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The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In today’s episode, Jonathan Rogers interviews Maryrose Wood, author of the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series. In today’s episode, Jonathan and Maryrose discuss the way that stage acting has impacted Maryrose’s writing, the implications of improv for overcoming writer’s block, and how to get comfortable with uncertainty in the writing process. Click here to listen to Episode 22 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

At Hutchmoot this year I was able to sit down for lunch with Jonny Jimison, the creator of The Dragon Lord Saga: Martin & Marco—the new, full-color edition from Rabbit Room Press. We didn’t discuss his new book, because he was busy teaching Douglas McKelvey how to play the card game that is a spin off from the book. That was fine, because I had already told him what I hated about his book—it was “Volume 1.” That’s right. Hated. What, hated a Rabbit Room book? Well, sort of. Spoiler alert: this graphic novel ends with a cliff hanger. I’m not sure how I missed that when I started reading it. It might have been the high-quality printing or the gorgeous handling of color or the immediate laughter that the book gave me. Regardless, I was halfway through it before I got that sinking feeling that the action and adventure was just getting started, and I was running out of pages. I was originally introduced to Jimison’s work through the Rabbit Room cartoons he posted. My favorite was the Every Moment Holy/Rick Astley one, of course. Those strips have been loads of fun, mining the peculiarities of the people and obsessions in the Rabbit Room community. But they did not prepare me for The Dragon Lord Saga. The book is described as part of a five-volume graphic novel series which combines the fantasy adventure of The Lord of the Rings with the cartoon humor of Calvin and Hobbes. As I have admitted, I only read the first volume of the series, so I can’t speak to the veracity of that representation. In that there are dragons in it, and it is set in a Dark Ages-sort of world, I can see the Lord of the Rings angle. And as it is extremely funny and features a young boy, I can appreciate the Calvin and Hobbes reference. But if you ask me (and since you are reading this post, you are asking me), I think of it more as if it was Pogo plays Dungeons & Dragons. It is rare to find a comic book that feels so classic and so contemporary. It is scrumptious to look at and a blast to read. Ned Bustard The illustration style is so classic and warm that I can’t help but see a visual connection with Walt Kelly’s famous comic strip. Walt Kelly was a Disney animator (Pinocchio, Dumbo, Fantasia) who created Pogo, a possum who lived in a swamp with a wide range of neighbors including Albert Alligator, a turtle named Churchy LaFemme, a skunk named Cousin Downwind, and more. The strip ran from 1948–1973. The Pogo strips are funny and insightful, plumbing the depths of human souls through anthropomorphic substitutes. The drawings of the characters and the settings are beautiful and animated. Not surprising since they come from the pen of a former Disney artist. The Dragon Lord Saga characters and settings have the feel of a classic Disney film. The artwork sucks you in. You can tell it was colored with cool software, but it never feels cold. This alone is a huge accomplishment in my mind. And reading through the graphic novel, I had a hard time dismissing the expectation that the horse was going to break into a song. He didn’t (at least not in Volume 1), but he did talk. Oops! Another spoiler! Sorry about that. I spent many Saturday afternoons in my college years playing Dungeons & Dragons. I even played it during some study halls at school. But I made sure not to be overt about such activities, since I was in a Christian school! These games were always filled with laughter, outrageous monsters, unexpected surprises, and allusions to Middle Earth. The Dragon Lord Saga captures all those feelings for me. That is why I balk a bit at pitching this graphic novel to readers as being like The Lord of the Rings. I love Tolkien’s classic work, but let’s be honest—hilarious sight gags and talking horses are not what ole J. R. R. is known for. In contrast to the epic adventures of Bilbo & Co., this graphic novel has all the laughter, outrageous monsters, unexpected surprises, and allusions to Middle Earth that I remember from my gaming days, and so much more. I can’t imagine a graphic novel that is more Rabbit Room-ish than this. Buy it for your kids. Buy it for yourself. It is rare to find a comic book that feels so classic and so contemporary. It is scrumptious to look at and a blast to read. Click here to purchase The Dragon Lord Saga: Martin & Marco in the Rabbit Room Store. Ned Bustard is the designer and illustrator for Every Moment Holy and The Light Princess. He is also a graphic designer, kids’ book illustrator, art gallery director, and various other things.

