A Day in History - 1998

Everyone has a day in their lives when something changes and turns your life in a whole new direction. Well, if you haven’t experienced it yet, I assure you, sometime during your stay on this planet you will. Today, I look back on that day in history and I’m so happy I decided to act on my instinct, on what I believed, and on my dreams. Over the next five weeks, I’m going to take you down memory lane, back to that day in history when it all began. The very first day I decided I’m going to write something and get it published.

Late 1998

One of the first hand written tracts in 1998

I remember that night so vividly. The memory still lingers in my mind. It was the evening my friend came to visit me after we had graduated from secondary school. We were sitting in my parents’ living room and talking about our plans for the future —what schools we wanted to go to, what exams we had written, and what course options were now available for us to pursue.

As I listened to him, my mind drifted off to a thought that I had been dealing with for a while, a thought that had consumed me since I left school. I wanted to be a writer, among many other things I wanted to do with my life, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it. The difficulty wasn’t about the publishing, it was how to write. What do I start with? How do I develop my story line? What genre would I like to write about? Who was my audience. I had no clue and so the idea remained just that: an idea.

So that evening as I sat listening to my good friend talk about future plans and as I started to think about how to actualize my dream of writing, I heard a voice within me say, “Write.” It was more like an instruction, so I got up, kept nodding along as my friend spoke, picked up a jotter and pen from the table, and just started to write a story that came to mind. I didn’t have it all planned out — no story line or title. I just wrote and that’s where it all began.

One of the first computer published tracts (1998)

After that night, I started to write stories in the form of handwritten tracts, cutting them up and giving them out to people. It was a lot of work I must confess — rewriting every story on small papers — but it was one I really enjoyed doing. My mission was simple: to pass on a message aligned with the principles of the bible via everyday stories to which people can relate. From hand written tracks I moved on to typing it out on my computer and cutting it up to size... Click to continue reading