Lincoln County native Bill Moak has just published his first book. “Don’t Eat the Cat Food!” is a book to help Christians live more exciting lives, according to Moak.

“It’s an exploration of how we as Christians sometimes miss out on the abundant life that we’re promised because we accept mediocrity into our lives,” Moak said. “The book explores a lot of different ways in which we do this. We tend to get comfortable with the idea of mediocrity, and we just accept that things are the way they are. But God does not want us to live like that. I wrote this book after several challenges in my life and a long period of introspection and prayer. I believe God wants us to live lives that are exciting — lives that are a lot more interesting than what we tend to accept.”

Moak started working on the book in the summer of 2012.

“The way it started out, it was just a way to kind of get my thoughts out,” Moak said. “I was trying to figure out what my next stage was. What was my next stage in life? What was I supposed to be doing? I had gone through a career change, and I had a lot of time to re-
flect on it. I started to get some insight into the world around me, and the fact that God is much bigger than what we think we see.”

Moak said in a news release that despite the title, the book is “a serious look at how we satisfy ourselves with the ‘cat food’ of a mediocre existence”.

“I was working one day through one of the chapters, and I still hadn’t had a title for the book,” Moak said. “I started writing about how an animal knows what it needs. It instinctively knows it, but if he doesn’t have a choice he’s going to settle for whatever is put in front of him. Your dog eats dog food because that’s what he has. But what really fulfills him and any animal is what God has intended for him to eat. So this led me to the idea of the tiger. The introduction of the book talks about how a tiger would react if you gave him cat food, but he really wanted the meat that you also had with you. Would he be satisfied with that? So that led to the title.”

Moak grew up in Lincoln County and graduated from Bogue Chitto Attendance Center.

“I grew up in church,” he said. “I grew up with a strong Christian background. My mom is a schoolteacher, so I learned the value of learning and teaching. All these things kind of led me to this point.”

Moak said he hopes to write at least a couple more books about Christian living.

“This is the first book I’ve written, so it’s a voyage of discovery. Writing a book is a very difficult and time-consuming thing. But now that I’ve been through this one, I have another couple of ideas sort of along the same path — things that we can do better as Christians, things that we need to pay attention to in our lives.”

“Don’t Eat the Cat Food!” was published Jan. 13. The book is available for order at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or directly on the author’s website at wordsbybill.com.

Moak currently lives in Madison with his wife and two sons. He works at LeFleur Transportation and also writes a business column for the Clarion-Ledger. He teaches business report writing at Tulane University’s Madison campus.