Books and CDs by David Evans

Does GOD Ever Speak through CATS?

Does GOD Ever Speak through CATS? Book by David Evans Several years ago I moved into a new house in Los Angeles. It turned out to be a very pivotal time in my life, although I didn't realize it at the time. For virtually all my life up to that point, I had been an atheist, with a great deal of anger toward God. (I'm a P.K., preachers' kid, so all my negativity toward God and church isn't really so surprising.) But just before the move, I had a religious conversion experience. It frightened me and turned my world completely upside down. So I began an amazing journey, into a totally new relationship with God.

But there was also another journey. For most of my early adult life, I had a strong dislike of cats. Then, once we moved into the new house, I discovered there was a stray cat living in the back yard. At first we avoided each other completely, then we moved into an uneasy, edgy relationship. It was an odd kind of journey I was on with the cat.

So, with the move, I unwittingly embarked on two strange new journeys. One involved a completely new relationship with God. The other journey was focused on the stray cat living in the back yard. To my great surprise, I discovered these two very different journeys were related to each other and had a lot in common. In fact, one day I realized that the cat was actually a parable!

I wrote the book, "Does GOD Ever Speak through CATS?"" to tell that story. For me it was an adventure in Christian Spirituality, with many surprises along the way, and also quite a few laughs.

Some things I learned from the adventure were:

How we can discover God's presence in very surprising places, sometimes a long ways away from any church.
How God often delegates important work, and sometimes he even delegates it to CATS!
How God has wonderful surprises FOR ALL OF US, when and where we least expect them!
How there is an extremely important role for laughter in Christian spirituality.

Readers' Comments:

"Being a P.K. myself (Preacher's Kid), I found David Evans' story of discovering his faith through one of God's most beautiful creatures both inspiring and touching." (Five stars on Amazon.com)

Jayne Meadows Allen

"Does GOD Ever Speak through CATS?" by writer, mediator and conflict consultant David Evans is a gentle, inspirational book about the author's heart-warming relationship with a beloved cat, Mehitabel.
Surprised by the attachment he develops with her, author Evans discovers a channel to the goodness of God through his bond with a cat. Full of comic interludes, joyous cat behavior profiles, and humorous leaps of faith, "Does GOD Ever Speak through CATS?" presents the idea that perhaps human faith development parallels the ability to trust and love a cat. Not just any cat will present this challenge, perhaps it must be a special cat, a treasured cat. Are cats our spiritual guides? Do we benefit from feeling their furry, purring essences? As David Evans concludes at every juncture, "Trust in the Lord." (Five stars on Amazon.com)

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)

Your cats shouldn't read this book - but you should! My cats already think they're divine creatures - they don't need to see it confirmed in print! Like the author's blessed cat, this book came to me unexpectedly (but purposefully) and I was a little afraid of it at first. I'm not the type of person that has ever read a book with God in the title, and what touched me most about this story is that it inspires through sincerity and wonder - not intimidation and fear. This is a lovely walk through one person's journey from rejection to adoration - and it is a story that translates into so many aspects of life and relationships of all types. It has made me reconsider prejudices and challenged me to look for inspiration and enjoyment in unexpected places. (Five stars on Amazon.com)

What'sWithAllTheCats (LA, CA)

Does GOD Have a Sense of HUMOR?

"Does GOD Have a Sense of HUMOR?" is a speech/workshop that developed as a result of my cartoon book, "THE GOOD BOOK...of Bible Cartoons." Several minister friends knew that my cartoon book was very much a part of my own spiritual journey. So they invited me to come and talk about my book, and my thoughts about humor and the Christian life. So I did. I gave my first talk about six years ago.

Since that time I have thought a great deal more about the topic, and both my speech and my thinking have changed and evolved. And I have now recorded the material on this CD.

I believe that humor is a wonderful gift from God that can greatly nourish our life of faith. I have what I call a "Ministry of Humor" to encourage people to use this great gift. Here are four important ways that I believe humor can help us as Christians:

• • Humor or cartoons about the characters in the Bible can remind us that many of those characters were flawed and funny, and were actually a lot like us! Consider doubting Thomas, or impulsive Peter. Or the squabbling brothers James and John! And don't forget about Jonah, who decided he would run away from God, by going to a distant land that God had never heard of! Cartoons and humor can help us look at the Bible with fresh eyes. (For this segment I draw on the cartoons from "THE GOOD BOOK...of Bible Cartoons." See below.)