Years ago I was helping out in a Sunday School class, and the teacher asked the boys and girls what I thought was an unfortunate question. The Scripture passage that morning was from Joshua 3, when the priests carry the Ark of the Covenant into the Jordan and the river stops flowing so God’s people can slip into Canaan. The text actually says the waters stood “in a heap.” The people cross on dry land, according to God’s promise and Joshua’s prophecy. I remember standing there in the back of the classroom listening through the children’s ears to a story I’d heard dozens of times, when I found myself gobsmacked by craziness of it, by all those little details that make Scripture so compelling, so uncategorizable. The kids were paying close attention. The room was pregnant with awe. Then the teacher closed his Bible and asked, “Now, children, what are some rivers you have had to cross? How have you had to trust God like the Israelites did?” All at once, the spell was broken. I had to hold my tongue, because I wanted to wave my hands and say, “Wait, wait! Can we just take a second and think about the fact that God dried up a river? That its waters stood in a heap? Isn’t that amazing? What does a heap of water look like, anyway?” Can’t the story, in other words, do its own work on us before we start applying it like good boys and girls? Of course there’s nothing wrong with application. But there is something wrong with turning a miracle into an object lesson before you’ve had a chance to consider the gobsmacking wonder of it. The same is true of the best fairy tales. I don’t mean to say that they’re factual in the way Joshua 3 is factual. After all, part of the power of that story is that it actually happened. But when a child hears a fairy tale, they take it as seriously as fact. The first time I read from my own books at an elementary school I was unprepared for the earnestness of the kids’ questions, the way their brains seemed to crackle when I told them about the weird creatures and mysterious magic, the way their faces scrunched up when they detected some apparent inconsistency because I had left out a crucial detail. None of my grownup friends were half as inquisitive or shrewd about the world, about the characters, about the bad guys. Kids know how to read a story. They believe it—or at least they instinctively suspend their disbelief. Grownups have to try twice as hard to open themselves to a story because the soul-muscle of wonder has atrophied. We read to know, not to experience. We apply. And in doing so, we protect ourselves from being gobsmacked—or enchanted, or frightened, or awed, or moved to tears without knowing why. Kids know how to read a story. They believe it—or at least they instinctively suspend their disbelief. Andrew Peterson As important as it is to remain childlike when reading a fairy tale, it’s just as important when you’re writing one. When Madeline L’Engle talks about “serving the work,” she means allowing the story to grow into what it wants to be. We aren’t meant to lord our will over a story, but to nurse it into being, then to let it loose to play in the woods of imagination. Only then can it surprise us with that zing of delight and discovery that reminds the author that making is mystery. George MacDonald demonstrates that as well as anybody. His tales are as wild as the Scottish Highlands, as untame as his bushy beard, and though it can be a little disorienting to a modern reader, MacDonald’s fatherly voice is ever present, full of kindness and wisdom. It doesn’t always feel like he knows where he’s going, but you do get the sense that he’s being led. C. S. Lewis said that hardly any other writer “seems to be closer, or more continuously close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.” If that’s true it explains a lot, because the Spirit of Christ is untame, too. Jesus said in John 3:8, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you can’t tell where it comes from or where it’s going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” Old George believed God loved him, and wanted you to know that God loves you, too. Love is the wind that blows through these stories, and love doesn’t always make sense to us. It goes where it pleases. The Light Princess reminds us that the world is an unsettling place, and mystery clouds the corners of our days. That means strange and terrible things are bound to happen, whooshing in from the dark periphery without warning—like a witch’s curse, or one of the White Snakes of Darkness. But mystery also means that grace and light can come whooshing in, too, so you might as well keep an eye out. You might as well hope for a prince to wander in, fall in love with you, and lay down his life to make you whole, even though you don’t deserve it. Well, that’s an unfortunate turn. I accidentally applied the story, didn’t I? Maybe so. But I was gobsmacked first. Click here to purchase The Light Princess in the Rabbit Room Store.

