Kirk Franklin - The Blueprint: A Plan for Living Above Lifes Storms

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Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, May 2010

Copyright 2010 by Kirk Franklin

All rights reserved

Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Franklin, Kirk, 1970-

The blueprint : a plan for living above lifes storms / Kirk Franklin.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-42953-2

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

http://us.penguingroup.com

I dedicate this book to my father-in-law, Bill Collins, and my father in the faith, Tony Evans. Whatever I lost as a child, you helped me find it as a man. Thank you.

Introduction

I magine waking up Christmas morning and receiving an expensive gift under the tree. Its nicely wrapped, beautifully presented. You tear off the paper, dig through the little Styrofoam peanuts, and find the gift. But it needs assembling. So you continue to dig. You dig and dig until frustration sets in. When you finally get to the bottom of the box, theres no instruction manual. So now youre left with lots of pieces spread out all over your floor and you have no directions for putting them together.

This takes all the joy out of the day. Your holiday is unfinished. You have a chaos of parts, with no plan for putting them together. Youre on your own to turn the chaos into the pretty picture on the box. Whatre you going to do?

For too many of us, our lives look like the same chaos of parts that we sometimes face on Christmas morning. The parts are scattered everywhere, our future is dark and cloudy, and we have no manual to put things together. So what do we do? Where do we turn? One option is to copy the kid across the street. Or maybe we look for answers with the guy on the corner. Or the thug on TV. Or the preacher in the pulpit. Because we think their gifts came with manuals. But in truth, they had no blueprints either. They put their stuff together by copying others, who had copied still other people before themjust like you are thinking of copying the ones before you. So what should you do? Do you copy the copies of copies, perpetuating the fraud? Do you fake it? Just grab everything, dump it all together and pray something fits? Do you give up and throw the whole mess away? Or maybe you walk away, leaving the pieces spread out everywhere.

Youve been given a gift. But without the instruction manual, without the proper plans, that gift loses its value. Its practically worthless. So if youre going to get anything out of it, you need a blueprint. And as things go with Christmas presents, so they also go with life. The greatest Giver of all has given you a precious giftyour life. And in order for that gift to be truly valuable to you, you need a blueprint.

But before we start the journey, I want to thank you for taking this ride with me. I know there are a lot of other books out there trying to ooh and aah you with their religious rhetoric and spiritual talk, trying to preach to you about the right way to live. I am 100 percent, unapologetically Christian. Jesus is my hero for real. My outlook and observations are sprinkled with my love for my faith. But I am also aware that, for centuries, we Christians have not always done a good job living what we preach. So for those who think this is going to be a soft, cuddly pie in the sky Bible book, dont get it twisted. Its one thing to tell someone they can make it, but its another (and more important) thing to tell them as best you can how to make it, how to get over the barriers that have been there for years.

Because of my background and everything Ive been through (which youll hear more about later), I am very passionate about being honest, straight up, and transparent about my struggles as a black man, my lack of education, my frustrations with the church that I am so proudly part of, and my failings, first as a man, then as a boyfriend, and then again as a husband and family man. Although I dont have a masters or a PhD, Im going to share with you every lesson Ive learned from a life filled with hard knocks. The street corner was my classroom. The hood was my Harvard. And fourteen years of marriage, four kids, a blended family, and a ministry that has allowed me to travel the world have become my laboratory for life.

What I have to offer isnt perfection; its experience. Ive lived through what many of you are experiencingI had no relationship with my father or my mother; I was abandoned, adopted; I have family members battling drug addictions; I had my own baby mama drama; my wife also had a child when she was very young, which means that we came together with families already in place; Im trying to balance a career and family; and, like you, I pray to God even though sometimes I struggle to believe that He loves me and knows what in the world Hes doing. I battle, like many of you, with faith.

You see, I didnt have any blueprint when I was coming up, any kind of instruction manual on how to be a man. All you have to do is look at any city corner to know that my education was flawed. And so was my behavior. Many of us had either no blueprint or a bad onemaybe you had to be daddy to a drunk daddy or mama to a mama who was raising you all alone.

There are so many vivid examples from my own flawed upbringing. When I was growing up, I never saw a man who was faithful to his wife. Think about thatnot one ! I was told by my own mother that she did not want me, that she had wanted to abort me. That messed me up real bad! I was confused and hurt by the insecurities of growing up without my pops. Throughout my early childhood, I struggled with not being accepted for a lot of reasonsmy adopted familys poverty, my small physical size, my role in the local church choir as a singer and musician, which was definitely not what the hood thought being a man was about.

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