Seeing God
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About this ebook
Who is God? What is God? In what sense can we say that God actually exists? How can a good, omnipotent God permit sin and the suffering of innocents to exist? Theo Lee, a young minister in a small suburban church, confronts these questions head on when his infant son unexpectedly dies. Wrestling with his grief, he comes to a deeper understanding of what the reality we call “God” means. To bring his congregation to a spiritual rebirth beyond all creeds and dogmas he begins a series of sermons taking as his text a paraphrase of John 1:1. “In the beginning was the mystery, and the mystery was with God and the mystery was God.”
For the nature of God is surely a mystery, the biggest mystery of all. Every one of us of us comes face to face with this mystery at some point in our lives. In the dark of night, in our own beds, and alone with our own thoughts, it suddenly occurs to us that these lives of ours appear out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, are going nowhere, and will soon enough disappear.
We come face to face with this mystery because we alone among creatures have something called “consciousness.”We have eaten the fruit of the symbolic tree of knowledge. We have “minds” of our own.’ We know ourselves both from within and without. We see ourselves, and also see ourselves seeing ourselves. And this goes on ad infinitum, like those endlessly multiplying images one sees in the opposing mirrors of a barbershop. Consciousness is both our greatest glory and the source of our most nearly unbearable torment. Because we are conscious we know that we will die.
The story told in Seeing God explores the way in which this same consciousness can lead us to a rebirth, to an understanding that the world—the universe itself—is a spiritual reality.
Thomas Williams
I decided early on that I wanted to earn my living "with words and books." And with hard work and a lot of trial and error, I have done just that. I took the usual detour that many would-be writers take: I became a teacher of literature. In my case it was comparative literature in the University of North Carolina system. I published the usual "scholarly" articles in journals that nobody reads, but soon discovered that I was far more interested in the writing than in the scholarship. I decided to branch out. I began sending out queries and sold my first article, "How to Teach about Poetry" to a magazine called Teacher's Scholastic. Not long thereafter, the University of Georgia Press published my first book, Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism. Then, in a great stroke of luck (but luck that came about because I was a relentless sender-out of queries) I sold an over-the-transom article to Esquire magazine that managed to be featured on the front cover. With that clip to send out, I was a made man in the freelance business. But like an actor who itches to try directing, I wanted to try my hand at editing and publishing my own periodicals. In 1979 I was able to buy a weekly newspaper with no cash up front by assuming some of its debts. As it turns out, I was a pretty good editor. I increased circulation by 400% and ad revenues by an even larger percentage over a three-year period before selling out to one of the newspaper chains. I started and published many magazines, including Tar Heel: The Magazine of North Carolina (a statewide magazine), The New East magazine, NCEast Magazine (regional magazines) and Washington Magazine (a city magazine). I published Welcome to Wilmington, a newcomer guide, and the North Carolina Travel and Tourism Guide. I wrote extensively of my own magazines, dealing with freelancers from the other side of the editorial desk. I know what freelancers need to learn about querying magazines and writing saleable articles because, in my role as editor, I saw almost everybody doing it wrong. I started Venture Press, my home based publishing company, to self-publish my own books. This worked well. Titles such as How to Make $100,000 a Year in Desktop Publishing and How to Publish Your Poetry became Writers Digest Book Club selections. What Happens When Your Book is Published and What You Can Do about It is a successful eBook. I later expanded Venture Press and began to publish books by other writers as well. The result of all of this? I learned, step-by-step and from both sides of the editorial desk, how to succeed in freelance writing and in writing and publishing books, magazines and newspapers. Now my web site, http://www.Pubmart.com, will offer you every trade secret I have mastered, a very great deal of it free to you. In order to support myself in the modest but delightfully civilized style to which I have become accustomed, I still write, publish and sell my books, and I do one-on-one consultation, workshops and seminars for a fee. But mainly I "gladly learn and gladly teach" (as Chaucer said of his Clerk of Oxenford). If you want to learn how the writing and publishing business really works, PubMart.Com is a good, friendly place to start... Tom Williams PS. You can call me, Dr. Tom Williams, directly at 912.352.0404. I answer my own phone!
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