A second way to get in touch with your readers is to be willing to step out in faith and share yourself. Be open and honest in your writing and willing to reveal your innermost thoughts. I’ll warn you—it will make you transparent and vulnerable. You must be willing to take a risk. Don’t be afraid to be honest with your audience. Look at David, Joseph, and Paul. People are aware of their weaknesses by the accounts told of them in the Bible.
We can help others through our shortcomings, our mistakes, and our failures. We can share the lessons we have learned. We can say, “I don’t walk in your shoes, but this is what I’ve been through, and this is how I coped.” We must appear real to our audience to be of service to them.
We don’t have to undergo an exact experience in order to write about it, but we need to feel passionately about our subject. We can use a similar emotional response within ourselves to evoke a response in our readers.
You Start with One is a book I wrote about a ministry that feeds and vocationally trains thousands of children a day in Sri Lanka. Because of the problems there, I wasn’t able to go to Sri Lanka until after I finished writing the book. I’ve never experienced malnutrition or poverty, but I’d been to Tijuana and Jakarta. I’ve missed a meal and been hungry. I watched slides and movies and looked at pictures. I entered my imagination and felt what those children were experiencing. When I was able to travel to Sri Lanka, I found the scenes just as I had pictured them in my mind and in the book.
I’ve made this post a little longer since I missed last week. I was camping and my cell phone malfunctioned so I had no Internet service.