My Outline

That’s my term for my project. Too early to move forward to what I hope it will become – my book – but I hope it is moving in that direction.

I’ve been working on this outline for – let me look up in my files to see just how long – March of 2009. I have a hard copy stack of previous drafts of this outline that must be four inches tall.

For this trip I brought along my latest version, which by this time comes to 28 pages. From my first flight out from Richmond I have been revising, editing, correcting, adding to this printed draft. As I made the corrections, I noted that these have come in layers, each layer having a different color of writing instrument, representing the several times I have devoted to it. The editings show blue, light blue, black, pencil, and green.

This afternoon I finished putting all these corrections and adjustments into the computer. Now I have a new paper copy to work with, four pages longer.

The theme is very, very simple. I am of the opinion that Paul obeyed the Lord Jesus Christ in the instructions he received on the road to Damascus. Paul heard Jesus name him as the apostle to the Gentile nations. It seems very plain to me Paul took Him seriously, in all his life, in all his travels, in all his writings. So seriously that all of his thinking went into reorienting Jewish thought into a Gospel that encompassed all Gentiles, that all his letters push the church’s call to include all the Gentile nations, and that all his travels had the purpose of preparing churches to expand the Gospel among other Gentile nations.

All I am trying to do in my outline is to trace his determined and varied efforts to persuade the church to go to the least evangelized Gentile nations.

This afternoon I printed up the latest version with all my notes from the last ten days. I must say, it looks splendid. But a week from now when I bring it out and review it, I’ll ask myself why on earth I put a thought that way, or why I omitted something very obvious, or why I couldn’t follow the logic of the chapter. Definitely a work in progress; all I want is to keep making progress.