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The Art of Family: Rituals, Imagination, and Everyday Spirituality Gina Bria (1998, Dell Books) Traditions, rites, memories, rituals:  These are overwhelming to parents desiring to foster a nurturing home environment for their children — one of joy, playfulness, freedom to be who they (and we) are, common courtesy, respect, and unconditional love. Such big shoes to fill, and we know it. Family-creating, as author and anthropologist Gina Bria points out in her wonderfully articulate, and refreshingly non-judgmental book, The Art of Family, is indeed an art, and oftentimes art must be trudged through in order to get the right colors on the canvas, the right words on the page, the flowers in the correct garden soil and light. A family is a “little society” from which play, ritual, imagination and story all are reinjected into the contemporary home. In Bria’s own words, The Art of Family is “not a guide or manual to ‘achieving’ family [but] a book about applied hope and intelligence, a short definition of imagination. I hope this book and its stories will be a new imaginative friend to you, sparking new ideas, offering solace, giving rest.” Fulfilling the author’s expressed hope, my wife and I continue to pull this book from the shelves from time to time as a sort of reference, an encouragement, and something like a steady friend.

[Note: What follows is the piece I wrote for my session at Hutchmoot 2010.] This past summer, throughout the course of a week, six adults shared their personal stories with several hundred high school students attending the camp where I played music. Their stories ranged from sexual abuse, addictions (including pornography, alcohol, drugs), abandonment, and seeking a father’s love through athletic performance, to a young woman who used to cut herself in order to feel alive. While listening to such painfully real histories, I was deeply moved by the honesty and vulnerability of those six people. I also was profoundly moved by the work of redemption each of them experienced over the course of their lives at the hands of God, at the hands of His image bearers, within the alphabet of their chronicles as it was laid bare for all to see and to read. I heard author Barbara Brown Taylor speak on this subject in referencing media, online social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and our desire for genuine community. She said: “We have so many choices of stories to pay attention to; the risk is to choose stories that are too small. We bear one word – one narrative – on our soul; is that one word enough to save another soul?” The question then becomes to which stories should we give heed, to which should we give credence to in our day-to-day lives? Which stories will edify and help us further construct or understand our own narrative? As for me, I must pay closest attention to stories of hope, for hope is what I need most since it is so often found lacking and withering within me. If I ignore hope, or if I pretend not to care, I know full well the cavernous darkness, its jowls wide open, awaiting me. It’s no small irony that the songs I have written over the years have spilled over with this hope, even though I myself have struggled to cling to it or, at times, to believe anything good about myself, about the world, or even that God himself should dare call any of the scarred earth “good.” Perhaps it is catharsis – self-serving, though it may be – and a verbal reminder to my stubborn, willful self since I am the one soul who will sing that very song over and over again, even out of darkness, even out of light. I cannot speak of hope without thinking of the 1994 movie The Shawshank Redemption, in which the main character writes to fellow former prison-mate, “Remember that hope is a good thing, and a good thing never dies.” It is very much worth recalling that Jesus himself spoke and interacted with friends and strangers alike in the form of parables and stories. In doing so he edified people by posing questions to them in what might easily have been their greatest moment of shame or guilt at the hands of anyone less gracious: “Do you want to get well?”, he asked the crippled man at the Bethesda pool; to Peter & co., “Who do you say I am?”; to the accusing crowd gathered in front of the naked woman caught in the act of adultery, “Are any of you without sin? If so, cast the first stone.” Why did Jesus interact this way? Why not just call down swift and immediate judgment? Why not deliver words on a silver platter? Was it because the posing of a question requires a response? It takes two to share a story: a bearer and a listener. To listen is to hear, is to “see”, is to be moved, is to interact, is to be changed. Words, in all their quiet, humble power, make the impossible brim with possibility. Words are resilient. They can redeem. Words can edify, they can encourage. They can also cripple and devastate. But words, in and of themselves, are rarely enough; action must follow. “He who hears my words but ignores them is like a clanging cymbal.” The art of storytelling and the art of listening beg us to engage in our own lives as well as others’, to not ignore the inner groanings of our speechless heart or our basic human desire and need to belong. I recognize my story in author Frederick Buechner’s, and his suggestion that we “listen to our lives and to see it for the fathomless mystery it is” because, as he says, “all moments are key moments.” Buechner recognizes grace and redemption in the hubbub, skulduggery and decay of our fallen humanity. I was and still am being changed by Frederick Buechner, even some ten years after my first introduction to his work. He gave my own inner groanings and hidden secrets an alphabet, a language, from which to breathe, to speak and to make myself known. He drapes flesh on otherwise arcane, ghosts of characters long since passed from the earth. Biblical characters who once seemed such perfect people to me on paper (even in some of their obvious imperfections), I now see as seemingly ordinary men and women who, just like us, ate, drank, bled, laughed, cried, toiled, gave birth, gave alms, and gave up hope. God used the foolish then the way he still uses the foolish today. I think of examples like Jacob in Buechner’s The Son of Laughter: limping, panting and hip-whipped, Jacob dared wrestle with God, to go to the mat with him, and he found himself, his family, and later the world, changed forever by the event. I also think of an aging Adam seated fireside in his La-Z-Boy, taking a drag on a Marlboro, now reminiscing about that long-ago afternoon in the green, ripe orchard with that forbidden apple, a smooth-talking serpent and his beloved wife, Eve, in Buechner’s Peculiar Treasures. Buechner’s uncanny gift for reading between the lines and for taking musty, archaic characters off the mantle and bringing them back down to earth, affords me a mercifully graceful gift: the chance to relate to those lofty characters myself amid my own humanity, my own failings and occasional successes, and to realize that their humanity is not so different from my own, even now from across a vast expanse of time, culture and religiosity. But perhaps Buechner’s greatest gift to me is not in what he actually says, but what he does not say. He never forces me to believe or to think a certain way; he simply observes and reflects, leaving me the time, space, freedom and dignity to observe, ponder and absorb the picture myself. Never forceful, never obtuse, never condemning, never narrow-minded or shortsighted, but always vivid, poetic, genuine and with a beauty born out of humility, and a humility born of Beauty itself, Buechner allows for what many in the Church see as dichotomy: faith and doubt, light and dark, knowledge and mystery. It allows for that most dangerous of existences: the opportunity to be yourself, the fool God made you to be, and in that originality to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are never alone. This has been key in informing my own writing over the years. I am not called to preach or to condemn, nor am I to present my “message” on a silver platter or to spoon-feed it. I am to venture alongside those who will go me on the journey in an attempt to paint a picture, to convey a scene, however abstract or esoteric it may be, that life is much too short – too long for some – and far too treacherous to go about pretending that we, especially the Church, are entitled to a singular righteousness that has anything at all to do with our own merit. It seems to me that in offering the listener/reader the space to interpret a song – or any artistic endeavor, for that matter – themselves, I grant them the freedom, grace and dignity to employ the brain and heart God himself wove together and placed within us. To “write something that seems beautiful, lasting, and true”, as Buechner states in The Sacred Journey, is to take people on that journey. I hope to remind people that though they may feel alone in life, in their struggles, in their despair, in their darkness, even in their light, they are most assuredly not alone. None of us are. To believe that we are utterly alone is perhaps Satan’s most subtle, and therefore, greatest lie heaped upon man. The sharing of story defuses the human capacity for judgment, enabling us to respond rather than react. Story breeds empathy, and therefore mercy reminds me of the power of redemption, and healing reminds me I am not alone, softens my heart, ignites hope. There is always a flipside to every coin so long as we give ears and eyes to its telling. At the heart of everyone’s story is the narrative of redemption being spoken and uttered into the world, whether we realize it or not, whether we purpose it or not, whether it is alive or moribund in us. We don’t always live out of such knowledge, we curse it at times, we regret the kinship, but if we ultimately believe that God is a redeemer, then all of it – all our poor choices, the mistakes, laziness, sadness, overzealousness, hypocrisy – is ultimately being reclaimed, redeemed, and blessed. And in a kingdom where no lily of the field is overlooked, every moment is a hallowed moment, and every story is sacred, hallowed ground.

We just discovered this piece (thanks to Katy Bowser) by renowned painter Makoto Fujimura, adapted from his introduction to our friend Michael Card’s book on creativity, Scribbling in the Sand. Dear Young Artist: Remember your first love—how much you enjoyed creating as a child. If you ever lose that sense of joy, you will need to reflect on why you lost that spark. Of course, the craft of expression takes much “dying to self” and much discipline. A discipline of any form takes perseverance. But when we are going through a period of training, we must remember the reason for our training. Our journey needs to have a specific direction. Our direction need not be toward being successful and being famous. We need to start from your first love; what we cherish, what we are, and what we value. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” Read the rest at Makoto’s website, where you can also see some of his beautiful paintings.

The last installment of the Hutchmoot session given by Andy P. and me. The last post dug into the false self and its origins; this one continues the same thought and moves into a conclusion. A quote from a book by Dan Stone, The Rest of the Gospel (When the Partial Gospel Has Worn You Out): “The false self is a soul-based self. It is the soul operating independently of its Source. I don’t want to minimize the vital role of the soul in God’s economy. The life of God through us must be expressed through the soul. But His life is expressed through a soul dependent upon its Source, not acting independently of it.” “As an unbeliever our spirit was dead to God, so we became dominated by our soul (psuche in Greek). Our soul was turned toward the world, getting its direction and validation from the external environment. We were a natural man, as Paul called it, living a soul-based (psyche in English) life.” “Somewhere along the way we got saved and our sins were forgiven. And we wanted to live this thing called the Christian life, but we didn’t know how to live out of our new spirit. So we fell back upon our only other resource: the false self. It knew how to get along in the world. We just made a few adjustments to fit the Christian scene. We were sitting ducks for the how-to books, which told us how to manipulate the false self to make it more effective in getting along.” “Although having the Holy Spirit in our spirit, we didn’t know about the Holy Spirit living the life of Christ through us. So our mode of operation was the same as for the unbeliever: self-reliance. That’s what the false self is: our attempt to independently operate our own lives. As Christians, the false self even tries to do it for the glory of God.” George MacDonald expresses a similar thought this way: “It is only where a man is at one with God that he can do the right thing or take the right way. Whatever springs from any other source than the spirit that dwelt in Jesus, is of sin, and works to thwart the divine will.” Another one from GMac: “The law itself is infinite, reaching to such delicacies of action, that the man who tries most will be the man most aware of defeat. We are not made for law, but for love. Love is law, because it is infinitely more than law. It is of an altogether higher region than law – is, in fact, the creator of law.” And again: “In order to fulfill the commonest law…we must rise into a loftier region altogether, a region that is above law, because it is spirit and life and makes the law.” Jesus states in Matthew 5:20, “For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.” He then goes on to make the Law utterly impossible apart from the Spirit of God living in us, empowering us. C.S. Lewis wrote: “God made us; invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” I have gone on to read many different writers, but Lewis and MacDonald remain two of my most cherished influences. Lewis took me by the hand as an emotionally troubled child and, through fantasy, showed me what God is like, what love is, what men are meant to be, and the ugliness of evil.  MacDonald continues to  mentor me into a better understanding who I really am in Christ – a dwelling place of God.

I recently discovered this creepy old George MacDonald poem and the painting that inspired it. It may take reading it a few times aloud to get what he’s saying (it did for me, anyway), which I recommend doing with all poetry. So you don’t think it’s all gloom, here’s a snippet from stanza eleven: “God is in heaven–yes, everywhere; And Love, the all-shining, will kill Despair.” Enjoy the poem (if you dare). from The Threefold Cord: Poems by Three Friends: edited by George MacDonald (1883) Suggested by a drawing of Thomas Moran, the American painter. I. THIS must be the very night! The moon knows it!–and the trees– They stand straight upright, Each a sentinel drawn up, As if they dared not know Which way the wind might blow! The very pool, with dead gray eye, Dully expectant, feels it nigh, And begins to curdle and freeze! And the dark night, With its fringe of light, Holds the secret in its cup! II. What can it be, to make The poplars cease to shiver and shake, And up in the dismal air Stand straight and stiff as the human hair When the human soul is dizzy with dread– All but those two that strain Aside in a frenzy of speechless pain, Though never a wind sends out a breath To tunnel the foggy rheum of death? What can it be has power to scare The full-grown moon to the idiot stare Of a blasted eye in the midnight air? Something has gone wrong; A scream will come tearing out ere long! III. Still as death, Although I listen with bated breath! Yet something is coming, I know–is coming; With an inward soundless humming, Somewhere in me or in the air– I cannot tell–but its foot is there! Marching on to an unheard drumming, Something is coming–coming– Growing and coming; And the moon is aware– Aghast in the air At the thing that is only coming With an inward soundless humming, And an unheard spectral drumming! IV. Nothing to see and nothing to hear! Only across the inner sky The wing of a shadowy thought flits by, Vague and featureless, faceless, drear– Only a thinness to catch the eye: Is it a dim foreboding unborn, Or a buried memory, wasted and worn As the fading frost of a wintry sigh? Anon I shall have it!–anon!–it draws nigh! A night when–a something it was took place That drove the blood from that scared moon-face! Hark! was that the cry of a goat, Or the gurgle of water in a throat? Hush! there is nothing to see or hear, Only a silent something is near; No knock, no footsteps three or four, Only a presence outside the door! See! the moon is remembering–what? The wail of a mother-left, lie-alone brat? Or a raven sharpening its beak to peck? Or a cold blue knife and a warm white neck? Or only a heart that burst and ceased For a man that went away released? I know not–know not, but something is coming Somehow back with an inward humming. V. Ha! Look there! Look at that house– Forsaken of all things–beetle and mouse! Mark how it looks! It must have a soul! It looks, it looks, though it cannot stir; See the ribs of it–how they stare! Its blind eyes yet have a seeing air! It knows it has a soul! Haggard it hangs o’er the slimy pool, And gapes wide open as corpses gape: It is the very murderer! The ghost has modelled himself to the shape Of this drear house all sodden with woe, Where the deed was done, long, long ago, And filled with himself his new body full– To haunt for ever his ghastly crime, And see it come and go– Brooding around it like motionless time, With a mouth that gapes, and eyes that yawn Blear and blintering and full of the moon, Like one aghast at a hellish dawn. –It is coming, coming soon! VI. For, ever and always, when round the tune Grinds on the barrel of organ-Time, The deed is done;–and it comes anon– True to the roll of the clock-faced moon, True to the ring of the spheric chime, True to the cosmic rhythm and rime; Every point, as it first went on, Will come and go till all is gone; And palsied with horror from garret to core, The house cannot shut its gaping door; Its burst eye stares as if trying to see, And it leans as if settling heavily, Settling heavy with sickness dull: It also is hearing the soundless humming Of the wheel that is turning–the thing that is coming. On the naked rafters of its brain, Gaunt and wintred, see the train Of gossiping, scandal-mongering crows, That watch, all silent, with necks a-strain, Wickedly knowing, with heads awry, And the sharpened gleam of a cunning eye– Watch, through the cracks of the ruined skull, How the evil business goes! –Beyond the eyes of the cherubim, Beyond the ears of the seraphim, Outside, forsaken, in the dim Phantom-haunted chaos grim, He stands with the deed going on in him! VII. O winds, winds! that lurk and peep Under the edge of the moony fringe! O winds, winds! up and sweep; Up, and blow and billow the air, Billow the air with blow and swinge; Rend me this ghastly house of groans; Rend and scatter the skeleton’s bones Over the deserts and mountains bare; Blast and hurl and shiver aside Nailed sticks and mortared stones; Clear the phantom, with torrent and tide, Out of the moon and out of my brain, That the light may fall shadowless in again! VIII. But alas! then the ghost O’er mountain and coast Would go roaming, roaming; and never was swine, That, grubbing and talking with snork and whine On Gadarene mountains, had taken him in, But would rush to the lake to unhouse the sin For any charnel This ghost is too carnal; There is no volcano, burnt out and cold, Whose very ashes are gray and old, But would cast him forth in reviving flame, To blister the sky with a smudge of shame. IX. Is there no help–none anywhere, Under the earth, or above the air? –Come, come, sad woman, whose tender throat Has a red-lipped mouth that can sing no note! Child, whose midwife, the third grim Fate, Shears in hand, thy coming did wait! Father, with blood-bedabbled hair! Mother, all withered with love’s despair! Come, broken heart, whatever thou be, Hasten to help this misery! Thou wast only murdered, or left forlorn; He is a horror, a hate, a scorn! Come, if out of the holiest blue That the sapphire throne shines through; For pity come, though thy fair feet stand Next to the elder-band; Fling thy harp on the hyaline, Hurry thee down the spheres divine; Come, and drive those ravens away; Cover his eyes from the pitiless moon; Shadow his brain from her stinging spray; Droop around him, a tent of love, An odour of grace, a fanning dove; Walk through the house with the healing tune Of gentle footsteps; banish the shape Remorse calls up, thyself to ape; Comfort him, dear, with pardon sweet; Cool his heart from its burning heat With the water of life that lakes the feet Of the throne of God, and the holy street. X. O God, he is but a living blot, Yet he lives by thee–for if thou wast not, They would vanish together, self-forgot, He and his crime:–one breathing blown From thy spirit on his would all atone, Scatter the horror, and bring relief In an amber dawn of holy grief: God, give him sorrow; arise from within: Art thou not in him, silence in din, Stronger than anguish, deeper than sin? XI. Why do I tremble, a creature at bay! ‘Tis but a dream–I drive it away. Back comes my breath, and my heart again Pumps the red blood to my fainting brain Released from the nightmare’s nine-fold train; God is in heaven–yes, everywhere; And Love, the all-shining, will kill Despair. To the wall’s blank eyeless space I turn the picture’s face. XII. But why is the moon so bare, up there? And why is she so white? And why does the moon so stare, up there– Strangely stare, out of the night? Why stand up the poplars That still way? And why do those two of them Start astray? And out of the black why hangs the gray? Why does it hang down so, I say, Over that house, like a fringed pall Where the dead goes by in a funeral? –Soul of mine, Thou the reason canst divine:– Into thee the moon doth stare With pallid, terror-smitten air: Thou, and the Horror lonely-stark, Outcast of eternal dark, Are in nature same and one, And thy story is not done! So let the picture face thee from the wall, And let its white moon stare. (End.) ———————– What do you guys make of the last several stanzas? I know what I think, but I’d love to hear your take on it.

