My First *Non-Adventist* Publication!

My husband and I have been attending the Ministerial Association in Logan, WV since last fall (2017), and they apparently get a slot on a regular basis to write a piece for the local paper - The Logan Banner. I was excited at the prospect of being able to write and use the opportunity to hopefully make new connections, and on October 25 it was my turn! I submitted an article (the word limit 400-700) to The Logan Banner. It was hard to refine all that I could say and wanted to say about this entire experience into the word limit, but somehow God helped me distill it by the deadline.

I found out a few weeks late that my article did finally run (!) because the first two newspapers that Russell and I looked at didn't have it. Because I stay quite busy in general, I decided to just let the chips fall in God's hands and that if my article was published and impacted someone, it would somehow get back to me.

Today it did!

A woman I'm friends with who comes to our church's food pantry told me earlier tonight that she enjoyed my article in The Logan Banner and upon hearing that, all the discouragement I'd forgotten that I'd been suppressing instantly evaporated into joy and excitement :)

I'm currently having some technical difficulty with the websites (links included below so you can see beyond the screenshot), and I've emailed the paper for some help - it seems to be an issue regardless of which web browser I use. But in the meantime, here on this blog I've shared what I wrote so you can read it. I don't know if/how much my article was potentially edited, but this way you won't have to wait to read what I submitted. All they did change was that they added onto my short title a little, which I don't mind; it affirmed the spirit of what I wrote - and when Russell wrote for them a couple months ago, they changed his title also, but pretty much didn't edit anything else, so I'm optimistic and curious to see how they related to my whole article, since what I saw in the screenshot was mine.

I know that articles get edited or abridged as par for the course, but I've only been published twice before and they were vastly different experiences; one of them was very positive:  http://chloedmurnighan.blogspot.com/2015/10/my-first-publication-adventist-review.html -- all they had to do was abridge what I wrote, they actually didn't edit my writing itself which was very kind and touching. I know that is a rarity.

The other experience was quite wrong: http://chloedmurnighan.blogspot.com/2017/01/my-actual-writing-about-summit.html.

My heartfelt thanks to all of you who were excited enough for me to want to read the rest of the article beyond the screenshots :)

(((Hugs))),
Chloe

https://www.loganbanner.com/features/chloe-murnighan-be-willing-to-grow-into-being-all-his/article_095856ec-d5d8-50a9-9731-1f00b16d8caa.html

https://www.williamsondailynews.com/features/be-willing-to-grow-into-being-all-his/article_a11df8f8-c500-58f7-914d-5c45377a7c9f.html?error=Subscription+required+to+authenticate

 

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ALL His.

By Chloe Murnighan

I almost died while my husband and I were moving to West Virginia. On the morning of January 5, 2017, I survived a deadly combination of black ice, my car spinning on a freeway with no control, and making contact with two semi-trucks in the midst of all the spinning. Afterward, as I began to calm down, the first thing that came to me was, “Satan tried to kill me!” and right after it: “God saved my life!” The third was, “God must want me to do something important in West Virginia…!”

Staring death in the face was unspeakably terrifying, but God turned it into a tonic of purpose. And I needed it. Prior to this car accident, I was already in bad shape. I had just been traumatized through a months-long ordeal that I’d been powerless to stop. The only thing I had control over was how composed I could be while surviving it. And so with the car accident stacked so freshly on top of that, my heart was not a pretty picture.

It was the last time I should have been asked to prepare a spiritual concert for the opening weekend of our conference’s camp meeting. But God’s ways are not our ways, and that is exactly what happened. The title and theme was an outreach initiative called “Total Member Involvement.” Its goal is to inspire and energize individuals so that every church member of every church is doing something, however small, to reach out to someone in need – so that no one is merely attending and doing nothing for God’s mission.

I was not inspired by the title. However, I knew it was about the noble necessity of service and so I began to dutifully comb through my iTunes library for songs that dealt with serving God. He began to breathe into my process. I became truly excited about the concert as I saw it developing from an arbitrary list of songs into a spiritual journey of the heart through music. A sense of awe and privilege filled me as the vision grew. It was so much bigger than me. The preparation process alone was a shot in the arm to my wounded heart; it became consuming in both personal and technical ways. God is a consuming fire (Hebrews 12:29) and so I’m not surprised it happened that way.

The title “Total Member Involvement” meaning all church members doing something to minister evolved into the epiphany of all parts of each individual person in a consuming relationship with God for His purposes: awake and present to God rather than being dead inside. As human beings we are made and we crave to give our all to something – the good, the bad, the vulnerable, the unfinished. We’re made to give it all to God. Union with God is our truest state.     

I settled on naming the concert, “ALL His” – a tiny phrase that goes in countless directions. Here are four: When it comes to Christians, we are ALL His children and we want to be ALL His – to love Him with our everything (Matthew 22:37). We believe in ALL His Word – the Bible – and in it we have been called to go out into ALL His world to draw His lost sheep home.

Healthy ministry cannot happen without a healing realignment within, and so the concert integrates that into the picture it paints of Christlike service. Recently God put it on my heart to share this concert more broadly. I can share it at any church or venue that has a sound system and Aux jack for my iPod. My email is chloemurnighan@gmail.com.

            Remember this: God’s defiant creativity and love can transform all things for good. He doesn’t cause everything but He can transform anything that we surrender. God called and consumed me when I had no strength left so that I couldn’t credit anyone but Him with what resulted. It was all His doing. And this wild, lavish story is just one of the things He has done in my life! He has something breathtaking in store for you if you are willing to grow into being entirely His.