I’m going to talk about this whole “Bond Between Creature and Creator” idea in just a bit, but first I want to lay some groundwork by telling you briefly about myself, and you’re going to have to trust me when I say that I’m going somewhere with it. Okay? Okay.

I was born in 1971 and lived my early childhood amid the cornfields of Illinois. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Midwest but the horizons there are just immense. You can see for miles and miles, and to a kid a mile or two can seem like the far reach of the universe. I remember trying to walk across the cornfield next to our house once. I was very young, maybe five or six at the time, and the cornfield had already been harvested and plowed under so that it was a vast tract of brown furrowed earth with bits of dead cornstalk jutting up, poking through the topsoil like dried bones. I set off on my great adventure to the other side determined to find out what the world looked like all the way over there, but I turned back halfway across because I was scared of the distance. The further I went, the smaller the house looked behind me, and the other side never seemed to come any closer at all. I was suddenly afraid that I might take one step too far, I might cross that giant horizon and lose sight of my house altogether, and then I wouldn’t know how to get home again. So I went back while I still could.

That’s one of my earliest memories and it’s unique to me not only because it was a scary experience, but because it’s one that doesn’t involve books. Nearly everything else I remember about being a young child, as far back as I can remember, revolves around books–around stories. I’ve never had kids of my own so I’ve never rediscovered picture books like many parents do, but I remember clear flashes of color and images: a bird that thinks a tractor is its mother, a worm named Lowly in an adventure with pie-stealing rats called Pie-Rats, a giant red dog, bizarre creatures from the mind of Seuss, a boy dressed as a wolf who sailed for a year and a day, a hobbit, a bright yellow page with the Timbuktu printed across it–no idea what that’s all about.

Beyond those earliest years I remember Encyclopedia Brown, and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and dozens of hours spent exploring the myriad trails of Choose Your Own Adventure books. And then there were books of mythology. I scoured the library for them and pored over everything I could get my hands on about Odin and Zeus, Olympus and Asgard. I liked Odin the best because he only had one eye. The Greek pantheon always seemed like a bunch of pansies next to a one-eyed Odin, and when I had surgery on my eye in my first grade year and had to wear an eye-patch for a while, well, I felt pretty important. The way I saw it I was either a pirate or the All-Father of Asgard, and either was fine with me. I was sad when that patch came off.

Mythology led me naturally to history: Romans, Greeks, Alexander, the Caesars, the Spartans, and of course mixed into all of this were the Old Testament stories of Gideon, Samson, David and all the rest. The New Testament wouldn’t be much fun for year to come. So I sat in my Dad’s lap for what seemed like hours at a time, begging him to pull out more books so I could look at the archaeological pictures: ruins, skeletons, excavated cities, cuneiform, hieroglyphs, petroglyphs. I couldn’t get enough of the stuff. And that, I think, might have been when things first began to click, because when I looked at a ruin of an ancient temple, I wasn’t looking at a story, not in the same way that I read a story or was told a story by someone else, but I was looking at the remnant of one, the fossil that a story had left behind. To many people it might have seemed that I was looking at nothing more than old rocks and broken pottery, but for me, it went way beyond that. The people were gone but story was still there and I could see it in an instant, unfolding in my mind in all it’s millions of possibilities–wars, heroes, gods, titans, entire civilizations rising and falling and crumbling into nothing more than the ruins on the page in front of me.

I began to connect a string of dots in my mind. It wasn’t a story someone else had drawn for me, but instead, something of my own imagining. I could look at a rock and see the story of it, or at least a story of it. It was a meteor struck out of the sky having travelled across the rainbow bridge from Asgard, an arrowhead left by a long-forgotten archer who died defending the last of his ancient race, the last remaining stone of a once-great castle battered to earth by siege engines and vast armies. It no longer occurred to me that it might be just a rock. There were stories in everything, every tree, every stone, and the older the better. Fossils were everywhere. Antiquity fascinated me.

When I was ten my parents moved us to Florida and I spent my teenage years there. This wasn’t palm tree and suntan Florida, though; this was back woods, redneck Florida: alligators, rebel flags, beer cans, and trailer parks. Suddenly my horizon was no longer out at the far reach of the cornfield, it was just a few blocks down the road, obscured by pine trees, palmettos, and four-wheel-drive trucks. The world felt a lot smaller.