Randall Goodgame and a whole passel of other folks have been in the studio this past month putting the finishing touches on A Slugs and Bugs Christmas. I know Randall is excited about how the whole thing has come together, and today we’re giving you a first listen to one of the finished songs. If you’d like to be a patron of the record, act fast–tomorrow is officially the last day to sign up. “Gingerbread House” from A Slugs and Bugs Christmas

[Note from the editor: This post constitutes the Rabbit Room’s 1000th post! Celebration is in order. Dance, cheer, toast your friends, and then come back and read this most excellent post by Jonathan Rogers.] “It’s around here somewhere, boys,” I said, kicking at the pine straw. The lot was still vacant, but it was hardly identifiable, overtaken as it was by brush and vine and scrubby pine saplings. It had been a full twenty-five years since I had been there; but still, how does a concrete house slab just disappear? I imagined eager souvenir hounds chipping it apart and carrying it away piece by piece. But that seemed unlikely. Could we be in the wrong spot? I sighted with a surveyor’s eye across the playing fields to the back exit of the school. No, this was the place. It was past lunchtime, and I could see that my boys were losing interest. “Keep an eye out for broken teeth,” I said, “hanks of hair—that sort of thing.” They gave skeptical looks. This wasn’t working out the way I had pictured it. How many times had I told the boys about the Slab? How many times had I gone over the speech I would give when I finally took them to see the place for themselves. I should have sussed things out before bringing them cold like this. There we were, and the Slab was nowhere to be found. It seemed a shame, however, not to give my speech. “Boys,” I said, “this ground was once stained with the blood of my enemies.” Was that an eye-roll I saw? Perhaps I was overstating the case. I started again: “Such deeds have been performed on the ground where we stand,” I said. “How many wrongs have been avenged on the Slab? How many boys have stepped onto the Slab and walked away—or were carried away—as men?” I looked into the faces of my sons—eleven, twelve, thirteen—and it dawned on me that I was not much bigger than they when I had last been in this place. *** Separated from campus by a gravel lane and a red clay ditch, the Slab was the venue for big after-school fistfights betweenWarner Robins Junior High students. There were spontaneous fights, of course, that popped up and played out as suddenly as summer storms, but the big, premeditated fights took place at the Slab, supposedly beyond the jurisdiction of Mr. Beck, the Assistant Principal. No matter now many times Mr. Beck crossed the ditch and the gravel lane to drag combatants back by the ear, we persisted in our belief that Slab fighters enjoyed an off-shore immunity that hallway fighters didn’t. A hallway fight was simply a matter of action and reaction; the psychology was straightforward, centered around the fight-or-flight response. But a code duello obtained in a Slab fight, beginning with a challenge issued and accepted: “Meet me at the Slab.” In a Slab fight, that lapse between challenge and fisticuff—usually hours or a day or two—brought a whole new dynamic to bear. No utterance spread through the student population faster than “Meet me at the Slab.” A Slab fight almost always had an audience, and often a large one. The fights were usually scheduled to start as soon after the 3:15 bell as possible. Spectators who rode later buses were often able to see the whole thing and still get to the bus line on time. Many bus-riders, however, made arrangements on Slab-fight days to walk home with friends who lived nearby. As often as not, potential combatants had time to think better of a decision made in hot-headed haste, and the fight never happened. Would-be onlookers were left to derive such entertainment as they could from the opponents’ face-saving convolutions, which were a kind of sport themselves. (“Oh, you thought I was talking about your mother…well it was obviously just a big misunderstanding…”) Of those Slab-fights that actually did survive the preliminaries and resulted in two boys squared off in the vacant lot, a high proportion resulted in more talking, some cautious circling, and a foot-shuffling headlock, if that. But one Slab-fight during my tenure at Warner Robins Junior High was legendary. I forget the details of how it started, but one way or another my friend Mike felt it was his duty to defend the honor of a girl who had been insulted by a boy named Rusty. Mike issued the challenge. Rusty accepted it. And they agreed to meet at the Slab the next Wednesday, five days thence. The fight quickly took on great symbolic significance. Rusty was one of the “hoods” who terrorized us from the day we entered seventh grade. Even in junior high they drank and smoked and put boys like me in trash cans. Rusty, to be fair, was one of the more agreeable of the hoods but there was a wildness in his close-set eyes that made me think he was capable of anything. Mike, on the other hand—ah, Mike. One couldn’t imagine a finer champion for the “nice” kids. He was big and good-looking, an honors student, a star football player, the beloved son of married parents. Michelangelo’s David statue has always put me in mind of Mike. If he couldn’t whip Rusty, none of us nice kids could. Which was exactly what I feared. I feared that Mike would step onto the Slab and get beaten to a pulp. The hoods’ oppression would go unchecked—and for how long? Through the rest of junior high, for sure. I understood that Rusty and his cronies weren’t going to be running the world when we grew up. But they certainly seemed to be running Warner Robins Junior High, and I feared what would happen if Mike failed in his one-man rebellion against the status quo. Would the hoods clamp down all the harder? For five days, every lunchroom and recess conversation was devoted to odds-making for the upcoming fight. “Mike’s going to win. Of course he’s going to win. Look how much bigger he is.” “Okay, so he’s bigger. But how many fights has he been in? Rusty’s cagey. He’ll mop up the Slab with Mike.” “But Mike has The Right on his side. That has to count for something. Doesn’t that count for something?” By the time Wednesday finally rolled around, Warner Robins Junior High was whipped into a frenzy. Who could focus on school when such a momentous event loomed on the other side of the 3:15 bell? I, for my part, was so distracted that I was late for Math and was assigned fifteen minutes’ detention after school. It was a worst-case scenario. Mike had agreed to let me be his second second. Our friend Ben was the real second; his chief duty was to carry Mike’s bookbag to and from the Slab–and, I think, to inform Mike’s family should the worst happen. In the event that Ben couldn’t perform his duties, I was supposed to stand in. But how could I stand in if I was in detention? I spoke with Ben. “Is there any way you could slow things down this afternoon?” I asked. “I’ve got detention until 3:30. I don’t want to miss the fight.” Ben shook his head slowly, gravely. “I’ll do what I can,” he said, “but I can’t promise anything.” When 3:30 arrived, I leapt from my desk and sprinted down the hallway. I burst through the back exit, the one nearest the Slab, hoping I could still catch the fight. But as my eyes adjusted to the brightness, I saw a whole horde of junior high schoolers tearing across the playing fields back in my direction. And at the front of the crowd loped Ben, swinging a book bag in either hand, his head thrown back for joy. I caught him by the arm and swung him around. “What happened?” I asked. “We won! We won!” Ben whooped, as if he or I had done something. Boys and girls blurred past in their haste to get back to where they were supposed to be all along. “Mike threw one punch and Rusty went down and stayed down. One punch!” I mostly felt relief. I was genuinely afraid that Rusty would hurt Mike. I felt exhilaration too, as if Mike’s triumph over Rusty were a triumph over oppressors everywhere. And I felt let down. One punch? Really? And I was in detention? I looked back toward the Slab. Mr. Beck clutched Mike’s collar in one hand and Rusty’s collar in the other and was marching them across the gravel lane, down into the red clay ditch, and up the near side. Mike was grinning and rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. Rusty, red-faced and surly, kept his eyes on the ground. Ben and I buzzed with unspent energy. We rode the bus to my house, where we beat the tar out of one another with boxing gloves. But after Ben went home, the excitement of the afternoon gave way to a sadness that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But the gist of it was this: I knew already that somewhere between boyhood and manhood, the Rustys of the world would give way to the Mikes. I just didn’t expect it to come so soon. Eighth grade wasn’t over yet, and there was a good chance that Rusty was on the wrong side of his high-water mark. In Houston County, the punishment for fighting was three to five days at Pearl Stevens Alternative School—Pearl, as we called it. Pearl’s permanent population was a mix of career delinquents and students who were too deeply disabled to make it in a regular school. It was an especially cruel and insensitive arrangement, lumping the system’s most vulnerable students with its meanest. I think it has been abandoned by now. Into that mix was thrown the short-termers like Mike and Rusty, for whom Pearl was a terror. It was customary for boys who went Pearl for fighting to come back buddies, their new friendship forged and hardened in the fires of adversity, like combat veterans from the same unit. Pearl is the kind of place where you can use a friend, and if the only person you know is the person you were fighting on the Slab last week–well, he’ll have to do. By the time they returned to the junior high, any animosity between Mike and Rusty was entirely spent. As I remember it, they even ate lunch together from time to time. *** “What’s this?” my son asked. “Is this part of the Slab?” He was poking a stick at a piece of broken asphalt protruding from a tuft of grass. “That’s asphalt,” I said. “We’re looking for concrete. Keep looking.” The more we looked, however, the more asphalt we found, split and broken by twenty-five years’ growth of vegetation. We never found the first piece of concrete. Then it occurred to me. The spot we called the Slab wasn’t a slab at all. It was a patch of blacktop, maybe a bit of driveway. Another realization dawned: for all I had talked and heard about the Slab, I had never actually been there. I had seen the vacant lot from across the way, but I had never been to see the Slab itself. I was a nice kid, after all, and never wanted any trouble with Mr. Beck. The showdown between Mike and Rusty marked the first time my interest in a Slab fight had overmatched my desire to keep my nose clean. And even that had been thwarted by my math teacher…though, if you want to know the truth, it’s entirely possible that I drew detention on purpose so as to have a face-saving excuse for not crossing the ditch and the gravel lane to the wildness and danger of the Slab. I already knew that the Slab’s significance in my imagination and memory had been exaggerated. I now realized that it was more than exaggerated: it was more or less fabricated. I picked up a piece of asphalt and held it in my hand—a little chunk of my own personal mythology. And I made a new speech for my boys, a shorter one: “Sic transit gloria mundi.”

The next installment of the Hutchmoot talk by Andy P. and me. The last post introduced the idea of the true self as found in the works of Lewis and MacDonald. In this post we come to the dark side. In my two favorite works of George MacDonald, Lilith and Phantastes, I found the flip side of the coin of identity: the false self, an illusory self pumped up by the great Shadow. In Lilith, the character Odu speaks of this great Shadow and says, “‘He was a shadow….He came down the hill, very black…He was nothing but blackness…He came on as if he would walk over us. But before he reached us, he began to spread and spread, and grew bigger and bigger, till at last he was so big that he went out of our sight, and we saw him no more, and then he was upon us!…He was all black through between us, and we could not see one another, and then he was inside us… I felt…bad. I was not Odu any more – not the Odu I knew. I wanted to tear Sozo to pieces – not really, but like!’ He turned and hugged Sozo. ‘It wasn’t me, Sozo,’ he sobbed. “Really, deep down, it was Odu, loving you always! And Odu came up, and knocked Naughty away. I grew sick, and thought I must kill myself to get out of the black. Then came a horrible laugh that had heard my think, and it set the air trembling about me. And then I suppose I ran away, but I did not know I had run away until I found myself running, fast as I could…I would have stopped but never thought of it…Then I knew that I had run away from a shadow that wanted to be me and wasn’t, and that I was the Odu that loved Sozo. It was the shadow that got into me, and hated him from inside me; it was not my own self me!'” Odu recognizes and differentiates his real self from this false self; “It was not my own self me,” echoing Paul’s statement in Romans 7, “When I sin it is no longer I that sins, but sin which is dwelling in me.” In Phantastes the same idea is similarly expressed. “Shadow of me!”  I said, “which art not me, but which represents thyself to me as me, here I may find a shadow of light which will devour thee, the shadow of darkness! Here I may find a blessing which will fall on thee as a curse, and damn thee to the blackness whence thou hast emerged unbidden!” Going back to Narnia for a moment, we can see this same conception of the self in Eustace, who has turned into a dragon through sleeping on a dragon’s hoard and thinking greedy, dragonish thoughts.  Through seeing the horror he has become, and hating it, he truly repents, and begins to make himself as useful as he can as a dragon. Finally Aslan comes to him one night and leads him to a pool. The dragon Eustace goes to get in, but Aslan says, “First you must undress.” Eustace goes to undress himself by scratching off his old skin like a snake. But he scratches off and steps out of his skin three times only to find he is still a dragon each time. Aslan says, “You will have to let me undress you.” Eustace says, “The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off…and there it was lying there on the grass…And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me…and threw me into the water.” Lewis echoes this again in Mere Christianity: “The point is, He wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble – delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having got rid of all the silly nonsense about your dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you humble in order ot make this moment possible: trying to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-dress in which we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are. I wish I had got a bit further with humility myself: if I had, I could probably tell you more about the relief, the comfort, of taking the fancy-dress off – getting rid of the false self, with all its ‘Look at me’ and ‘Aren’t I a good boy?’ and all its posing and posturing. To get even near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.” I have found this same idea in other writers, as well as biblically in the idea of the old man and new man.

