollowell (LOVEWINS) was on stage with Shane Claiborne and Johnathan Wilson-Hartgrove at Big Tent Christianity. Hugh is The Marine in Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide?

The following is the talk Hugh gave and now you know why I adore me some Hugh Hollowell:

According to Jesus, loving your neighbor is half of the greatest commandment. Pretty much everyone agrees that, if taken seriously, it’s a radical idea that could change the world. And yet it seems nearly impossible for American Christians, liberal or conservative, to agree on what it looks like.

Let me make a modest proposal.

Loving your neighbor begins by being in a relationship with your neighbor.

I love Johny Cash. I have the entire Cash Discography – all the way back to the 1950′s. Love me some Johny Cash.

Or do I?

Because I also love my wife, and I am here to tell you that while I feel consistently good toward Johny Cash, how I feel toward my wife depends on what day it is, how our finances are doing, if I have indigestion, whether I had a good day at work… But I always feel ecstatic toward Johny Cash.

Because I don’t really know Johny Cash. I love my impression of Johny Cash. It is fair to say I am a fan, or that I very much like his music, or that I love the idea of Johny Cash. I submit there can be no love outside of relationship.

By that standard, most Christians don’t really love their neighbor. They love the idea of their neighbor. We vote for this candidate or that candidate, whoever promises to provide the sort of help we think people need. We outsource our compassion to the soup kitchens, to the clothing closets, to the homeless shelters. On Thanksgiving day, we load the youth group up in the van, to go feed the “less fortunate”, so the kids can be “exposed” to poverty, while never giving thought to wonder what they do for food the other 364 days of the year. And if that thought come up, we quickly suppress that thought and write a check. We outsource it.

Loving your neighbor presupposes a relationship. It means knowing your neighbor is going through a divorce, that the lady who cleans your office has a mother that is dying, that the man at the end of the street holding a cardboard sign has been outside for three years now, and his name is Brian. In the story we call the Good Samaritan, it meant getting in the ditch to bind the man’s wounds yourself.

When the average person in the pews can tell you the names of all the Judges on American Idol, or can name all the Glee cast members, but does not know a soul that makes 1/4th their income, I think it is fair to say we have lost our sense of mission as co-creators of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus told us the poor would always be with us – but we don’t really want the poor among us – we want someone else to handle that.

Last year in the US, some 17 million kids went to bed hungry. 17 million. In a nation where we throw away 40% of all the food we buy, where 1 in three of us is obese, and yet children are laying in bed, hungry. How can this happen?

Because none of those kids know you.

Because if you knew a kid who was hungry, you would move heaven and hell to get that kid some food. But because those 17 million kids don’t know you, they laid in bed last night, hungry.

Here in Wake County, the official statistics say there are approximately 1200 homeless people. And many hundreds of Christian congregations. You cannot tell me that out of the many thousands of Christian homes represented by those churches, there are not 1200 empty beds somewhere. Of course there are. But we save those beds for people we actually know.

The justice of Jesus is brought about by sacrifice, love and suffering. And to the extent that we do not exercise sacrificial love, suffering and proclaim the Reign of God, we are far from the way of Jesus.

Jesus calls us to serve, not lead. The way is not about political solutions – in fact, Jesus said political power would be used against us as we sought to bring about God’s justice. The way does not involve courting those in power – the Apostle Paul told us Jesus made a spectacle of the powers of this world.

There are any number of passages in both the Hebrew scriptures as well as the New Testament that speak of God’s love for the victims of injustice and our responsibility to work to bring that justice into fruition. The one I am thinking about right now, however, is Matthew 16:18, where Jesus tells Peter that …”I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it”.

I am not the first person to note that Jesus refers to the gates as a defense measure. Those gates are there to keep us out. Just what does Jesus expect of us?