This Christmas season marks twenty years of Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God. Wow. What can I say about an album so beloved by so many people? Some of you were there in 1999 when AP first took his show on the road. I was four. My first Behold the Lamb experience didn’t come until just last year, and I feel like that negates anything I have to say about this record. Then again, if AP held that attitude twenty years ago, we wouldn’t even be talking about this album. Because what can anyone really say about a tale, a “true tall tale,” so beloved by so many people across 2,000 years? Yet, Andrew tackled the story anyway. He took the CCM artists’ Obligatory Christmas Album (two or three in some cases) and dared to offer something unique—something that reminds us of both the gravity and joy of the Christmas season, the necessity of rehearsing our stories, and the power of music to fill our hearts with longing. I could geek out for quite a while about the musical elements of Behold the Lamb, but I’ll try not to bore those less interested in the technical side of music. Just let it be known that AP and producer Ben Shive approach the task of creating a cohesive, conceptual album with excellence, filling the smallest musical crevices with motifs and reminders of the album’s journey from overture to finale. Note: In particular, listen for the repetitions of the “Deliver Us” melody throughout the record, sometimes switched from minor to major. OK, I’m done geeking out. But what a journey this album is. So often our Christmas stories begin with the angel appearing to Mary or perhaps the birth of John the Baptist. But Behold the Lamb, like the Gospel of John, reminds us that those moments were the flickerings of a hopeful light ready to break into a much older, colder story filled with pain, suffering, and darkness. This story begins in captivity. It begins with God’s people crying out in anguish for deliverance from oppressive evil thousands of years before the coming of Christ. But even then, God was foreshadowing what he would ultimately do in Christ: offer salvation through the blood of the Lamb, defeating death and sin with peace and perfect love. The story outlines God’s faithfulness despite Israel’s brokenness from Egypt (“Passover Us”) to the embrace of human kings (“So Long, Moses”) to exile (“Deliver Us”). And despite every failing across humanity’s history, God offered himself without blinking twice at the sacrifice that would have to be made. This is why we sing out with joy: so that no matter when you come into the story, whether it's 1999 or 2019 or 2039, we may proclaim together 'the power of death undone by an infant born of glory.' Chris Thiessen This is the story of Behold the Lamb of God. It may not sound like anything novel, and that’s because it isn’t. It’s all right there in the Bible and has been for a long time. But the power of this story isn’t in its originality; its power is in its reminder that this is our story. Just like the Israelites in Egypt, each one of us feels the pangs of sin, separation, and darkness. For each one of us, God made himself nothing, giving up his pride to come here and die like a man. I wasn’t there when it happened. Neither was Andrew. So for our sakes, we rehearse the story. We participate in the liturgy of the Christmas season to remind ourselves and each other of God’s goodness and unfathomable grace, even when we feel entirely broken. This is our protest against the darkness we encounter daily. This is why we sing out with joy: so that no matter when you come into the story, whether it’s 1999 or 2019 or 2039, we may proclaim together “the power of death undone by an infant born of glory.” Click here to view Behold the Lamb of God in the Rabbit Room Store.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In today’s episode, Jonathan Rogers interviews John Hendrix, author of The Faithful Spy. John Hendrix is a much-decorated author and illustrator and an art professor at Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His most recent book, The Faithful Spy, is a graphic novel about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the plot to kill Adolph Hitler. It won a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators. In today’s episode, Jonathan and John discuss the painstaking process of crafting The Faithful Spy, the interdependence of text and image, and the many motivations for making things. Writer who makes John Hendrix want to write: Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) Click here to listen to Episode 23 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

This song began with a dream that my wife, Kelsey, had, in which a group of well-dressed, professional-looking young men filed quietly into our house and proceeded to steal all our belongings, filling cardboard boxes with everything they could find. Kelsey watched them from the couch and asked, “Excuse me—why are you taking all my stuff?” One of them turned around and reassured her, “This is perfectly normal. It happens to everyone. We’ll be out of your way momentarily,” then resumed his polite theft. Within minutes, the intruders were gone, along with everything we had owned. It’s such a striking dream. It seems to be saying something like, “Growing up involves all kinds of inexplicable moments of incremental loss, but provides no ceremony for its accompanying grief.” Somewhere along the way, we pick up the unspoken expectation that we must keep moving forward, unshaken by the layers of skin we’ve shed. “Grace” is my interpretation of Kelsey’s dream, guided in large part by the wisdom of Wendell Berry. And you might just hear Kelsey’s voice in the recording, too (she did an awesome job). Listen on Spotify or Apple Music, and visit Drew’s website.

With great pleasure, we share today a new Rabbit Room Press reprinting of The Light Princess by George MacDonald. The influence of George MacDonald’s imagination is sweeping and inestimable. His approach to the fairy tale, ever-enchanted by the beauty of the gospel, continues to leave an indelible impact on generations of writers and readers—including us, of course! It’s the least we can do to honor this particular tale with new art by Ned Bustard, a foreword by Jennifer Trafton, and an afterword by Andrew Peterson. Click here to view The Light Princess in the Rabbit Room Store.