A lot has happened with JJ Heller in the two years since we reviewed her last album, Painted Red. JJ and Dave’s daughter, Lucy, was born a couple months after the album released, and then around this time last year, a contestant on the hit TV show So You Think You Can Dance decided to use her song “Your Hands” as her audition music. Turns out having your song played on a show that has millions of viewers – 6.8 million that night – is a good way for more people to discover your music. Because of the subsequent radio success of “Your Hands” – it spent 24 weeks on Billboard Magazine’s Christian Radio chart – they decided to delay the release of a new acoustic record they were planning on releasing and head back into the studio to flesh out some of those songs with more production, as well as adding a couple more songs. As with their last four albums, When I’m With You was engineered and produced here in Nashville by Mitch Dane, but this time around they asked Ben Shive to co-produce besides playing keys, bringing his great ear for melody and memorable hooks to the production, resulting in their best sounding album to date. Andy Osenga is back, joining Dave on acoustic and electric guitars, and Paul Eckberg returns to play drums, with Tony Lucido on bass. JJ’s music has always been notable for her great melodies and the way her vocals seem to float effortlessly above the instrumentation, and this album is no exception. The title song, with a melody that is stuck in your head for days after you hear it, was written for their daughter and is a touching account of how the world looks different when you’re holding a child in your arms, someone looking to you for love and attention, completely dependent upon you: When I hold you in my arms, Love, / something changes / It’s the strangest feeling / The things that used to matter, / they don’t matter to me // When I see you, / and you’re smiling, / how my heart aches / So full it is about to break / You make me believe in love // This album, more than JJ’s other releases, puts love songs front and center, with at least four of the songs on the topic, including Tell It Again, Boat Song, Love Can Make You New, and Until You Came Along. A couple of these, the ones I’m guessing are autobiographical, provide a nice contrast to the kind of love songs that one normally hears, songs that talk more about puppy love or first attraction – a good topic to write about, to be sure, but we need love songs that go deeper than that. These songs are the kind of love songs that could only be written after almost eight years of marriage, containing a maturity to them that is both a tribute to Dave and JJ’s marriage and a noteworthy example for younger couples. Dave and JJ are good storytellers, and this time around, they spend some time sharing the stories of others. Olivianna tells the story of a little girl they heard about who died eleven minutes after being born, and Control describes the struggle of someone who turned to cutting themselves to deal with their pain (The cut is deep, but never deep enough for me / It doesn’t hurt enough to make me forget / One moment of relief is never long enough / to keep the voices in my head / from stealing my peace). No Fight Left continues on the same theme as Control with a realization that maybe admitting that you can’t make it on your own is the best place to be: There is no fight left on the inside / But maybe that’s where I should be / I’ve given up trying / I’m giving it all to you. // Their new radio single, What Love Really Means, is an updated version of a song they wrote and first recorded five years ago. I think it is one of the best songs they’ve written, and it’s certainly one that has generated a lot of feedback from listeners who find much needed hope in the lyrics. Each verse tells the story of someone desperate for love, desperate for someone who will look past mistakes they have made and truly care about them: He cries in the corner where nobody sees / He’s the kid with the story / no one would believe / He prays every night, / “Dear God won’t you please, / could you send someone here / who will love me?” // Who will love me for me / Not for what I have done / or what I will become / Who will love me for me / ‘Cause nobody has shown me what love / What love really means // The song both points to the source of love and offers a reminder that we, you and me, are the hands and feet of Christ in the world, that the way Love is made tangible is in the way we care for the hurting. Besides releasing What Love Really Means to radio, they also turned it into their first music video, shot here in Nashville recently. And after just three weeks on youtube, it has already been viewed more than 130,000 times. When I’m With You releases this week, and you can buy it, and JJ’s other albums, at her website, www.jjheller.com, or on iTunes.

Jason Gray might be “new” but his music video career is even newer. Check out the video of his new single co-starring Evie Coates and her workshop, “The Hatch.” (If you like the song, don’t be shy about letting your local radio station know.) Check out Jason’s music in the Rabbit Room store.

This continues the series of posts on the Hutchmoot talk by Andy P. and me. The last post, beginning my part, spoke of the inconsolable longing which Lewis awakened in my heart with Narnia. By my mid twenties I had read nearly all of the works of Lewis. I read and reread The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Mere Christianity, Till We Have Faces, God in the Dock, and most of the others. In The Great Divorce I saw people I knew, and myself, in the ghosts from the Grey Town. Complainers, self-justifiers,  self-pitiers, hanging on to offenses and illusions from their past; since they lived by illusions, they had become illusions themselves. They refused to be their real selves God made them to be, became caught up in world, flesh, and devil, and eventually lost their ability to be real at all.  This idea of the false self and the true self runs as a common thread through the works of Lewis and George MacDonald. In Perelandra, as the demon-possessed scientist Weston does his best to tempt the pure Queen to disobey by filling her mind with inflated and melodramatic views of herself, Lewis writes, “The external, and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy’s true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.” In my mid twenties I began to seek out the works of George MacDonald because Lewis said, “He was my master.” Lewis wrote that Phantastes “baptised my imagination. But MacDonald disturbed me at first. I had carried a legalistic concept of God in my early years which culminated in a nine month stint in a very legalistic church at around the age of seventeen. I longed for God to be more like Aslan. Nearly a decade later when I encountered MacDonald, I had traded the legalistic God for a more biblical God I could trust. By then I was trusting God to take care of me financially  via Malachi 3 and Matthew 6, and I trusted Him to get me to Heaven through Christ. In short, I was believing in a  God of grace and love but not one who required holiness. At the time I didn’t believe it was possible to be holy; I believed Jesus died merely to pay my sin debt so I could go to Heaven when I die. By the time I was beginning to read MacDonald, I had long since learned that I couldn’t ever be good enough to pass muster. MacDonald’s constant talk of obedience, of doing what Jesus said to do, tore at the depths of me. He stirred up what seemed an ancient sense of inadequacy. I would read him for awhile and set the book down, feeling agitated inside. He writes of Jesus in Unspoken Sermons Series II, “It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in him, if you do not do anything he tells you.”  He struck at the heart of some of the  things I had been taught – the lie that mental assent to a set of facts about God, about Christ, was the same as relying on God Himself. I began to find through MacDonald that true faith and action were inseparable, that obedience was just another word for Faith, that real faith will always bear fruit in our action. He wrote, “It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ.” Although at the time I struggled with MacDonald’s unrelenting emphasis on obedience, paradoxically it was through MacDonald I began to find that the  righteousness of Christ is at the heart of a redeemed man; that Christ in the man is the root and the source of fruit in a true man. In study I began to find the Word of God supports this. I had long believed the opposite, that even as the redeemed, we were at the root depraved and sinful, and that only through physical death would we be holy, so I had given up. But MacDonald says, “Of what use then is the law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth – to waken in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence…of God in us, requires of us – to let us know, in part by failure, that the purest effort of will of which we are capable cannot lift us up even to the abstaining of wrong to our neighbor.” Unspoken Sermons, Series One MacDonald writes in Unspoken Sermons Series Three, “The Christ in us is our own true nature made blossom in us by the Lord, whose life is the light of men that it may become the life of men.” This “Christ in the man,” for MacDonald, is the source and ground of our real  identity. MacDonald’s constant prompts to obey God, to do what Jesus Christ said to do, are the starting point to finding that real identity. For MacDonald, “Everyone who desires to follow the Master has the spirit of the Master, and will receive more, that he may follow closer, nearer, in his very footsteps.” This echoes Ephesians 5:8-10,  “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), finding out what is acceptable to the Lord.” This new self, or true self, that we really are and are meant to live by is a consistent theme in MacDonald’s work. For MacDonald, salvation means Christ has given himself to us as our inner wellspring of righteousness, and to be true is to live by that trueness – our humanity indwelt by and in willing cooperation with his Deity.

If you’re a Rabbit Room regular, then Jill Phillips and Andy Gullahorn should be common names that display on your iPod or iTunes. Both songwriters continue to release albums year after year that become important for the spiritual journey for many of us — an old friend reminding us of what is true amidst a culture that lies to us daily. Now, the duo turn their attention to the holiday season to bring an unexpected Christmas release that should avoid the holiday cliches and cheese that Andy hates so much. It’s just easier to let Jill explain. The Rabbit Room: The new release is going to be a Christmas album. Obviously the holiday music category is already quite stocked, so did you hesitate to do a project like this in the past? And what makes this the right time? Jill Phillips: I think we felt that way for so long and that’s why it’s taken us so long to do it. We’ve had people telling us since I started 12 years ago, ‘Oh, you should do a Christmas record.’ It was always, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Then when Andrew’s [Peterson] tour became a big part of our Advent season, people would still say, ‘Oh, you should do a Christmas record?’ And we’re thinking, ‘No way.’ [Laughs] It just always felt opportunistic, or not like the kind of thing that would be our first priority. But I do love Christmas music. I really, really love it. During Advent season, I just really enjoy listening to it. I love being on a tour that’s been a part of my own worship during that month of December. That’s become such a tradition for us. But the flooding and the damage in May sucked up the money that we’d been saving for my record. We felt we needed to postpone that for a while, but I also felt like I was creatively dying. [Laughs] I’d been in mom-land for a really long time. It’s great and I’m grateful for it, but I felt I had to do something that was creative outside of the bounds of parenting. So Andy and I began to brainstorm together on what we could both work on in our own studio that would appeal to us and that we could get done in the time crunch we were under. And we kept coming back to the holiday project. It’s what we did with Kingdom Come a few years ago, to work on something in our house together. He is not a Christmas music or holiday music kind of guy, so I knew that it would take a different slant and be a very interesting project. I knew it wouldn’t be your typical Christmas record. It would be more centered on the church year with some traditional things thrown in. It would be acoustic and organic and produced a bit more like the Kingdom Come record. The Rabbit Room: How many songs did you come up with? Jill: Maybe 30 or 35 that we thought might potentially work. We didn’t want to do something just to keep it interesting. I think that’s so annoying. We weren’t going to take every Christmas song that’s been around for ages and put it in a minor key or do something weird. We didn’t want to do that. But we also didn’t want to do something that has been done. What we tried to do is choose songs that wouldn’t be the expected person to sing that song. What would it sound like for Andy to sing his version of “O Holy Night?” What would it sound like to hear an acoustic-only version of “Christmastime is Here,” since it’s only been done on piano? It’s not anything too crazy and it’s true to us and what we find interesting. The Rabbit Room: Is there a most pleasant surprise? Jill: Yeah, the thing we were both least excited about was doing a song that was more recognizable and traditional. We had three original songs and some that were reworked hymns. So we chose “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and I thought, ‘This might be the snoozer of the record, the one that’s most boring.’ But the arrangement that Andy pulled off is one of my favorites. It really is one of the best on the record, and I wasn’t expecting that. The Rabbit Room: Can you talk about the originals? Where do they come from and what do they speak to? Jill: The first one was for City on a Hill, the compilation put together by Steve Hindalong. He’s a friend of ours and he asked us to try to write a Christmas song to pitch for that record. We did and they liked it, but for whatever reason, it didn’t end up on the record. So we had this Christmas song that we both really loved that had been sitting around for years. We’ve never had an opportunity to do anything with it. Then Andy had written a song with Jason Gray that you might have heard at Hutchmoot that he wrote about a short story by Walt Wangerin, Jr. I love that song. I absolutely love that song, so he put a version of it on the record. Finally, we worked with this old hymn, “Nations That Long In Darkness Walked,” that not a lot had been done with and we put that to music. So there were a couple of different ways those original songs came about. We also did a more obscure Advent hymn–it’s not an original–called “Once In Royal David’s City” that’s really beautiful, but nobody else really does it. So we did that one. We tried to pull originals from things that were not done very often as well as things more recognizable. The Rabbit Room: That has to be fun to uncover a gem like that. Jill: Yes, I’ve only heard one person do that one and it was Sufjan Stevens and he did an amazing version of it. But he also did a Christmas record that had 40 songs on it or something. [Laughs] The Rabbit Room: Yeah, the five-song EP project. Jill: Yeah, I think he did every song that is out there, and it’s kind of fun to listen to that. But this whole journey has been surprisingly fun. I think Andy is having fun as well. He did this bluegrassy version of “In The Bleak Midwinter” and I just loved the way it’s been turning out. It’s been really fun to be creative, yet at the same time, we can do it quickly. We don’t have to come up with 12 new songs. It’s been fun to interpret the songs and see what we want to do with them. The Rabbit Room: You mentioned the time crunch a few times, so what does that mean? Can you explain that more? Jill: Sure. We were hoping to start my record sometime in early summer and have it done before we left on Andrew’s Christmas tour this year. We’ve learned that that’s a good time for us to release records. It’s what works for us. The kids are back in school in the fall and for whatever reason, that’s the cycle that tends to work. But with the flooding, we were overwhelmed, not only with the things that needed to be done, but we were overwhelmed financially. It was just thousands and thousands and thousands in home repairs we weren’t expecting. We lost everything in our basement from the HVAC to the hot water heater to the washer and dryer–everything that was in the basement. Even though we had insurance and a lot of it was covered, there was still a plenty that wasn’t covered. It pushed everything back and making a record just takes time. You don’t think that it does. You think you can go in there and just knock it out, but the scheduling, the logistics, the finding the studio, child care–it all becomes a challenge to turn out a record quickly. I think that’s why Andrew and the guys just left for two weeks. They left their families for two weeks and that wasn’t super-exciting, but they knew that what they could do in two weeks of isolated time up there would equal what they could do in two months at home. So Andy and I didn’t have that luxury this fall. It was nice to have something where we didn’t have to put finishing touches on all of our songs or wonder which ones we were going to keep. We were working with three or four originals and then just finding the other songs. That was really fun in a different way. The Rabbit Room: If you guys continue to be a part of Behold the Lamb of God, I assume this means your own Christmas music and release won’t get a lot of support? Jill: Yeah, we thought about that. It would be hard to fit it in unless we did it around Thanksgiving. [Laughs] Most churches don’t want to do that, so I think it will probably have to be–at least for this year–just Behold the Lamb. And that’s okay with me. It really is. It probably won’t last forever. There will come a day when it won’t happen and I’m sure we’ll miss it. So we just take it year by year. We get an email in September that asks, ‘Is everybody in?’ Then you respond and you’re in for another year. But I don’t think beyond that. The Rabbit Room: How many years have you been involved there with the projects and tour? Jill: Let me think. I first sang the song when Andrew did his first concert in Nashville at First Christian. They weren’t touring it yet. They were still doing the stripped down version with Silers Bald and Gabe [Scott]. I did one Nashville show and they had me come sing the song and I was pregnant with Drew, and he’s now almost nine, so it was a while ago. [Laughs] It was at least eight-and-a-half years ago. I’ve been pregnant three times singing that song. It really has become part of our Advent season or our tradition that we do as a family. It’s been great. I think the tour has been going on for six years, maybe? I think that’s right. We never had a clue when he asked us to do it. It’s like anything that’s successful in that you usually don’t know what it’s going to be in the beginning. We just thought it would be a fun adventure for a year. We would have 10 or 12 shows and it was so wonderful and fun that the shows were well received. Well, every year it just kept expanding with the amount of shows. We were thinking we could get up to 19 or 20 shows and it’s at that point that I realized, ‘Oh, this is going to be something they’ll want to do every year.’ It became the defining thing of Andrew’s career in a way. It became the thing that eclipsed his other albums of work and I think it will be the thing he’s remembered for. So we’re just glad to be a part of it as long as we can and as long as it works for our family. If it comes to a point when it doesn’t, that will be a sad day. For now, though, it’s okay. I do have to miss every Christmas thing known to man. We miss all of December. We miss all of our kids’ Christmas everything–all of the pageants and whatever. We just know, though, that this is what we’re doing every December for as long as it’s feasible. The Rabbit Room: After you reset yourself in 2011, where does the attention turn? Jill: I think if we can get this record completed the way we would like, I will feel very, very pleased. Then my attention will turn to my own solo project with Cason Cooley. He did the last one and he will be on the tour as well, so we will do some pre-production on the road in December since we will have that time without kids. He has two little kids as well, so I just look forward to that. When I feel that I have the 11 or 12 songs that I feel really great about, then we’ll head into the studio. That will be the next thing. The Rabbit Room: And what of Andy? Jill: He’ll start his in the summer most likely, whenever I’m done. We just leapfrog records. It’s just too hard for us to do it at the same time, so my guess is that he’ll keep writing and get his songs ready. Like right now, I’m getting my songs ready and then when I’m done with mine, he’ll start on his projects. It’s the only way we could do it, I guess. When our kids are all in school, it might be different, but this is what works for now. [Laughs] The Rabbit Room: So what are the details for the release? Jill: The goal is to have it out by the beginning of November and it’s going to be sold at the Rabbit Room. We’re starting to move our store from my own site to the Rabbit Room just to take one more thing that we have to worry about out of the equation. For years, we’ve shipped all of our own orders and it’s finally gotten to the place where Andy and I looked at each other and decided we could use some help. So the Rabbit Room is there and iTunes is still a big thing. So I think Pete [Peterson, Andrew’s brother] and all of those guys now are making a page specifically for our music so we can specifically sell it there and then Pete will ship it out. So we will all be sending things out when the project is ready. That should be beginning of November. We just had our photo shoot last weekend and the designer is working on the artwork right now. The Rabbit Room: What’s the title? Jill: We don’t know. [Laughs] Right now, it’s just Christmas. If it doesn’t work, you might as well just call it Christmas. Everything else just sounded pompous or ridiculous or not at all Christmas-y. We would pick random lines from the hymns and it would sound like a hymns record or something. So we just say Christmas until we can come up with something better. #AndyGullahorn #Christmas #JillPhillips