Thank God for books. I began a steady diet of Stephen King. And add to that a constant intake of fantasy and sci-fi novels. All these stories swirled through my head and began coming out as cheap imitations in high school when I wrote dozens of awful short stories fashioned after King and Lovecraft. My English teachers, Mrs. Johns and Mrs. Roberts, would probably swear otherwise, but I’m here to tell you that those stories were awful. I sometimes lie awake at night in fear that someone might find one of them and put it on the internet–a far scarier tale to me than any I told in English class.

All those stories, though, taught me to remember that the world was, in fact, bigger than my small town. I might not be able to see the far horizon for the skinny Florida pine trees, but Stephen King assured me that it was still there–possibly peopled by nightmares, but there all the same and certainly more interesting than the world close at hand.

In 1991, when I was nineteen, I had another distinct shift in my thinking, not unlike my realization that a simple rock might be the remnant of a castle. I was working in a grocery store and worrying about little more than “fixing up” my car, which generally meant finding bigger speakers for it, when suddenly, the country was going to war. I wasn’t even sure where Iraq was, but I knew that war sounded like fun. Foolish, I know. But when you’re nineteen these things make sense. And as dumb as it may seem now, my thinking at the time was very clear, and it became a sort of watershed in my life. You see, I’d been wrapped up in stories for years. I’d been listening to them and learning from them and I’d begun to tell my own and even back then I wondered if someday I might be an author. But suddenly, with war looming over the horizon, I saw that I had the chance to do more than merely read or write stories, I had the chance to step inside a story and live it. Again, this all seems so naïve now, but at nineteen it was a revelation. When people asked me why on earth I was joining the Marine Corps and going to war, my answer was simple. I wanted stories to tell. I wanted war stories. I wanted assurance that I’d have a good tale or two to tell in my old age. I’d read stories all my life, and maybe, I thought, it was time to start living one.

So over the horizon I went, across that old, dead cornfield. I didn’t look back but I knew, sure enough, that behind me, home had finally disappeared.

Well, I did get my stories–though, by the grace of God, none of them war stories. The war was over by the time I got out of boot camp and I was stuck with six years of service in peacetime. I wasn’t happy about it, but I was learning to live as a story. When I made decisions my thought process was something like this: Should I go to Korea for a week, or should I go home for a week? Which story would I rather tell? –and off to Korea I’d go, or Thailand, or Singapore.

Now this didn’t make for very responsible living, mind you. I was lucky to live through a lot of my own stupidity and it was no end of frustration to my mother, but it did keep things interesting. At the very least, I wasn’t bored.

Now let’s fast-forward a bit. I did my six years with the Marines, then I went to college for a while, worked in television a bit, did all sorts of odd jobs, and eventually ended up back in Florida, stuck behind those ugly pine trees and working with at-risk boys in a place called the Florida Sheriffs Boys Ranch. It was a good job and I truly enjoyed it. My military background had trained me well for dealing with militant teenagers and in the nearly eight years I spent there, I met some of the best people and had some of the best experiences of my life. But I couldn’t escape the feeling of being trapped. I was back in a small town, and the horizon was obscured. There was nowhere much to go, and no one much to talk to. So it was there that I started writing again. It’s no surprise that it was a story about a girl stuck at an orphanage and dreaming of far off places and adventures.

When I started writing, once again, something clicked. I was writing my story, creating my characters, putting them into tough situations and pulling them out again, and a curious thing happened. They stopped being mere words on a page. They ceased to be simple constructs of my imagination. I began to think of them each as pieces of myself that I’d broken off and breathed into life, setting them into motion on the page, and because they each were tiny fragments of myself, I felt as they felt, hurt as they hurt, rejoiced and laughed as they did. The story I was creating became, for me at least, a living story. Now this was something different than all the writing I’d done before. I’d written stories before, but even at their best they were clinical, hollow, clear fabrications. This living story was something new to me and it was exhilarating. I couldn’t wait to get home from work to sit down and nudge my characters around to see what they might do.

