Win a Free Book - Interview with Kathi Macias

I hope you enjoy my interview with Kathi Macias, author of "How Can I Run a Tight Ship When I'm Surrounded by Loose Cannons?". If you leave a comment by Friday, February 27, I will put your name in a drawing for a free copy of the book!

Kathi, first of all, I thoroughly enjoyed reading "How Can I Run a Tight Ship...". Your storytelling was so honest and engaging that I had trouble putting it down! I could also very much relate to many of your struggles. Was there something specific that inspired you to write it?

Actually, as much as I hate to admit it, I came up with the title before I had a clue about the content. How Can I Run a Tight Ship when I’m Surrounded by Loose Cannons just popped into my head one day, and I thought, Wow, what a great book title! So I started to pray/think about it and realized it epitomized my life—a control freak who could never get a handle on anything! That realization brought me back to the first time as a new Christian that I stumbled across the Proverbs 31 woman and immediately began trying to be like her. What a hilarious and pathetic failure that was!!! I also realized that nearly all Christian women, to some extent, get caught up in the fallacy of the Proverbs 31 role model, and I wanted to help them see the futility of trying to do the impossible. Instead, I desired for this book to help women see the progression of grace in our lives as we pass through stages of growth and different seasons of Proverbs 31 living, moving into excellence but not striving for perfection. And I wanted to make them smile in the process.

Is it safe to say that you would be considered a "Type A" personality?

HA! I am such a Type A that I feel a failure if someone doesn’t tell me I’m a Type A-plus! Seriously, if I got a 98 on a test in school, I was ready to throw myself off a cliff. All I could think of was that 2 percent I missed. And, of course, I was a great “fixer.” I knew just how I could help others become as perfect as I wanted to be—at everything! If you read the book, you’ll know that kind of thinking got me dubbed “Mighty Mouse” in school—you know the theme song: “Here I come to save the day!” What a joke!

God has obviously given you (and me) and countless others that type of personality, and yet it seems like we struggle so much letting God rather than ourselves be in control of every situation. In our drive to be productive for Him, we lose track of our relationship with Him. That balance between being and doing s such a hard one to find. How have you seen God use your "type A" personality in positive ways?

Yes, God has used me “just as I am”—in spite of myself. And it never ceases to amaze me. More than once I’ve found myself asking, “Father, have You forgotten who You have on the end of the string here?” Then, of course, He reminds me that it’s not about who’s on my end of the string, but who’s holding it at its source. Why do I have to be reminded of that fact so often??? How can I write a book about it and STILL slip into that “it’s all up to me” thinking? Hmm… Do you suppose I’m still a “WIP”—a “work in progress” with a lot to learn? Absolutely! And so are you. So we may as well share a few laughs as we learn together along the way, don’t you think?

If you could sum up what you want to say to readers in this book in a sentence or two, what would it be? What do you most want readers to take away from it?

I want my readers to relax—to stop striving and failing and feeling frustrated and hopeless. We can’t do anything on our own anyway, so why feel badly when we fail? If we really believed Jesus’ words that “apart from Me you can do NOTHING,” we’d have a lot more peace in our lives because we’d stop trying to do what we cannot do. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But after 35 years of walking with the Lord, twenty of those years having been spent in fulltime ministry, I’m still trying to learn and apply it. So take heart, fellow pilgrims! You and I aren’t faithful—but God is, and He has promised to complete that good work He started in us. So let’s just hang on to Him and let Him steer our ships safely home—loose cannons and all!

Thank you, Kathi!

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