One of the many things I have learned from my dear friend and mentor, Lauren Winner: If you’re going to write about a topic, any topic, but especially topics connected to the Christian faith, write something that hasn’t already been written a hundred times.

I’m tempted to keep this lesson to myself because it could increase increase supply of good spiritual writing and increase competition, but I don’t want the scarcity mentality that so pervades Christian nonfiction to win even though it seems to always win.

It can be very tempting for writers to give more attention, creativity, and energy to their books, larger projects, more literary projects and be lazy with “less important “ columns, etc. Laziness in one monthly column translates to your whole body of work.

It is possible to try to write about something that hundreds of people have written about already. Just write about it in a way that adds something new and interesting to the conversation.

And there’s an extra “increase” in a tweet in this thread that I’m going to blame on pain meds even though I have typos like this all of the time, not only when I’m on pain meds.