I reached a point one night when Fin, my heroine, had come to the lowest point in her life. All her dreams had fallen apart; everything she’d hoped for was gone. She was in total despair and she was crying out to God: Why?

When I heard that cry, I cried. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I sat in my chair and shook. I felt her pain so clearly and so personally, because, of course, she was part of me, wasn’t she? She was my own creation. Created in my own image. To whom was she crying out if not to me?

Why, she cried. And then I realized that I had the answer. My answer was: Because I know the end of the story. “Just wait,” I wanted to tell her. “Just wait!” But of course she couldn’t hear that. She was lost in the cornfield with no idea of what lay over the immense horizon–and no way home.

Here then is the bond. Creator. Creature. Tied together. Bound up in the same mind. One, only a part. The other, the whole. The creation, an incarnate expression of the creator. I realized that I loved my characters, each of them, even the unlovable ones. And of course you’ve already made the leap that was dawning on me then, that in the love we have of our creation, we glimpse the love of our own Creator.

This brings me back to living as a story. I’d been asking for years: what story do I want to tell about my life? But that was small potatoes, wasn’t it? It was the wrong question. Here’s the right one:

What story is being told with my life? Whose story am I a part of? What part am I playing?

It’s no new thing to realize that the world, history itself, is a story. It’s right there in the word: his-story. The writer to the Hebrews called God the Author and Perfecter of our faith and there’s been a long tradition of seeing the world in story terms down through the ages. But my favorite is John Milton. Near the end of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve have committed their infamous sin and are in total despair. They’re lost in the cornfield, afraid of what looms across the horizon, and they’re far out of sight of home. Adam follows the Archangel Michael up to a mountaintop and Michael shows him all the earth. Milton describes it, not as Adam sees it, but as it will be throughout history, in terms of kingdoms yet to be that Adam has never imagined and will not live to see, and it sounds so big and so foreign and so sweeping that I can scarcely believe it’s real. It’s like something out of a fantasy novel–and yet it’s our earth, our home, the setting of our story. Here’s part of the passage:

“His eye might there command wherever stood
City of old or modern fame, the seat
of mightiest empire, from the destined walls
of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can,
And Samarkand by Oxus, Temir’s throne,
To Paquin of Sinaean kings, and thence
To Agra and Lahore of Great Mogul
Down to the golden Chersonese, or where
The Persian in Ecbatan sat, or since
In Hispahan, or where the Russian Czar
In Moscow, or the Sultan in Bizance,
Turkestan-born; nor could his eye not ken
Th’ empire of Negus to his utmost port
Ercoco and the less maritime kings
Mombaza, and Quiloa, and Melind,
And Sofala thought Ophir, to the realm
Of Congo, and Angola farthest south;
Or thence from Niger flood to Atlas mount
Then kingdoms of Almansor, Fez and Sus,
Marocco and Algiers, and Tremisen;
On Europe thence, and where Rome was to sway
The world: in spirit perhaps he also saw
Rich Mexico the seat of Montezume,
And Cusco in Peru, the richer seat
Of Atabalipa, and yet unspoiled
Guiana, whose great city Geryon’s sons
Call El Dorado…”

Every time I read that I think: Wow, this is where I live. That’s the story I’m a part of! It sounds so alien, so fantastical, and yet it’s as real as Nashville, Tennessee. All those kingdoms and kings are as real as Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt.

And then Michael tells Adam a story. He tells him that even though he’s brought about the Fall. Even though he’s put a rift between himself and God, even though he’s going to have to leave Paradise, that something new is coming. What does Michael do? He lifts up Adam’s eyes and shows him what’s over the horizon. He doesn’t leave him like a child wandering through a cornfield. He tells him, “Just wait! One is coming to who will set everything right again, One is coming who will mend the rift.” He shows him the great Story of the world that’s about to unfold and this is how Milton wraps it up:

“…in his seed all nations shall be blest.
Then to the heav’n of heav’ns he shall ascend
With victory, triumphing through the air
Over his foes and thine; there shall surprise
The Serpent, prince of air, and drag in chains
Though all his realm, and there confounded leave;
Then enter into glory, and resume
His seat at God’s right hand, exalted high
Above all names in heav’n; and thence shall come,
When this world’s dissolution shall be ripe,
With glory and power to judge both quick and dead,
To judge th’ unfaithful dead, but to reward
His faithful, and receive them into bliss,
Whether in hea’vn or earth, for then the earth
Shall all be paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days.”
So spake th’ Archangel Michael, then paused,
as at the world’s great period.”

