“If you want to get in touch with creation, ride the bus or take the subway.” -maybe, possibly, Eugene Peterson I wasn’t given a playbill, and it definitely started without me, but I’m enjoying the symphony nevertheless. I’m settled into a cold corner table near the kitchen, and the coffee shop is well into the performance. An orchestra of voices already warmed, already in tune, already swelling in unpredictable harmonies. The girl wearing the bandana and workout clothes looks like she has yet to make it to the gym. Maybe she’ll exercise after she’s done telling a friend about the fear she has of telling Brian she loves him too. College kids gather around laptops, textbooks open, minds and hearts alive only in whatever has them laughing—likely not the subject matter of their assignments. A couple of tourists are wrapping a “wonderful” weekend trip to Nashville—We should do it again sometime. I feel alive in these scenes. Urban life has always compelled me. For a boy who lived in a trailer park in a small country town in southern Indiana for the first 13 years of his life, the first ventures to DC or NYC were mesmerizing even beyond the sights and sounds of the city. There was for me a symphony of stories, disparate notes of varied instruments coming together in a new and beautiful way. Some people withdraw to grand canyons or scale snowy peaks. It is there, in those places, that their hearts are filled, their perspectives renewed for a journey back into the noise of the mainstream. But my circuit has always been flipped. It’s not that I can’t appreciate the beauty of the created order, but there’s a renewal that occurs while nestled between strangers. Hearing a story that’s not my own, that has absolutely nothing to do with me, that’s filled with the same tensions, hopes, fears, and joys, breathes fresh air into my life. My heart is filled, my perspective renewed. The siren song of the city is bolstered by this idea that I’m in touch with the business, and busyness, of God. Sorrows are comforted. Joys are shared. Hopes are restored. Loneliness finds company. Even those who are alone here in this coffee shop are leaning into something, and the mystery of that excites me. Someone is finding the discipline to do what she loves for a few more minutes. Someone else wraps up the last few chapters of a story that’s somehow become his own. No matter the table, the good things of life are aglow all around me. It’s nights like this that I remember that anything is possible, that our stories can move in any number of directions or not at all. I’m reminded that my own notes, while important and valuable, are only a small part of a grand orchestration. And even when my Sunday night seems like just another Sunday night without any great meaning or purpose or hope or reason, there’s much more going on than I can even begin to understand.

Jeremy Casella tends to be the Square Peg that lurks unnoticed in the background, so you’re forgiven if you aren’t a fan yet. But while he’s lurking back there, he’s making great music, and this new album has been a long time coming. Death in Reverse has been a hard journey for him and we can’t wait for you guys to hear it. Jeremy wrote a post about the record a while back, and here’s how he describes the record: A few years ago I read N. T. Wright’s wonderful book Surprised By Hope and had my mind blown by all of the beautiful implications of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Being an artist and songwriter, I naturally started to wonder how I might explore ways to connect with the resurrection musically. I found myself day dreaming about writing an album full of songs that sounded like they were coming from the other side of renewal, but with lyrics tethered to the present. I wanted to explore the “already/not yet” tension of living with expectant hope in the midst of suffering. In addition to this, I wanted it all to sound like joy. Here’s sneak peek at one of the tracks from the record. The whole album is now available in the Rabbit Room store (note that CDs aren’t in yet, but if you order now, we’ll ship them in two weeks when they arrive). “Letter From An Old Friend” from Death in Reverse by Jeremy Casellahttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Letter.mp3 I wish I could find a way Back to where it all began For the future point of view Through the telescopic lens Because I know in looking back Everything will change Flip the axle upside down In reverse and rearrange I listen through the veil at night I listen till my soul believes The music in my mind’s eye I sing it through the in between I got a letter from an old friend Written in a harmony Take a heart of stone And make it bleed Make it beat Tracing out your silhouette Up before the morning comes I packed my things and headed west For the trumpet and the drum I’ve got the image loud and clear I put the picture in the frame And everything I’ve left behind It’s luminescence fades away Yet arise my soul, you’re not alone You’re not alone Yet arise my soul, you’re not alone Yet arise my soul, lift up your heart You’re carried in a cloud by day Wrestle through the fire by night The Father fights for you Lift up your heart Be still

Note: This post contains some major plot spoilers for The Lego Movie. When I was a kid, my brother and I had two boxes of treasure. You could run your hand through them and hear the clinking cascade, or grasp a fistful and watch the pieces fall through your fingers. So much opportunity, so much potential to work with. One was a box of Playmobile, the other a box of Legos. We spent many long, creative afternoons beside that Lego box, which represented a conglomerate of various sets collected over the years. Nothing stayed in its original state very long, but was sacrificed to the common hoard of building blocks. The results were wonderful and varied. A medieval castle might arise from the icy foundations of an arctic science laboratory. A pirate might don a space helmet (no wonder I love Firefly and Andy Osenga). Wild and incongruous creations emerged from our uninhibited eight-year-old minds. And yet there was also something about coming home with a new box of Legos, watching the carefully packaged plastic bags plunk out onto the floor, along with that smooth blue booklet of instructions. We’d sit there with brows furrowed in concentration, trying to discern each step, not quite understanding how the awesome image on the front cover would emerge, but trusting that the master builders behind the plan knew what they were doing. And once the last piece clicked in, you’d have a sleek spaceship or a labyrinthine castle. It was with nostalgia for this time of life that I  went to see The Lego Movie. It honestly wasn’t on my radar for must-see films in early 2014, although I do enjoy a good animated film. But then the highly positive reviews started rolling out. And then it got a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Seriously? That’s better than most of the Oscar-nominated films this year. Finally, I read this fantastic review by Jeffrey Overstreet and I knew I had to go. They were right. The Lego Movie is a great film, filled with creative visuals, a clever sense of humor aimed at riffing pop culture clichés, and something I did not quite expect—a profound message about the nature of creativity itself. The main character of the film, Emmet, is a bland cog in the machinery of the perfect world created by the evil Lord Business. He’s a construction worker who is used to following plans and rules, and he loves it. But through an accident he comes into contact with the mystical Piece of Resistance and the Master Builders, a group of brilliant individuals who stand against Lord Business and his inhibiting master plan of perfection, and believe Emmet is the Special who can defeat him. They are charismatic rebels, like goth girl WyldStyle, and Batman, each with their own genius level talents and skills. Based on this premise, you’d expect such a film to work itself out in the following way: Emmet, through a series of tests and lessons with a wise old mentor (yes, there actually is one, played brilliantly tongue-in-cheek by Morgan Freeman), comes to realize that he really is the Special, unlocks his hidden abilities, and saves the day in heroic fashion. And while that sort of happens, there’s something much bigger going on in the story. Our society exalts the Master Builders, the highly individualistic, creative geniuses like WyldStyle and Batman and Vetruvius and Superman. After all, who wants to be a boring old drone in the system? But as Emmet points out at a crucial point in the film, they don’t know how to work together as a team. They are undisciplined and unorganized. In the end, it is not some untapped well of genius that Emmet accesses to save the day. It is his boring, cog-like ability to follow a plan that brings the team together and harnesses their abilities. But what makes this story idea even more fascinating is the huge twist in the final act, which reveals that this story is the creation of a young boy playing with his father’s Lego collection in the basement. The father, played by Will Ferrell, is obviously the inspiration for the son’s Lord Business character (who Ferrell also voices). He sees the Lego city he has built as a world of detailed perfection, which must be kept that way by a generous application of super glue (which works out hilariously in one of the major plot devices). The son is of the Master Builder stripe. He sees all the potential fun and crazy ideas he can bring to life in his father’s world. But in watching the film we arrive at two realizations: the son can only create within what the father has already made, and the father realizes that the son has taken his world and made it even more amazing through his imagination, and relents on his drive for totalitarian perfection. What we come to realize in watching the film is that we need both of these things in the world. We need the boring stability of the everyday, the organized structure of the plan. We need the wild, think-outside-the-box creativity of the charismatic individual. These things are not opposed to each other, but are designed to work in harmony The structure provides context for the artist, and the artist provides fresh meaning and perspective for the structure. With the advent of this Father-Child relationship in the film, I would also dare say that we are approaching an analogy to the relationship of the divine and the human, the Creator and the creature. Jeffrey Overstreet has already made some fine points about this in his review. I will only add that in thinking more about the film, these two quotes from J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis came to mind: “We make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.” (J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”) “An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.” (C.S. Lewis) For a film about a kid’s toy, The Lego Movie has some pretty deep things to say about our work in making the world. But considering the pure power of creativity offered to a child’s mind through a gleaming box of building blocks, that’s pretty appropriate after all.

For the first time in weeks, I woke to the sun in my curtains, and it felt like the break of spring. It may be the Sunshine State, but chill and rain have pushed their way into paradise. As brief as a Florida winter can be, there comes a time when the wet and the gray give way to the sun, and it feels like death working backwards, even though the next wave of rain will come again soon. The sky is the perfect pale blue. The air is just cool enough to wear a light sweater. Even a few of my neighbor’s pink azaleas had the audacity to bloom. Today, I’m not holed up in an office, or buried under blankets avoiding the rain, or turning future preoccupations over and over in my mind like a troubling foreign object I found in my yard. Today, I simply take the time for being and dip my fingers in the stream of eternity. These days I catch myself too often living in the future, for good reasons at least. I can’t wash my hands without catching the flash of a diamond that promises how everything will soon turn upside down. When I’m not trying to work or sleep, my mind tries to skip forward in time. After all, there’s wedding food to taste, guest lists to tweak, shoes to search for. From the growing task lists to help me pull off this party, to packing boxes before moving and making a new family, to choosing napkin colors and cake flavors and what kind of vacuum to put on my registry, everything seems to exist in a sort of rapidly approaching someday that becomes more real with every sunrise. It’s a someday that’s beautiful and terrifying at once. It’s a someday wrapped in promises I sometimes question my ability to live out. Isn’t this how it all is though? Is there ever a moment when my time-bound body and soul can step back and see where the frozen past and vaporous future melt together into right now? In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis imagines how this bent obsession with time becomes a devil’s tool of distraction: “The humans live in time, but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.” The Present is barely here before it becomes Past. By the time you finish reading this next sentence, a new one will be present. For most of us, if we think about it long enough, we can imagine God standing outside the stream of time, watching over the whole of it, the slow trickling bits and the days that rush by like rapids over rocks. We can mentally assent that he is here, even in this moment, and there, in the past, and further downstream, in all the future moments to come. And there I am, caught in the flow, too worried about what’s around the bend to appreciate the way right now is cradling me. And isn’t this just the opposite of what God wants for us? “We want a whole race perpetually in the pursuit of the rainbow’s end,” says Screwtape, “never honest, never kind, nor happy now . . .” So it seems nigh impossible to “live in the present,” as so many motivational posters would proclaim, when so much of it is fleeting, flowing, disappearing in the past and hurtling toward an unseen future. But today, for now, I see the break in the clouds, and on this short mid-winter day, I take advantage of the sun and the free time. Instead of attending to the task list, the errands, the worries, or the self-doubts, I’ll take a cup of coffee and a book and some ink on paper. For now, this is my Sabbath. I redeem the time and hope to carve out something holy.