A few years ago I had lunch with a friend in Chattanooga. His name is Chris Slaten, and he’s an excellent songwriter, performing under the name Son of Laughter. I’m envious of his beard. I asked him how his songwriting was going, and since he’s a schoolteacher I wondered where and when he wrote. Did he have an office? He smiled between bites of tortilla chips and tapped his temple. “I do it up here,” he said. This may come as a surprise to you, that a song could be written in that miraculous space between a human’s ears. It surprises me, even though I’ve done it before. Chris said that the other day he had a doctor’s appointment and he sat in the waiting room with a copy of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. He opened the book for a moment, then shut it and decided instead to work on a song. He stared at a fake plant in the corner for twenty minutes and bent his will to the task. He said he was sure that he looked strange, staring all that time without really moving. But he made progress. He got home, grabbed his guitar, and tested out what he had “written,” then helped his wife with dinner until the next time he had twenty minutes to think—which was, he said, the next morning’s commute to the school. If you wait until the conditions are perfect, you’ll never write a thing. It’s always a matter of the will. The songs won’t create themselves, and neither will the books, the recipes, the blue-prints, or the gardens. One of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Richard Wilbur, is called “The Writer.” Look it up. Seriously. Right now, go find a computer, Google it, and read it twice. Then head over to a bookstore and buy his collected poems. Keep the book on your nightstand and read one of them each night before you sleep. Writing is always a matter of life or death, he says, and finding the right arrangements of words is like being a bird trapped in a house, trying to find its way through the open window. Sometimes you've done all the planting you can do, and it's time to start weeding the garden. Andrew Peterson When I was in college I wrote most of my songs during class. I often sat next to my friend C.J., who was not only my college roommate, but was the guy who taught me to play the guitar ten years earlier at church camp. The first song I ever learned on the guitar was “Patience,” by Guns ‘n Roses, which starts in the key of C with a whistle solo, and I must say that there are much worse first songs a guy could have learned. C.J., who was hard at work learning to write songs even in high school, also happens to be the guy who introduced me to the music of Rich Mullins. I have happy memories of the music we made at C.J’s house during his senior year of high school. We’d pull out the guitars and Belinda, his mom, would belt out “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’” by Journey. Man, did she have some pipes. The whole family did. Those “na-na-na’s” at the end of the song provided me one of my first opportunities to sing harmony. I was the skinny kid in the background, trying to keep up, trying to learn to sing in tune. When I look back at those days I’m overwhelmed by their kindness. The Fluhartys encouraged me to sing, to play, to write, even though I was sloppy and flat and overeager. When C.J. graduated high school and went to Bible College, I followed suit, partly because I had nothing better to do. So there we sat next to each other in Old Testament survey classes, covertly passing lyrics back and forth. I watched the way he wrote his songs, the way he ordered the words on the page, arranging the stanzas so he could keep track of the meter of each line, the way he anguished over the syncopation of the syllables. I had still not managed to finish a song of my own—nothing worth sharing, anyway—but I felt a burning desire to contribute to our little college band’s body of work. I was a freshman, and fresh out of a pretty intense relationship with a girl. Then along came Jamie. She was beautiful and funny and full of life. She was a junior, and it was impossible to ignore her. We fell in love in a matter of weeks, and I knew without a doubt that if we kept dating we’d be married before you could sing the chorus of “Patience.” That was what scared me. I had just started college, I had dreams of playing music with a band, and was utterly unprepared to marry anybody, even if she was beautiful and wonderful and encouraging beyond measure. There were days when I wished I could retreat to a simpler place where there were no big decisions to be made. These are the lyrics I worked on for those early weeks of college. I take a walk down a dusty road and I Sink my feet in memories of colder days gone by I don’t want to go, but it’s all downhill And it seems so easy, I think I will Go down Could you tell that I’d been crying When you talked to me today? I’d been running from the words inside I never meant to say So come on with me and I’ll walk you around Through the backstreets of this old ghost town Come along and you will see There’s a place where we can be Far away from you and me Way down I’ll spare you the rest. To be honest, reading it now I don’t really know what it means. Something about memories, something melodramatic about wanting to escape all the questions so we could just hang out like the lovebirds we were. Apparently there was some kind of tearful discussion about our future, but I don’t remember it now. I don’t mean to diminish what must have felt at the time like a big deal, but the obscurity of the lyric makes it difficult for me to take it seriously. There are two more verses equally vague and earnest, but at the time I couldn’t find the chorus. One afternoon in apartment 418 my nineteen-year-old self mustered the courage to play my unfinished song for C.J. and ask him what he thought. Where should the chorus go? What should it be about? Was this all terrible? No, he said, it wasn’t a bad start. He liked it in all its “Toad the Wet Sprocket-ripoff” glory. He looked over the lyrics, pointed at the part about the ghost town that ended with “way down” and said, “That’s your chorus. It already has one.” Then he took a bite out of his apple and walked over to the courtyard picnic table with his guitar to work on a song of his own. Sometimes you’ve done all the planting you need to do, and it’s time to start weeding the garden. Click here to buy Adorning the Dark at the Rabbit Room Store.

