At first I didn’t want to do it, but I’m so glad we did.

With my previous book projects, I hired a professional to record the audiobook. It’s funny to think about, but even though being a local church pastor entails doing a lot of reading in public, I’m still not all that great at reading out loud. And when you listen to an audiobook, they are typically done so well, I feared the contrast from professional readers to me—at best a novice reader—would be too noticeable.

But I’m also too much of a perfectionist. So John and I pressed on, and the audiobook of Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World turned out far better than I had hoped it could have. I received a lot of great coaching from the production manager, Mark Johnson of the Loft Studios, and my coauthor John Beeson reads as well as he writes. If the process was difficult for John, I sure couldn’t tell from his finished recordings.

The paperback and ebooks released last November, and the audiobook just came out a week ago.

Win a Free Copy

We’re each giving away five copies of the audiobook. You can win a copy by sharing about the book on social media, whether Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram. You can share this blog post or the Amazon page (share on Facebook; share on Twitter; share on LinkedIn). Just make sure you tag me in the post or email me the link to your post, so I know it happened and can get you entered. I’ll pick the five winners randomly on Saturday morning (3/6/2021).

Bad news, but we only can do this for those using Audible in the United States or the United Kingdom—it’s not us; it’s an Amazon thing.

Sample

Here’s a sample of the audiobook of me reading from the introduction.

What Does It Mean to Blog for God’s Glory?

“Daddy, I painted this for you,” says my daughter Izzy. Closing the door behind me and setting my work bag on the table, I bend over to look at the paper she’s covered with splotches of primary colors in the shape of people. The paper is still wrinkly from liberally applied paint. She places her artwork in my hand.

“That’s wonderful,” I say, trying to figure out which way is up and which is down. I’ve learned from experience not to ask, “What is this?” Instead I say, “Tell me about your picture, sweetie.”

“It’s a doggie in our backyard, and all of our family is eating pickles,” she says.

“Oh, I see. May I hang it on the fridge?”

Izzy smiles wide. Her two front teeth are missing.

We hang her wrinkly artwork on the front of our refrigerator along with all the others.

People tend to mark the stages of life. We save the paystub from our first paychecks, mount diplomas on walls, celebrate a marriage and a first mortgage. I’m in that stage of life where my fridge hides behind artwork from my children. They hand me watercolor paintings when I leave for work. They hand me colored-pencil drawings when I come home from work. They come to work to hand me colored macaroni glued to construction paper. It’s wonderful. I don’t want it to end.

What I love most is the innocence of their gifts. My little Izzy doesn’t have a clue there is such a place as the British Museum housing works of Rembrandt and Rubens. Izzy doesn’t know anything about the Louvre in Paris that displays da Vinci’s Mona Lisa for ten million visitors each year. All Izzy knows is our fridge: the two sides of the fridge and the front side of the fridge. I guess we could call them the three sides of our art galleries. The front of our fridge—or the main gallery, if you will—receives nearly ten visits a day, or maybe one hundred visits a day in the summer when our children enjoy vacation and standing in front of an open fridge. But no one in our family visits the fridge necessarily to see her artwork. That’s the child-like innocence Izzy has when we mount her paintings. If an adult were to possess this kind of ignorance of the great works of art, especially an adult given to producing her own art, we’d call it something other than innocence; her ignorance would take on the pejorative, culpable sense of the word. In a child, however, the ignorance is admirable.

The purity of her gifts strikes me too. “Daddy, I painted this for you,” she says. Izzy paints not for fame or money or from the overflow of competition with her siblings, but for you, she says. When I say purity, I mean this kind of single-mindedness, the kind of joy that is captivated by and treasures only the smile of her father. No mixed motives, no duplicity. Only pure, single-minded devotion.

I’m not saying children are innocent and pure and full of rainbows and bubble gum. I believe in original sin because I read of it in the Bible and also because I see it in the mirror and in the eyes of every one of my young children who—if their little arms were strong enough—might kill me rather than not get their way. Children are not pure and innocent in an absolute sense. As those downstream from our father Adam, we are not sinners because we sin, but we sin because we are sinners. As David writes, “In sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps 51:5).

Still, I think about my children’s artwork often when I blog. I like to think of God printing out my blog posts and hanging them on his heavenly fridge, which I’m sure is huge and made of stainless steel and has an ice dispenser that always works. I like to think of God stooping over to smile and say, “Tell me about this one, Benjamin.”