It was New Year's Eve, 2017. (Some might want to call it "December 31.") I was in Queens, NY, visiting my son Luke and his wife Mushroom (that's right, I said "Mushroom"), a native Chinese girl he'd met while doing language work in China. A newsletter was due, and I was in the midst of the Romans Series, a series that I'd begun three years earlier. I was in a snit. 

 

Why was I feeling so snitty? For three years, I had been writing what I thought to be the greatest commentary ever penned on the book of Romans. (I still think it is.) I felt that my writing skills were—by the grace of God—being ratcheted up to world-class levels. But besides that, I knew that the spirit of God was operating in me and giving me insights into the soaring letter written by Paul to the Romans in the Spring of '56—the Magna Carta of our faith. The problem was, I didn't think that anyone much cared; it didn't seem to me like anyone was reading. 

 

Writers are generally insecure people. I published my ZWTF installment of the Romans Series every Sunday, and every Sunday only two or three people would respond and comment upon the edition. This was odd, as I was mailing to around 1,500 people. So I was beginning to feel that, with the Romans Series, I was writing into a void where my words echoed back into my own ears. On this particular New Year's Eve, I felt particularly disturbed about it. 

 

And so I got pissy. I became strange. I concocted a terrible idea, but one that would provide me great pleasure as I sprung it upon an unsuspecting audience that, to my mind at that time, didn't read what I wrote anyway. 

 

Before going any further, let me tell you that, yes, many people were reading my writing. Many looked forward each Sunday to another installment of the Romans Series. It is just that, because I was feeling insecure at the time, I took the fact that only two or three responded to mean that only two or three were reading. It was a juvenile conclusion and all wrong—as I've already said—but nothing was going to stop me from taking out my frustrations there in Queens, NY, in the neighborhood called "Briarwood," next to the neighborhood called "Qew Gardens."

 

I decided to write a nonsense newsletter and see if anyone noticed. (The allowance that this was an experiment was not confessed until the last line of that edition.) In the meantime, did I ever have a good time writing five pages of inspired nonsense. By the time I'd finished, I considered it (but of course) a masterpiece in its own right. 

 

While scrolling through my own catalog this morning, I pulled up this edition and read it for the first time in three years. Gawd! It's pretty amusing, I think. Even funny. So here it is. I hope you get a kick out of it. 

 

My editor, Matt Rohrbach, was the first one to read this back in December of 2017. He emailed me and said: "Um, gee Martin, I started reading this, and I said to myself, 'Huh?' I kept waiting for you to get past the gobbledegook, but you never did. I thought that, any paragraph now, you were going to turn a corner and start being serious. By the time I got to the end and not a serious fact or even a deliberative fancy was to be had, I have to admit to being gobsmacked. I also have to admit to laughing throughout the damn thing." 

 

So as I said—here it is. Have fun. I know I did. 

 

Yours from the Floridan peninsula, with love and some needed mirth, 

 

—Martin