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.

“Don’t stretch those out.”

Once again I have to begin a post with a statement from my wife. In this statement she was saying I have a big head. Not ego wise, just physically. I have a large melon.

I didn’t realize this, or that I have a hammer toe, until I got married and my wife pointed both things out. (I always just thought my big toe liked to spoon with the toe next to it.) Sure, hats never seemed to fit that well and when Mike Myers said, “Look at that boy’s head, it’s like an orange on a toothpick,” in the movie “So I married an axe murderer” I took it a little personally. But I never knew my head was larger than average until my wife stopped letting me borrow her sunglasses on road trips.

Turns out the width of my cranium stretched out the arms of her sunglasses, rendering them useless for her. So that night when I asked to try on her new pair of reading glasses, she wisely said, “Don’t stretch those out.” Fair enough.

As a Christian, I’m used to conversations that center around our head. In fact, every good Christian knows that one of our favorite things to say is actually about the head. I’m of course talking about the ubiquitous statement,

“The hardest 12 inches to travel are from the head to the heart.”

You might say it differently. You might have instead heard, “I believed it in my head but not in my heart.” Or perhaps, “I had the Sunday School answers, I had the head knowledge, but not the heart knowledge.”

But it’s a new year. This is 2010 we’re talking about. That phrase is so 2000 and late and if you’ve seen my Christmas card I believe you know I am so 3000 and 8. Here are three possible ways we can freshen up the old “head to heart” statement.

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Can we please put TobyMac in a laboratory somewhere and get him on top of this already? Seriously, lock him and Kirk Franklin and Mandisa and maybe Barlow Girl in a room in Nashville and don’t let them come out until they’ve figured out how Christianity can have their own version of the uber popular dance sensation Lady Gaga.

Why?

I have three reasons we need a Christian Lady Gaga.

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