Jesus expects us to storm down those gates and invade Hell itself. Jesus is telling us to go to Hell to be with the drug addict and the alcoholic. Go to Hell to be with the victims of abuse, and with the abusers. Go to hell and liberate the adulterer, the homeless man, the pornographer. In hell is where we will find the single mother and the embezzler, the pimps and the pimped, the hungry, the broken, the forgotten. We, you and I together, should be wading into hell itself and proclaiming that there is a new way to live and a new way to love, and that new way is bringing about the justice of God.

The justice of Jesus is a personal justice. It involves sacrificial, relational love. It involves dying to ourselves, our ambitions, our preconceived notions of how things work. The way of Jesus invites us to be the means by which God’s justice comes into being. It invites us to go to Hell, for the sake of those imprisoned there.

Today, in this Big Tent, my most fervent prayer for the church is simply this: I pray I will see you in hell. They need us there.

Pre-Order Your Copy Now!

Pat Conroy calls Patti Callahan Henry’s debut novella lyrical – “Patti takes you to those places in the heart you didn’t even know you wanted to go.”

In The Perfect Love Song, Callahan Henry tells the story of Jimmy Sullivan, who has been living on the road with his brother, Jack, and their band. The road is Jimmy’s only home and music his only savior until he falls in love with a beautiful girl, Charlotte Carrington. Spending time with Charlotte inspires Jimmy to write a love song for her, which becomes an overnight sensation.  

As Jimmy finds himself caught up in the desire for fame and fortune, the genuine lyrics of the song are overshadowed by his career ambitions. Will Jimmy miss his brother’s wedding in Ireland for a chance to put on a biggest show of his career in New York City —or will he find his way back to his family, to Ireland…and to the love of his life, Charlotte?

Join in as Karen Spears Zacharias talks with Patti about her much-anticipated story:

Karen: This story – THE PERFECT LOVE SONG — is your first novella. What are some of the challenges of writing a novella versus a novel, and how did you deal with them?

Patti: I found this a thrilling way to tell a story because I focused on ONE situation. I brought the lens closer and closer to the main characters and allowed the outside world and its tangents to blur into the background. I concentrated on Jimmy and Charlotte’s journey together. I eliminated any subplots and used the symbol of the Claddagh ring to hold together the events of the story. I didn’t find this a challenge at all, but merely a new way to write, a fresh way to tell a story. Writing a novella wasn’t so much about page count or cutting the length as it was redesigning the focus of my storytelling ways. When I wanted to delve into a subplot or another character’s needs, I reminded myself what this novella was really about and steered my words back onto the main road.

Karen: Readers who are familiar with your previous work will be delighted to encounter familiar characters from WHEN LIGHT BREAKS. So did you know when you finished that book that you’d revisit those people again?

Patti:I had no idea I would revisit those characters, yet at the same time my characters always live on. They just do. In the past few years, I’ve received a lot of email asking, “So when will Charlotte and Jimmy get together?”, so the question must have worked its way into my writing soul and I finally decided to find out what happened to ole’ Jimmy Sullivan. I never write a book with the plan for it to continue past “the end”, yet this time it did. I think part of the allure for adding to this story was hidden within the character Maeve Mahoney. She still had something to say and something to teach. Her story and her legend continued.

Karen: This story is narrated. Is this the first-time you’ve used the first-person to “tell” a story? Why did you choose that?

Patti: I don’t premeditate the way I tell a story; I write the story in the way it comes to me. I’ve written seven books and have gone from third person male POV to first person female and almost everything in between. This story came to me as a narration – almost a fairy tale or legend. The narrator knows more than the characters and we are privy to her information: I found it a fascinating way to tell a story. In many ways, the narrator told me the story! 

Karen: As a writer, are there characters you encounter that linger long after the book is finished?

Patti: Absolutely. All of my characters seem to linger not only in my mind, but in my readers’ minds also. They go on living. Even after their situation is told, their story goes on.

Karen: There are parts of The Perfect Love Song that read almost like wisdom literature — nuggets of truth. For instance, the line “The smallest actions lead to the biggest changes.” Can you think of a time in your life where that’s been the case? 