I’ll begin with something of a confession: While I enjoy lots of music, and there’s an abundance of excellent artists and well-crafted songs these days, and it’s marvelous to behold—very rarely do I hear a song or album that I wholeheartedly love, that speaks to me on a visceral level. For What It’s Worth is that kind of rare album for me. It stopped me dead in my tracks and insisted that I listen a second, third, and fourth time. And J is celebrating the release of this album with a concert this Friday night at The Well on Granny White Pike (click this link for tickets). J Lind’s music comes from a unique place. He says it best: “My songwriting is grounded in true stories and old ideas, few of which are my own.” Many of those true stories emerged from the time he has spent with hospice patients. He studied philosophy at Princeton, where he also served in two civic service groups—Ascend Hospice and Princeton Music Outreach—that aim to forge connections between students and hospice patients. He then kept studying philosophy at Oxford before interning at a home-based palliative care organization in New Delhi, India. All the while, he’s been writing songs that bear witness to the suffering he has encountered. In fact, this album’s aim is to convey some of those stories in song form. And if that makes you feel a bit uneasy, I can understand that. Like, isn’t it kind of audacious to turn the stories of the sick and dying into a piece of art? Can it be done without sounding patronizing, condescending, or self-serving? Can the question of human suffering be engaged so directly without collapsing into truisms and platitudes that ultimately do a disservice to its subjects? It turns out that it can be done exceedingly well, because J Lind has written these songs from a place of honesty and sobriety. This album asks the question of theodicy over and over again from various moments in history, each iteration of the question lending a new dimension of insight. The album begins with “Letter to the Editor,” which approaches the question of human suffering from the relatable perspective of someone stuck in traffic. He muses: That accident on the interstate was so bad that they closed both lanes A man was dying while I complained that the traffic wouldn’t move Soon all the cars will drive themselves Some people think it will really help— Help me complain about something else So grant me the serenity to accept what I can’t change And give me the audacity to look the other way “Letter to the Editor” It’s hard for me to resist quoting the whole song. He moves seamlessly from this portrayal of guilt-laden cynicism to a tone of determined gratitude, clarifying what it could mean to truly love this world: No, I don’t want to love in spite of it Like it’s just some sad mistake No, I would rather love because of it Oh, the contrast that creates All of the colors found in every twist of this kaleidoscopic fate Yes, I’d like to learn to love it anyway “Letter to the Editor” In the second song, J Lind moves from the modern world to a far-off one, singing of a mighty king who asks his servants for an ancient ring (uh-oh—those rings are trouble) that will serve him in “both his misery and joy.” After the servants’ futile striving, a wise man fashions for them a ring with the words carved into it, “This too shall pass.” The rest of the song unfolds the wisdom to be found in this affirmation that all is transitory, as the king’s kingdom endures both wealth and want. Before we have time to catch our breath, we’re launched into space with “The Astronaut (Part II)” for another take on hubris and the human temptation to insist that all problems can be solved with more innovation. After painting a portrait of our extravagant, ill-fated protagonist and effortlessly alluding to “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats, J Lind crash-lands us in the middle of an unknown shore for the moral of the story: Behold the astronaut, so far from home He washed up on a shore unknown He’d build a tower out of stone, but all he sees is sand Mistaking confidence for competence He calls himself an optimist And builds until the sand is wet and running through his hands So you build your crystal palace high up in the sky The rivers of Babylon will never leave you dry And what would it take to teach a man that he can’t fly? Though you won’t triumph, you will try “The Astronaut (Part II)” This album asks the question of theodicy over and over again from various moments in history, each iteration of the question lending a new dimension of insight. Drew Miller Next up is the centerpiece and title track of the album—the moment where all these questions find their conceptual and emotional climax. We travel to the wilderness to observe tigers, hyenas, and jungles (hence the album cover). In the first verse of the song, J takes on the question that all Planet Earth viewers have found themselves asking at some point during a violent episode: “Wait! I thought the earth and everything in it was beautiful. So why is it that animals have to kill each other in order to survive? Is this really the way God made the world?” The rest of the song confronts harder and harder questions about the contingency of all death-fated creatures, humans included, until it juxtaposes the suffering of impoverished children with their inexplicable laughter, drawing attention to the absurdity of such a broken universe being laced with joy: And their song is lost to the chaos of the earth But they still lift up holy hands for what it’s worth And the people sing for the day their gods have made As the bishop bows in a foreign land to pray, “Let the Lord rain down his judgment on the earth, But I still love the heart of man, for what it’s worth” “For What It’s Worth” With all the restraint I can muster, I will now cease my rambling so as not to spoil the way this album draws to a close. Suffice it to say that J returns to the beginning of the biblical story with his song “It Is Good” to find a landing place for his searching questions: There’s wisdom in the garden But a serpent in the grass A just reward, a flaming sword, a flood throughout the land Till arcing ‘cross the heavens The rainbow bids you stand A voice commands, “It is good, it is good The colors, the wonders, the consequence of man Yes, it is good, it is good And I would do it all again” “It Is Good” I’ll let that speak for itself. One more thing: I would be remiss not to mention how masterfully these songs were arranged, recorded, produced, and mixed. Lucas Morton strikes again! (If you’re not familiar with his name, Lucas has worked on projects by Jordy Searcy, Jill Andrews, Sandra McCracken, Carly Bannister, and the list goes on and on.) The sonic landscape of this album switches seamlessly according to the setting of each song, shifting from medieval kingdom to outer space to jungle to open sea, never sacrificing a bit of cohesion. View For What It’s Worth in the Rabbit Room Store. Listen to For What It’s Worth on Spotify or Apple Music.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In today’s episode, Jonathan Rogers interviews JJ Heller along with her husband and collaborator, Dave. JJ Heller‘s songs remind people that they are loved. She and her husband Dave have been writing together since before they were married. On the first Friday of every month, they release a new song to the various digital platforms. In this episode, Jonathan talks with JJ and Dave Heller about the quest of finding one’s voice, anxiety, the tension between wanting to be impressive and wanting to make something that lasts, and the liberating gift of collaboration. Click here to listen to Episode 24 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