Here’s Ellen and the Peacock, a piece I did a while back. (See the full image below). It’s story-ish looking (as most of my paintings tend to be) and so people naturally assume there’s a story that goes with it. There’s not. At least not yet. Ellen first appeared back in 2006 or 2007 when I painted her walking through the woods with a bear. I finished the piece and I wrote a little story that went with the image. Back then she was just “the girl.” But somewhere along the way “the girl” showed up again and she was Ellen, and this time she was carrying a suitcase through the woods on a dark and snowy night. I began to wonder if there was a bigger story here. I began to ask myself who she really was and what she was about. And then came the peacock. I’ve always been fascinated with topiaries and so I decided to paint one, and shoot, Ellen wasn’t doing anything so I decided that she wanted in on this too. And the piece began to come together. As I was painting the peacock topiary I thought, “What if this thing was also somehow alive, or almost alive, or both a real bird and a bush?” So I painted its neck blue and gave it a big ol’ liquid eye, but left its feet firmly rooted to the ground. And there was Ellen, calmly looking up at it with her lantern held high, probably understanding the situation better than I. There isn’t a finished story here yet, but it’s forming with every Ellen painting I do. These paintings all, to one degree or another, turn out differently than I expect. As I paint, I’m asking those “What if?” questions that steer the emerging narrative in unexpected directions. My goal is to eventually get her story down, but in the meantime I enjoy this painting for what it is without a story: mysterious. I like it because that mystery is fertile soil for the imagination of the viewer, and an invitation to join me in the creative process. As the viewer looks at the painting, his or her mind is stirred with possibilities, just as mine is. My hope is that these elements—this walled garden, this girl bundled against the cold, this freakish peacock/bush thing that might just be alive—will trigger the imaginations of those who see it, and they’ll also be brought—just as I have been—to a place of wonder, asking, “What if…?”

It occurred to me this morning that it might be helpful to think through one really annoying aspect of creative work, which is that every single time you sit down to make something, even if you’ve done this for years and know the routine, it feels like you’re starting from scratch. It feels like you have absolutely nothing to offer, nothing new to say, and whatever you’ve managed to get right in the past was just a fluke, and you’re not writing a song so much as reinventing the wheel. Or building the Space Shuttle out of matchsticks. While this is true in some ways, in others it isn’t true at all. Here’s what I mean. It’s true because the creative act is and will always be a mystery to which we are only allowed the access of clarity for fleeting moments if at all. For ninety nine percent of the time the process is frustrating and difficult and tiresome. This is to be expected. Good things take work, and in the end God isn’t interested in the thing you’re making half as much as the person he’s making out of you. Work, pain, frustration, joy, patience: these are the tools God uses (along with many other things) to shape our souls. In this sense, then, the song is writing you. Every now and then, though, the veil is lifted and the subcreator gets to see the beautiful mechanism (wheels within wheels) at work behind the curtain, and the process of songwriting makes sudden and perfect sense. “So this is how you write a song,” you think. Then, just as suddenly, the veil falls back into place, the glow is gone, and the world seems drab by comparison. Has this ever happened to you? It’s tantalizing—just enough to make you want to pick up your guitar again in defiance of your fears. But there’s another truth at work: you’re not starting from scratch. You’ve done this before. You know how this works. If you wrote a song once, it must be possible to do it again, right? Songs exist. Humans write them. I am a human. Therefore it must be possible for me to write one—even if it ends up being lousy. You have the testimony of history on your side, Ebenezer stones dotting the landscape all the way to the horizon. It’s also the great blessing of the Bible. We have something the fathers of our faith didn’t have, at least not in the way we have it: perspective. We’re able to see in Scripture that when God makes a promise, he keeps it. We’re able to see the story as it has unfolded since the beginning, and so, though the future is dark, the past is pulsing with light. So are we starting from scratch? Yes. And no. Every line in your notebook, every strum of your guitar is an act of faith. But you’ve been here before. Don’t be afraid.

“Ball,” he said, and he gestured to the heavens. I looked where my little boy was pointing and saw a full moon hanging high in the winter sky. “That’s right, you brilliant boy,” I said. “It is a ball. The moon is a great big ball.” He didn’t know more than four or five words at the time: Mama. Daddy. Ball. Dog. Plane. What a remarkable thing—to have words only for one’s favorite things in the world. “The moon is a ball,” I told my boy, “and so is the earth we’re standing on. This whole world is one big ball set spinning in the universe.” He smiled at me. It was not a smile of comprehension, but of contentment. To me it seemed to say, “Of course this whole world is a ball! And why shouldn’t it be? It’s a great ball where dogs trot and planes soar overhead and my mama loves me and my daddy holds me in the cold night and tells me what I suspected all along: that the moon is a ball, and the world is too.”

Not a day goes by that I don’t look down and see it. Every day, at least one person asks about the symbol tattooed on my arm. “What’s your tattoo mean?” I never know how to answer that question. Well, that’s kind of a long story . . . it’s from this book I read . . . Fin Button (the protagonist in Fiddler’s Gun and Fiddler’s Green) is an icon of my own passions and fears, my own wounds, my own desire to voyage out into the world to do something with my burning heart. She embodies some of the most fundamental aspects of our human existence: the need to love and be loved, the yearning for a place to belong, the burning desire to be who we are in the world and to nurture and protect the places and people we hold dear. Every time I return to Fin’s story, I hear the last stanza of Christian Wiman’s poem, “And I Said To My Soul Be Loud”: For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things and I will ride this tantrum back to God until my fixed self, my fluorescent self my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self withers in me like a salted slug Fin’s journey through pain and into beauty is, like our own, dizzy with light and darkness, joy and suffering. It follows no pre-determined formula for traveling from Point A to Point B and takes on the non-linear and wildly free traveling pattern of a ship at sea—destination in mind, but swept along by the breeze of life. There are enemies and allies, tragedies and victories; mistakes are made, and lives are taken. The smell of gunpowder is strong, but there is music floating across the deck of the Rattlesnake. In the transformation of pain into beauty, what is calcified in us is softened; what is artificial and grief-stricken finds its way to joyful authenticity; what is confined and lost in wonderlessness recovers the innocent eyes and imagination of childhood.* It’s been a couple years since I read Fiddler’s Gun from cover to cover, but it’s never far from my reach. The cover is completely shot, folded over and stained and torn. It’s beautiful. I open to dog-eared pages bearing a beloved typeset, offering a story to the world—the story of a young girl in pain, learning to turn that pain into beauty. Turn it beautiful. Those pages also bear my own scribblings, black ink from the only kind of pen I ever use: a Pilot Precise V5. My story in the margins of Fin’s story. We understand each other. Turn it beautiful. How these words have haunted me. They’ve taken up residence in my soul. I wasn’t sure about getting a tattoo. I didn’t know if I wanted to be that old lady, the one with the withered ink. But the more I immersed myself in Fin’s story, the more I knew I wanted both the visceral experience of pain being turned into beauty and the visible reminder of this deep truth, this grace: Turn it beautiful. When I found myself sitting down to a meal in Santa Fe, New Mexico, next to poet Luci Shaw, whose right shoulder was boasting the sharp lines of a new tattoo, it was decided. The tattoo was intended to provide a permanent reminder of the meaning I long for my life to inhabit, the meaning I hope inhabits my life. I scribbled the words on a scrap of paper and sat down in a reclining chair tucked into the back corner of a tattoo parlor in a tiny Northwestern Michigan town.Turn it beautiful. As I watched the needle alter the color of my skin, I held the words close to my heart. Black ink from the tattoo gun** mingled with specks of crimson from my own veins. I felt the story take up residence in my blood. In the pain of the experience, I felt the pain of my own story, this whirlwind of wasted things, enveloping me and making itself available to me as raw material. Shortly after this experience, a friend texted me a picture he’d snapped of the final stanza in Luci Shaw’s poem “Stephansdom Cathedral, Vienna”: So much of life happens between the verses of the psalms. When I got the tattoo, the pain subsided as the image grew, the duet of flesh and ink branding me for the ages with a flower-cross. The likeness, on the skin of my right shoulder, will someday toughen into leather. But why, they’ll speculate, did she do it? What in her life was like a flower? A cross? So much of life happens between the lines of a good story. When I got the tattoo, the pain subsided as the image grew, the duet of flesh and ink branding me for the ages with a fiddle-gun. The likeness, on the skin of my left forearm, will someday toughen into leather. But why, they’ll speculate, did she do it? What in her life was like a fiddle? A gun? *For a musical interlude, listen to Ron Block and Rebecca Reynolds’ song “Let There Be Beauty.” **For the Star Wars fans among us: The artist had attached a Darth Vader head to the end of this tool of his trade and dubbed the tattoo gun “Darth Shader.”

