I have never written an e-book before.

Bill Seaver has been encouraging me to test this platform and see if it would be an effective way to communicate with my readers. His advice has proven to be invaluable to me in the past, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I took some existing content and assembled into a book format. Then, I contracted with a local Web designer who I’ve worked with for years and loaded it on Issuu.com and Box.net. That was Monday afternoon, March 22.

What happened next was nothing short of a miracle.

By the time I got up Tuesday morning at 4 a.m., I already had nearly 100 alerts in my inbox. Thinking someone had hacked my account and sent out a crazy direct message about how much money I made selling tissue paper (or something) on Google, I rushed to open my laptop and see what had happened.

I realized that Ed Stetzer had endorsed the e-book about 12:30 a.m that morning. By 4:10 a.m., more than 200 people had already read or downloaded the e-book. Then, Ron Edmondson published an interview with me later that morning. Those two posts along with a series of Tweets and Facebook updates from countless other church leaders sent off a chain reaction that took this experiment “viral” in every sense of the word.

To date, more than 800 people have read or downloaded the e-book. The number continues to grow daily.

I continue to receive notes that tell me how much it challenged them to think differently and offered a vocabulary and process to what they already intuitively knew as well as notes that said it was the encouragement they were looking for to continue to “press on.”

Kerry Bural from also featured the e-book in the post “Same Old, Same Old” just doesn’t cut it.

I’m grateful to everyone who mentioned the e-book in a Tweet, Facebook update, blog post, e-mail, etc., and I’m indebted to those who took the time to download or read the e-book online. I pray that it was helpful to you in your ministry.

I’m humbled I get to do this for a living.

God is good. All the time.