As I sat there at the Hutchmoot listening for the first time to Andrew’s talk, I was thrilled to see how our two parts fit together. I’ve broken this into several parts for the good of the blog. I saw the moral failure and subsequent humility of Edmund; I saw Aslan eat death for Edmund and all Narnia, and rise from the dead to wipe out the White Witch, and forgiveness, cleansing, restoration, and renewal were given as unmerited gifts to Edmund by the great Lion. In A Horse and His Boy, I could see the difference between Shasta and his twin brother, Corin. There was Shasta, raised in an ill-tempered home, learning to lie and sneak and steal when necessary, and Corin, raised in a royal family, never even considering it an option to lie or do wrong. In Shasta I saw how someone could come from the most humble, hard beginnings, born a king and not knowing it, not living from his kingship, instead living like the poor fisherman’s son he thought he was; I could see a good heart with bad habits, a true heart sometimes acting falsely. I saw how, even still, he had the makings of a king, and how he became one in the end – a humble, kind sovereign because of his hard background. I was struck by Aslan’s kindness to even Digory’s Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, his twinkling humor with Trumpkin the unbelieving dwarf at the end of Prince Caspian, and his love to Emeth the Calormene soldier in The Last Battle. I saw King Tirian fighting to the death for love of Aslan and Narnia, and Prince Caspian overturn an oppressive regime into love and justice for all, and I saw throughout all the stories the depth and importance of Aslan’s “Well done” to all who stood firm to the end. The White Witch and the Queen of Underland  displayed the deceptive and seductive power of Satan. Both witches were liars who smoothly exploited others for their own ends, making lavish promises, distorting reality; “There is no Narnia; there is no Aslan.”  I saw Prince Rilian, Eustace, and Jill come under the witch-Queen’s spell, repeating her words, “There is no sun,” as they began to believe in a false reality, a distorted conception of themselves, of Aslan, of Narnia. I saw Puddleglum gather his courage and stamp out the seducing incense of the witch to break the enchantment with the smell of burnt Marshwiggle. Puddleglum said, “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things – trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that…the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.” The spell was then broken, and the witch took her true form – a green serpent. With great trepidation I saw Prince Rilian attacked and entwined by the monster, and with greater  satisfaction to my sense of justice I watched as they hacked off its head. I think most if not all of you can understand the inconsolable longing these books awakened in the heart of the eight year old me. I wanted to be inside Narnia. Lewis captured my imagination, immersed it in God’s goodness, and opened the doorway for more. As a child I could not have put these things into words; nevertheless they were present in me as subconscious ideals. My Bible study has often been a discovery of truths and types already placed in my mind and heart by the fiction of Lewis, and later, George MacDonald, Tolkien, and others.

I just got home from watching The Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole with my family. I’m eager to share just “owl” much I loved this movie. And with that bad joke I demonstrate explicitly how far I am from being qualified to review a movie. I have none of the skill of the learned chaps who frequent this fine establishment. This will be a review from a person who has never seen most of the movies that get reviewed by people who know a lot about cinema. Most of my male relatives chew tobacco. Owls movie, regular idiot review, with commentary on raising kids in a toxic world…go. Firstly, Legend… is breathtaking to watch. It’s a visually stunning, captivating movie, with wonderful detail and Movies with good “special effects” are in great supply. (Do they still call them special effects?) But there are fewer movies that have a great story and fewer still which don’t undermine the truth about the world God made either in slight, or flagrant ways. This movie, to unholster a tired cliche, has it all. I loved the story. I bought in like a rich investor, took the bait hook, line, and sinker. Was it a basic good vs. evil story?  Yes. I love that. The story was so fundamentally good in that I just sat there grinning throughout. My review can be summarized in one word: fantastic. But this has a lot to do with where I am in life and who I was sitting with. I sat between our 5 and 7 year old kids, my wife held our sleeping baby throughout. Our 5 year old boy has only been so for a few days. Yesterday we celebrated his birthday with a “St. George” party. My older brother dressed as a dragon and our son, distinguished from his comrade knights by the St. George’s cross on his chest, led the attack on the castle to save the princess (well-acted by his brilliant and beautiful sister). It was a great time, though I’m sure if there were any dour, P.C. scolds watching they would have been horrified. (This is unlikely in rural West Virginia farming country.) What we emphasized in that party and what countless tales told to these children over and over emphasize is this: If you have strength, it is not to dominate and control, but to love and serve. If you are a leader, then you are not to rule by lording it over others, but to lay down your life. To serve. To die. I must say (though I know it is hard for some modern ears to hear) that I especially emphasize this point with my oldest son (and will with his brother in time). My old-fashioned understanding? Boys need to know that strength is not for lording, intimidating, tyrannizing, and it is for dang sure not about serving yourself. We. Look. To. Jesus. Jesus is our example. The Son of God who, though being rich, became poor; though being strong, became weak; though being Majestic in Glory and Deserving of All Power and Praise, put on a servant’s nature. He came to serve. Husbands are therefore commanded to be like that as they lead. My heart is for that in my own life (though I fail regularly) and my training and instruction for these boys must be “in the Lord.” So, back to this movie about owls. Inside the story there is a story (I love that kind of thing.) The story within the story is one that our main character, Soren, loves and retells over and over. He believes this story (of the legendary Guardians) with all his heart, though others deride him for his faith. A beautiful element of this movie is how the story that he believes to be true, though he can’t see with his eyes, impacts his entire being. He is different because of how this story works on him, in stark contrast to his unbelieving brother. This is pretty much the situation for Christians. Of course Soren is right, his faith eventually becomes sight and he meets his heroes. In a lovely touch, his number one hero is not as physically impressive as he expects. This clever turn points to the underlying theme of the story and the oath of the Guardians. They are charged with, “mending the broken, making the weak strong.” In contrast with the evil “Pure Ones,” (wondrous, ironic nomenclature) who wish to manipulate, dominate, and enslave the weak and vulnerable. The Guardians protect the vulnerable, they serve the weak. They do not use their power and authority to serve themselves, but fight for those who cannot fight for themselves. The Guardians also have a hierarchical structure, they have a king and queen. But the use of this power and authority, as in Tolkien and Lewis (and Scripture), is operated by the “good side” not for self, but for love and service. It is, frankly, a beautiful thing to see. It is a rare joy to go to the movies and so explicitly see the values that we emphasize in our home be, not undermined, but underlined. I was ecstatic. Sure, it’s fine to talk over all the core toxicity of films with our kids, to learn something from the bent expressions of the fallen imagination. These can sometimes be very fruitful –especially, I suppose, with older kids. But man, it’s great to just see something good. Real good. This is why I love Andrew Peterson’s books. Fantastic stories brilliantly told, but without the core deceptions of a man-centered worldview. A modern author…and we can trust him! Don’t wonder why Christian parents rejoice at such things. It’s a rare treasure found. There are others of course (my kids have read hundreds of good books), but the “total package” thing is pretty rare in my experience. I feel like that’s what you get with AP’s books. This movie feels pretty close to that as well. I haven’t read the books (The Owls of Ga’hoole), but this movie was a deep delight for me to see with my kids. I enthusiastically stick all the thumbs I have and can borrow from my neighbors in an upward direction. Note: Some of the action/peril might frighten young kids, but my 5 year old (prepped) was not bothered –and he is not exposed to a lot of scary images/movies.