Notice what just happened. Milton framed all of Creation as not only a story, but as a single sentence. Read it again: “So spake th’ Archangel Michael, then paused, as at the world’s great period.”

Maybe it’s just because I’m a writer, but that geeks me out.

So after hearing and seeing all this, what does Adam do? He rejoices. He’s just caused the fall of all Creation, and yet because he understands that his is only the first chapter in a greater story, he rejoices, and Michael leads Adam and Eve out of the Garden by the hand. They go forth in tears, but not in despair.

That’s our story. I’m not talking in vague metaphor; I’m talking in absolute literal terms. That is the story that we are a part of, right now. Right this very second. Where you sit today, a scene is being written, is already written, and we are all part of it.

Because of the stories I’ve lived in and lived through, I’m no longer a child afraid to strike out across a cornfield. Neither am I a foolish young man charging off to war in search of his own story. Instead, I’m a man who feels the joy of his Creator when he sits down to write.

When we create a story, when we set characters in motion, we are participating in a Divine tradition. I’m made in the image of a creative God, and so when I create and love that creation, when I mourn with it, laugh with it, and lead it along by the hand, I’m in the midst of a holy communion–like a child imitating the work of its parent. And in that sacred work, we learn by imitation that the Author is in control, that he knows the answer to our cries, that he knows what lies ahead and he tells us not to fear.

The act of storytelling gives our lives context, reminds us that though the beginning is far behind, and the end is up over the horizon, that we are not lost, we are led. Have faith. The Author sees the end and is whispering, even now, “Just wait! Just wait!”

And in case your $14 have not joined the other billion that the movie has already made, check out the One Minute Review of The Avengers: www.oneminutereview.com/2012/05/avengers.html

There’s a lot of N. T. Wright talk around here right now, so it seems an appropriate time to continue the series on Christian Storytelling. In the past couple of installments we began looking at Wright’s view of the Bible as an “unfinished drama.” We continue now with an understanding of ourselves as actors in the fifth act.

The Christian story gives new meaning to the old Shakespearian line, “All the world’s a stage.” The world is the stage upon which the drama of redemption takes place. And you and I are players. But we are not merely players. We are the faithful improvisors of the tragic and glorious fifth act of history, trying with all our might to remain faithful to the first four acts, as well as the few scenes of the fifth act, that preceded us.

The first four acts, and perhaps even Act V, scene 1, have been laid down for us in the Scriptures. We have some solid clues as to what will happen in the final scene of Act V, but there is a great length of scenes in the fifth act to be played out.

Obviously, the objection might arise that if we only have four acts and have to improvise a fifth, we’ll be left to our own devices, and authority would shift away from the text and to us. I think this would miss the point of the illustration, however, as the first four acts would serve as the authority for the fifth. It just wouldn’t be a comfortable or easy authority. Rather than pulling timeless principles from Scripture to apply in any and every context, we would now be forced to ask the question, “Where was the biblical story going?” and “How do we, as its followers, continue to take it there?” We somehow have to deal with the fact that the Scriptures do not give us the whole story, nor do they give us an answer for every single question that arises. To treat the Bible like it does is to misuse it. The Scriptures do not lay out the fifth act in detail, but they provide a direction that we faithful improvisors should take.

The strength of this position comes in its treatment of the Scriptures as the story of redemption. Certainly the Bible is not laid out in the form of a Shakespearian play. But it is a story, and we must treat it as such, difficult though that may be.

The story, of course, has a main character: Jesus of Nazareth. If we get bogged down in too many of the minor details of the story and do not focus on the story’s central trajectory, the proclamation of Jesus as crucified Lord of the universe, we’ll take the story in all sorts of misguided directions. Therefore, we should see the Scriptures as an unfinished drama about Christ, a drama which we are to live out in each setting we are given. We should take our places in our allotted scenes, take the role given to us, and live out the incarnational story of Jesus as faithfully as possible.