I’ve wanted to be a musician since I was a kid. Had posters on my walls of Jars of Clay and Steven Curtis Chapman (before I discovered Pearl Jam). I dreamed of playing arenas, being in a recording studio, making music with my heroes. It has been an incredible gift and honor to, one by one, put little checkmarks on each entry of the dream list. It’s also let me see the reality of touring/musician life, and that being “bigger” or more successful is not something I actually even want. It would mean more travel and more things pulling me from my family, which to me is a much deeper calling. I’ve come to a place where it feels I have to choose between providing for my family on the road or being with them at home. This past year I’ve found myself praying for a way to keep working with people I love on music I love, while coming off the road and being with my family. So next week I will be starting a job at Capitol Records in the Christian Music division. This would be the label that bought the label that both signed and dropped The Normals. Same building. Such glorious irony. Or is it merely happenstance, Alanis? I’ll be doing A&R, which is short for Artist & Repertoire. Essentially, I’ll be coming alongside artists, encouraging and helping them find the right vision for their projects and the right songs to speak into that vision. It is connecting artists with songwriters, producers, engineers, etc to make the right combination for the best record. It’s also scouting and signing new acts. This job is half of what you do while producing indie records, and it’s honestly my favorite part. Songs are what define an artist and a record, and being able to speak into them in their infancy is something I love. Getting to know a new roster of artists and helping them find what God has made great in them when they’ve forgotten. This is something I am incredibly passionate about and can’t wait to be able to do full-time. And this will be a full-time, office, salary and benefits kind of gig. Something I’ve never had before. It will mean, however, coming off the road as a full-time musician. This past year was maybe the most I’ve ever enjoyed playing music on the road and I’m glad to be able to leave it while it’s a thing I love. I’ll also be letting go of the studio, which is sad in one sense, but freeing in that “check I don’t have to write every month” way. I’ll be moving a lot of my gear into Ben Shive’s BeeHive Studio so he has some more toys to play with and I’ll still have a place to go and make some noise. And some more EPs. I’ll continue my artist writing and recording, because I couldn’t stop if I tried, and after all, I still owe you four more EPs! So you’ll be getting more music from me this year than you ever have before. I’ll also keep writing music with my friends and playing on their records if they’ll have me! Road-wise, I’ll be finishing out a few solo and weekend Steven Curtis shows that are left on the schedule for this season. And I’ll keep playing Nashville shows, since honestly, those are usually the most fun anyway. The truth is, my solo music has always been a side job, so except for not seeing me on the Christmas tour, it probably won’t look too different from the outside. For my family, I’m hopeful it’s going to look very different. In a good way. I’m really excited about this new opportunity, a chance to really speak into something I have both loved and loathed over the years. I’m looking forward to getting to work with my producer/writer/artist friends in a new capacity, hopefully bringing them work and bringing true and beautiful music to a wider audience. Mostly, I’m excited about seeing my girls and Alison every day. I’m thrilled to be able to be a more stable presence in our home, with a more stable income (and dental!) and a job that lets me use my love of songs, Jesus, and people in a new way. I’ve had the incredible opportunity to share the stage with my heroes, write songs that have been a part of both weddings and funerals, and have made the most amazing friends. I’ve played somewhere around 2000 shows and done over half a million miles in a 15-passenger van. I got to perform at Carnegie Hall! I have somehow been able to play guitar and sing harmonies with the absolute best songwriters in a town called Music City. Looking at that last paragraph feels like it’s written about somebody else. It can sound lofty in a bio, but it’s just been hard work at a thing I love, nose down, trying to pay the bills. For me, it has taken walking out of the room to realize just how amazing it was to have been there in the first place. Thanks for being my friend and being a part of the past 16 years as a working musician. It has literally been a dream come true. Andrew P.S. To celebrate this new beginning, I’m going to be throwing an online StageItparty next Tuesday night, 7:30 Central. I start the job Wednesday morning, so this will be the Reverse MidLife Crisis Eve Show. I’ll be playing songs from the Heart EP and from the past 15 years. Hope to see you there!!

If all goes according to plan, in the fall I will be filling in for my colleague on sabbatical and teaching the course “Sustainability in Action” at Point Loma Nazarene University. The purpose of the course is “to equip us as scholars and citizens of the United States, the world, and Christ’s Kingdom to be effective champions of the changes humanity must make in order to live sustainably within the ecological and social limits of earth.” In preparation for the class I have been brushing up on my agrarian readings. Today I have been enjoying Norman Wirzba’s edited volume, The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land: The Essential Agrarian Essays. By itself Barbara Kingsolver’s “Forward” is worth price of the book. Yet, this afternoon I took a break from reading agrarian prescriptions for sustainability to watch the livestream of the SpaceX Falcon launch to the International Space Station. It was killer! And yesterday’s news from NASA that the exoplanet Kepler 186f orbits within the habitable zone of its star was awesomeness on a Perelandraic order. Perhaps this is as good a time as any to confess I am secretly writing a sci-fi story. By now, you are wondering where I am heading with this blog post. Well, it is less a post with a point than an inquiry. You see what is odd about my interest in agrarianism and outer space is that I am completely removed from both. I am a non-astronautical, indoors suburbanite who nevertheless thinks farming and space flight are spellbinding. What I want to know is, why? Obviously it makes sense to ask rabbits about garden tomatoes. This group of rabbits, however, seem to know a thing or two about space. (“Blast through the glass of the atmosphere.” “Rocket, rocket shooting to the moon.” Leonard?) What I cannot imagine is Wendell Berry in a cosmonaut suit. What I can imagine, if ever I journeyed to Mars, is kicking back in a pressurized chamber reading Jayber Crow. What I am having a hard time figuring out is how my imagination works. #SpaceX #WendellBerry

I have to admit… Christmas is everyone’s favorite holiday (mine too), but something about the Lenten and Easter season feels deeper, more profound as I get older. Yet what do you do with Holy Saturday, that single dark day in between despair and hope? Last year, I did my best to capture the tiniest glimpse of what it might have been like for those left behind who didn’t yet know for sure how the story would end… She used to say she loved those TV movies about Jesus, but hated the crucifixion scene even though it was toned down in the grains of 1970s film, palatable to the eyes of those eating dinner in front of a flickering screen. This is us, now, knowing how it all ends, knowing in three days the lungs of God would reinflate. Knowing the ending, could I ever comprehend the blackness, ever imagine the darkest Saturday in history? A King’s body shrouded in spices and linen lay withering behind stone, The budding bloom of salvation, crushed careless trod by His creation. Oh my God today the sun scatters clouds the sun that once turned away at your final earthly breath as the lion lay shorn and still. May I never forget the darkest day of history, spring stopped, waiting, pressing her face at the tomb’s door.

Lent I On Noah In your dreams you saw water and death. In your days you saw darkness and evil. How far we have come from the gates of paradise, spewing a wretched trail in the wake, vomiting the rotten fruit of our first sin. And yet how does this horror of water and blood manage to be our sole salvation? I run to the secret place and hide, resolving to cling to the dark mystery of grace. Lent II On Malaysia flight 370 In a moment of horror I cannot say how, we plummeted through clouds on bright wings broken, cast into the deep into the lowest darkness. The eyes of men searched to and fro, in days and nights of weariness, while I sank down to the heart of the earth to the black, cold soul of Sheol. Out of the depths I cry to you to the eyes that see through dark or light, raise me up from the shadow of death on bright wings born from morning’s fire. Lent III On the Oso mudslide In matter of moments earth took them back, though it takes us all just much more slowly. God formed man out of the dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. The living search for bodies in the mud life in the dirt like a desperate spring Son of man, can these bones live? Sovereign Lord, breath giver, you alone know.

[Editor’s note: Rejoice, Kickstarter backers! The presses are rolling on The Warden and the Wolf King. We’ll send out a Kickstarter survey in the next few days to collect shipping addresses, so keep a close watch on your email.] Around two years ago, Andrew Peterson and I were just shooting the breeze now and then about a nice illustrated map for the fourth and final chapter of his acclaimed Wingfeather Saga. I was pumped about it and itching to get started, but I was secretly telling my wife Gina, “I wonder if Andrew would let me do some other art as well. Like, for free.” Well it just so happened, while we were on the phone about this time last year, that he popped the question. And I said, “NO, Andrew! I’m happily married!” Wait . . . that’s not how it went at all. We were discussing the map when he kind of fished around, wondering if I would be up to doing some additional art for the book. It kind of sounded like this: “Well, I would REALLY love to have the book be heavily illustrated, but we don’t have a budget, or any money at all . . . so I probably can’t pay you much—or anything—but I’m sure we’ll find a way to pay you something, somehow.” [Editor’s note: Let the record show that thanks to all the generous Kickstarter backers, we did indeed pay Joe for his hard work.] I didn’t care about the money. I had no major projects in front of me, and I was worn down from my endless search for work amongst the NY publishing elite. I was ready to just do some real art for once, and this series already had a fantastic fan base. So, I agreed to do some art—for free. We weren’t sure how it would all work out, or turn out, but we were excited to collaborate and make something great, no matter what it took. Justin Gerard’s work had embellished the pages of previous Wingfeather books, but there was never the budget to allow him to accomplish a grand vision (ah, the wonders of Kickstarter). I wanted to honor his designs, while still digging in with my own style, and really explore the fine details of Aerwiar. Justin left a lot of room for interpretation with his airy, smokey visuals, but I always went back to them, really wanting this new vision to feel a part of the world he had begun to depict. I asked Andrew to send me a list of all the characters of concern, along with detailed descriptions. After looking them over, I decided to begin with our young hero, Janner Igiby. (I’m playing it safe in case there’s a slimy Fang of Dang lurking about. His real name is Wingfeather—but don’t read that aloud.) I have a tendency to lean toward a slightly playful flair when creating characters, but my first attempt at Janner looked very much like a clumsy Disney squire. Andrew quickly explained that he was really hoping we could design the characters with a sense of realism that lent itself to the darker tones of the story. I decided to ramble out a slew of facial concepts and see where it led us. Again, I ran these by Andrew and he narrowed it down to a few different faces. After I combined the best aspects of these, I stumbled upon a face we both felt was right on target. It needed to convey a sense of responsibility and weight while still being the face of a 12- or 13-year-old boy. Several months later, we began the Kickstarter campaign and fans flocked to my Instagram feed. I was nervous, but as I read through their comments I began to see exclamations such as “That’s exactly how I pictured him!” Likewise with the other characters. I even got to talk with some kids at Hutchmoot who were fans, and as they thumbed through my sketches I would ask them who it was they saw on the page. The kids had no trouble naming the characters I had sketched, even without names on the page! I was on the right track. In the coming months, I look forward to sharing even more stories and characters with you, and I can’t wait to hear your reactions once the book lands in your mailboxes.

