This month, Verse & Vine is honored to feature Jeb Odom for our Author Spotlight. I found myself within the lines of his raw and moving essay, and I’m certain you will as well. Happy reading!
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I prayed and asked God to kill me if I couldn’t stop sinning and hurting others. You won’t believe what happened next. But first, I’ll give you the backstory.
I grew up an athlete and focused on athletics well into high school. However, I wasn’t an outstanding student. I had too much energy to sit in a classroom and study. Although I enjoyed science and history, I never understood or agreed with public education because it didn’t teach me how to learn and it directly contradicted everything I was taught in Sunday School. Although some wonderful teachers really worked on fixing me, quite frankly, to me school felt like torture and a waste of time. Not to mention I would never be smart enough to score nearly perfect on the ACT and SAT like my dad and brother.
I lost interest in athletics in high school and favored spending the summer at my grandad’s on the farm. I was free to discover anything and everything with little supervision. See, my grandad was a pastor and a farmer, and he built a church and a wonderful community that became my family. The crops that Grandad grew went to feed the families of his flock until the deacons told him that he had to stop farming because no one wanted a personal visit from a preacher wearing overalls and manure on his boots. He stepped down, and I turned my back on God.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I’m not what you would call normal, but I can fake it. After high school, I married and had two wonderful daughters while working as a newscast director, but my interests and God-given abilities, as well as all the stories from my dad growing up in a muscle car era, led to the next stage of my life.
I’ve always had a technical mindset and considered myself to be an inventor or engineer at heart. It was fitting that I had little fictional imagination and was only interested in tangible aspects of life. I only dreamed of fixing and creating solutions to problems and fabricating cars, and fortunately for me, there was a hot rod shop near my house where I was able to work and learn. It wasn’t a paying job, and the owner was a salty retired Navy aircraft mechanic. He taught me how to fit into the blue-collar world. Oh, what a wonderfully exciting experience. I learned how to be a man, leaned into my rebellious nature, and followed my friends into bars, where I learned to love the stories they told, the live music they played, and, of course, the beer that we all drank.
After working those two jobs and hanging out with the boys most nights, my marriage ended. At first, I was excited to get out and explore single life, but with a hefty child support obligation, I ended up living in that same shop. Being single and sleeping on a couch in the shop’s office led me to excel in some areas and decline in others. Sure, I had all night to work, but when I wasn’t working, I was learning guitar and getting a bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering, all while drinking heavily and inching my way into a darker and darker world.
Somewhere at the bottom, I met Ami, my wife. She was in a similar situation herself. We found each other to be much more entertaining than anything else, so we stuck together as God started working. Before I knew it, we were back in church, but I was guarded because of what happened to my grandad. Yet the Holy Spirit was leading Ami, and she found a calling as a pastor while I was still holding onto the grudge.
Since I wouldn’t submit to God’s direction, I shifted back into my old blue-collar ways of sin, but this time, I realized God wasn’t messing around with me anymore. He stripped us of everything. My health, my wife’s health, my career, and the new cars were all taken from me. During that same time, I lost my brother, father, and grandfather and found myself right back where I started at the TV station. God was giving me a mulligan, and I knew it.
I wrote down my thoughts at that point. Here is an unedited snippet of what I wrote:
When despair infects you
Misery penetrates like morphine in your veins
Your Mind feels like it’s racing, but you can’t get it to go anywhere
Any outside noise or sound feels like a shock to your pain
Feeling continuous small explosions in every cell of your body
Every sound is an extreme aggravation
Seems like you hide it well because no one else can tell you are being torn apart
How long till the agony ends
Every direction is dead ends
All the education says it only in my head
How can that be
The pressure is external, causing the internal combustion
How much worse can it feel
Why are we allowed to suffer
So late that night, I prayed, fully submitting to God and asking him to take my life if I could not correct my sinful ways. The course of three days and the month following took me through a life-altering experience.