My new single, “I Am New”, was released to radio last week, and I find myself thinking about our sense of identity and it’s consequences… Today I sat by an angry man. I was in seat 7C on a small commuter flight to Chicago, and I could feel his anger the moment he came to my row to take his place in seat 7D. Though I got up, smiled as I made room for him to take his seat, this man only glowered as he took his place and, leaving his sunglasses on, turned to the side to apparently go to sleep. No problem, I thought, all the better for me to get some work done. He was an older man – maybe early 60’s – dressed in casual business style with black pants, nice though non-descript black shoes, and a powder blue button up shirt. He was tan and fit with well-groomed, spikey white hair. He looked like a confident and powerful man in the world of business, and yet he was wound pretty tight. Once we were airborne, I got out my computer and went to work on some writing I needed to get done, quickly getting lost in it – so lost, in fact, that an hour later I didn’t hear the lone flight attendant of our small plane ask us to put away our electronic devices. Not only that, but I didn’t even hear the man in 7D talking to me at first, until his words reached some distant region in my brain, and, shaking off a focus induced kind of stupor, I looked at him and said, “oh… uh, I’m sorry… are you talking to me?” The first thing I noticed was that he had finally taken his sunglasses off and that he was glaring at me with cold, blue, and watery eyes. His face was flushed, his blood was obviously up, and he was actually cursing me with a string of profanities – both adjectives and nouns. I quickly tried to get my bearings and figure out what I had done wrong and realized that he was unhappy that I was on my computer. It was then that I discovered how close we were to landing and that I must have missed the announcement to turn off and stow all electronic devices! Had she really asked and I didn’t hear it? My first reaction was subconsciously defensive: I quickly looked around me to see if other people were still on their computers or listening to their iPods, etc. Shoot! She must have announced it – no electronics in sight. “Oh man, I’m so sorry…” I started to say and immediately closed my laptop to stow it under my seat, though I doubt he heard me because he was clearly on a roll. He was taking my oversight personally and he intended to shame me with a verbal whipping. Having closed my laptop and stowed it under my seat, I was surprised to find that this infuriated the man even more as he kicked the intensity of his tirade up a notch. People started looking at us – including the flight attendant – and once again I felt like I was at a loss, looking around trying to take stock of the situation, desperately wanting to figure out what I was doing wrong. I genuinely wanted to make things right. “That (insert colorful adjective followed by colorful noun here) isn’t cool. They said to power it off! Power that (colorful… adjective maybe?) thing off! I don’t appreciate (colorful pronoun, plural) like you endangering my life.” Oh… okay… it’s coming to me now. He’s upset that I only closed my laptop, putting it in sleep mode. Which puts me in a complicated position. What should I do? Take it out again? He must not realize how long it will take to power my computer down… We’d be on the ground by the time I did all that. Besides, I can’t really power it down, because… “I’m sorry sir, I have information I need for my layover that I won’t be able to retrieve if I power down,” I tried to explain to him. You see, my itinerary was on a webpage that I had to leave open on my desktop. Without wi-fi at the airport, I wouldn’t have any of the info I needed for the rest of my trip. But as I tried to explain myself, it was clear that he was not interested in my story. He was angry and seemed invigorated to have found a place to spend his wrath. Technically he was right – I guess I could have tried earlier that day to save the web page as a document so I could power down as would be requested of me, but doing all that at 5:30 that morning was low on my priority list, partly for this reason: A couple of years ago I asked the flight attendant why we’re always asked to turn everything off at take off and landing – “does it really interfere with the cockpit instruments?” I asked, trying to reconcile the logic of their request with the fact that my iPod doesn’t have transmission capabilities. “No, not at all. It’s more because If anything is going to go wrong on a flight, it is most likely to happen during take off or landing and it’s just a precaution we take in order to have everyone’s attention, so they aren’t tuned out with their iPods during the critical moments of our flight.” Ah, the truth at last! God bless you, Mrs. Flight Attendant, for your truth telling! How many times had I heard the company line that my iPod might interfere with the cockpit instruments?! Oh the little lies we are told to invoke fear and force our compliance! It was obviously an illogical assertion and I was grateful for her honesty. From then on out, I have interpreted “please turn off all electronic devices” as them saying, “please give me your attention during this part of your flight, we want you to be alert and ready if anything should happen.” And ever since, I’ve been happy to give them my attention. Now skip ahead a couple years to my current predicament. My first thought is that I’m surprised that a man of his age and education is still buying this old lie about cockpit interference. I feel my adrenaline start to rise as my fight or flight instinct is triggered and I have to decide how I should respond. Part of me feels genuine regret. Lost in my own thoughts, I simply didn’t hear the flight attendant’s direction. And in this man’s defense, I can imagine how it might have looked like I was brazenly ignoring the rules. Maybe he assumed I’m one of those people who feels entitled to do whatever they please, or that I’m a disrespectful punk who cavalierly ignores safety procedures. I genuinely wished to apologize – if he would’ve let me – for my ignorant disrespect that was offensive to him. He was right after all, I should have stowed my computer. And technically, yes – they do ask us to power down our electronic devices. But for the reasons I mentioned above, I just hadn’t prepared for this, nor could I get it done before landing even if I had. And since I know that the real objective is our undivided attention, I knew that strict compliance to the rule, at this point, defeated the purpose of the rule. But then another part of me was aware of the fact that this man obviously had anger issues. Is he a father I wondered? Does he shame his children like he’s shaming me? Do I fight back? I’m good with words, they are my specialty – I think I could have outgunned him… My anger was welling up in me, eager to come to my rescue. Ah… and yet I know that’s not the right thing to do. But what should I do? As I weighed what the proper Christ like response would be, I began to suspect that the inner drama within me mattered more than the outer drama, and so I turned my attention there. Last week I was at a retreat where author John Sheasby told us of our Heavenly Father’s love for us, his children, and how so much of our heartache and trouble comes from our misunderstanding of our identity in Christ. The story of the prodigal son is the story of us all, John said. There is the son who ran away because of his self-hatred and the one who stayed because of his self-righteousness and neither of them knew their father’s heart nor their place in it. The thoughts and insights John shared are worthy of their own post, and I hope to share his beautiful insights here soon. But suffice it to say that their effect on my heart was profound. He proposed that most if not all of us only know how to come to God as a servant, and so lurking in our minds and hearts is the servant identity – the identity of one who desperately and dutifully wants to please their Master, our value tied up in what we do rather than who we are. Think of the scene of the prodigal son returning home. In Luke 15 it says that, “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father…” Even in the moment of repentance this son reveals his servant mindset: he thinks of returning as a hired man! He thinks to repent for what he’s done when in fact the real sin is that he forgot who he was!And so he prepares his speech – the repentant speech of a servant – but barely gets a word out when his father runs to him and says, “Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate!” The father will not hear of the speech – it’s irrelevant because of course the boy is not a servant, he is a son. John Sheasby would propose that it was a case of mistaken identity all along and that it was the son’s perception of who he was that drove him to run away in the first place. I’m a people pleaser, full of shame and self-loathing, with an identity firmly rooted in the servant’s mindset. If I am living victoriously over my various vices then I’m at peace, confident of God’s love for me. But if I’ve sinned in any way, then I’m plagued with shame and doubt. I feel God’s pleasure to the degree that I feel like I’ve gotten passing grades on my righteousness report card (a grade, by the way, that I give myself). And so I’m often tempted to feel like I can never do enough to please my heavenly Father, afraid that I fail him too often. Because of this, I rarely feel like I can do or be enough for others either! You see, this is how it works for all of us: our relationship with Father God colors our every other relationship.In my case, my servant mindset sets me up to succumb to shame pretty easily.I don’t know who I am, and therefore I don’t know where I stand, and that’s why I desperately want the approval of others. And when I don’t get it, I get defensive, and defensiveness, of course, is the posture of a servant who has to constantly prove himself. But sons and daughters don’t have to prove themselves – because there’s nothing to prove! Their identity rests in who their Father is! I’m trying to learn what this means and I find myself as defenseless as the prodigal son, my servant speech silenced as my Father embraces me. These were my thoughts as I sat next to this angry man in seat 7D, fighting my desire to fight fire with fire and trying to restrain my usual instincts of shame and defensiveness (wanting to prove to him that it was an honest mistake, and that really, I’m a pretty great guy if he could get to know me. Please like me! Pretty please?). And then I finally remembered who I was. I am a son of the Most High God, an heir according to His promise. I am chosen, holy, without blemish and free from accusation. I am no longer a servant, and my Father celebrates me. He knows my name and has carved it in the palm of His hand. I made a mistake, I did – I should have been paying more attention to the flight attendant and stowed my computer.Heck, maybe I should have even powered it down.But my Father knows my heart, he knows I never meant disrespect or harm.He knows I desire to do the right thing, even when I miss opportunities to do so.He loves me as a son and is daily setting me free from the shame and fear of a servant. A remarkable thing happened: all of a sudden, the angry man’s words didn’t mean anything anymore – they could find no purchase in my soul. He didn’t know me like my Father does (nor did he even wish to know me, if the truth be told). Chances are he’s angry because he’s bound to a kind of servant mindset of his own – a slave to his work, his ego, his ambitions and ideals, perhaps – and he is crushed under the burden of constantly trying to be enough, to prove his worth.  No wonder he’s so angry. I relaxed in my seat, answering his accusations with a humble “I’m sorry” repeatedly until I answered no more and stopped cowering (which seemed to make him even more angry). The adrenaline receded, the blood that had rushed to my face in embarrassed humiliation began to find its way back to my other extremities, and my heart settled. He continued to rage at me for several minutes even after we landed, but I sat untouched in my identity as a son. Not gloating, mind you. Just at rest. In a way, I became grateful for the episode and how it so dramatically forced me to see the difference I experience between living as a servant and as a son – not just in my relationship to God, but in my every encounter. It was a swift and certain confirmation of what the Lord had ministered to my heart just that week about my sonship. This man would not accept my apology, but my Father does. I am writing this from some thousands of feet in the air during the second leg of my flight home, and wouldn’t you know it? They’ve just announced that it’s time to turn off and stow all personal electronic devices. I think I’ll do just that.

This is the final part of a series about George MacDonald, adapted from my lecture with Ron Block at Hutchmoot 2010. In part one I discussed the inner chamber (about MacDonald’s peculiar insight into scripture and God’s nature). Part two was about his inner vision, MacDonald’s childlike ability to imagine. I said before that his imagination was unbridled. That isn’t quite what I mean to say. It was, in fact, bridled– It kicks off with: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. In him was life, and that life was the light of all men. So John was, I think, a poet. But when you read his letters, you get the sense that he might have been a bit senile. I mean no disrespect. But he was so repetitive, and his habit of calling his flock his little children implies his old age. And then you get to Revelation! How could a normal person have written a book like that? It’s a fascinating bit of writing, as confusing as it is epic. I’m working through Revelation right now, and it struck me recently that I get the same feeling of unsettledness when I read it as when I read MacDonald. There are elders and hosts of angels and cherubim and dragons and pits and millennia. It paints a picture that may confuse you, but you always get the feeling that it means something, like it’s there for a reason. And it is, of course. The only way for John to have written Revelation is to have been led by the Spirit. In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus says: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” John 3:7-9 I’ve heard people describe Rich Mullins the same way. He was a free spirit. He seemed to be swept up in something and was helpless but to go along for the ride. He listened to a voice and sometimes obeyed it, and to the rest of us it looked like craziness, or weirdness, or eccentricity. And it was, in its way. The Spirit, once it lives in you, may have you on some hobbit-like journey you never in a million years thought you’d take. So when a writer, especially a writer of fiction, sits down to write, and the Spirit is in him, and he’s willing to abandon whatever inhibitions he may have, you never know what you’re going to get. You can’t tell where it’s coming from or where it’s going. It goes where it pleases. And I don’t think the writer knows any more than the reader where the story is going. I’m not saying this is the best way to write, or that you’ll ever get published, or that you’ll ever come up with something anyone will read—but I guarantee you will be surprised. And you may have something to learn from it. For that matter, you may end up with something that is better than you can do. Buechner said, “Where [my stories] tend to be repetitious, simplistic, superficial, merely rhetorical, I blush for them. Where, if at all, they have any power in them to touch for good the human heart, I can say only that in that instance I have said more than I know and done better than I am.” Which brings us back to L’Engle’s principle of serving the work. George MacDonald, in his way, knew this better than anyone. At times he was on a galloping horse of a story, holding on for dear life, trusting that the destination was good. In the closing of Phantastes I discovered one of my favorite MacDonald lines, about the hope that the author of our story has good intentions for us: “A great good is coming—is coming—is coming…I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it.” That sense of ultimate goodness beyond the veil is what Lewis encountered in MacDonald’s books. MacDonald is helping us to see greater truths about hope, and sorrow, and our false selves, and about sacrificial love. But he’s doing it in a way that just might set your imagination crackling. He might wake up your sleeping inner child. He might even disarm you enough to admit that maybe there’s more to the world than you thought. And if you were a whip-smart young man from Belfast, on his way to Oxford and a life of high study, a young man who had decided long ago that there was no God, you might have the sinking feeling that you may not know as much as you think you do. C.S. Lewis’s imagination, he said, was baptized. Immersed. It was redeemed by the Holy Spirit to do a great Kingdom work someday, all because he picked up a book at a train station. Life, it turns out, isn’t all that much different from one of MacDonald’s meandering, surprising, frightening, and luminous stories, where at any moment you may find yourself walking through a portal into another world. “Picking up a copy of Phantastes one day at a train-station bookstall, I began to read. A few hours later,” said C.S. Lewis, “I knew that I had crossed a great frontier.”

Fiddler’s Green is the end of a story that began a long time ago with a map and a buried treasure. You may recall that I buried my family’s Christmas presents in the woods one year, giving out maps so they could find them, and how that was the genesis of The Fiddler’s Gun. But that’s not the map I’m talking about. The real map was nothing more than a faint outline in the mind’s eye. It was a fleeting vision of a young woman—an American revolutionary named Fin Button. Over the last ten years, I’ve trusted Fin’s lead and followed her into some strange and wonderful places. I tried my best to keep up and she always kept a few steps ahead, always confident that she knew just where she was going. And like any good map should, she beckoned me toward a fair and hidden place and bade me dig. I spent most of this year digging, not with a spade but with words. And now that the treasure chest, Fin’s story, has been unearthed, and dusted off, and carried out of the wilderness, I’m honored to announce that it’s time to start handing out keys so you can all see what’s inside. The Fiddler’s Gun was a success because so many of you believed in the project and generously offered your patronage. I’m deeply grateful for each of you. Patrons were a pivotal part of the book’s creation. It’s now my hope that if you enjoyed the first part of Fin’s story, you’ll stick with her to the end. The book is written. The editing is complete. I’m probably typesetting as you read this, and how about that gorgeous artwork by Evie Coates? But the final hurdle is the tallest and the costliest: printing. I’ve been saving all year to pay for the print run, but right now I’m only able to cover about half of the cost on my own. If you’re interested in becoming a patron of Fin and her story, you can be a very real part of the publication of a book that may not exist without your support. Read on to see what some who have read it have to say. If you judge it to be worthy of your patronage, I hope your face will light up with the shimmer of gold when, come December, you open and partake of the treasure I’ve labored so long to give. Early Praise for Fiddler’s Green: “Mercy, honor, trust, dignity, reclamation: these words are not typically associated with pirate folklore. But in the astounding sequel to The Fiddler’s Gun, Peterson has managed to save the best for last. Fiddler’s Green is just as replete with action and adventure as it is with love and reclamation.” —Eric Peters, singer-songwriter, Chrome “The colorful character of Fin Button comes resplendently alive in the pages of Fiddler’s Green. Peterson has done his research well and found the human heartbeat at the center of both history and legend.” —Douglas Kaine McKelvey, author of The Angel Knew Papa and the Dog “Peterson has written an exciting adventure, but it is so much more than that. The characters will get inside you, and you will live, ache, die, and find freedom with them as you enter their stories. Fiddler’s Green is raw and real, a very human tale, and nothing short of transformational.” —Travis Prinzi, author of Harry Potter & Imagination “The best of Peterson’s work in The Fiddler’s Gun is matched and tripled in his action-packed sequel, Fiddler’s Green. He proved himself an able writer of a worthy tale in Gun, but as I read Green, I felt like I was witness to the magical moment of a certifiable author being born. There were passages that took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes. Stunning prose, unforgettable characters, a rip-roaring page-turner of an adventure that I couldn’t put down. I thoroughly enjoyed this book! Now, tell us another story Mr. Peterson.” —Jason Gray, singer-songwriter, Everything Sad is Coming Untrue “There’s more to Fin’s story than meets the eye. Sure, there’s peril, piracy, heartache, and humor, yet enveloped within the expected is the unexpected. Fin is not always who I want her to be—rather, she is who she is. Still an orphan deep in her bruised heart, she wrestles with goodness and redemption, but they wrestle back. I love a book when its characters reach out, grab my arm, and pull me into their lives, forcing me to look them in the eye, to bear their burdens and joys. With Peterson’s pen at the helm of such beautiful, poetic, and precise writing, I felt tears rolling down my cheeks during a chapter or two. And is Fin’s homecoming joyful? You’ll have to read this classic-to-be to find out, but I will say that joy is a strange and complex reality. Peterson is right up there with my favorite authors who write truthfully, taking the hurt and ‘turning it to beauty.'” —Jenni Simmons, Editor, Art House America Blog; Contributing Editor, The Curator Fiddler’s Green A Secret Mission. A Faraway Sea. A Long-awaited Homecoming. From the backwaters of Georgia to the taverns of Philadelphia, Fin Button is the talk of the colonies. The British say she’s a pirate. The Americans call her a mutineer. The crew of the Rattlesnake call her the most unlikely thing of all: Captain. But with the Revolution on the verge of defeat, the Congress offers Fin a deal. If she can free a noblewoman held captive by pirates, the French may be persuaded to join the war. Fin’s reward? A full pardon. Along with Jack, Topper, and the mysterious Armand Defain, Fin sails the Rattlesnake to the Mediterranean Sea, half a world away. Their destination is Tripoli—home of the savage corsairs and slavers of the Barbary Coast. To win the prize, Fin will need the help of an ancient seafaring order, the Knights of Malta—and the resolve of one faithful knight could alter more than just the outcome of the Revolution. It could mend the heart of a lonely girl and give rise to an American legend. Official Release: December 7th, 2010 Patron packages ship as soon as books arrive from the printer (estimated 11/19). ——————————————————————————- Fiddler’s Green Patron $25 – (2) signed copies of Fiddler’s Green, priority shipping, *your name listed as a patron on the acknowledgments page Fin’s Revolution Bundle $25 – (1) signed copy of Fiddler’s Green, (1) signed copy of The Fiddler’s Gun, download of the digital book The Fiddler’s Gun: Letters, *your name listed as a patron on the acknowledgements page Fiddler’s Green Gift Bundle $50 – (5) signed copies of Fiddler’s Green, *your name listed on the acknowledgements page Fiddler’s Green Book Club Bundle $100 – (10) signed copies of Fiddler’s Green, custom bookmarks printed with the name of your club, downloadable discussion guide, *your book club listed as a patron on the acknowledgements page Fin’s Revolution Club Bundle $150 – (10) signed copies of Fiddler’s Green, (10) Signed copies of The Fiddler’s Gun, custom bookmarks printed with the name of your club, downloadable discussion guide, downloadable digital version of The Fiddler’s Gun: Letters, *your book club listed as a patron on the acknowledgements page *For inclusion on the acknowledgements page, order must be received by 10/21