This isn’t a movie review, I’ll leave that to Thomas, but I do want to talk about my impressions of the film and hopefully start some (civil) discussion. It’s undoubtedly a film that challenges expectations and a lot of the comments and reactions I’ve seen online tell me that there are some who aren’t sure what to do with those challenges. If you ask me what I do when a movie like Noah unsettles me, here’s my answer: think about it (calmly and rationally), and then talk about it (calmly and rationally). To begin with, let me tell you I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. The script has a few clunky spots and some things work better than others, but overall it’s fascinating and packed with good performances, rich visual storytelling, and complex human characters behaving in often surprising yet understandable ways. Yes, the Nephilim are giant stone “ents.” No, that doesn’t bother me—in fact it really excites me. Yes, the story goes some strange places that aren’t factual. No, that doesn’t bother me either, especially considering that the story remains biblically accurate in its essentials. The film certainly embellishes the tale in imaginative ways, but I consider that a good thing, especially because in doing so it raises some thought-provoking questions. In fact, as I sit here and ponder it, I can think of almost no other “biblical” film that has been this interesting, this thoughtful, or this artful (though that’s more a critique of “biblical” films than it is a praise of Noah). In order to have a meaningful discussion, I’m going to assume you’ve seen the movie. If you haven’t, or if you’re on the fence, it’s definitely a movie to see in the theater (don’t wait for the DVD). I’ll also say that you should leave young kids at home; this isn’t your Sunday School Noah’s Ark story. If you don’t want to know the details, now’s your chance to stop reading. As River Song would say: Spoilers! One of my favorite things about the film was how it dealt with the importance of being created in the image of God. The characters of Noah (of the line of Seth) and Tubal-Cain (of the line of Cain) seem to represent two differing interpretations of what it means to bear the imago Dei. Despite what you may have heard, God, the Creator, is a major part of the film. Characters discuss him (or talk to him) in nearly every scene (both the good guys and the bad), and often the discussion is about what it means to be created in his image. Noah and his family are following the Creator’s command to watch over Creation, to be its care-takers, and to love one another. Tubal-Cain, on the other hand, defines the imago Dei as the right to take life (as he says God does) and to subdue, dominate, and consume Creation. The question of which of these ideologies is more true ought to be an important one to any Christian. It’s interesting to listen in on the discussion of the film and hear how clearly some people seem to echo either Tubal-Cain or Noah. This idea is illustrated in another more visual way in the film. When the serpent first appears in the garden, it’s bright green and beautiful, but then it sheds its skin and something black and monstrous emerges. In a brief flash of the Garden story, Adam picks up the shed skin and keeps it. It becomes an heirloom, and his descendants wrap the skin around their arms as they proclaim themselves image-bearers of the Creator. The serpent shed the image of God and became a monster. But the sons of Adam wear it as a reminder—at least until it’s stolen by the violent line of Cain and held as a war trophy. When the skin comes back to Noah in the end and he reasserts himself and his family as image-bearers, it’s a beautiful moment of resolution. Great visual poetry. So what does it mean to be created in the image of God? Does it mean we are benevolent caretakers of the Creation he’s entrusted us with? Or does it mean we rule over and subjugate Creation like tyrants, taking life as we will, as Tubal-Cain argues that God does. Another major theme is the difficulty of understanding and obeying God’s will. When Noah has a vision, he doesn’t know how to interpret it and he goes to his grandfather, Methuselah, for advice. But later, though Noah is surrounded by signs that God will provide for his family and his future, he misinterprets these signs to mean that God intends to wipe out not just evil men, but all men, and Noah’s sees it as his responsibility to obey and carry out that judgement. He doesn’t seek anyone’s guidance in the matter, in fact he rejects the admonishment of his wife, and he makes the decision on his own. You might say he moves from righteousness to self-righteousness. As a consequence he nearly destroys not only his own family, but the remainder of the human race. If that doesn’t sound applicable to much of human history, you aren’t paying attention. What’s even more fascinating about Noah’s misinterpretation is that his misunderstanding requires him to shed his own imago Dei in order to achieve his new perception of God’s will. He turns from love to violence, the very thing that has made God angry in the first place. And it’s turning away from violence and back to love that saves him (and everyone else) in the end. Some folks have seen this as a story in which Noah’s mercy, not God’s, saves mankind. I don’t think that’s accurate at all. God’s providence is with Noah and his family all along, even when Noah himself becomes blind to it. It’s Noah’s self-righteousness that nearly destroys his family, not God’s judgment. The Creator’s mercy is demonstrated throughout the story, but Noah fails to see it, until it’s almost too late. Does that sound like a familiar story? Maybe a little bit like . . . well . . . the Old Testament? Noah’s dark night of the soul is going to make people uncomfortable, and that’s good. It should. But being uncomfortable isn’t always a bad thing, and if you’ve spent much time reading Scripture you ought to be used to being uncomfortable. It’s worth noting that Noah’s struggle is not contradictory to Scripture. It’s probably not factual, but it also doesn’t contradict anything about the story or the man (about whom the Bible tells us almost nothing). Noah’s questions and struggles are played out in similar ways by other Patriarchs and heroes throughout the Old Testament. If you think Noah gets a little crazy and homicidal in this film, you might want to skip right past Abraham, the conquest of Canaan, David, and a whole slew of other stories. This Noah seems entirely in line with Old Testament drama, and this version of his story works out to a fitting and edifying conclusion. So how do you interpret the will of God? And how might that be dangerous outside the context of a community of elders and other believers? How far would you go to be obedient to what you understand God to be asking of you? What if you’re wrong? What if you’re right? Hard questions. I’d love to hear what others enjoyed about the film. What surprised you? Did seeing it send you back to Scripture with renewed curiosity? It did me, and that’s more than I can say for most “biblical” movies. (Also check out this great conversation about the film between Julie Silander and Jeffrey Overstreet.)

I love aspen trees. When I was a child, my dad often traveled on business and came home with gifts for us. I have abalone jewelry from New Zealand, traditional clothing from India, and coins and pottery from Guatemala. But one of my favorite keepsakes came from a place much less exotic. When I was eight or nine, my dad came home from Colorado with an aspen leaf pendant for me and each of my sisters. Nothing flashy, just little rust-colored leaves preserved inside a clear coating and dangling from golden chains. I had never seen an aspen tree, so the gift didn’t initially hold any particular significance for me. It was pretty, and it was from my father. I liked it. But it came to mean something altogether different to me when I was 11, and my father took us to the aspens. I remember that everything felt dangerous once we crossed west of the Mississippi. All I knew about Kansas was that it was a popular hang-out for tornadoes, and I expected one to drop out of the clouds at any moment. The roads across the Great Plains had never heard of curves, and the corn and wheat crowded in shoulder to shoulder, waving like spectators for a 100-mile parade. So much distance passed between towns that I worried a tank of gas would not get us from one to the next. Then we reached the desert of eastern Colorado. Brown, scrubby, flat – I had never seen a place with so little vegetation. For hundreds of miles, I felt exposed. I was sure that if I lingered there, I would shrivel up and blow away. Ah, but then the mountains: green and wild, crisp and bright, dotted with blossoms I’d never seen before – Columbine and Indian Paintbrush. And the lakes! Perfect, pure, and shockingly cold. This place had its own dangers – there were so many ways to get lost or eaten – but it was bursting with life and beauty. We took a shuttle to the Maroon Lake trailhead. A few steps from the parking lot brought us to the water’s edge. You could see the pebbled lake bottom all the way out to the middle, where the reflection of the Maroon Bells’ rocky face took over. I could have stayed there all day, but I’m glad my parents prodded me up the trail toward the Bells. That is where I met the aspens. Something I’ve learned about aspen trees is that you rarely see a solitary one. They colonize, sending up new saplings from their roots, multiplying into groves. So you don’t appreciate an aspen like you do, say, a sequoia – looking straight up, marveling at its individual majesty and strength. With aspens, you step back and consider them as a whole, as you would a family. A mile or two up the trail, we paused and looked back toward the lake where we had started. It was far below us, reflecting the sun so brilliantly that you couldn’t look directly at it. But between the lake below and the trail where we stood, all down the mountainside, stood an aspen grove. The trunks were slender and pale, and the small heart-shaped leaves were new green. When the breeze blew, the leaves quivered and turned, showing their silvery backs. The effect, as the breeze slid through the grove, was that the whole slope of the mountain appeared to be twinkling. If you could see the sound of tinkling bells, I’m convinced that’s what it would look like. Populus tremuloides: “quaking” or “trembling” aspen tree. This is why I love the aspens. Even the slightest whisper of wind sets them quaking. It’s as if they acknowledge that they are tender among the hardwoods. They feel the rippling frailty of their days and shiver with humility. I understand them.  I have seen the brokenness of the world and felt my own helplessness in it. A faint downdraft of sorrow, and I’m shaken. The world is too much for me – more and more often I feel it. Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming; it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! I’ve seen some who, when faced with darkness, try to stand like sequoias. They must be strong, I’ve heard them say. They must hold together. They insist they can outlast the curse’s bite even as the wind ravages and strips them bare. But the aspens shudder and bow. And they seldom do it alone. Trembling in solitude, an aspen is lovely. But the sight of them in community – the way they twinkle like bells and scatter the sunlight off their backs! How they bend and quiver until the whole mountainside moves! Gathering together and nodding their assent, they are altogether enchanting. — — — My children have learned to weep for loss. Mighty I am not. An ending comes for us all. Let the kindred tremble together. Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return. And yet that is not the truest thing. Amen. Thanks be to God.