• • The Bible warns us against the sin of pride and urges us toward humility. Humor can do wonders here. I have a friend who is a very celebrated physician, a gastroenterologist. He has all of his relevant framed degrees on the wall of his office. But if you look closely you can see that the frame right above his desk holds the certificate for his graduation from fourth grade! My friend put this funny joke up on his wall to remind him not to take himself too seriously. A wonderful use of humor!

• • Humor can sometimes be a tremendous blessing in helping us get along with each other better. In addition to writing, I also work in the field of conflict resolution. Once, I was mediating a case where two parents were suing the head of a private school that their son was attending. The parents felt the school was cheating their son, and they were extremely upset. There was so much animosity between the two sides that I finally put them in two different rooms. But as I was talking to the two angry parents, the father gave me kind of a funny look and said to me, "Are you aware that you are wearing different colored socks?"

I looked down, and sure enough, although I was dressed in a suit and tie, somehow I ended up wearing different colored socks! We all had a big laugh.
It completely broke the tension of the case. We still had things we needed to resolve, and the problems didn't all magically disappear. But the laugh we had about my socks, removed the tremendous anger and hostility that had been present. We were now able to look at the different options we had in the case and do some good problem solving.

So humor at the right moment, in the right situation, can do wonders in helping people get along better!

•• These are the four topics that I cover in this CD and in my live speech/workshop. For each of the topics I share strategies and tell some other funny, real-life stories, beyond the ones I've mentioned in this brief presentation. My goal in the speech and the CD is to share ideas that are helpful, inspiring, and transformative. I also tell some jokes and funny stories to make it a fun experience.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This CD is temporarily unavailable for purchase. I am re-recording it as a DVD, so that it has both audio and video components. It will be filmed in front of a live audience. The program has gotten an extremely good response from earlier audiences, so I am looking forward to having it recorded. It will be available soon. D. E.

The Good Book ... of Bible Cartoons

Originally I wrote the cartoons in this book just intending to make them as funny as I could. I was working full time as a comedy writer at that point. Sample from The Good Book of Bible Cartoons by David Evans (I wrote for The Monkees TV show, among other things.) TV comedy writing is a seasonal business, and I decided to develop some project of my own during the off-season. So I drew on my background as a preacher's kid to develop these cartoons, and got my friend Sherman Labby, an excellent storyboard artist, to illustrate them. I wasn't a believer at that point. (I've written about my spiritual journey elsewhere, in, "Does GOD Ever Speak through CATS?") These cartoons were just designed to be funny.

But later, after a personal religious conversion, I came to see the cartoons in a completely different way. I realized that cartoons and humor can help address a major problem that sooner or later most Christians face. That problem is over-familiarity with biblical characters and stories.

Consider the stories of David and Goliath, or of Jesus walking on the water, or the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. After reading these stories several hundred times, we get used to them. They don't surprise us anymore, and don't affect us as powerfully as they should.

What can we do?

Sample from The Good Book of Bible Cartoons by David Evans I believe cartoons can be very helpful here. With cartoons we can see a familiar Bible scene or character, but in a very unfamiliar way. Humorous cartoons give us a jolt and jostle our thinking. Then when we return to the original Bible story, it doesn't seem quite so predictable. Cartoons can help give us a fresh perspective.

I think there is also another advantage we can gain from cartoons about Bible characters. That relates to a second problem many Christians have. And that is that, somewhere along the way, we stop seeing those Bible characters as real people. We begin to see them as special "Bible people," stereotyped characters who had no existence outside the Bible stories where we see them. But cartoons can help remind us that they were real people just like us.

Consider the case of Lazarus. We only see him twice in the Bible. Once when he is raised from the dead, and then a few days later, briefly, when he is having lunch with Jesus. But imagine another additional scene (in a cartoon). This one would take place a few days after Lazarus is raised up by Jesus, when he returns to his job. And Lazarus says to his boss, "I'm sorry I missed work last week. I was dead."

Sample from The Good Book of Bible Cartoons by David Evans A cartoon like that can jolt us into realizing just what an incomprehensible, impossible thing Jesus did that day when he raised the real, human Lazarus from the grave.

For the last several years I have been using the cartoons in this book as part of my own personal ministry and Christian witness. Using an overhead projector, I incorporate the cartoons into a one-hour talk that I now give to churches. I focus on the wonderful gift God has given us through our sense of humor. It is not only a source of joy, but I believe laughter can also nourish our life of faith. We all get into Bible ruts, prayer ruts, and faith ruts. We often keep doing the same thing the same way all the time. But laughter can jostle our thinking and help us see things from a new and different perspective.

My hope is that the cartoons in this book can help jostle your thinking into happy new pathways, and also give you some fun and laughter along the way.