One day I needed a fondue pot. A fondue pot is not something one wants to buy. I have lived over 18,000 days now, and on exactly ONE of those days have I wished I had a fondue pot. But the day in question was that day. So I went to Facebook and put out an all-call for a fondue pot. Within minutes, my friend Matthew Sullivan had offered to make his fondue pot available. Within a couple of hours, cubes of gruyere cheese were melting in my borrowed fondue pot, and my kids were spearing bread chunks to toast over a Sterno flame. Matthew Sullivan brought great joy to the Rogers house that day because a) he had what we needed, and b) he was willing to offer it. And I’m pretty sure Matthew got some joy too. (I don’t have any data to support this, but I suspect that at least 2/3 of the pleasure of owning a fondue pot derives from letting other people borrow it; after the first couple of months of ownership, nobody has ever eaten enough fondue to justify the storage space for all those accoutrements.) But as much as I loved and appreciated Matthew Sullivan that day, how do you think I felt about those hundreds of Facebook acquaintances who failed to come through for me in my hour of need? I made myself vulnerable. I expressed a need. Ninety-nine percent of my Facebook so-called “friends” were absolutely no help. And yet I wasn’t mad at them at all. My joy at Matthew’s provision was untainted by everyone else’s failure and indifference. Was this saintliness on my part? Perhaps. But also, it would be ludicrous to be mad at people for not having a fondue pot. Especially when I don’t have a fondue pot of my own. This brings us to The Fondue Pot Principle, which I just made up. The Fondue Pot Principle is expressed as a theorem with three corollaries: Theorem: You can only give what you have—but that’s just fine. Corollary A: When what you have to give matches up with what people need, those people feel delight, appreciation, and other good feelings. Corollary B: With very few exceptions, people are not disappointed or angry or upset when what you have to give doesn’t match up with what they need. In fact, with very few exceptions, people have no opinion at all regarding your shortcomings. Corollary C: Unfortunately, the “very few exceptions” mentioned in Corollary B tend to be the people who are closest to you. That Corollary C is a doozie. It’s the main reason Corollary B may seem hard to believe. We will return to it in a minute. But first, some real-world application. I cannot dunk a basketball. I am starting to think it’s never going to happen. (I hope that doesn’t sound defeatist.) While this shortcoming has caused me some disappointment, nobody else feels disappointed or let down. Basketball skills just aren’t what I bring to the world. Even people who love basketball aren’t disappointed in me. They’re too busy enjoying LeBron James. And speaking of LeBron James, nobody watching LeBron James play basketball has ever said, “Too bad that guy’s a mediocre cook.” For the most part, this is how the world works. The world is set up to benefit from your strengths and to pay little attention to your shortcomings. Your friends love you for what you bring to their world. They don’t think much about what you’re not bringing. You’re bad at math? Ok. As long as you’re not trying to pass yourself off as a certified public accountant, the wider world isn’t going to care one way or another about your math skills. You don’t need to be self-conscious (though you may need to find somebody who can help with your personal finances). Your job as a writer is simply to give the reader what you have to give. Jonathan Rogers You’ve probably heard it said that nobody is thinking about you because they’re too busy thinking about themselves. This idea is related to the Fondue Pot Principle, but there’s an important distinction. The Fondue Pot Principle suggests that the wider world cares about what you DO bring a whole lot more than it cares about what you DON’T bring. I don’t mean to suggest that the world is waiting with bated breath to see what you’re going to do next. I mean only to suggest that when you give what you have to give, the potential upside is quite a bit greater than the potential downside. You may find it hard to accept the idea that the overwhelming majority of the people in your world are unaware (and uninterested) when what you bring doesn’t match up with what they need. This brings us back to Corollary C: the people who ARE conscious of your shortcomings and failure are the people who are closest to you, and with whom you spend the most time. If you are a spouse, your spouse needs things from you that only a spouse can give. If you are a parent, your kids need things from you that only a parent can give. You may find it hard to give some of those things. Your spouse or children, who have nowhere else to go, may have feelings about that. Welcome to the postlapsarian world. This built-in difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that we put unrealistic expectations on the people we love the most. When my wife can’t meet my every imagined need, I get angry and surly. My expectations for other people are much more reasonable. When my electrician can’t meet my electrical needs, I call another electrician. No hard feelings. Corollary C touches on complexities of human relationships that I can’t unpack here (actually, I’m not sure I could fully unpack them anywhere). This is a letter about writing, not marriage and family counseling. I mention Corollary C of the Fondue Pot Principle because I think it helps explain why our inner critics are so much harsher than they have to be. Writing problems, as I often say, are rarely just writing problems. Your relationship with your reader isn’t nearly as fraught as your relationship with your parents or siblings or spouse or kids. Your job as a writer is simply to give the reader what you have to give. In this week’s episode of The Habit Podcast, songwriter JJ Heller talks about a line from one of her songs: “I’ll sing the song that only I can sing.” Yes. Exactly. That’s all your reader is expecting from you—to give what you have to give. Nobody is judging you for what you don’t have.