For a generation of British children, growing up in the UK meant there was a good chance that you cut your literary teeth on the writing of Enid Blyton. Amongst her best loved work was an adventure series called “The Secret Seven” and I think it was there that I first learned what it was to lose myself in a story. At the centre of the action was an old garden shed where seven children would perch on upturned flower pots, drink lemonade, solve mysteries, and come up with plans to unmask the latest gang of dastardly villains. The plot lines were not particularly complex but it mattered little, such was the appeal of that band of friends. Long before I found the words to name it, I was pulled in by the sense of belonging and common purpose that bound the children together. So much so that I decided to form my own “Secret Seven.” The perfect headquarters was already in place. A cellar as thick with dust and cobweb as it was with possibility, accessed by a little wooden door at the side of my grandparents’ house and masked by a wall of tall thick trees. Somehow I managed to convince six of my classmates to sign up. At the pre-arranged time they stole into my back garden, sneakers tracing a silent path through the long shadows. One by one they knocked on the little door, muttered the secret password and slipped quietly into the underground room. Thirty years later I still cringe at the memory of that first meeting. As we sat there, precariously balanced on flimsy packing crates and sagging boxes, eager anticipation began to turn to awkward silence. It took about thirty seconds for my excitement to be replaced by the realization that I had no idea what to do next. And I had forgotten the lemonade. It turned out that in my town, the criminal gangs, if they existed at all, didn’t make their plans known to groups of small children intent on bringing them down. The best we came up with was an overly zealous attempt to solve an argument between two older boys fighting in our street. Our help was not well received. By the second meeting seven had become four. When the time for a third meeting came around only one child knocked the door, her whispered password lost in the empty darkness. I had long since abandoned the disappointing reality and retreated back into my books. As this memory resurfaced recently, it occurred to me how often similar scenes have played out in my life. I may not have attempted to resurrect my ill-fated “Secret Seven” but, with surprising regularity, I have pursued my own romantic visions of community, only to return deflated when the reality fails to measure up to my pre-conceived ideals. Community is part of who we are. In its purest form it is a beautiful reflection of the intimate relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in whose image we are made. We have good reason to hope and long for it. The problem is that the practice of community can be a lot less romantic than the theory. The perfect ideal sits in tension with the fact of our brokenness so that life in relationship rarely works out the way we have pictured it. Sometimes it seems that the closer we get to one another, the more our sharp edges scrape and tear, drawing blood from new wounds and opening the scars on old ones. This jarring clash between what is real and what is longed for raises the question; is community still worth pursuing? Our response to this question is critical. We can, as I did, retreat. Drifting from one place to another. Expounding theory from a safe distance as others take arms against the darkness. Searching on for the holy grail of perfect community. Or, we can accept the challenge of engaging with imperfection, throwing our hat in the ring as we try to figure out what grace looks like when it is let loose on the reality of the here and now. The problem with the first response is that, according to Jesus, the litmus test of our relationship with God is not creative genius, artistic beauty, or even theological expertise. It is love. And love, by its very nature, can’t operate at a distance. Jesus laid down the gauntlet in John 13 verse 35 with these words: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” If we love one another the people around us can conclude that we are disciples of Jesus. If we don’t . . . well, I’ll let you finish that sentence. The inescapable fact is that when I choose to retreat, rejecting the challenge of loving my brothers and sisters the way that Jesus loves me, I make a mockery of my claim to love Him. There is another reason why the pursuit of community matters. In the hours before Jesus faced the cross, knowing all that lay ahead, these were the words that weighed on his anguished heart: “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you sent me.” (John 17:20-21) According to Jesus, our unity, our “oneness,” is the very thing that will convince the world around us that the story we are telling is true. If we do not love as Jesus loved, then all of our words, all of our God-given creativity, and all of our efforts are lost on a world that sees a charade and simply doesn’t believe us. This truth and the implications of it have me in their grip and won’t let go. Whatever it means practically on any given day, the pursuit of community will cost us. It will mean investing our gifts in the building up of the church. It will mean staying put when it would be so much easier to walk away. It will mean difficult conversations that take place on bent knees over open Bibles. It will mean forgiving and letting it go. Sometimes it will mean an incarnation of grace that acknowledges the wounds and then steps up to bandage the very hands that inflicted them. The truth is this: the reality of unity is hard. But it still matters. It matters because the story we are telling is wonderfully true and, if we want to tell it, there is no plan B. The great thing is that when we invest in community, pursuing love on Jesus’ terms, it not only authenticates our story, it also opens the door to relationships that have passed through the storm and come out stronger and deeper for it. In her recent post “Beautiful Community of Artists,” Ellie Holcomb wrote about an experience of community that was as beautiful as anything I have read in stories. She said; “These people love well. They seek each other out. They listen. They pray. They laugh—a lot. They play spike ball and catch phrase. They say, ‘I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?’ They gather each night to eat a meal together. They bear with each other. They craft songs that carry the ache and joy and hope and wandering our souls experience, and they welcomed me as one of their own.” I am learning that the way to find a community worth belonging to is not to spend your life searching for it, but rather to invest in what is there in front of you. It’s true that the reality of relationship often falls short of the ideal. But sometimes it is better. Sometimes the friendships formed in the crucible of forgiveness and grace, of shared experience and the telling of our common story, turn out to be richer and more meaningful than the thing we imagined in the first place.

First let me give you my warmest computer blog “Hello!” and thank you for welcoming me into the Rabbit Room as though this were my inaugural post—because it may very well be.I don’t know. Things are magical around here and the order in which posts roll out is a mystery on par with a certain Wardrobe. [Editor’s note: I heard that.] I post today in order to open up, to share, to be vulnerable. The amazing thing about being surrounded by other creators of art (and I am obviously including every art form here: writing, illustrating, singer/songwriting . . . think Yul Brynnar’s “Etcetera! Etectera!'”) as well as lovers of, and subscribers to, the arts, is that I can feel free to share bits and pieces of my own process. There’s a terrible freedom in that. And I use the word “terrible” because I mean to indicate the very real sense of Terror that comes upon me when I so much as contemplate acting on this freedom (the way I am acting on it this very instant!). As I write today, I am one of many millions of Christians who are continuing to walk through Lent of 2014. Easter swiftly approaches (thankfully) but as we are still in Lent, and as a Christian who also happens to be a producer of visual, written, and audible art, it makes sense for me (indeed, for us all) to lean in to Process. I do mean all of it, too—the messiness of it, the uncertainty of it, the scattered incoherence of it. Process. The very word makes my skin crawl, even as I contemplate just how necessary and, frankly, inevitable it is. I am humbled to say that I was asked, along with other visual artists within my church family, to contribute a complete piece on the theme of Resurrection that will be unveiled on Easter morning and remain open for anyone to view until Pentacost, fifty days later. In the spirit of full disclosure, I will also add that I was asked back in—February. Any guesses as to just how long I’ve actually been working on the piece (you can see an incomplete portion of it above)? Since April 6th. Yeah, that’s this past weekend. We’ve had a few solid months—and I started work yesterday. We have until the 12th to turn something in, so now I have the looming specter of a deadline hanging over me, haunting me into action. Point is, I’ve spent the last six weeks or more unable to submit to the Process. Unwilling. In denial. Crippled. Willingly and unwillingly paralyzed by dread of my own work and the struggle it is destined to bring. It is a sheer impartation of divine grace that, finally, in the 11th hour, brings with it a vision/purpose/direction for this project, and has also granted me the creative capacity to chase that vision and convert it into something tangible in fairly short order. Let me encourage my fellow creators on this point—the grace is there if you do procrastinate in your work, AND you shouldn’t be afraid to lean into the process right away rather than waiting until you literally can’t wait anymore to start. This is not the first (nor will it be the last, I’m sure) project that I have completed in this hastened manner. However, I recognize now that it’s a personal brokenness of mine that prevents me from, perhaps, experiencing even richer depths of grace throughout the duration of a project’s lifespan, from first inspiration, to sketch phase, to comps, to finished piece. May the Lord grant, to all of us who create, the grace to dive in and keep at it, to engage in the Process, from start to finish, with Him. He doesn’t have a habit of rushing anything that I can think of. Not in my experiences with Him thus far, nor in the experiences and stories of those I know and love who walk with Him. Yet, when we have forestalled a creative venture so long that in order to see it through we must rush, even, and perhaps especially, then His grace is sufficient. Here is a portion of the iconographer’s prayer, which is something I have turned to in recent weeks as I felt the pressure of Process closing in around me: Teach me, Lord, to use wisely the time which You have given me and to work well without wasting a second. Teach me to profit from my past mistakes without falling into a gnawing doubt. Teach me to anticipate the project without worry, to imagine the work without despair if it should turn out differently. Teach me to unite haste and slowness, serenity and ardor, zeal and peace. In the spirit of this Lenten meditation on Process, I feel I should speak to the (partial) work presented above, if I may. I have called the piece “The New Body Mythic.” Rather than re-writing an artist statement for the Rabbit Room, I think I’ll simply copy/paste my working statement below, and commend it to your reading for further meditation/contemplation on what the hope of resurrection means for we Christians and our physical bodies: “The New Body Mythic” was conceived while prayerfully contemplating the utterly Christian doctrine of a bodily resurrection. More specifically, this work—its four individual pieces (eye, heart, inner ear, & lungs) as well as its audible component—attempt to capture, however abstractly, the moment of first sight, first breath, first circulation, first audible sensation with and in the resurrected body. It is such an idea as can only be thought of in the here and now as mythic, but that is not to suggest that the idea of the bodily resurrection is a myth in the sense of something ‘fictional.’ On the contrary, in faith we must believe, as the Holy Spirit imparts said faith, that the future fact of our resurrected bodies as first demonstrated by the risen Christ Himself, is such a wondrously glorious future state as to be called mythic in the Tolkienian sense of the True Myth; something seemingly remote, distant, the stuff of fairy tale, but something that is in fact far more real, more literal than what our current bodily senses are capable of perceiving (or our intellects capable of fully processing). Lewis’s archetypal hero Ransom grasps for words to describe this future state as “trans-sensuous” and again as “too definite for language.” To even attempt to contemplate such a hope, and then believe it is a literal and bodily hope, the human artist in his/her broken, decaying body can, at best, produce a representation. How else does one process this amazing promise, this historical, supernatural, ultra-physical act of Christ that has such incredible implications for those in His care? How does the former creation look ahead to the future Creation with any kind of tangible idea if he/she does not process that hope in some literal way, albeit graspingly, stumblingly, inadequately, dimly. So it is, with my current and crumbling hands & eyes that I strike out to represent the mythic, future eyes, ears, heart, & lungs that will not fail those who awaken in Christ on that day, that will not be subject to the slow, painful moth-gnawing of death and decay once His Creative Spirit has completely invigorated them as part of His restorative work throughout the whole of His own good creation. We will, from that first moment, take in the New Creation with newly created instruments of the senses, newly created organs of being. It is not a story ‘too good to be true,’ as the Sadduceean among us might suggest. Rather, He is so good and so true (The Truth being one of His Names) that it is a story and a promise that cannot be anything but true.