This is a series of posts about the imagination, adapted from my lecture at Hutchmoot 2010 about George MacDonald. The last post was about his approach to the doctrine of common grace, the idea that everyone is an image bearer and therefore reveals to us something of the God the Father. That leads us to learn to keep our eyes open for the thousand moments of truth unfolding around us every day. I love to draw. This summer Ben and I were at a train station in Sweden for an hour. The June sun only sets there for a few hours a day, and even then it’s never completely dark, which means the Magic Hour, the sweet golden time when the angle of sunlight gilds everything here for thirty minutes or so, in Sweden lasts for hours and hours. The sunrise is the same. Hours of daybreak. It’s beautiful. So we were stuck at the train stop for a while, and the architecture of the station caught my eye. It was an old building—at least a hundred years old—and I thought to take a picture of it. Then I remembered my sketchpad. I drew the building’s face. I drew the rainspouts, the eaves, the stone flourishes, the window framing, the brick cornices. I saw the building. I studied it. It was only thirty minutes. But now, when I happen upon that very amateur sketch in the notebook, I remember that old building on the other side of the planet and its blushing bricks in the slow dawn; I remember the archways that led to the town park and the pigeons and the cool of the air. (I love Sweden, if you can’t tell.) I mention that as an example of a time I’m glad I remembered how to be a child, and how to take the time to see. Most of the time I just snap a picture with my phone. But once in a while I manage to take a deep breath and make a choice to live life as if everything is a miracle. I remember what it was like to be a kid who loved to draw. Now, imagine learning to approach the Gospel that way. Imagine looking at your children that way. Imagine how rich every moment would be if we could keep that sleepy inner child awake. But as Rich Mullins sang, “We are children no more, we have sinned and grown old.” The way of Jesus is one of learning to grow young. The kingdom is made of such as these little ones. All that to say, George MacDonald, however wrong he may have been about some things, was astonishingly wise about others. He had something to teach us, he was able to reveal the secret things of the Father, which only George MacDonald could reveal, just as you have things for me that only you can teach. And here’s one of the big things I love about MacDonald: his sense of child-like, excessive, exuberant imagination. He was good at being a kid. He was a kid with a bushy beard and a Scottish brogue. And like a kid he told stories that sometimes didn’t make a lick of sense. His imagination was untethered by modern storytelling convention, and that, I confess, is what I like least about his stories. They’re hard to read. As I said, they meander. The wild, Alice in Wonderland oddness makes me uncomfortable (as does Roald Dahl’s stuff), and it’s no surprise George was friends with Lewis Carroll. (He was also an acquaintance of Dickens and a friend to Mark Twain.) In Lilith and At the Back of the North Wind and The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes, the author seems hardly able to write fast enough to keep up with his inner vision. There are goblins, little men who live inside the moon, fairies, ogres, ghosts, singing trees; little old ladies who know more than they should and whose hair flows around them like water are sometimes visions of holy kindness and others long-toothed monsters in disguise. In North Wind, a little boy named Diamond is swept nightly across the skies, nestled safely in the swirling hair of a beautiful pale woman, the personification of the north wind, and the boy’s encounter with her makes him “touched”, makes him odd and wise beyond his years—a trait that makes him seem simple to others. I never quite knew what the story was about until the last chapter, and I have a feeling MacDonald didn’t either. But somehow, to my great surprise, I closed the book with tears in my eyes. He pulled it off. The Princess and the Goblin was more of a straightforward story, but it still seemed, uncomfortably at times, like MacDonald was flying by the seat of his pants. But there’s a gentle tone, and a reverence for true beauty that I’ve never read anywhere else, except maybe in Tolkien’s treatment of Galadriel or in Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale. The stories are suitcases so stuffed with wisdom and wonderings and frights and delights that I picture George bouncing on top of them to zipper it shut while monstrous fingers and bits of luminous lace poke out. And yet. He gave me a way to think about faith and obedience that still helps me. As strange as the other fairy tales are, Lilith and Phantastes, two of his best-known works, are even stranger. Here’s the best way I know to describe these books: imagine a Scottish preacher with a bushy beard setting up a desk in the middle of an old English forest, taking out his quill and paper, saying a quick prayer, then beginning to write his story—but not before dropping acid, just for good measure. McCartney and Lennon would have loved MacDonald. His main character in Phantastes, a 21-year-old named Anodos, bumbles his way into Fairy Land, and for some reason I could never quite figure, wandered about from weird house to weird house to creepy forest, meets other inhabitants of the woods who seem not at all surprised to be there, sings to a marble encased woman, encounters a rusty-armored knight, wanders about for a few days in a castle of invisible servants, eats well, and kills a giant. It was baffling. No one would ever, ever publish one of these books today. George would have been a fine pastor who self-published his books until his congregation got a hold of them and then they would’ve fired him and called the authorities. I’m joking, but only sort of. And yet. And yet there was something fascinating about the whole journey. Every book I’ve read of his has been the same. Every time I encounter again and again a stab of bright truth that makes the journey worthwhile. Here are a few examples: On joy and sorrow: “As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love.” On love: “I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another, yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being beloved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness.” On good work: “Somehow or other,” said he, “notwithstanding the beauty of this country of Faerie, in which we are, there is much that is wrong in it. If there are great splendours, there are corresponding horrors; heights and depths; beautiful woman and awful fiends; noble men and weaklings. All a man has to do, is to better what he can. And if he will settle it with himself, that even renown and success are in themselves of no great value, and be content to be defeated, if so be that the fault is not his; and so go to his work with a cool brain and a storng will, he will get it done; and fare none the worse in the end, that he was not burdened with provision and precaution.” “But he will not always come off well,” I ventured to say. “Perhaps not,” rejoined the knight, “in the individual act, but the result of his lifetime will content him.” MacDonald wasn’t crazy. He was able, somehow, to keep his inner eye wide open; he was able to peer into the dazzling invisible world and tell us what he’d seen. He was caught up in the rapturous love of a God he knew as Father, and more than any author or artist I’ve ever read, succeeded in Madeline L’Engle’s principle of serving the work. Next, Part Three: The Inner Spirit

At Hutchmoot 2010 Ron Block and I spent an hour or so discussing George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis in a session called “The Immersed Imagination”. A few of you asked for the manuscript and I thought I’d post it here. It’s a little long for a blog entry so I decided to break it up. Here’s the first part. I have just finished reading MacDonald’s Phantastes. It isn’t the first book I’ve read by this Scottish preacher with a bush “I write, not for children but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” So if you’ll indulge me, I’m going to take a cue from MacDonald and do some meandering of my own as I process my thoughts about Phantastes. The book was first published in 1858, which by my questionable math was 152 years ago. What was happening in the world then? The United States was simmering with the discontent that would lead to the civil war. Cars hadn’t yet been invented. Neither had electricity been harnessed nor the first photograph been taken. Native Americans still roamed parts of the unmolested West. There were cowboys. I’m not too familiar with England in that time period, but we can safely assume that London was a foggy, bustling, smelly city, while the English countryside was much as it had been for hundreds of years: horse-drawn wagons, farmers tilling ancient ancestral farmlands, thieves, lanterns, old pubs and public houses, and stone church buildings. In one of those churches, in a little hamlet south of London called Arundel, a family man named George MacDonald preached. He wasn’t there long, and his time there wasn’t all pleasant—as much as we may love MacDonald’s writing and his deep love of God, he tended to preach a kind of universalism. It wasn’t based on the usual “many ways to God” idea, but on his fervent belief in the fierce, unchangeable love of God as Father. He believed, as far as I can tell, that God wasn’t content to allow any of his children to remain as they were and that even after death God’s love would burn and purify until the wayward soul was overcome by his love. He said the fires of hell were the very love of God—torture to those who didn’t want him or his presence. The fire was purifying. But we must conclude, as C.S. Lewis did, that this doctrine, as attractive as it may be, isn’t to be found in Scripture. Lewis said the possibility may exist, but should only be entertained perhaps as a hopeful thought, not a doctrine to be preached. Jesus, we know, talked more about Hell than anyone else in the Bible. George’s time at the church in Arundel was troubled by the church’s understandable discomfort with this teaching. Still, he preached Christ, and his death and resurrection, and the great love of God, and filled books with sermons and passionate pleas to cling to Christ and his mercy. So, as uncomfortable with that part of his teaching as we may be, we mustn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. He had much to teach us. And one of my favorite lessons of MacDonald is that of the inner chamber of God. He said, “As the fir-tree lifts up itself with a far different need from the need of the palm-tree, so does each man stand before God, and lift up a different humanity to the common Father. And for each God has a different response. With every man he has a secret—the secret of the new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter . . . a chamber into which no brother, nay, no sister can come. From this it follows that there is a chamber also—(O God, humble and accept my speech)—a chamber in God himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man,–out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. This is that for which he was made–to reveal the secret things of the Father.” I am comforted and emboldened by the idea that even I, who am not a proper theologian, I who am more sinful than I’d like any of you to know, who carry my own private doubts and fears around wherever I go, may have something to offer. I may be able to tell you something about the heart of the Father that you may have come all this way to know. I may have insights peculiar to me and me alone that may, by the power of the Spirit in my, edify and strengthen you. Now, the beautiful thing about that idea, if it’s true, and I think it must be, is that if I believe such an outlandish, beautiful thing of myself, I must also believe it of you. Everyone I meet has insight about the world and even God himself that they and only they can bring to me. It reminds me of this quote from C.S. Lewis: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. … There are no ‘ordinary’ people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Look around you. You’re rubbing elbows with immortals. You’re sipping coffee with the crown of all creation, more intricate and precious than the cell structure of a diamond, and more majestic than Everest. Let that sink in for a minute. That idea, the idea of common grace, the idea that every human is an image-bearer is at the heart of many Rabbit Room discussions about art. Films, books, songs, paintings—all these tell God’s truth if they tell the truth at all, no matter whose labor bore them into the world. Einstein said, “There are two ways to live your life: one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is.” But what did he know? Buechner said, “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” Isn’t that a more beautiful, gracious way to pass through our time on earth? If you want to learn to live with your eyes open to the million wonders converging every moment, writing is a good place to start. Reading is another. Still another is to have children, or if you have no children to spend time with them as often as you can. The few real moments of clarity in my life happened when the child in me was wide awake. Next, Part Two: The Inner Vision

Today marks the release of our own Jonathan Rogers’s newest book, so I thought I’d spend some time telling everyone here why I think they should read it. The book is at least as good as the cover, and the cover is, like, super cool. Here goes. Earlier this year I read Tom Sawyer for the first time. I read it to my kids. When I closed the book I couldn’t believe I had never yet made time to experience all the humor, the rascally wisdom, the adventure, the honesty, and the insightful take on boyhood and human nature that runs like a big river through every page of Twain’s masterpiece. It’s so good. The Charlatan’s Boy is like that. I also read another classic I can’t believe I’ve never read: Perelandra by C.S. Lewis (thanks, Kevan Chandler). I’m reading Lewis’s books slowly, since the canon is closed. It’ll be a sad day when I have no more of his books to read for the first time. But Perelandra! What a book. It might be the creepiest depiction of evil I’ve ever read, and the cosmic soliloquy at the end hurt my brain in the best of ways. Reading Perelandra, I felt like I was in the hands of someone who had encountered the Truth and wanted to tell me a story about it. I was all ears. The Charlatan’s Boy is like that, too. When I wrote a blurb for The Charlatan’s Boy I described it as the kind of story Mark Twain might have written if he had been a Christian, or the kind C.S. Lewis might have written had he grown up in the American South. After I finished it I thought long and hard for something to compare it to and came up with nothing at all. Jonathan, a Christian from South Georgia with a Ph.D., wrote a story no one else could have written. It’s anecdotal, as you might expect from a southern boy. Anecdotes were the language of the Florida community I grew up in. I was never able to speak that language well except maybe with a guitar in-hand, but my dad can still palaver with the best of ’em on his front porch, where I used to listen in awe to the richness and cadence of the language. Southern folks never lack for the pitch-perfect way to put something. The things they say sound ancient and new at the same time. For example: I remember sitting at home on the porch and saying to my dad, “It’s windy today.” He said, “Yup. So windy the hens are laying the same eggs twice.” Every page of Jonathan’s book has a sentence that good. Grady, the main character, is an ugly, motherless child with a heart of gold. He tells us story after story about his misadventures with Floyd, a charlatan gifted at separating people from their money. It just so happens the best tool at Floyd’s disposal is not just Grady, but Grady’s ugliness. Floyd actually charges people money for a glimpse of the ugliest boy in Corenwald–a boy so ugly he might even be a Feechie. It’s a funny premise, and it’s deftly executed–sort of a literary situational comedy, seasoned with Jonathan’s intimate knowledge of just what goes on in the heads of  good ol’ southern boys. It’s easy, if you didn’t grow up in the South, to write southerners off as simpletons who cain’t talk right. But if you’ve ever read Flannery O’Connor or Wendell Berry or Faulkner, you know there’s often a formidable intelligence, a shrewd wisdom hiding behind all the y’alls and the yeehaws. Grady may be ugly, but his waters run deep. And that leads to my favorite thing about this book. It’s not just wisdom hiding behind those accents and between the lines of this tale; it’s sadness. If a story about a boy so ugly he can make a career out of it is funny (and it is), it’s also one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard. If The Charlatan’s Boy were a song, it would be the kind that struck you as happy until you really paid attention to the lyrics. Then you would notice the tension, the irony of heartbreak coursing through joyful strains. It’s like discovering that the grinning old fella who’s always been the church greeter, shaking hands with visitors and slipping peppermints to the kids, carried in his breast pocket a notebook of sad, lonesome poetry to keep him company at night. My point is, this book is much more than a comedy. I got the feeling that Jonathan bravely told us some of his own secret story in the pages of The Charlatan’s Boy. For that matter, I felt like he was telling my own. I have often looked in the mirror and seen nothing lovable. I know my own heart well enough to know its profound ugliness, and I have wept over my own disbelief that God’s intimate knowledge of me and his deep affection for me are compatible. Somehow, though, God doesn’t just turn a blind eye to my ugliness. He doesn’t ignore it, or merely abolish it. He’s stronger than that. In Christ he does a greater wonder: he makes it beautiful. He turns it inside out. He does what evil can never do–he makes. He gathers up the cast off and misbegotten and arranges it just so. My eleven-year-old loved it as much as I did, by the way, and whether or not you’ve read The Wilderking Trilogy this book stands on its own. It exemplifies what we’re shooting for here in the Rabbit Room: imaginative stories, good works of art, works that by virtue of their beauty and excellence proclaim the truth, whether implicit or explicit. I happen to know that the writing of this book was no easy thing for Jonathan. It took a lot of work and a lot of heart, and it’s plain on every page. I hope he sells a jillion, because I want to read more of his story, and more of Grady’s story, and more of mine. I want to laugh until I cry. Click here for signed copies from the Rabbit Room.