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Ned Bustard. It was his illustrative touch that brought Every Moment Holy to life in our imaginations, lending beautiful images to the vast variety of subjects like creating, feasting, lamenting, and forgiving. So when we saw this video of Ned describing how he relates to art and creativity—specifically the transformation in how he measures “success”—we were delighted and eager to share. This video was produced by Cursive Films, and you can learn more about Ned and his work at his website, World’s End Images.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In today’s episode, Jonathan Rogers interviews banjo player and “amateur theologian” Ron Block. Ron Block is a banjo player and a long-time member of Alison Kraus’s band, Union Station. He is also an amateur theologian, a George MacDonald aficionado, and the star of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (he’s the banjo player in this scene). In this episode, Jonathan Rogers and Ron Block discuss the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, the “try-harder cycle,” and how to turn that negative cycle into a positive cycle that liberates our creativity rather than suffocating it. Writers who make Ron want to write: C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) George MacDonald Click here to listen to Episode 25 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

[Editor’s note: What follows is a transcription of John Cal’s delightful introduction to Thursday night’s dinner from Hutchmoot 2019, originally given five weeks ago today.] I watched them as they filed into the room for dinner. They arrived scared and excited, full of glee and trepidation, faces washed and in Sunday best. By the hundreds they came, bags packed and off long bus rides, and plane rides, or driven up the mountain by their equally nervous parents. These eager summer campers were met by counselors, horse wranglers, and water ski instructors, maintenance guys, campfire musicians, mountain bikers, laundry girls, and even office staff. They gathered in the lodge cafeteria around rectangular folding tables to share a meal, their first meal together. Big Lake Youth Camp had been around for decades before I ever stepped foot on campus, and they’re still going today. This summer they celebrated 57 years. With each new season, I could feel the experiences of the thousands of people that had come before me, the years of campers and staff and countless meals that ebbed back in time. There were so many days of camp before this one. There were assuredly many first days to come, and yet, each Sunday, that first meal, the one that we were about to share together, somehow seemed to hum with the truth that this one was ours. And for the years I worked in the kitchens at Big Lake, every Sunday it was the same meal, a meal I actually didn’t like very much. I’d chop the same vegetables, bake the same pans of cornbread, fill the same bottles with honey. It was the traditional first meal for decades, served on Sundays for years before I became the head chef, served for years after I left. The meal was called haystacks: a taco salad of sorts, a supper quite beloved in Adventism, the Christian denomination that first taught me about Jesus and that operates Big Lake Youth Camp, where I worked in the kitchen for ten years. It is a meal that is recognizable enough by non-Adventists, but the details are also peculiar, like hot dish to a Minnesotan or poutine to a Canadian. There are regional aspects to it, like Spam Musubi in Hawaii or boiled peanuts in Cajun Country. Haystacks are an integral cultural food that might not be fully understood by outsiders. This year we celebrate ten years of Hutchmoot, and perhaps without even noticing, we’ve created unique cultural variances of our own. “What do you mean that people who are scholars of Buechner and O’Connor also have a deep affection for Dr. Who?” “What do you mean you can quote both Toy Story 3 and Ephesians 2 to me verbatim?” “How is it that Jennifer Trafton can so seamlessly compare Bruce Springsteen and Mary Poppins and their shared merits? Who knew Bruce and Mary had shared merits?” And no, I still haven’t seen Star Wars. No, not any of them. And yes, I will keep reminding you year after year until I do. But how does it happen, all this variance? How is it possible that he holds the whole world in his hands, when the mere prospect of those in this room getting along, we divergent few, seems so utterly frightening? I had just become an Adventist, a Christian really, three years or so before I started working at Big Lake, and in my experiences with Adventism the concept of Haystacks had always scared me. The ingredients are put out on the table for you to assemble your own supper, but for a newcomer asking how to create their own haystack, the advice can be confusing. “Cheese should go after the beans,” someone will say, “so that the cheese melts from the warmth of the beans.” “Melted cheese eventually cools and forms a solid barrier in your haystack,” someone else will argue. “Cheese on top.” I’ve been told to “crush your chips, so that it’s easy to blend all the flavors together.” “Keep your chips whole so they stay