Patti: Wow – nuggets of truth? I had hoped that was true about this story. Yes, I can think of one very particular time when “the smallest action led the biggest change” – when I quietly said to my five year old daughter (who is now almost eighteen years old), ‘I am going to be a writer of books’. This statement and gut-knowing decision changed my life slowly and deliberately. I think sometimes we don’t know the seeds of change have been planted, and yet other times we do know for certain, and this was one of those times!

Karen: You have been a huge fan of Amy Grant’s husband, Vince Gill, for several years now. Did you model Jimmy Sullivan after Gill in any fashion? Are you sending an autographed copy to Gill?

Patti: I have been a fan of Gill’s songwriting in a way that could be called more “envy” than admiration. This man can write a song, a song that changes the heart and soul of anyone who hears it. He can take one stanza and say what takes me 300 pages to convey. I don’t know how he does it, and I can’t help but follow his career and music with something akin to obsession. His vulnerability and ability to show us the hidden places of the heart is nothing short of miraculous, and his gift is something to strive for in my own storytelling.

Jimmy Sullivan isn’t based on Vince Gill at all. But I do believe that the character Rusk Corbin has a bit of Vince’s kind spirit (or what I deem to be his kind spirit by listening to his music). And if I knew where to send a signed copy to Vince and Amy, I most definitely would.

Karen: You’ve teamed up with one of Nashville’s top songwriter– Dallas Davidson — to find that perfect love song. Tell us more about that. Any chance Dallas can hook you up with Gill?

Patti: Dallas Davidson is one of today’s top new country songwriters, with eighty songs recorded in the past six years and five of them being number one hits. I am so excited that he’s agreed to judge our “Finish the Love Song” contest. I am enthralled with the art of songwriting, and yet I could only pen the first two lines of Jimmy Sullivan’s perfect song! Dallas, I am quite sure, will be able to help me find the rest of the song! As far as meeting Gill….hmmm…I haven’t asked, but maybe I should.

Karen: Tell us why Jimmy Sullivan’s love song “Undeserved” is considered the perfect Christmas song. How did the title of the song present itself to you.

Patti: Jimmy wrote this song when he was overwhelmed with Love (and as the narrator says,’ what is love if not overwhelming?’). He felt he didn’t deserve to be loved as he was and that he didn’t deserve to feel the way he did. When he wrote the song, it was from the purest place (the soul). When others heard the song, they dubbed it “The Perfect Christmas Song” because the lyrics were all about undeserved love changing a heart from the inside out. And isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

Karen:   You grew up a preacher’s daughter. How does that upbringing and your own personal faith journey play out in your writing?

Patti: I think that our childhoods and our upbringing are underground rivers that we don’t always see or even feel, yet always inform and infuse our work. So, maybe I don’t wholly understand the impact my preachers-daughter influence has on my work, but I am sure it is there.

Karen:  Ultimately, this story is about how our choices, career or otherwise, can impede our relationships. I couldn’t help but wonder if part of this story is your own. When you hit the New York Times bestseller list last year you were on the road. This year your first-born child is a senior in high school. As Jimmy Sullivan wrangles with the issues of where his fame has taken him, is Patti Callahan Henry also wrangling with some of those same issues about her own career?

Patti: Wow, Karen, you know how to get to the heart of things. You’re right, I have missed events and moments when I’ve been on the road – the one event that hurt my heart the most was when I missed my youngest son’s ninth birthday (years ago). I have always attempted to balance this tightrope-walking act between pursuing my passion of writing and family love/obligation. I think for the most part I stay on that rope, but I have fallen off and hurt myself many times.  

I don’t regret for a single moment writing or touring. I also don’t regret the choice I made eighteen years ago to be a stay-at-home Mom. I can only hope that when I have erred, it has been on the side of family (the most precious thing in my life).