The term “faithful improvisor” is meant to be a self-correcting term. If we focus solely on the word “improvisor,” we’ll think authority lies in each actor, making it up as he or she goes along. But if we are genuinely “faithful” to the script we have been given, we’ll hopefully avoid such an approach. And furthermore, there are few soliloquies in this play. We surround ourselves with other actors (and even drama critics) on the stage to point out when we’ve taken too much creative license.

But likewise, if we neglect the word “improvisor,” we will establish for ourselves some rigidly narrow view of how things should be done and lose our ability to become faithfully incarnational in our own worlds and contexts. We’ll also refuse to learn from other actors who might be better than us.

So with humility, we have the joy of playing our parts in the drama of redemption, living and speaking the story of Jesus.

I remember how it felt to walk through the grocery store
watching others dispose so recklessly
of everything I ached to be.

I remember mothers
(or so-called mothers)
snapping off ugly words
to curly-haired toddlers.

I remember mothers
(or so-called mothers)
sighing in exasperation,
ignoring bundles of angel on earth,
telling them to hush.

I remember seeing from a distance
the wonder of ten little curved fingers,
dimpled knuckles,
wrapped sweetly around a shopping cart handle.

I remember small voices saying,
“Momma, Momma,”
and wondering what unforgivable thing
I had done
to become unworthy of that name.

It has been sixteen years,
but I will never forget Mother’s Day empty-armed,
trying to smile politely,
running to the church bathroom,
weeping the long, hard, labor of grief
behind a locked door.

Because of this, I define motherhood
a little differently than most.

I define motherhood
as the womb of creativity
and breasts of recreativity
made full.

Motherhood is an idea fluttering and kicking,
compassion fluttering and kicking,
music birthed,
books nursed,
social healing held upright on wobble knees until it walks,
wounds of the heart and body dressed and bandaged.

Motherhood is entrance into dark rooms
where fright cries out from sleep,
and motherhood is chasing away the monsters.

Motherhood is the renaming of the rejected,
it is the embrace of the lonely,
it is a Saturday picnic packed for the hungry,
it is the rocking of the forgotten
in the lap of an old, sweet song.

Motherhood is the soft, feminine hand of love
on the cheek of the world’s need.

For children are born and tended
in a million different sorts of ways.

The earth cries out,
and here you are to answer.
You are maternity,
and you are beautiful.

Watch the other videos here: Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” and Sydney Carter’s “Friday Morning.”

Here’s the hilariously awesome synopsis:

Son of a Gun is a quirky, darkly comic, folk/rock musical that tells the story of Danderhauler Agamemnon Khrusty, the eldest of three sons of Winston and Elmadora Khrusty, and the heir apparent to the throne of the Khrusty family Appalachian band. Danderhauler’s life is dominated by the charismatic personality of his father, a highly- functioning, highly-entertaining alcoholic. When Danderhauler meets the love of his life, Lucy Sunshine, they conspire to free him of the burden of his father’s addiction, but the surprising news of Winston’s tongue cancer thwarts their plans. In exchange for Winston agreeing to have his tongue surgically removed, Danderhauler steps up as the new band leader. As the events that follow spiral out of control, Danderhauler clings to his love for Lucy to keep him upright. When even that window of hope is shattered, Danderhauler realizes that to save his own life another sort of surgical removal is required. He must find a way to confront both his dead father and his own demons. He does both by means of an old fashioned cowboy duel.

They only have a few days left to meet their goal. If you’d like to help support the project, here’s the link.

Check out Waterdeep’s website here.

The evening’s joyful exchange of music and humor and knowledge was nothing less, in the end, than the Kingdom come, the Kingdom made plainly visible in the present. It was present in the brother next to me, in the sister laughing across the room, in the theologian imagining the universe into order, in the musician creating aural spaces for the Spirit to move, in the brownies and chips offered on the table, in all of it the the presence of a King and a Kingdom was apparent and palpable. It was a blessing, in the most real and literal sense. I’m grateful to have been a part of it, and I’ll venture to guess that Bishop Wright is grateful for it as well. In fact, he told Thomas on the way back to the hotel that he had had “the most fun in a long time.”