[Editor’s note: If you’re in Franklin, Tennessee, be sure to stop by the 5 Points Starbucks where there’s currently a Subjects With Objects art print show hanging on the walls.]An Explanation for the Uninitiated: Subjects With Objects is an ongoing, collaborative art project forever ordered according to the following rules: A shadowy public spaces painter sets up in pubs and executes spontaneous portraits at the rate of one painting per pint. He then hands off those enigmatic little ocular disturbances to a semi-anonymous poet & novelist who lives with them long enough to solicit their otherworldly mumblings and ephemeral whispers, distilling each of their essences into a line or two of poetic prose. The painter is Jonathan Richter. The poet is UNKNOWN & UNKNOWABLE, so it is best NOT TO EVEN ASK! However, for the sake of convenience we may refer to him as DKM. _________________________ Untitled 46 (2008) Things Vs. Us Theoretically, we’re told, a man could gain the whole world and still show a loss on his balance sheet. But at least that guy got the world. What are we getting? Soviet dissident, novelist, and GULAG-survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, rankled feathers during his 1978 Harvard Commencement Address. The rankling was not on account of his passing references to the dismal and sometimes brutal outworkings of the Communist ideology he and millions of his countrymen had suffered under for decades. Such references were expected and mostly welcomed. No, what disturbed many of Solzhenitsyn’s American listeners was that he also had the gall to turn his eyes towards the West, and to lift his voice as one crying in the wilderness. Aleksandr, who had endured harsh years in a Stalinist labor camp in Siberia, now sought to warn his American listeners of the possibility that our pursuit of comfort and material successes had come at the cost of a greater spiritual impoverishment. I know, right? After all we did for him, Aleksandr stood up there calling us out in front of God and the Russians and everybody. Was it supposed to help the medicine go down that he prefaced the talk with “There is some bitterness in my today’s speech . . . but I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary, but from a friend.” When Subjects With Objects painter Jonathan Richter handed Untitled 46 off to me, I didn’t have to examine it long to note that there was, captured in the relationship of subject to object, a spiritual sickness of the first order. In fact, this piece was one that solidified the overarching theme of the ongoing collaboration, and in so doing, ultimately led me to the project title Subjects With Objects. The woman in this painting is, after all, fading, while the material objects around her remain solid. She seems to be shrinking in size, while the object she poses with (and yes, she does look as if she’s posing for a portrait) appears to have grown larger than it might once have been. Or perhaps she’s an adult who somehow hasn’t grown rightly herself. At any rate what we’re seeing is her insubstantial spiritual nature. Whether she once had a more robust nature that was choked out and faded over time, or whether she never grew beyond a childish (not childlike) spirituality, is immaterial. The point is, she, in her essence, is immaterial, and that owing to an exaggerated materialism. Here, in this painting, is materialism running its course. Here is the sickness Solzhenitsyn warned us about. Here is what it means to have a life full of many comforts and things, and to prize the pursuit of things, and to prize the pursuit of happiness (through things) above all else. Here is what it means to structure one’s life around the avoidance of suffering at all costs. Here is what it means to define self and self-worth by the attainment of numbers of things. And it isn’t pretty. One fades in the pursuit. One is stunted. One forgets who one was, or once longed to be. At the end, one finds oneself haunting the world of material things, no longer fully human. No longer able to even use and appreciate the material blessings of life, for one has become as a ghost among them, unable to define oneself except in relation to things. So the things have become some-things, while the soul has shriveled to a no-thing. One becomes a hollow suck, needing more and more things to try to give definition to the shape of one’s being, a black hole collapse of personhood from which, eventually, no light can escape. But let us speak no more of the physics of hell. Instead, let us flip the pages of a now-discarded yellow legal pad, and there follow the author’s scribbled trail of thoughts that led to the final choice of text for Untitled 46. In time, the things seemed to become more real, even as I began to fade. [Note that with this piece the central idea was there from the beginning, but the expression was too “on the nose.” No room was left for the viewer to interact and find their own connections.] In time, my things became more solid, even as I seemed to be fading. Perhaps we were always less substantial than we believed. I might have been less substantial than I believed. I might have been less substantial than I believed, but I do not see any benefit in addressing that now. Apart from my objects, I had little conception of myself. Apart from my objects, I’m not sure who I was. I know I was someone who had things, but I don’t know much else about myself. All I can tell you is that I was someone who had things. All I can tell you is that I was someone who had a number of things. All I can tell you about myself is that I was someone who had a number of things. The things informed me of who I was. The things told me who I was. Sometimes, the things emptied me. I remember when I first discovered that I was someone who had things. I remember realizing I was someone who had things. In time I realized that I would never be able to compete with my things. It was my things they were friends with. It was never me, but only my things they were friends with. I knew from the beginning that my personality was thin, and so I would have to have things. And so, what I lacked in personality, I made up for in things. They played with me, not because they liked me, but because I had things. They came over, not for me, but because I had things. They were never really friends with me, only with my things. They were never really my friends, they were friends of my things. And now it has become painfully clear that they were never really my friends, they were only friends of my things. I found it easiest to relate to people through the medium of things. All I can tell you about myself is that I was someone who wound up with quite a number of things. Postscript: This piece was originally part of the gallery show First Day in Purgatory. The premise for that show I described in the “Subjects With Objects Unplugged Pt. 3” column, but it’s more or less self-explanatory from the title. I can’t look at this piece in that light without some sadness and horror. To come to the end of it all and sum your life up with that epitaph is a truly chilling prospect. MORAL: If you’re bartering your soul, please at least ask for something more than a giant glass egg thingy. _________________________ Subjects with Objects Unplugged, Part 1 Subjects with Objects Unplugged, Part 2 Subjects with Objects Unplugged, Part 3 Subjects with Objects, Vol. 1 is available in the Rabbit Room store. To read the full text of Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address (with a few typos thrown in for good measure) go to: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenitsynharvard.htm

“There’s nothing worthless about being wordless, it will only save your mouth from talking gibberish.” —Michael Bassey Johnson “Good morning, maestra. How are you?” “I’m well, how are you?” “I am good . . . thank you.” Her English is halting and deeply sincere. We look into each other’s eyes for a brief moment, both of us willing to say more—if only we spoke the same language. We are building a bridge as the weeks pass, but our work doesn’t seem like progress. She learns my language more quickly than I learn hers—that is, after all, why we meet. She wants to learn English; I can speak it. She is one of a handful of adult students from Mexico, China, and Vietnam. We sit together for an hour every morning, enter into the same rhythm: I read, they repeat, I annunciate, they repeat. They strain to wrap their lips around the contours of this strange language, but their tongues refuse reform. Their accents add intricate flourishes to words that would otherwise escape my notice. We started with the basics. I scrawled upper- and lower-case letters across the whiteboard, pointed to each letter and pronounced its particular identity. They mimicked these vocalizations in drawn-out syllables: Ayyy. Beee. Seee. Deee. Eeee. Efff… We’ve moved forward since then, always at—what might seem to anyone walking past the classroom—a glacial pace. Simple conversation is an exhilarating victory: Hi, my name is Barbara. Nice to meet you. Hi, Barbara. My name is ______. Nice to meet you, too! The tendency of the English language to shove words together has presented learning opportunities I never anticipated. “She is” becomes “she’s” and I find myself in the midst of an in-depth annunciation. Their tongues soften the hard ch sound to a soft sh, and I write on the board: she’s = she is cheese = queso Together we practice the art of slow attention; we notice small sounds and learn their differences in meaning. We are building a bridge, but our work does not seem like progress. I’m a sucker for personal stories and I’m passionate about the importance of telling and receiving each other’s stories. Not long after I’ve had my first cup of coffee, I sit with these students and together we cross a language barrier. It is painstaking. It forces my passion for story to encounter other ways of seeing. Once in a while, a student finds the words and I find the ears to share a particular facet of her story. The rare moment comes along in which a student makes his way across the bridge enough to tell me what he did before he moved to this country. But more often than not, our stories are shared in quick glances of reassurance, hard stares of concentration, and the mirroring of the movement of our lips. We are building a bridge, but our work does not seem like progress. It is the slow emergence of story; the work itself becomes the story we share. Buen trabajo, I have learned to say when they complete a particularly challenging exercise. Good job, they have begun to tell me at the end of each class. And before we leave the room, there is an unspoken agreement to stop, smile, and wave goodbye. Wordlessly.