After I prayed, I went to bed and woke up in a circumstance that I was unable to tell if it was reality or a dream. A gorilla was standing at the edge of my bed, and he was glowing. The multiple shades of his fur were made of individual glowing fibers of hair. I could see each one. He faced me, and I frightened him. I looked down and behind me to realize that I was in some sort of meta-material suit that was connected to my senses, allowing me to feel my meta-wings brush up against my nightstand. Then, I looked at the mirror hanging on the wall and was frightened by my appearance. I turned back to the gorilla, and he was also terrified. At that moment, six tentacles jetted out from my sides and latched onto him, turning him into a pile of ashes. After the encounter, I went back to sleep and had a dream about an agitated white horse waiting beside a dock near a lake or canal. The white horse was arrayed in battle gear and was ready to go to war, and the setting even had the same glowing characteristics as what I saw in the earlier encounter.
When I woke up, everything was different. I was filled with the Holy Spirit, so much so that I had trouble holding in my emotions and was crying all the time, to the point that I never took off my sunglasses. For the first time in my life, I finally felt free and understood what life really was. I prophesied, had even more visions and dreams, and read the Bible most of the time instead of eating or sleeping. My family thought I was nuts, and I understood why. Driving felt so foreign to me that my wife had to drive me to most places. The only direction that God gave me was to write. I didn’t know what to write, so I went to Big Lots and bought every spiral notebook they had. The cashier asked me what I was doing with all the notebooks, so I told her that God told me to write. I went home and began transcribing the Bible. After weeks of doing that, I thought that I might be destined to write commentary until I started to read novels. Reading fiction wasn’t something I did before. Up to that point, I had read two novels my entire life. Now, I had dreams that I wrote down nearly every night. While I loved that experience and would give up everything to have it all the time, after about a month, I had to ask God to dial it back because I could not function at my job because my hands shook, and I cried most of the time, not to mention I still could barely drive myself to work. Once everything settled down, I realized that I had a ton of grief that was eating at me from when my life fell apart. Also, dealing with the emotional aftermath of my Dad, Brother, and Grandad dying, not to mention the guilt and shame I remembered from my own life, I began writing those emotions into my stories. That is when I understood my calling to be a Christian Author.
The problem was that I needed a foundation in what audiences expected and a new miracle gift that no one believed in and only a few supported. At that point, all I wanted was to leave and go to heaven, and facing the “real” world again was not something exciting to ponder. Yet writing was such a wonderful gift to have. I only wanted to write. That is when I learned that others suffer because of your commitment to writing, and there is no guarantee it will yield fruit. Your writing isn’t honed, so no one believes in you, so no one helps. When I talked to friends, I found that only a handful of people understood what was going on.
The struggles surfaced quickly. I enjoyed writing but felt guilty. I had a golden ticket that no one else had. My relationships were strained because writing time competes with everything else. Life boiled down to competing priorities. Church functions, family events, and sleep were all contentions to writing.
I was laid off from the television station after COVID-19 and landed a job at an automotive restoration shop while my wife was trained and hired as a pastor. I was hoping things would settle down and I could get into a writing routine. Well, to say the least, the exact opposite happened. The restoration company was taking off and is now the top in the world, all while our church where my wife works grew exponentially. We had an impossible task finding free time, and I felt idiotic for trying to start a writing career in the midst of all the chaos.
As I neared completion of my second novel, I sent the story to beta readers. The majority of people never opened the book, but a few people took the job seriously and helped me tremendously, and I am very thankful for those people.
With good feedback, I went to work hastily rewriting, anticipating that my writing career would soon become a reality. Once I read the comments and reread my story, I almost quit writing forever. I spent the following months wrestling with everything related to writing.
When you write, you inevitably have certain doubts about what is allowed and what isn’t. You begin to ask yourself questions like, what are the guidelines on doctrine vs. creative license? Will Christians understand me or reject me? Do I genuinely have content freedom?
Do I write Christian fiction, or am I a Christian Author? Why do I feel like every novel must include Sunday school lessons? The more I learn about writing, the more I feel lost in a sea of talented writers. Why do I have a flood of ideas with no time to write? Which story do I want to invest in becoming the next novel?
After being introduced to Verse & Vine and learning more about it, I am thankful that Sam and Jack listened and followed the Holy Spirit. I see what a blessing they are for Christian writers. I know that I can trust them to help answer all my questions and guide me into my professional writing career.
–Jeb Odom