A few weeks ago we had two giveaways. One for the new book from Craig Gross and one for the new CD from Greg Sczebel. If your name is listed below, email me and I will hook you up.

Craig Gross book winners:

Jeremy Keegan
Kelsie Nuessmeier
ryan guard 
chrissymariec
remedyconnect

Greg CD winners:

JanetInLA
Carla Anne
Sam Isaacson
Cheryl Barker
Nick McMaster

In the 8th grade, the other wrestling team burst into laughter when I got on the scale in the locker room in my tighty whiteys because I was so skinny.

In the 9th grade, I shaved stripes into my eyebrows so that I would look more like Vanilla Ice.

In the 11th grade, I got dumped by a girl in a coat closet of a dance at the Polish American club in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In college, every frat rejected me.

I’m no stranger to failure and it’s many flavors, but what about you?

What if you fail?

What if that thing you want to do, just bombs? What if you get embarrassed? What if you leave a safe job for a new adventure and it’s all a big mistake and you regret every stupid minute that you thought you could do it and you end up gaining a lot of weight because you’re unemployed and eat macaroni and cheese for breakfast? (My summer of 2001.)

What if?

We worry about and that makes sense. I know right now, that if you’re like me, you wonder if you’re really doing what you were designed to do. You wait for the weekend and wonder if there’s a job where that wouldn’t happen. You wonder if there’s a mission or a goal or a journey you’re supposed to be on right now because such a small percentage of who you are, who you really are deep down is getting used at your day job.

And you think about trying something new, but that voice comes back in and you wonder,

“What if I fail?”

I wonder that too. The Stuff Christians Like book comes out in April and I sit down at night with my wife and talk about it not selling. At all. People have said that. Smart people with pleated pants and straight teeth have told me Christian humor books never sell. And I worry about that, about failing.

But I think as Christians, we have a duty, a responsibility, a call from on high to look at failure differently. So in the last few weeks I’ve come up with 3 new ways to answer the question, “What if you fail?”

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Easy Jon, easy. This is one of those subjects that could get you on the couch. It’s true, my wife has a stack o’ Christian romance fiction. It’s right next to her bag of knitting on our bedside table. And should I open up one of those books and poke the genre a little on Stuff Christians Like, I’d be in a world of trouble.

So I’m not going to. I’m not going to write about the books. But what I am going to do is create one. Instead of picking on Christian Romance Fiction, I created my own. It’s called “Lonesome Crick” and I’m debuting it today.

Best part? It’s a choose your own adventure. I went back through the Stuff Christians Like site and hid parts of “Lonesome Crick” at the bottom of old posts. When you choose a path for the characters to take, you’ll get to a page that has the next section of content on the very bottom of the page.

Ready to roll? Ready to fall in love with “Dalton McCoy?” (He’s the main character and spoiler alert, he’s just moved into town and he’s got a troubled past but a heart of gold.)

Lonesome Crick

A novel by Jonathan Acuff

Chapter One

The sun rose high and strong, the way it always did on main street in Lonesome Crick. A small Western town that was barely a footnote on the journey to California, Lonesome Crick was a quiet sort of place. Kids played in the street, chickens ran free on farms, apples tasted sweet and crisp in trees that were tall and generous. It was simply one more fall day in 1869, with simply one more sunrise lighting up the dirt covered streets, until …

Click here if a stranger with a mysterious past rides in on a horse.

Click here if a man who used to live in town but went off to find his fortune only to realize that what he always truly wanted was right there in Lonesome Crick.

Click here if some sort of orc or other mythological creature walks into town for an epic battle.

The only thing Christians like more than the Internet is taking a break from it. A digital fast if you will, where you swear off the Internet or a particular flavor of social media for a prolonged period of time.

But how do you do it? What are the rules? How do you take a really good, really helpful digital fast? The Bible is very thin on the best way to wean yourself off of a Twitter addiction. Not once does Peter say, “Follow me on Twitter, I’m @Rock.” Or better yet for all you old school rap fans out there, “@PeteRock.”

So today I thought it might be good for us to review the 7 steps you need to take before a digital fast.

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This head terrifies me.

I have a crazy head and a crazy idea.