From the minute I stepped off the plane that brought me home to Colorado from Hutchmoot, I’ve had this post in my head. “Better late than never,” is an adage I am coming to embrace as a writer, because I never get things written as quickly as I think I will. But Hutchmoot has followed me. The stories told and people met have stayed with me in so fresh a way that I have decided to write about it no matter how late. So this is my delayed, but heartfelt tribute to Hutchmoot. I must begin it by saying that one of the best parts of Hutchmoot to me was the feasting. Evie’s meals have now become the stuff of legend. I love this, because the meals we ate became a metaphor for what was offered to our souls in the sessions and dinner-table conversation. But I also love it because it put me in mind of another feast I experienced, a feast that changed my life. And a feast that will help me explain why I feel that Hutchmoot was a time of such grace. It all began several years back, when I spent a summer as a ministry intern in England. I worked with a group intent on changing culture and having the right theology and worldview. I did it because, well, it was England after all. It was C.S. Lewis country. It was faith and academics and pubs and tea. I thought it seemed a worthy sort of work. Deep down, secret in my heart though, I also yearned to know God. Though I believed in him, he felt distant and vague to me, and I thought working with theological experts might finally answer my hunger to truly know his love. Oh, but I was starry eyed. After two months of hearing everything there was to know about God, after sitting in two or three dozen lectures on Scripture, poring over worldview books, writing papers, and talking about God round the clock, I woke one morning and realized that I felt farther from him than I ever had. The realization was so stark, my soul so barren, I barely knew if I could finish my internship. Later that day, I heard a lecture on the six interpretations of the word “hell” and the fate of the people sent there. When the lecturer stated that he knew for sure that only one of them was true (the cruelest, I thought), something in me snapped. I didn’t even want to know so awful a God in so dark a world anymore. I finished my work and nearly ran the cobblestone streets back to the refuge of my attic room. But that’s where the grand bit of the story begins, because right then, when I was close to throwing my faith out the window, a man named Aptin was ready to save my faith with an offering of grace. My home that summer was a rambly old manor house made over as student lodging. Good bones kept it standing, but its joints were all out of place in odd staircases and tipsy attic rooms. A narrow, homey little kitchen glowed at its heart though, crammed with mismatched teacups and a window that let in the sunset light as I cooked. This became my place of refuge in the evenings, and most days, Aptin cooked with me. Aptin was a professor of something or other who commuted to London. He was from Iran, and had escaped with his parents when the Shah was overthrown. I’m sure he had a somewhat glamorous story, but I knew him mostly for his gourmet cooking, his friendly demeanor, and the snatched talks we had about life and travel. We both got home late most nights, and while he grilled salmon or concocted a souffle, we talked. I loved his stories and he distracted me from the bland monotony of my student’s fare of eggs and toast. On this particular night though, my budget and soul were both so tight, I made plain oatmeal and ended up just passing him as I headed upstairs with my dinner tray. “Wait,” he said, in his high voice with its British accent, “I have found a new place in London, so I’m moving. I’m throwing myself a going away party in the garden tomorrow night – I’d be so happy if you could come.” I nodded my acceptance. I had two days off, and even if I intended to spend them having a spiritual nervous breakdown, I couldn’t offend my friend. The morrow found me mad. Furious with myself for being the sort of person that struggled in her faith. Furious with the teachers I had trusted to lead me closer to God, and who, I felt, had shoved me away from any sense of his love. Furious, I must admit, with God himself who had left me to bumble about in a lonely darkness. By evening, I was fit company for no one, but I forced myself downstairs, eyes down, heart in my toes. One step outside, I looked up, and I could not help it; I smiled. The garden had been transformed into the site of a fairy tale feast. The prim, green squares of English lawn were ranked by tables heaped with food like plunder. Aptin must have raided every grocer in town to fill the first with thirty different cheeses that sat amidst mounded breads, olive pates, and cracker stacks. Three giant bowls of fruit graced the next, full of grapes, pineapple, and tiny English strawberries, leaves and stems intact. The last was the crown, two or three dozen bottles of wine, among them the elderflower cordial I had come to crave during my English sojourn. As my feet sank into the grass, Aptin hurried over from the rounds he was making, shaking hands, laughing. “Oh, I am so glad you came! It’s a perfect night for a feast – fill as many plates as you can.” I obeyed. I sighed for the sheer relief of distraction, and somewhere between the brie and the cordial, I forgot to stew on my crisis. There was simply too much to enjoy. Plate filled, I found a seat under a gnarled old apple tree. The light was honey and gold and it fell on my head through the green apples and heat-struck leaves. The setting sun dyed the garden gold, and everything in it glowed; poppies and roses, the red stone walls, the rich, worn wood of the tables. A merry group of housemates soon joined me, and an air undeniably hobbit-like descended upon our feast. For almost the first time that summer, I talked with my neighbors. I shared internship woes with Andrea, a German student. I asked Debbie, a doctoral candidate in theology, all about her studies. And I finally worked up the courage to talk to Ged, our housemother, a former nun who had left a strict, secluded convent to run the house for the summer. I questioned her about a life of contemplation and prayer, and in her gentle, reticent way, she told me her tale. “But I needed to be with people again,” she ended. I simply nodded, knowing the truth of that need as I basked in the friendly presence of the woman beside me and the other friends round me. Night grew up as we lingered, a warm, hushed darkness that slowed our breath and rested our bodies. Bugs chirruped. Stars blinked. We chatted to the clink of plates refilled and glasses brimmed again. When sleepiness finally came, I climbed slowly to bed. The minute I opened the door, my earlier struggle sprang, catlike, from the shadows. I clearly remember the way I tensed, and even clearer, I remember the peace that came and relaxed my fear. Darkness passed me by and I sat down on the edge of the bed, shocked at my lightened heart. The silver light of the moon fell full on my face and out of the blue, I know God loved me. I knew he was with me. A calm warmth filled every nook of my soul and I knew that I was held, kept, loved just as much as I had hoped. Grace cradled my heart and doubt seemed like a ghost. And it was all because that night, I had finally touched something real. God, I finally realized, is not merely a thought I must think, or a proposition I must know. For the first time in weeks, I had tasted good food and rested. I had spent time in the fresh, green glory of the garden, seen the myriad colors, tasted the fresh, fresh air. For almost the first time that summer, I’d had a personal conversation, I had exchanged stories, doubts even, with a friend. And I’d been still. Quiet finally had a chance to still the frenzy of my thoughts. Sitting there in the moonlight, I came to the knowledge I had so hungered to find. God is the lover and maker, the friend and creator. He reveals his goodness in the tastable, touchable wonder of his world. His love is felt in the fellowship of his people. His joy is what sings in the wind and spices the best wine, and glimmers in the gold of sunset. In the savor of feasts, the cadence of seasons, in apples crunched and friends touched, God is known for the eternal Good that he is. But I had lived apart from that goodness all summer. I had tried to know God by thinking about him. By working for him. By saying the right things about him. All the while, I ignored the earth and people God made so that I might know his soul. To grasp truth is vital, and I know it is something that must be taught in an age of such spiritual confusion. But truth must be enfleshed by love and beauty, or it will ring empty to the soul. Beauty known and people loved are the great ways that God offers his hands to us while we sojourn here in the earth. By loving, by feasting, by touching his beauty, we grasp him back and let him fill our hearts with joy. Two months of study couldn’t give me what one night of feasting could, because I was made to touch and taste and see the goodness of God. I don’t even know if Aptin had my faith, but somehow, he had grasped a heart of celebration. He understood the grace that beauty and friendship bring, and through the gift of his feast, he saved my faith. The reason I tell this story here is because, for me, The Rabbit Room is that feast continued.  I discovered the Rabbit Room the same year I went to England, and as I grew, slowly, in trusting a God of beauty, it became a refuge for my heart. The Rabbit Room community sheltered me as I learned to let stories, music, and nature bring God close to my heart. In the daily creativity and fellowship of this place, I experienced that sense of God being not just a thought to be known, but a song to be sung, a story told, a friendship sealed by love of the same good things. Then I went to Hutchmoot and felt that I had stepped into Aptin’s garden all over again. Taste and see that God is good, says David in the Psalms. And at Hutchmoot, we did. We sipped wine and gobbled up spiced rice and roasted chicken made by the matchless Chef Evie, and we knew that God is good. We lingered at conversations that rambled onto holy ground, sat and marveled at songs that sang out the hungers in our souls. We watched light drip through a stained glass window onto the heads of a band of musicians merrily re-enacting the Last Supper, and we knew that God is a God who has laughter every day. And the laughter continues here, now, in the Rabbit Room. To stumble into a feast is one thing, to have a daily bit of savory bread served to me through this place is another level of grace altogether. So this is my roundabout and heartfelt tribute to Hutchmoot, and really, to the whole Rabbit Room. It is my thanks to all you feasting folk who make this a place where God is touched as well as talked about. To me, the Rabbit Room is Aptin’s feast continued every day. Since that feast restored my faith, I can think of no more heartfelt compliment. God bless you Aptin, wherever you are. God bless the Rabbit Room, and all of us here as we strive to taste and see his goodness. And Hutchmoot 2011, here I come.

[Note: The Charlatan’s Boy is now available for pre-order. Get thee to the Rabbit Room store and reserve your signed copy now!] I s’pose since The Charlatan’s Boy will be thereabouts in right ’round a week, we best get to talkin’… Okay, I’m being ridiculous. What is not ridiculous, however, is the fantastic yarn spun by Jonathan Rogers in his latest book (out on October 5). Immersed in the culture of the feechiefolk, Rogers’ work is a hilarious and heartwarming adventure that is pitch-perfect for all ages. I talked to Jonathan recently to find out a bit more about the birth of a new world and how he submits to the story and allows his characters to roam free. Don’t worry, we leave the dialect to the book itself. The Rabbit Room: I have to start with the feechiefolk and their culture. What’s the genesis there? Jonathan Rogers: I could answer this a couple of ways. On the one hand, feechies are an embodiment of a wildness, an earthy vitality that is in all of us and that I think is there for a reason. Which is to say, it’s not there simply to be tamed out of us. Feechies live wide-open. They laugh too loud, cry too much… they’re pretty demonstrative in a child-like way. I would say they’re sort of a noble savage, except I don’t know how noble they are. The Charlatan’s Boy isn’t just about feechies; it’s about fake feechies. Floyd and Grady’s schtick has been all about portraying Grady as a young feechie and charging people to look at him. When people quit believing in feechies, Floyd and Grady have a much harder job. But I digress. You were asking where the feechies came from. I gave you a philosophical answer. The more practical answer is that feechies are based on some of the old boys I knew growing up in Georgia. The Rabbit Room: The “old boys?” Jonathan: Not literally old. Old boys as in “good old boys.” The ones who were always wanting to fight one another but were actually pretty good-natured about the whole thing. They were always fighting, but they were never scheming. Know what I mean? The Rabbit Room: Yes. The idea to embody this wildness of sorts inside a character like Grady… where does this come from? Did you observe this wildness you described and then think, “That would make a great character?” Jonathan: Yes. Definitely. I knew a guy in Georgia — I wrote about him in my blog — who spent most nights in the swamp catching wild boar. That was his hobby. I don’t mean he shot them. I mean he caught them…or rather his bulldog(s) caught them, and he tied them up with a rope. This guy was just wild in every sense of the word. He came to work crying one morning because an alligator had eaten his dog while it was trying to swim across the Ocmulgee River. That guy inspired the feechiefolk. The Rabbit Room: What lessons did you learn from the Wilderking Trilogy that became essential for even prepping to write The Charlatan’s Boy? Jonathan: I think the biggest thing I learned from writing The Wilderking was simply to trust the story — trust that its meaning will find its way out without too much help from me. It’s always tempting to tell a story and then tell the moral of the story. I mostly resisted that temptation in the Wilderking, but every now and then I succumbed, and those tend to be my least favorite parts of those books. In writing The Charlatan’s Boy, I recommitted to the story, and I think its meanings come through plenty strong. The other thing I learned: to speak in my native tongue. So much language in the “fantasy” genre is stilted and artificial. And in some ways that’s a crutch. If I have a knight speaking like a knight rather than like somebody I know, it’s harder for a reader to hold me accountable if I get it wrong. My favorite language of the Wilderking books are where people sound like Americans, and I decided to make sure everybody talked like Americans in The Charlatan’s Boy. The Rabbit Room: Grady and Floyd seem like they’d be fun characters to flesh out. I’ve spoken with authors before who say their own characters surprise them, but it seems like these would be even more so. Is that true here? Jonathan: Grady definitely surprised me. I knew he was going to be fun. What I didn’t know was just how much sadness and hurt would be underneath the fun. I had never written about sadness and loneliness and hurt before. One thing I realized about Grady was that if he was going to have the kind of vitality I wanted him to have, he was going to have to feel the hurt and loneliness of his situation pretty deeply. He’s a beautiful soul — a fellow who responds to beauty and longs for the truth — and yet he lives in this world of ugliness and falsehood. One of my favorite lines from the book goes something like this: “Wasn’t we a pair? Floyd made his living by telling lies, and I made mine by being ugly.” That’s the poor boy’s plight in a nutshell. Grady wants to have a meaningful life, but the only life he’s had has been geared toward tricking people out of their money. That’s a hard situation for a sensitive soul. Floyd hasn’t surprised me yet. But I think he’s going to surprise me in the sequel. The Rabbit Room: Sequel? What are the official plans there? Jonathan: I have a two-book contract with Waterbrook Press. Book two is slated to release in the fall of 2011. The Rabbit Room: The book holds such a fantastic sense of adventure in several places. Do you naturally live there as a writer or even a person? Did those sections come easy? Jonathan: As a writer, I live for those action-oriented scenes. I love those scenes that have to be blocked out the way a director blocks out a scene in a play. I love having to to get up out of the chair and say, ‘If this guy’s standing here, then the other guy would be facing this way, or he wouldn’t be able to see him…’ Actually, it drives me crazy to read a story in which the writer obviously didn’t get up out of the chair to block it out. Great stories are about ideas, of course, but they’re about how ideas express themselves in the physical world. That’s what sets me on fire about fiction. I love essays too, but they work in a very different way. The movement in an essay is from one idea to another. In a story, it’s about moving from one physical place (or one physical state, even) to another. The ideas work themselves out either way, just in a different way. The Rabbit Room: How about writing from a child’s perspective? That has to be a challenge not to make the kid too “adult”, right? Jonathan: Definitely. I was very nervous about writing in the first person. I wrote a first chapter I was very proud of, got a book contract on the strength of that chapter, and then said, “What have I done? I can’t do that for a whole book!” Part of the problem was, as you said, that the narrator is a boy. I had one advantage there, though: Grady is worldly wise in some ways, having spent his whole life as a charlatan’s boy. At the same time, he’s extra naive in many ways because he’s never had anybody take enough interest in him to help him grow up. So that gave me some latitude, I think, to do what I wanted with the character. Another problem was just his language. It’s a little dialect-y, and if you get that wrong, it can be a disaster. The Rabbit Room: [Laughs] I wondered about that too. Did you pore over a few of the phrases wondering what to put? Jonathan: Oh yes. And some of them didn’t make the cut after the editor saw them. The Rabbit Room: The author is more responsible than ever, it seems, for the marketing of his/her own product. What are you having to do for The Charlatan’s Boy? Jonathan: I’m doing more than I have done for any previous book. How well I’m doing it remains to be seen. But I’ve started a blog — www.jonathan-rogers.com — that gives readers a way to connect a little more with me. It was supposed to be a place where I opine about “how stories do their work on us,” but mostly I just tell funny stories about my relatives. And then there’s the Feechie Film Festival on Facebook, in which friends and readers make short movies about feechiefolks. Self-promotion doesn’t come naturally for me. Self-absorption, on the other hand–that comes very naturally. #JonathanRogers #TheCharlatansBoy #WilderkingTrilogy

