Mike Mason Books

On February 3, 2012, I celebrated my 60th birthday. The day itself I spent quietly, but the next day I had a party. My friend Andrew Case, accompanied by Kristina Hutchison, offered to play a living room concert, so the evening was filled with music, good friends, and a fabulous chocolate cake courtesy of Karen. [...]

Often excerpts from my book The Mystery of Marriage are read at weddings. Recently my friend Ron Reed was asked to do this, and for the occasion he organized my prose into lines of poetry. The result is quite nice: There is a heady, breathtaking freedom in love, and the marrying kind is the headiest [...]

Over the years many readers have enjoyed my book The Mystery of Marriage. But hardly anyone ever mentions the poem at the end, “The Lover’s Hermitage.” This puzzles me, because I think it’s a fine poem, maybe the best thing in the whole book. Finally someone has noticed! Not only that, but my poem has [...]

It’s here! At long last! A book I wrote fifteen years ago has finally hit the press. Well, not exactly the press. Fact is, I’ve just launched my first self-published ebook. Having sent my manuscript to some 30 publishers over the years, I finally decided that this thing needs to see the light of day.  [...]

Great reviews are starting to trickle in for my new novel The Violet Flash! From Carrie Padgett of Author’s Choice: “Mike Mason’s story will take its proper place next to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and other speculative fiction that points the reader to God and expounds on the nature of good, evil, creation, [...]

“Well, here we are at Porter’s, the store that has inspired two famous novels!” So began my talk at the launch party for my new fantasy novel The Violet Flash, sequel to The Blue Umbrella. For all of you who couldn’t be there, here’s a link to a VIDEO of the event. It’s 34″ long, [...]

“My eleven-year-old granddaughter, Bailey, had her school picture taken holding a copy of The Blue Umbrella. That says it all. She reads everything she gets her hands on so for her to choose your book was a huge statement. She and her friends concur that it is on a par with Harry Potter but better [...]

For all of my readers who couldn’t be at the book launch of my new fantasy novel The Blue Umbrella, I want to give you a taste of my remarks that evening to a packed crowd in the real Porter’s Store (featured in the novel) in Langley, British Columbia: Good evening, everyone. Thank you all [...]

In January, 2011, I addressed a group of doctors on the topic of “Doctors, Writers, & Stories: The Ointment of the Healer.” The next morning, my father died. Listen to my 35-minute talk. (79 MB mp3)

An Ordinary Man Here begins a seven-part series from a book-in-progress whose provisional title is Want What You Have: A Guide to Contentment. I liked my original title better, but my wife nixed it, saying neither she nor anyone else would buy it. That original title was How To Fail Successfully. On the internet I looked [...]

Wash Your Bowl Joel ben Izzy, in his wonderful book The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness, relates a Zen story he had often heard but never understood. It seems a student seeking enlightenment went to visit a great Zen master. Knowing he must let the master speak first, the student waited. But the [...]

The Importance of the Unimportant Everyone has an ordinary life. The Pope has an ordinary life. Movie stars and rock stars have ordinary lives. Presidents and great artists and workers of miracles have ordinary lives. The person you are most jealous of has an ordinary life—every bit as ordinary as yours. To be sure, the [...]

The Book of Life We are marvelous creatures, fearfully and wonderfully made. Yet so much of what we do is utterly mundane. These ten amazing fingers of ours—how do we use them? Even brain surgeons and concert pianists must brush their teeth, eat, bathe, wipe—an endless diurnal series of basic maintenance tasks. The contrast between [...]

Contentment The nice thing about ordinary life is that there’s so much of it. It’s all around us, all the time, so if we can actually learn to like it, we’re home free. We’ll never lack for anything ever again. We’ll have something the Bible refers to as “great gain” and puts in the same [...]

Living Life to the Full We have this expression “living life to the full.” But how can we live life to the full when life is, apparently, so full of mundane moments and plain things and unremarkable events? Happiness is only possible in the present moment, yet the overwhelming majority of our moments are utterly [...]

Prefer the Ordinary The reason it is so vital for believers to focus on the ordinary is that the spiritual life cannot be understood in extraordinary terms. Who was looking for the Messiah to be born as a baby in a manger? Or who could have expected that He would die the common death of [...]