Media Matters: Part 3
Soooo… If you’ve been following part 1 and part 2 of my series for the year here on Tirzah, I’ve been discussing WHY media matters. It truly has been one of the best things in my life. Discovering Tirzah and being friends with Yelena have brought a lot of joy and clarity to my life. Those are all things that happened in my life - because of technology.
However, for so many of our wins there are always the losses that make the wins so much sweeter. In the Bible, it says that God works all things together for our good. That includes our sins, pitfalls, and mistakes. My journey with blogging and media began long before Tirzah and did not have the direction you would think.
For my last two years of high school, I went to online high school. We were given our own MacBooks and got to work at our own pace. I was friends with a friend, who is still a friend to this day, who I met in one of our online chat rooms and the two of us became great friends over our love of books. We would swap book suggestions and discuss all our latest reads. It was great!
Outside of the safety of those online high school chat rooms, I found a whole different world though. I learned the ins and outs of book publications and marketing. Due to my Christian bookstore job, doors were open for me to assist with marketing and promoting authors. Doors that I love to jump through to this day. There were innocent conversations with friends about beautiful books and, to this day, I can still tell you the very strict guidelines on Bethany House Publishers Christian fiction. You couldn’t even have a kiss in a book, at one point, unless you could explain how it glorified God!
These are probably random facts for you, but they were things I loved. I’m the ultimate book nerd and when I discovered I could get more books for free by promotions, I jumped in feet first. Then, I connected with a new sort of author. As a teenager, I loved her completely unrealistic and tumultuous romantic books set in a different era. They really were well-written. I learned about marketing and became one of her top free marketers. I would go to the online sites and promo her books and sell her ideas.
There’s one small piece that set her apart though…she was promoting a new movement in Christian fiction. That movement was Christian books with sex scenes. Yes, you heard right - I was a teenage girl online promoting Christians reading books with heavy sexual scenes. In addition, I received every single book that she ever wrote signed in the mail for free. In my defense (not that there really was one), her books did have great storylines. But - let’s be real, just like Fifty Shades of Grey, most people were reading for the hot and heavy scenes of sexual tension. The thing is, I did not see anything wrong with it and even bought into that cause.
Unfortunately, I was one of the founding people to help start a popular genre called “edgy Christian fiction” and now there are more authors promoting bedroom scenes in their books. If I could go back in time, I would warn my younger self that this type of content promotes women desiring a fictional character over the very real husband in front of her. I would warn that this content opens young women’s eyes to sexual awakening that the Song of Songs says to wait to learn until the right time. But, that was my biggest foray into the world that I genuinely love.
Somewhere out there is a book with my name as a character that’s kind of smutty and a bad girl. I accepted the offer to have a character named after me because of the appeal of those books to me in that season. It wouldn’t even be until I was in my early 20s that I threw away every signed copy - because I loved the fact that I had almost every book by an author signed. And, man, did I enjoy those books at that time. But, sin is always pleasant for a season and leads to death.
I’m grateful to say God’s grace is sufficient for all and I’m still a promoter, here on Tirzah, and other media outlets, for appropriate books. God took those years of lack of wisdom and maturity and developed skills that allowed me to glorify Him more. This is your reminder, though, that the internet and this world have both light and dark. If you’ve been in the dark, God can still use that, redeem it, and bring glory. Join me next month to hear more about the relationships God did grow because of my presence here in this tech world!