It’s church time: the V. A. will never have enough resources

Yesterday:

Turning to the final proofing of our book, it has been heavy going. I read it out loud to Annelie and we go over it sentence by sentence. Let no man put this husband down as gutless. You may have heard it mentioned that Germans tend to be thorough.

The latest example was when I read the section about Paul going to Rome as a prisoner and the ship was caught in a storm. I had typed "winter" at one point and got called. Annelie is a well traveled European and "storm season" was reentered. She wasn’t sure it would have been a Schirokko.

Then it was that Annelie was not satisfied; she called her cousin Bodo in Bavaria. Bodo is a long time recreational sailor in the Mediterranean. They spent an hour, long distance, trying to determine when Paul could have been caught in that storm. So help me, it came down to the route and they decided it was indeterminate as to time: so it was just left as “storm season.” I once asked him about a lapel pin and it turned out to be from the Japanese government for bringing his sailing yacht up against one of their merchant ships that was sinking. He had brought off the crew. If “storm season” is indeterminate enough for Bodo, it is indeterminate enough for me.

Today:

We went over to Lima, Ohio to take the completed proof to the publisher; nice people at CSS. We are using their self publishing subsidiary, however. We want to get The Apostle Paul and Post Traumatic Stress out in much less time than the regular, royalty contracts do: we have people coming home with PTSD and we want to speak to that condition. The V.A. will never have enough resources to meet the need and a lot of pastors, and most of their congregations, really don’t know much about PTSD. We are hopeful this book will fill a need. It will be out just when a lot of troops return in early fall. We wish that it could have gotten out a little earlier so pastors and church groups could do something about it in regard to fall planning, but it didn’t work out that way. I understand, however, that it will make it for a text in the fall semester at a local college. We hope it will be in the hands of a lot of church study groups come spring.