And really, what could be better than that?

Chad Pennington emerged as the last guy standing after injuries plagued Marshall University’s football team at the quarterback position. Player after player went down and the unheralded freshman from Tennessee debuted. I was there at an early game, watching this guy throw passes that looked like they took ten years to get to the receivers. My verdict was in: this guy stinks, and he’ll never amount to anything in the football world. That was about 15 years ago.

A few days ago, Chad Pennington retired from the NFL after an eleven year career in which he was twice named the NFL’s comeback player of the year. He still has the highest completion percentage in the history of the NFL, making him the most accurate professional quarterback of all time. And professional takes on a fuller meaning with Pennington. He is universally praised, loved, and acknowledged as an ideal pro athlete. He worked hard and overachieved his entire career. Besides his intelligence and athletic gifts, he is known for class, dignity, charity, and other virtues that make a lasting reputation.

In college, he led Marshall to unheard of victories and became one of the most, if not the most, beloved quarterback the team has ever had. And that’s saying a lot at Marshall, which has had numerous great quarterbacks. Everyone in West Virginia feels like he belongs to our state, even though he is not originally from here. He is an adopted son and we are very proud of him. I admire him greatly, and despite my cheerless prognosis, I cheered him on for his entire career. His career features many highlights, one being that he was once a runner-up to Peyton Manning for the NFL’s MVP award. Playing through countless injuries, he left a mark on professional football that was all his own.

What about my early prediction, my dismissive reaction to his debut? I was, of course, dead wrong. I’m fairly knowledgeable about football, but I suspect no one is interested in hiring me as a talent scout. For Chad Pennington, it goes beyond his talent. What I couldn’t see at the time was his intelligence, character, class, work ethic, and determination. I counted him out without all the facts.

What if what I had said mattered? What if Chad had heard my dismissal, taken it as truth, and hung up his cleats?

There are people who don’t have access to all the facts about you. They may criticize and dismiss you based on a sampling of your efforts. Maybe they’re right, of course, in their evaluation (and it may help to hear them out). But don’t let critics write you off.

I still think Chad wasn’t that impressive when I saw him early on. He didn’t have a great arm. In fact, he never had a truly great arm. But his intelligence, will, and over-all character did more than compensate for whatever lack of talent he had. I think it’s safe to say there have been thousands of players with more natural talent. But it’s the same story over and over. The physical stats–your strong arm, height, speed, agility–don’t make you the best. Having enough talent is a given, after a certain point it becomes about work ethic, character, and other factors (see Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, or Matt Conner’s review here). Mostly, it’s about who works the hardest.

The same may be true of you and me. If we are called to do something and genuinely have a gift for it, then the main thing in our way is hard work. And the critics, if we let them be.

Of course, one of the great needs for discernment in our lives is in just this area. We need to know when some one is a critic and when some one is a counselor. We need counsel, and some of that will be critical. (The best help I’ve received in my writing has been very critical.) We should ask for wisdom from God, who gives generously.

Chad Pennington had more doubters than just me, and you have plenty of people lining up to tell you that your dream is not realistic. There are likely people itching to tell you the sample of your work they see defines you as a bust. These people often operate on a baseline of condemnation. They feel condemnation surrounding them and look for opportunities to share what they know so well. This is a very tempting mindset and is pretty much mankind’s default setting. It’s a mindset that must be argued against with vigor every day.

If you are a believer, the deep reality about you isn’t one of condemnation, but of acceptance and love. That doesn’t mean you will be an NFL quarterback, or the next C.S. Lewis. But you will be you, and that’s what the world needs. More precisely, it’s very likely what your community needs. And if you don’t play well at the local level, why export that to the world? Seek ye first to love and serve your family, your church, then see about what happens elsewhere. Leave it in God’s hands and work very, very hard.

Don’t hang up your cleats and don’t worry about “proving everyone wrong.” Let God be true and every man a liar. Christian vocation is about love and service, not revenge. Don’t make the condemning critics important enough in your heart for it to continue to be about them. Make it about God’s love, your calling, and a community that needs the work of your hands.