Let’s talk about the head first.

As I’ve mentioned before, this is a head my daughters got from the salon my wife goes to. It’s made of real human hair. Sometimes I forget we have it and open closets and scream like a small cat when I see what I perceive to be a murdered lady resting peacefully next to my daughter’s sweaters.

Around this head, is an autographed scarf from Chris Tomlin. It is unnecessary to wear with a short sleeve shirt and very metrosexual. It is awesome. And because the winner of the scarf has not claimed it in 4 weeks, it’s available again. There are also 9 Stuff Christians Like buttons up for grabs.

Let’s talk about the crazy idea now.

I think we should try to get the Stuff Christians Like book on the New York Times bestseller list.

That’s impossible, right? That is ridiculous, right? That is so egotistical that even reading that should make your teeth hurt a little. But why not?

How fun would it be to have a Christian satire on the New York Times bestseller list? And why is it so impossible?

I think we can do it. I think we should try.

So what now? Well the big thing is actually selling the book, which you can pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Click here to buy the book for $8.76 on Amazon

Click here to buy the book for $8.76 on Barnes & Noble

But what about the head?

Oh yeah, new giveaway for the scarf and 9 Stuff Christians Like buttons.

To enter, post an idea on how we could sell the Stuff Christians Like book. (Should we do a blog tour? Create a street team where people go to bookstores and sneakily put it on the bestsellers table?)

Any idea will be listened to. Comment until end of day Tuesday, January 19th. And then I’ll pick a winner at random and mail you the scarf.

Let’s get started.

If you haven’t had a chance to buy the Stuff Christians Like book yet, you should. Why? Because it’s only $8.76 and we’re doing some ridiculous things with it. Today, I get to share Zondervan’s very first foray into AutoTune, that electric voice tuning that T-Pain and Kanye have made famous. (Buy theStuff Christians Like book today)

Think Rob Bell is doing that? Donald Miller? Rick Warren? Nope. Stuff Christians Like is.

Here’s the remix to the Deep V-Neck Syndrome Post. (Big shout out to the audio genius Brad Hill.)

I have a confession.

An international confession.

It’s a dark secret I really need to share.

Ready? Are you sitting down? Have you braced yourself adequately?

OK, here goes …

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There are 4 people in my family.

There are 12 people on my team at work.

There are about 30 people in my cul-de-sac at home.

There are 2,000 people at my company.

There are 25,000 people at my church.

There were 30,000 people in the town I grew up in.

And if you added them all up, they’d still fall well short of the number of people who died in the earthquake in Haiti .

It’s impossible to figure out the total number of lives lost, but some estimates put it at 50,000 – 100,000. And there might be more than a million people homeless or injured.

So today and tomorrow, instead of a normal post on Stuff Christians Like I thought I’d just link to Samaritan’s Purse. If you want to donate to support the relief efforts in Haiti , click here.

And if you want to say a prayer for Haiti or link to a different charity raising funds, feel free to do that in the comments.

“Are you OK?”

That’s my wife’s polite way of saying, “Why are you being such a distant, distracted jerk right now?”

She said that to me about a week ago and she was right. I was distant. I was distracted. I was a jerk. Above all, I was surprised.

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A few weeks ago, someone almost hit us in the church parking lot.

I know what you’re thinking.

Did I get to dive with the agility of a cat that had been inexplicably trained in the Israeli based fighting technique Krav Maga, and shove my family out of the way of the speeding car? No, unfortunately not, but I would have. I would have.

The whole thing was pretty simple actually. A car had paused in the parking lot so that my family could by. As we started to cross in front of them, the car behind them got impatient and sped around them on the left side, barely missing my wife and kids.

What’s the appropriate response in that moment? Do you say a Christian swear? (Shoot, heck, dang, etc.) Do you throw your Bible at the back of the offending vehicle? Do you turn it into a “teachable moment” and instruct your kids on how not to be a wicked huge jerk?

I suppose you could go down any of those paths. Me? I started writing a blog post in my head.

And the reason is pretty obvious. I don’t believe we have a universally agreed upon rules of engagement for the church parking lot. So I created one.

10 Rules for Church Parking Lots

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