[Editor’s note: Andy Osenga’s new EP, Heart, is now available. Here’s Andy with a song-by-song breakdown of the record. Enjoy.] “No Heart Beats Alone” My friend Russ Ramsey had open heart surgery this past year (you may have read about it here). He was telling me about all he was learning about the heart and how it works and said he asked the doctor if it was hard to get the heart beating again once you stopped it. The doctor replied, “No, it’s hard to get it to stop. It starts right up. The heart is made to beat. It wants to beat.” How powerful. Two heart cells floating in a petri dish will, Russ told me, find each other and begin beating in time. No heart can beat alone. The guitar at the end is my Les Paul, through my new Tyler JT45, on some stage in some church somewhere between soundcheck and the show. “Belle Isle” I was in Richmond, Virginia, with the Behold the Lamb tour and went out for a run. It was a damp, foggy day and I ended up running along the James river. The interstate goes over the river on two huge bridges and underneath was this strange, snaking walking bridge hanging just above the fog. One is helpless but to cross this sort of thing. I thought it would bring me to the other side of the river, but it didn’t. It dropped me off on an island. It was beautiful. There were kayakers racing through the rapids along the shore six feet from where I was running. Trails up and down the rocky, wooded hills were everywhere. I had found some sort of mystic Southern Narnia. Scattered around the island were those little historical markers, talking about what used to be on that spot. Turns out this island, Belle Isle, was a Confederate prison for soldiers captured at Gettysburg. The South had nowhere near enough resources to take care of its own people, let alone its prisoners of war. They essentially left an estimated 14,000 men to freeze and/or starve to death here on this gorgeous spot. This song is what I imagine a letter sent back home from one of these prisoners might look like. “Until You Provide” I’m self employed. So are most of my friends. This song is a fictional summary of a thousand conversations I’ve had within my community. We work as hard as we can and try our best to be good husbands and dads and sometimes it feels like the pressure is just never going to let up. If it works like it’s supposed to, this is one of those songs that you either get or you don’t. If you don’t, just listen again in a few years. Pretty much every note of this song was recorded in the 2-year-old room of some church, at a table built for 2-year-olds. My back still hurts from hunching over. “Out of Town” Our house has flooded twice in the last 3 1/2 years. It’s hard to state just how devastating that has been for our family, in so many ways, not to mention the time lost on my career. Like so many difficult things, it’s hard to understand how God can be there for us when we’re in it. So many people said things they thought were helpful, but just weren’t. What I had to hold on to was the same thing David did in the Psalms. “I don’t see you now, but I’ve seen you in the past and so have the people I trust, so I’m going to believe you’re still here.” “She is a Foreign Country” I’m married to a smart, funny, and beautiful woman. My Legos would never have believed you if you’d told them this when I was twelve years old. It has slowly dawned on me over the past eleven years that I won’t begin to learn everything there is to know about this woman sleeping a foot away from me every night. She is at least twenty lifetimes of beauty to be discovered and celebrated. When I’m in beautiful places all over America I love to imagine what it would have been like to be the first person to walk over this hill and see this valley or waterfall or canyon or mountain. That thrill of discovering a new land will surely be something we’ll experience in heaven. This is how I feel with my bride. I keep walking along and randomly looking up and being knocked out by some stunning uncharted aspect of God’s glorious creation in her. The writing of this song is a map on a napkin of what I’ve seen so far. “The House Where No One Spoke” Like most of my favorite songs of my own, and this is one of my all-time favorites, I still don’t really know where this all came from. I just know I love it and believe in every word of it. We want so desperately to feel some control that we kill the things we say we love. But we have no control over anything but our own response to the madness of the world. It is kindness, after all, that accomplishes what anger and armies and manipulation and money never can. Kindness changes us. The fruit of the Spirit growing within us is love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against these things there is no law, there is only mercy, forgiveness, trust, and redemption. Lord, let me be someone whose heart reaches out with kindness rather than grasps tightly to not lose control. I don’t have it anyway. This was recorded in the middle of the night at my daughter’s art table in our basement, which used to actually be a studio, but, courtesy of one of those floods, is now a play room.

Between any person and any other person is the middle. What happens in the middle makes a significant difference. For not one of us ever experiences another person without first passing—physically, emotionally, spiritually—through the middle. Picture the middle by looking over this simple illustration: You THE MIDDLE Any other person Think for a moment about all that happens in the middle. Take a simple relationship, a husband and wife. Consider everything between them. They see each other, hear each other, touch each other—bodies are in the middle. Usually they are wearing clothes—fashion is in the middle. Usually they are somewhere—a house and parks and all manner of created spaces are in the middle. He was the first child of three and she was an only child—all the experiences of their families of origin are in the middle. She speaks English and so does he—language is in the middle. But she is from New England and he is from the Pacific Northwest—cosmopolitanism and hipster culture are in the middle. She grew up Catholic and he grew up Baptist though now they attend a Presbyterian church—religious expression is in the middle. The list could be endless. There is so much middle to get through before getting to another person, it is a wonder any of us knows any one else at all. But somehow we do. Even, sometimes our relationships thrive. When they do, I like to think of it this way: There’s some good middle happening. The truth is I am blunderer. But so is everyone else (except God, of course) who I try to get along with. Odds are if two blunderers try to make friends, it is going to be hard. But many of us have best friends. Where there are best friends, there’s some good middle happening. And so it is with all kinds of relationships. Where there is a happy marriage, there’s some good middle happening. Where there are loving parents and loving children, there’s some good middle happening. Where there are friendly neighbors, there’s some good middle happening. Where there are flourishing students, there’s some good middle happening. Where there is a healthy church communion, there’s some good middle happening. And so on, and so on. Now, it is wisely said that the only person I can change is myself. If one of my relationships sours, I cannot fix it by fixing the other person. This is true. Yet, though I cannot change another person, it does not follow that I cannot change anything but myself. I can do some work in the middle. In fact, the middle is where the greatest work we people do gets done. Artwork and stories and songs and histories—all that we do—occurs in the middle between persons. The middle is the locale of creation, and also reconciliation. We build muddy bogs or cobblestone paths in the middle; means to hinder or help us draw close to each other.

Come with me, if you will, to Belmont University in the year 2005. Belmont hosted a C. S. Lewis conference called Past Watchful Dragons, which I attended for a number of reasons, none of which yielded anything nearly as impacting as my chance introduction to the Good Doctor Rogers. I had just released my fifth album, The Far Country, and because of the Lewis/Tolkien influence on those songs, I thought the conference might be a good opportunity to sneak my CDs into the gift bags of the attendees. (That album was released independently, so any crazy marketing ideas were carried out by yours truly.) Towards the end of the conference Douglas Gresham (Lewis’s stepson) was signing autographs and I decided to wait in line and give him a copy of the record. After that extremely awkward interaction I saw another dude standing around. He leaned against the wall in a way that made me think he was much more smarter than I be. As I recall, he had under one arm a box of leftover Wilderking books which his publisher had also included in the gift bags; I was carrying a box of leftover CDs, expecting at any moment to be ejected from the premises. I remembered seeing The Bark of the Bog Owl on a display at the local Walmart, so when I saw his name tag I introduced myself and told him so. He was doubtful that the books had ever had such prestigious placement. What I didn’t tell Jonathan was that when I first saw his books I was a little jealous that he had beaten me to the punch. At the time I had been working on The Wingfeather Saga for a few years and had yet to find a publisher. Here was another Christian writing fantasy aimed at children. I decided to finagle my way into his inner circle in order to thwart him. (It hasn’t worked. He just keeps writing awesome books.) We exchanged phone numbers and agreed to meet for lunch sometime. I went home with my copy of his book and started reading it to Aedan and Asher, with the added bonus that J. R.’s main character’s name was Aidan. I didn’t know at first that Bog Owl was loosely based on the biblical story of King David. Once I realized it I enjoyed not pointing out the similarities to my boys. I wanted them to experience the story without any preconceptions. They laughed at Dobro the Feechie. They listened closely whenever the prophet Bayard spoke. They wrung their hands when Aidan faced Greidawl, the boss bad guy. It was a load of fun to read the story to them at that age and let them discover the connection with King David. But it was the next books, when Jonathan broke away from the Davidic parallels (especially in The Way of the Wilderking), that the tale really found its legs. None of us had any idea where it was going, or how it would end, and the land of Corenwald and the Feechiefen Swamp began to take on a new life. It felt like this: he had painted a fantastic-but-familiar picture of the Bible story, then we tumbled into it like Eustace and Lucy in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and finally he led us into a brand new country. Jonathan has described these books as “a fantasy told with an American accent.” That’s about as apt a description as I’ve ever heard. Yes, there are swords. Yes, there are battles and prophecies and betrayals and everything else you could want in a good fantasy, but the “American-ness” of them adds a nuance that’s both rare and welcome. When J.R. followed up this trilogy with The Charlatan’s Boy (set in the same world, and one of the sweetest, funniest books I’ve ever read), he aimed that accent directly at the South and the world got that much richer and that much more bizarre in the best way possible. Folks, there are hundreds of thousands of books in the world—hundreds of thousands of fantasy novels, for that matter—and I’m not sure any of them can boast this particular combination of Biblical literacy, Southern humor, intelligence, and adventure. Jonathan has taught me to be thankful for my roots, and that’s one of the greatest gifts he’s given me. Early on, he helped me to see my youth in the Deep South as a great blessing, not just by texting me news stories about all the strangeness in Florida and Georgia (which he still does), but by his obvious pride in his Georgian upbringing, his saucy disdain for anglophilia (if that anglophilia produces a disdain for one’s own heritage, at least), not to mention his love for authors who share a similar affection for the South (like Flannery O’Connor and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings). The Bark of the Bog Owl helped me see the story of David with new eyes, but Jonathan has also helped me see the beauty in my own story a little better. A good writer is an eye doctor, too. Jonathan Rogers is precocious, opinionated, and smart as a whip, and yet he’s also humble, teachable, and wise. He may hold a Ph.D. in 17th Century Literature from Vanderbilt. He may be a professor who can actually get away with wearing a seersucker suit. He may be a gifted writer. But Jonathan remains, at heart, a Georgia boy who delights in the beautiful and complex absurdities of the South, who sees glory in swamps, hears dignity in drawls, and unapologetically loves what he loves. If that’s not godly, I don’t know what is. —————————— If you’ve never read The Wilderking Trilogy, get your tail over to the Rabbit Room Store and grab them while you can. Did I mention that he and his wife have six kids? Maybe go ahead and buy several. Books, I mean.

