God sent His Son in part so that mankind could know grace and love in a physical form: Jesus. And as Christians “we eagerly embrace Jesus and He seems so much more accessible than the God of the Old Testament,” Ginny Owens said.
Owens, a three-time Dove Award-winning singer/songwriter who recently co-wrote “Transcending Mysteries: Who Is God, and What Does He Want From Us?,” said many of her unbelieving friends have told her that the Old Testament was the greatest barrier to their faith in God.
That’s one inspiration for the new book published by Thomas Nelson and co-authored by Andrew Greer, she said during an interview with The Alabama Baptist.
Active discovery
Greer, a Dove Award-nominated singer/songwriter, said, “We wanted to use ‘Transcending Mysteries’ to look at who God is and who we are to God. The book is a touch point of discovery. We did not want to dictate who God is in the book but we wanted to discover who He is.”
Using The Voice translation of Scripture throughout the book, Owens and Greer wrote “Transcending Mysteries” in a conversational kind of way much like The Voice is written. The content is not “‘this is what it is and how it is,’ but ‘this is what we are discovering,’” Greer said.
Using their songs as a blueprint, each chapter relates to one of the singers’ songs and includes that song’s lyrics, a personal story, a passage of Scripture and thought-provoking questions for reflection and study.
As far as the writing process itself, Owens said writing the book was a slow process for her — and not because she’s blind.
Owens typed out her thoughts on her computer then used a text-to-speech program to hear her words read back to her.
But she discovered it was difficult to only listen to the words through the text-to-speech program, so she also used a special braille computer. It has a screen display on the bottom where, after typing, she was able to read the words in braille and process them internally.
“Just hearing my words had a different meaning. I learned that you process things differently when you read them,” Owens said.
“I’ve learned there are occasions where I can write things in a few hours, like some songs, but mostly it takes me a while to write because I’m trying to figure out what I want to say,” she said with a laugh. “I rewrote chapters a lot of times and that’s OK. … I had to lay aside everything I knew about Bible study books because this is quite different.”
‘Heart on paper’
For Greer, putting “his heart on paper” was a challenge while writing the book. “We’ve been taught to edit ourselves, even in everyday life, so writing was a spiritual experience of sorts. We learned about ourselves and about our relationship with God as we wrote.”
Owens said she and Greer hope the book is an encouragement to readers to “continue to pursue God and investigate Him through Scripture, through discussion with others and through prayer and interaction with the Holy Spirit.”
“There’s so much to be gained from studying the Old Testament and it really is still alive,” she said.
Greer agreed and said he hopes that “Transcending Mysteries” leads to discovery and “keeping our hearts and minds open to discovering who God is. We will never fully capture that so let’s not try to.”
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