I hate traffic, especially drug traffic, but also the congested, automobile variety. Today I was held up by a vast, right-lane conspiracy of cars blocking the road by driving so slow they seemed to be going somewhere between 10 mph and reverse. I angrily imagined my vehicle fitted with sidewinders and me pressing a button, saying, “fox 1, away!” and “fox 2, away!” Just like in Iron Eagle, or whatever. Calming down, I listened to the cheerful chirrups of Jason Gray and wished that the sadness of being stuck in traffic would come untrue. I wondered if it was God’s will that I be late for work. Why would it be? How is that good? Why doesn’t my vehicle have side-winder missiles? You know, the big questions. Mostly I pondered sovereignty. I thought of how often I’ve heard people thankfully say that they were saved from a terrible wreck because of some irritating delay. A child couldn’t find his shoes and we were delayed. If we’d been on time…. A wrong turn. Delayed by a storm. We’d have been right in the middle of that terrible accident. Accident? The unifying element in these tales is thankfulness to God for rescuing the teller from what was very close by and terrifying. I’ve been impressed and conversely distressed at hearing these reports. Part of me is eager to embrace them, to say: “Good, see the hand of God in all things and be grateful for mercy.” Another part of me says, “Would we be giving thanks if the delay had caused the wreck? Or would we still attribute the calamity to God’s hand?” These questions, these kinds of puzzles, are what keeps the wise-as-serpents part of our minds busy while we go hunting for the innocence of doves. But I know why bad things happen. It’s because of rebellion. I’ve been studying the Pentateuch, particularly Genesis, for the past several months. The beginning of Genesis is so profoundly instructive, as well as being a deeply moving story, teeming with pathos. In chapter three we see the attempted de-Godding of God by the first parents. The heartbreaking results follow fast. In chapters four and five the hearts stop, the blood runs, the refrain echos out: “And he died…and he died…and he died…and he died…” Etc. On and on the deaths pile up, a grotesque contrast to the unfallen before. In the acrid air of usurpation our first parents got new clothes, a sacrifice to cover their naked shame. A hint of resolution, restoration brewing. God is still sovereign. Even in suffering. Happier still, he is merciful down deep, slow to anger and abounding in love. He offers rebellious, treasonous mankind a great exchange, our sin for the righteousness of Christ. We can be acceptable to the Father again, by the mercy of God in Christ. I don’t know how traffic jams and wrecks work out for God’s glory and the good of his children. I know, in the short run, it often feels terribly wrong. But death feels wrong because it is. It isn’t natural, isn’t the way things ought to be. It’s a fearful, final foe. But one which will be defeated by the victorious King Jesus. I don’t know how sovereignty works out. My father, quoting Walter Staton, always said, “God is sovereign and man is responsible.” That helps me. People say, “When God closes a door, he opens a window.” I am always tempted to blurt out, “and sometimes he knocks the house over on the people.” God isn’t safe. So do we give credit to God for deaths in traffic as well as praise for when we are saved from the same by lost shoes or a bad sense of direction? When we read the Bible, we see pretty fast that God kills people, sometimes in large groups all at once. This may bother us, but we can’t pretend it isn’t so. Wrestling with this is fine, even appropriate. But this reminds me of what Jared C. Wilson said. “It’s okay to wrestle with a biblical text, so long as at the end it masters you and not the other way around.” It’s popular to say that doubt is humble and certainty is arrogance. This depends, of course, on what we’re certain of and what we’re doubting. There can never be enough of doubting God and his Word to please an entrenched rebel in his pride. If we doubt ourselves, however, we may be on to something (this is humility). If we habitually doubt the faithfulness of God, this is no poetic virtue; it’s called unbelief. Who of us hasn’t prayed, “Lord I believe, please help my unbelief?” But let us keep on praying it and not surrender to our proud misgivings. Keep on fighting, keep on praying. Doubt is a thin shield, a hollow creed. So, brothers and sisters, let us struggle and lose. Let’s understand that God isn’t simply responsible for the deaths of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, or the many who worshiped the golden calf, but of Moses too. In fact he isn’t caught off guard by any death. He is sovereign over all, never asleep, feckless, or disinterested. We are responsible. We chose and go, drive and die, but God works his will over all. Whether I am spared death (for now), or meet my end today, I am glad. I’m thankful. Uncertainty about how it all works out abounds, as well as doubt in my own ability. But let me be certain of him and his Word. He is good. He is just. He is merciful. The Story is true. At his right hand are pleasures, evermore.

[Note: September 25 – October 2 is Banned Books Week Some ten or fifteen years ago, I called home to see how my parents were getting along and Dad told me the town was in an uproar over a book called The Giver. There was a movement afoot to have the book banned in the school system and as one of the little town’s most respected preachers, he’d been called to appear before the school board to deliver his own arguments on whether or not the book ought to be left on the shelves. Now, having grown up in this town and having had to defend myself regularly from such questions as “Why you always readin’ them books?” and “Them books got good pictures?”, I have to admit that I was a bit shocked to learn that someone else was actually reading. The fact that they had then decided to ban the book was far less surprising to me. I needn’t have feared, though. I asked Dad what he was going to tell the school board and the first thing he said was “Well, I read the book . . .” and right then I knew what he was going to say. I knew it because he’d read the book, he’d dispelled ignorance. He went to the school board and made his case and the book stayed on the shelves. In retrospect I know my Dad wouldn’t have been in favor of banning a book whether he’d read it or not, but in that moment, I did wonder. He told me later that the council chamber was split down the middle between those who were for the banning and those who were against it. I can’t help but wonder how many of those on the against side could start their arguments with “Well, I read the book . . .” Probably not many, and I bet those who could did their reading with suspicious eyes and little context. So, well done, Dad. The book is still on the shelves and I have a feeling a that whole lot of people in the county went out and bought a copy during the uproar just to see what the fuss was all about. I doubt there was much uproar left after folks started reading it and some may have even had their horizons broadened by an inch or two. More recently, a family I worked with at a group home listened to all the Harry Potter naysayers and banned the book in their house. They wouldn’t even entertain my defenses of it or my suggestion that they ought read it first and make up their minds second. I spent a lot of time with one of the boys they cared for who had read most of the Potter books before he joined the home. I had a number of great conversations with him about their humor, characters, themes, and lessons and those talks laid the basis for a healthy and joyful relationship between us. For a teenage boy from a broken home with a built-in mistrust of adults and authority, this was a step in the right direction. But when his houseparents found out he’d been hiding a book in his room and reading it in secret, they burned the book and punished him. He came to me later, knowing I would understand their ignorance, and asked me to buy him the next book in the series. It broke my heart, but I had to tell him no. I had to tell him that even if I disagreed with his parents’ decision, I still had to abide by it and wouldn’t help him sidestep their rules. What he didn’t understand at the time was that there was more at stake than merely a book to read, there was a deeper lesson to learn about honoring those who are given authority over us, even when (especially when) we think they are wrong. I continued to have a great working relationship with the boy but his relationship with his houseparents was completely broken. In their ignorance, by judging the books they’d also judged him. Instead of seeing an opportunity to deepen a relationship, foster discussion, and encourage growth, they’d taken something that was beautiful and meaningful to the boy and called it evil. They cast it out, forbade it from their presence, and then punished him for it. They never regained his trust. The difficult part for me was that these parents were good friends of mine. They were wonderful people who blessed me in a multitude of ways. But they let themselves be blinded by ignorance to the point of destroying not only a book, but their relationship with a child who needed their support. So what exactly did they gain by banning the book? I still don’t know. Every time I read about someone trying to ban a book, I have to scratch my head and wonder what on earth they hope to accomplish. I just can’t find an upside to that kind of thinking, which is, of course, another aspect of the ignorance that starts the fuss in the first place. The most obvious result of an attempted ban is that the book will sell a heck of a lot more copies. People will read it out of sheer curiosity. People who don’t even like to read books are wont to pick it up and give it a try. Book banning is a self-defeating goal, plain and simple. The only effective way something can be banned is quietly, George Orwell 1984-style; and that’s truly scary because the masses never know that the subject of the banning existed at all. Hopefully, nothing like that will ever happen in our country. (This is close but somewhat justifiable, I think. Still scary.) So by all means, if you want to ban a book, be vocal about it. Let me know its happening so I can run out and buy a copy and make up my own mind. If I don’t like it, guess what happens. Nothing. I don’t tell people about books I don’t like (well, not unless they are Twilight bad). And if it’s full of themes and language that I don’t approve of, guess what I do. I read something else. You don’t want your kids reading something that you suspect is subversive? Ignore it; downplay it. Give them a wealth of other choices. Are they required to read it in school? Great! You’ll have a lot of important conversations about it. If a book offends you and you feel like you have to speak out, protest the content and advocate for other options. Or you can try banning it. I wish people would ban The Fiddler’s Gun. I really do. I’d love to see it argued over in town hall meetings and picketed at libraries. I’d love to see it on the news being burned by Fred Phelps. I’d love to have the readers and the sales. I’ll leave you with a (partial) list of books that have come under the threat of being banned in just the last ten years. You heard me right. Ten years. People have tried to ban these books, not thirty or forty years ago, but since the year 2000. It’s scary. I really do wish someone would add my book to the list. It would be in good company. Of Mice and Men Harry Potter The Catcher in the Rye Bridge to Terabithia The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Beloved The Color Purple The Golden Compass The Kite Runner Twilight To Kill a Mockingbird And beyond ten years. . . The Great Gatsby The Grapes of Wrath The Lord of the Flies 1984 Catch-22 Brave New World Animal Farm The Sun Also Rises A Farewell to Arms Gone with the Wind One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest The Call of the Wild The Lord of the Rings

I had the idea a while back to write a post about two of my favorite bands: Waterdeep and Wilco. I like alliteration and alphabetical categories as much as any other former English major, and the comparison of what, in my mind, were two strikingly different groups, with startlingly opposing themes would give me plenty to rattle on about. I was probably also looking to up my cool factor one or two points with all you Rabbit Room geeks, and you know, quoting righteous lyrics from two gnarly bands was really my best bet, right? Right on. But along with all those self-serving motives, there was a longing to share something from my heart. I thought about telling you about a memory of working in my new-to-me kitchen in Maryland, a new Mom and a young wife – weary and tired. Waterdeep was my cleaning soundtrack, but when I heard the song “Hush,” I knelt on the vinyl and bawled for the tender love of my own earthly father, and the fractured, complicated relationship I shared with his wife, my mother. And then there was the time many months later, driving around listening to “When the Cold Wind Blows.” I kept thinking about all the different places I’d lived. Thirteen times I’d moved already, how long until it happened again, I wondered. And still, none of those places ever felt like home. I could not have begun to tell you where “home” was, I just knew I longed to have one. And I dreamed of staying in that car until I could figure out how to drive there. So much driving, so many tears, but at least I had a car, huh? I believe the plan was to testify about how Waterdeep has translated the language of my heart so many times over the years and how much I love the truth and boldness of their good news songs. To tell you how in the mornings, when I lay in bed awake, when it’s just me and the Jesus whom I thank for another day ahead, as well as the good night’s rest behind, it’s easy for me to believe the face I imagine is real. That He actually has “names for all his stars”, that he will “heal my wounds and kiss my scars.” You are not so far away from me, as I thought you’d be I think of telling him. After all that, I’d have surprised you by admitting my nighttime struggles which reveal more of an allegiance to Wilco lyrics. How by nightfall, when my energy is spent and I’ve lost my temper over and over again, when tomorrow’s worries line themselves up on my pillow, and I want nothing more than to sleep so I can start over again but there’s a million and one things left still to do. That’s when it’s much easier to believe “Hell is Chrome,” and God’s love is random, because He only speaks in code. Perhaps a few of you would have identified more with Tweedy’s lines at this point, and we could have looked each other in the eyes across computer screens and struggled together to get back on the truth sides of our stories. And in the end I would have tied a neat bow on top and said something about trying to choose the right path from here on out. But I never did write it, and then we went and had a Hutchmoot. I discovered a mere week before it came, that Waterdeep would be playing at the Square Peg Show scheduled for Saturday night! Would I actually get to meet them too, I wondered, even though seeing them perform live for the first time was certainly exciting enough. By some miracle of the Moot, we ended up sitting at the same table as Don and Lori while we ate dinner, and wouldn’t you know it? Despite their slightly Amazonian proportions, they’re pretty regular, albeit extremely talented, people. I was able to make some regular type chit chat with them, about families and shared histories, without spilling any drinks on myself, or snorting banana pudding during the punch line of anyone’s jokes. After dinner, it felt almost exactly like Jesus grabbed me by the hand and hurried me to my seat in the sanctuary, and the minute Mr. Walt Wangerin opened his mouth to speak, He poked me on the shoulder and whispered “Listen.” But three hours later, Jesus was still hanging around because he asked Lori to sing that song about Home again, just for me, and I was a completely undone fool on the back row, for like the eighth time that weekend. Then, after we’d been home a couple weeks, and the dreamy weekend had become hazy memory, I saw that Don was playing a house concert in Knoxville. We scooped up our tickets, begged our grandparents to babysit, and wore out the new EP. In truth, I wished for a show with both halves, but I turned out to be far from disappointed, as yet again, every song seemed chosen especially for me – which of course turned on the waterworks again. So many tries to hold it all together, in a small room full of strangers, three of which we discovered that night, were teachers at our son’s new middle school. I found myself thinking again how prideful it is to wipe away those tears, yet I haven’t figured out how to turn off that instinct. More powerful than the song selection though, was Don’s determination to spark communion with this random group of fans. Don led us in responsive readings heavily themed with grief and loss, then he shared his own personal poetry, laden with guilt and failure, yet when the show was over, all fourteen of our hearts were undeniably full of hope and love. It was a masterful construct, though I’m sure Don would never take credit for such an effective redemption experience. I came home and decided it was high time to tell my Waterdeep story. Sometime during the writing process, I realized this post needed a little less Wilco and a lot more Jesus. Not because I don’t like Wilco anymore, but because I just can’t wrap it up neatly and divide these two groups into nice little categories. (Even the picture of Don, along with my husband in a Wilco t-shirt bears witness to that—totally unplanned by the way). And I can’t honestly say that I’ll only listen to spiritually uplifting music. As long as I’m human, I will continue to have days when it feels more natural to cry out against God, than to fall at his feet. It may be a huge assumption to make here, but I think even Waterdeep has its Wilco days. In the end though, Don and Lori confess Christ, and ultimately, they point listeners toward Jesus himself. So instead of a bow here at the conclusion; how about a song of the day? It’s called “Everyone’s Beautiful” and beautiful is the best word I know to describe this couple who is simply faithful to their craft, their Lord and each other. I hope you take some time today to give it a listen.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/EveryonesBeautiful.mp3 Check out Don and Lori’s (a.k.a. Waterdeep’s) music at their webstore.