“Something You Choose” (unfinished) by Kelly Burton and Ben Shive The Lord must want me to start co-writing. It keeps coming up. Before January of this year, I had avoided co-writing like the plague. Why? I guess I’ve always been a bit cynical about the outcome and even more cynical about the process. In my view, the difference between the process of writing by myself and that of co-writing has always looked something like this: when I write for myself I attempt to come up with the words that will most delight me; in a co-write I try to come up with the words that I hope will least offend what I perceive to be my partner’s sensibility. Sound like fun? But I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t know what happened. My distaste for it simply vanished. It might be that I wrote two records by myself. And yes, I was trying to prove something. But what I ended up proving (NOT my intent) was that it’s lonely when you don’t have anyone with whom to share your victory, or worse, your defeat. Or—Lord I pray it’s true—it might be that I’m in the foothills right on the border of that lovely country called Over Myself. If I am approaching that fair land, let’s be very clear that God brought me to the verge of this country and on the way I got dysentery and my wagon caught fire—both clearly my fault. I can think of two modes by which God would have brought me safe thus far. One would be the aforementioned two albums’ worth of trying to be Brian Wilson’s heir-apparent only to find out that was a dumb dream. Don’t argue. The other would be ten years’ worth of producing, every day of which I’ve had to make the decision of whether to appease my unholy ego or to render the best service I can to my artists. I met with Charlie Peacock a few years ago and in his words I saw my next twenty years of spiritual and professional growth. He told me he believed in his own ideas more than ever but that never has he been less interested in pursuing them. Why? Because he has become so captivated with other people’s ideas and because he has learned to choose loving his listener over flattering his gigantic brain. Yowza! Them’s words to get excited about. Am I going to write my string arrangement all by myself today to prove that I can or am I going to ask the artist if she wants to sing some ideas together? Am I going to bristle when the producer says he doesn’t like the first piano hook that popped into my head or am I going to get excited because that sounds like an invitation to go find something even better together? Maybe that’s why I feel like co-writing all of a sudden. Regardless of how I feel about it, it’s the order of the day. Like I said, God keeps putting it on my plate right next to the humble pie. Take, for example, the curious case of Kelly Rae Burton. Kelly Rae Buuuuurrrrrrtooooonnnnnnnn. I elongate her last name so profusely because she’s just that good. She’s got a beautiful country voice somewhere in the neighborhood where she can borrow a stick of butter from Alison Krauss and a cup of sugar from Mindy Smith. And let me tell you, she has got the songs to throw at it! Her songs are so good I pretended they weren’t just so she’d let me write more with her. She came to Nashville and brought with her three or four songlets as she called them. A verse and a chorus and a shrug of the shoulders as to where they should go from there. She played me all of them and we picked one at random because they were all lovely. We didn’t pick out china patterns Baby you and I were paper plates We didn’t rent a car I don’t recall a sunset We took your old Ford And made our escape And I won’t say the rain came down on our parade But I won’t say the dream came true We set up camp somewhere in the middle And we’re still Learning that love Is something you choose After I inhaled deeply and exhaled a few superlatives, we went to work. The first thing we did, because I am assertive to a fault, was change the chorus. I didn’t like “set up camp.” It’s a nice phrase but “up” and “camp” don’t want to be sung together. We brainstormed a minute to “settled down.” Not only did it sing better, but a “down” metaphor is better than an “up” metaphor at conveying the emotion of the chorus. I also didn’t love “and we’re still” because the emphasis fell on still and it just didn’t sing great or sit right. We changed it to “and we’re here.” The way “here” fit the melody created a nice sense of “well, I guess we’re here and we’re going to be here a while.” From this, I already knew a thing or two about Kelly. First, she could receive criticism. Who cannot accept criticism? The insecure, unseasoned, and immature. I can say this with authority because I often have a difficult time with it and I am all of those things. Second, she had a great sensibility because she felt just as I did the better-ness of lines that roll off the tongue and of metaphors that suit the sense of the lyric. This was going to be a good day. Where to go from here? Verse 2 is like starting over, but this time with constricting rules. I found pants I like, but they’re a weird green and now I have to find a shirt that matches. But this was a country story song, so we knew we weren’t going to go wrong with a chronological progression. I asked if we were going to write about kids or marital difficulties (they’re one and the same, baby . . . one and the same). She said marital difficulties cause that’s what our chorus was about. Duh. I will now put a little extra space between this paragraph and the next to represent the interval of time we spent staring at the wall and mumbling to ourselves. . . . . . . . . . In this case the construct came before the lines got filled in. We decided the first half of this verse would be about those funny little flaws you discover in one another during the first years of your marriage, and the second half would either be about some of the deeper flaws—the ones that hurt a little more—or would be about some of the things we come to value about one another. We figured this much out: I’ll never learn to cook Like your mother And you can’t fix a car Like my dad Those lines were both Kelly’s I think. And here I return to the subject of co-writing. Had I written those lines myself (though of course I wouldn’t have written THOSE lines exactly) I would have thought to myself, “Those are delightful.” But because I was writing with someone else, we looked at one another and said, “I love it! I love the way that ‘like your mother’ actually sounds like an eye-roller the way it’s phrased over the melody!” I was inspired and offered: But I can make you laugh Like no other And you bring a joy to me I never thought I’d have We found a little melodic change to lift those lines up and into the second chorus. Another reason for me to enjoy writing with someone else: when I sing my melodies they sound like me singing my melodies. What a joy to hear someone with a really lovely, winsome voice singing a melody I’m proud of! So then it was on to the bridge. What is a bridge exactly? Well, it’s not a verse and it’s not a chorus. Andy Gullahorn would argue that in this sort of song the bridge is where time passes, but that requires a third and fatal verse which we weren’t willing to write. So instead we opted for a simple sentiment: Oh, it’s worth it all We have to believe it’s worth it all If we stand or if we fall Tell me that love is worth it all It’s not earth shattering but with the melody it’s heartfelt. Basically, “This thing isn’t easy and some days I need reassurance that these tears aren’t for nothing.” So we high-fived. We made a bad iPhone recording of our little baby song. We spent a few minutes sort of walking around the room of the lyric, testing the floor boards to make sure they held weight. Good. Done. We then proceeded to finish three or four more songs in about a day and a half. Crazy! And so fun. I’m all out of insight but might I let you hear the song we wrote? And might I suggest that you support Kelly’s Kickstarter campaign? She has just a few days left and a long way to go so be awesome and support awesomeness.

West Virginia is a little state with a big chip on its shoulder. I know, I’m a proud Mountaineer. We are likely to strike out in anger for many possibly slights, one being those delightful occasions when people express ignorance of our very existence. No, we are not part of Virginia. There was this little war between the states. You might have heard of it. Does the Civil War ring a bell? No, I don’t live near Richmond. That’s another state. In fact, we just celebrated 150 years of being our very own state. We get mad and hurt and complain, “Why can’t they get it right? How can people be so stupid as to not know about us?” But there’s another possible take on these infuriating occurrences. “Why don’t we make ourselves known better, so people don’t mistake and overlook us?” It’s easy to grumble about not being known. It’s harder to make an effort, to do some action that lets people know you are there and have something to contribute. But complaining about not being known, growing bitter and resentful, sensitive and withdrawn, is much easier. This is something introverts frequently do. We complain, often without making any effort to be known. “They don’t get me,” “Nobody understands me.” I know, because I’m not just the writer of this post criticizing/challenging introverts, I am one. Well, maybe nobody knows us because we are not knowable. We are not friendly. We are not open. I spent most of my early life terrified and quiet, reluctant to speak up, afraid to be friendly. I called this “being shy.” It took everything in me to say hello to a room full of strangers. I felt like I was being sent to the guillotine. I could bore you with tales of terror and despair, but I want to get straight to what helped me. Playing defense all the time, trying to avoid people, is a losing strategy. It’s what the sports world calls “playing NOT to lose.” (This, as opposed to “playing TO win.”) Not until I switched to offense did I see any real improvement. I had to intentionally be friendly. I had to do something very courageous, for me. It was embarrassing, because I could tell it wasn’t courageous for lots of people. It was easy to them. That made me envy them. But I’m finding that friendliness is a great pathway to understanding that those extroverts, those mighty people of the earth, also have weaknesses and fears, and that’s something you can’t find out by spending all day with your cats watching Star Trek and updating Facebook in clever ways that make you look like an interesting person, but really you’re just on the internet all day and also watching Star Trek. I get the introvert’s challenges. I get that there are incredible strengths in there. But, speaking as one, introverts can be some of the most self-righteous people you will ever meet. We frequently have the additional disadvantage of being “artists,” and “brilliant,” and “smart” and “quirky,” and often expect everyone to bow in deference to our self-consumed, navel-gazing craziness. Introverts often love to point out faults of extroverts, those people doing their friendly and open and positive things with other people and often in, gasp!, public (how crass and unsophisticated). Introverts love to snarkily sit on the sidelines and laugh at all the people in the game. We love to self-importantly preserve our undefeated record by never entering the ring. There’s an awful lot about introverts to love, but there’s also a lot that’s less lovely. I’m all for loving introverts as they are. I am one. I’m happy to see the recent flux of positive messages, books, and blog posts about understanding and appreciating introverts. I’ve written some of them and I’m for it. However, if all this positive affirmation for “being who I am”—that delightful and dangerous path—helps us feel superior as we disengage from community, friendship, spouse, family, and church, then we are believing a lie. Introverts need community—real community with real, flesh and blood people. We need to be loved, accepted, challenged, and to find our place in the world. Star Trek and Facebook and cats may make us feel like we have something real, but they cannot replace flesh and blood people. Star Trek won’t let you down. It’s safe. Safe and not real. Facebook can provide us a thousand opportunities to feel better than other people and to shine up our pristine image—even an image of being broken, humble, complicated, interesting people. But spouses can’t be blocked, sisters are hard to unfriend. We can’t decline a funeral event with a click. Cats . . . well, let’s be honest and just admit that cats are evil. Here’s the point, introverts. Maybe you’re angry because I said Star Trek wasn’t real or that Facebook is a minefield of pride and envy, or you’re steaming from having to face the awful truth that cats are of the devil. But hold on. Remember, I’m one of you . . . er, us. The world needs us. We don’t just need flesh and blood community, but flesh and blood community needs us. Seemingly-confident extroverts need us. Type A’s that type a’s on their keyboards with so much power and confidence need us. Muscular, tanned, salt-and-pepper haired businessmen in suits need the dog-hair-sweater-wearing bespectacled old maid who wears a Star Trek communicator because her cats have told her it looks rad. We all need each other. It takes all kinds, as the person quoting cliches once said. I know it will take courage that you believe you are incapable of to take those baby steps toward being present. Remember that God is strong when you are weak. Remember that you are loved, accepted, welcomed by God in Christ. Remember that your brothers and sisters need you, so be brave. Be present somewhere, introverts. You are needy, and needed. Just like everyone else.

Recently I sat down for a Skype conversation with Barry at The Twelve-Minute Muse. We talked about several things including, but not limited to, my latest EP, Counting My Rings: B-sides, The Book Mole (my new bibliomaniac book-finder and reseller service), the importance of metaphor in songwriting, painting, and the mal-importance of inspiration. We probably talked about LSU football, too, but nobody here cares about sports, so it was stricken from the record. Taking a cue from the One-Minute Movie reviewer, please enjoy this 12- (or-so) minute interview. [Click here for more from the Twelve-minute Muse.]