I also believe it’s incredibly important for children to see their mother pursue her gifts and passions, to understand her love while seeing her reach out into the world. I so hope I have done this very thing. In this novel, Jimmy struggles with this very same issue of love versus fame, yet his pendulum has swung all the way to the “fame” side of the scale, obliterating his view of all that is important. What can heal this kind of error? Love.

Karen: Recent polls indicate that a large part of today’s youth — I think it was like 46 percent — want to be actors. In other words, they are looking to be famous. You’ve got a household full of kids. What do you think this attraction to fame is with today’s youth?

Patti: The media makes fame look so….easy and beautiful. TV, magazines and movies make the young long for that kind of beauty and money, that kind of ease when of course it is all smoke and mirrors – nothing real at all.

Karen: Parts of the book take place in Ireland. Have you been to Ireland?

Patti: Yes! I’ve been to Ireland three times. Once just out of college and twice with my daughter when she was an Irish dancer. The land there is so rich with story that you can almost hear the earth whispering to you! I love that lush land and hope to return again soon.

Karen: Your writing has an undercurrent of the lyrical and the mystery of myth embedded in it. How does a writer go about crafting work that has those elements?

Patti: What a beautiful and wonderful compliment. Thank you! I don’t know if or how a writer can deliberately craft their work to hold the elements of myth and lyricism. I grew my writing wings in the land of mythology and legend, so I believe my writing must reflect that love. So many elements work their way into a writer’s voice: childhood, reading habits, geography, friends, education, etc… that I’m not sure you can force a certain kind of storytelling into an author’s “voice”. I write the way I ‘hear’ the story.

Karen: Do you believe there is interaction across the dimensions? Do you think those who’ve passed on before us are involved in our daily living still?

Patti: Interaction across the dimensions? Yes, I’d like to think so. I’ve never experienced anything like it, but I believe those who say they have. This story – THE PERFECT LOVE SONG – hints at such a thing, but still leaves the question unanswered

Karen: Do you think you’ll do another novella?  What’s next?

Patti: Yes, I definitely believe I’ll write another novella. The form and the structure appealed to my storytelling soul. There was a certain thrill in writing this tighter narrative. This novella stretched my writing muscles in new ways and as soon as I find the right situation, I will write another novella! For now, what’s next? My next full length novel will be out some time in 2011. Details coming soon!

I’m headed up to Seattle Friday to see my buddy Paul Young. Paul has issued an open invite to Pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hill to join him for a discussion. I’ll be reporting back here on the blog and over at Twitter about that visit.

Pastor Mark has been a critic of Paul’s book, The Shack. So Paul has asked Mark to join him to discuss the book publicly the way it ought to be discussed. No word yet on whether Driscoll is going to show or not but here’s what Paul is saying: 

Mark Driscoll has leveled some serious charges against my writing and by extension against me. He has publicly called me a heretic. I’ve decided to ask him to meet me in Seattle on Sept 10th, from 1-3 PM, and have an open discussion in front of a public audience about the different ways he and I view scripture.

I have asked my good friend Jim Henderson to host this conversation. It will not be a debate but a discussion about our differences and because we are both Christians about the places we are in agreement. The audience will be able to ask questions of both of us.

Mark seems quite fond of telling his congregants to “man up” and I guess I am really asking him to do the same. I would like him to say to my face what he has spread around the world via Youtube, and you can be sure I’ll have a few questions for him as well.

I’m sure many ‘non-Christians’ wonder why someone like Mark can say things like this with impunity. When someone is able to garner 350K views on Youtube, or for that matter has sold almost 20 Million copies of a book, I believe the conversations have become public property.

One of my girlfriends went camping over Labor Day. Not necessarily a big deal. Lots of people camp. Only she was camping the old-fashioned way — bag on the ground.

It had been a while since my girlfriend camped. It had been awhile since she had to crawl around on all fours that way. There was one other thing she forgot about — bathrooms and how the need for them has increased with age.

We have three bathrooms in our home. For two people.  There are two showers. Two tubs. Three johns.

We have four faucets with running water. There’s a water filter, newly replaced, on the kitche faucet and there’s even a water cooler in the corner because I’m suspect of the local water so we get the big tub of bottled water. And we had oodles of bottled water on the shelves in the garage. Mostly leftovers from driving trips.

There is water to brush our teeth, to flush our toilets, to wash our clothes, to scrub our hinneys and make them shiney. There’s water for boiling tea, dumplings, and chicken. There’s even water enough to bathe the dog a couple of times a week.

When I was a young girl visiting my Great Aunt Cil, we’d have to cart water from the well in the front yard to the house. That required walking off the front porch, across the yard, lowering the pail into the well, or pumping it and then carrying it back to the house and pouring it into various pails or basins that Cil had set out for cooking or cleaning. Cil didn’t have indoor plumping. The toilet was a two-seater out back, replete with Sears catalogs for your viewing pleasure.

As a kid I didn’t think much about the hardship of life without water. Even at Cil’s the well never ran dry. And had it, the Holston River was just up the road a ways. We could have run up the road to get water.

I never really thought much about the convenience of water until 2003 when I made a trip to Vietnam. When we were in the big cities — Saigon and Hanoi, DaNang and Hoi An — water was easily and readibly accessible. But that wasn’t the case when we traveled to the more remote regions of the country.

There, in those regions, potable water was sparse. Many communities didn’t have wells. We had to be more careful about the foods we ate. Most everyone fell sick once we entered the rural areas, which was a problem because bathrooms simply didn’t exist. It was considered a blessing if you could find a shady spot in a rubber plantation to squat. After awhile, we simply didn’t care any more. By the time we reached Bong Son, we were squatting alongside the abandoned airstrip. There is documentary photographic evidence that water and all its conveniences was hard to come by.

Evidence that serves to remind me that a ton of people spend a goodly portion of their lives doing nothing other than collecting water.

They have to.

Without faucets in their homes and wells in their front yard, without water coolers in the corners and water bottles in their garage, they are compelled to walk ungodly distances to collect water.

Have you ever tried to haul water? Even the gallon or so collected in a tin bucket is heavy. It’ll wrench your wrists, tweak your elbows and yank on your shoulders. Imagine carrying it over dusty dirt roads barefoot for miles.

The folks over at CharityWater.org are concerned about the billion-and-counting folks who are forced to make do with whatever source of water they can find — be it a pool of pond scum or dung-infested run-off. Did you know that bad water kills over more people every year than any other form of violence, including war?

Clean water is said to be the best antibiotic on the planet. That’s why the doctor urges you to wash your hands constantly, especially during flu season. Bad water and lack of sanitation accounts for 80 percent of all diseases. Children are the most susceptible to grave illness as a result of unclean water.

I know, right?

I’m not telling you all this to make you feel bad, or even to feel grateful, though both would be appropriate responses. I’m telling you this because there’s a group of bloggers who have partnered with Charity Water in an effort to raise $30,000 in 30 days.

This year’s September Campaignwill bring clean and safe drinking water to the Bayaka people in Central African Republic – one of the poorest and most remote countries in the world.  100% of the money raised will directly fund sustainable water projects.

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for awhile know that I don’t solicit funds often and I don’t do it without checking out the organization first. All of CharityWater’s financials are available here.

Now, I know $30,000 sounds like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. I’m not asking you for that. I’m asking you to go toCharityWater.organd donate $20 from your grocery fund, or your recreation fund or from your Christmas fund. Twenty dollars. That’s four trips to Starbucks. One run to the store for bread and milk. One sixth of what you’ll spend at your next Wal-Mart visit. It’s a trip to the movies and a box of popcorn. It’s half a tank of gas.

What it means for the folks in Central Africa, though, is clean water.

And for the children, it means everything.

I realize that some of you may not be in a position to give $5 $10 or $20. I understand. Trust me. I do. There are other ways you can help. Pass this blog along to a friend who is able to give. Post it on your own blog, or to your Facebook or Twitter accounts. Tell somebody. Anybody.

Thanks friends.