crunchy as long as possible,” someone else will offer. For years, I’d watch all kinds of Haystack creation come through my kitchen. Caitlyn McNabb was fastidious about the correct order of layers and the proper amount of pressure needed to crush her chips before folding, gently folding the concoction together so that it was sufficiently blended while making sure that large red and white swaths of salsa and sour cream remained. Matthew Russel would blend his haystack into an anonymous pink mass, enormously spanning the breadth of his cafeteria tray before piling pieces of cornbread and spoonfuls of melon over the top. Lena Sailor segregated her ingredients in their respective corners of her plate, making sure the beans didn’t touch the scant dozen or so Fritos, which didn’t touch the immaculately piled mound of shredded cheese. Seeing all of the deviations was the realization of my greatest fears. Are people just doing whatever, being whoever they want? Isn’t there a right way to do it? There are reaches of the country that put canned pineapple in their haystacks, or marinara sauce, or roasted potatoes. Some cover it with ranch or thousand island dressing or ketchup. And ketchup on haystacks is the manifestation of one of my deepest worries: “What if I’m doing it wrong?” There’s something about any idea becoming incarnate, about the thing—fearful or joyous—becoming real, tangible, something you can touch, see, taste. If we only ever read recipes and never get our hands dirty cracking eggs or whipping butter into soft peaks, we might be in danger of understanding what a cookie is, but never knowing what it tastes like. John Cal I’m sure many of you have heard the story of a pastor who put rocks into a large jar in front of his congregation—rocks and pebbles, sand and water. In the early 2000s, the story circulated through electronic inboxes and was recorded in books about soulful chicken soup. We know how it ends, how there is enough time, how there are enough resources, how to seek first and all will be added. We get the concept, at least cerebrally, but have you ever seen it done? Have you ever touched the rock, or poured in the sand? Have you seen the water fill the empty jar? We think knowing the story is enough, and so we often stop short of living the story. If we only ever read recipes and never get our hands dirty cracking eggs or whipping butter into soft peaks, we might be in danger of understanding what a cookie is, but never knowing what it tastes like. So before we get to the difficulty of navigating haystacks for supper, let us practice incarnation by first filling a jar. Our jar today, proverbially speaking, will be the song “Jesus Loves Me,” and I’d like us to sing it together, but just the melody, just the core line of notes, some might even say the most important of the notes, the ones that hold the whole song together. So please join me in singing. Here’s a note for us to start on. Remember, just the melody. [At this point, John walked over to the piano and played the middle C note.] Jesus loves me, this I know For the Bible tells me so Little ones to him belong They are weak, but he is strong Yes, Jesus loves me Yes, Jesus loves me Yes, Jesus loves me The Bible tells me so Beautiful. Of course it would be beautiful. We knew what to do. Unity, perfection, lack of dissonance. We all knew exactly what to do. The line of notes ahead of us clear and distinct. But now, I’d like us to try it again, and this time if you’re soprano, I’d like you to hit those ethereal notes seemingly unreachable to the rest of us. And if you’re an alto, let your voices, full and round, gently meander about the words. If you’re a tenor, you’re probably a praise band leader, so don’t be afraid to sing crisp and clear. Let your notes be a marker for the rest of us to come back to. Basses, show us rhythm and deep, deep perspective, and baritones, well, you can just remain the mysteries you are. Hold to the melody if you wish. Remember, these are your notes, not mine, and if you have no idea about any of the musical jargon I was just using, all I ask is that you try to find whatever song is inside you, and remember we were never told that the noises we make unto the Lord had to be beautiful, but only that we make them with joy. Here’s that note again. Jesus loves me, this I know For the Bible tells me so Little ones to him belong They are weak, but he is strong Yes, Jesus loves me Yes, Jesus loves me Yes, Jesus loves me The Bible tells me so You probably saw it coming—the ending, the punch line—and somehow, you already knew it would be better, when you allowed yourself to be yourself, to sing the notes inside you, your notes, the notes you were meant to sing. Then why is it still so hard to be ourselves, to believe that we were fearfully and wonderfully made, to not be so afraid that we’re doing it wrong? In the early 1950s Ella May Hartlein and her husband moved to Arizona to work at small boarding academy, where Mr. Hartlein was the dean of boys. While in Arizona, the newly married couple loved eating out at a local Mexican restaurant, where they became fans of tostadas. But after only a few years in the southwest, the Hartleins moved to Idaho, and then Iowa where there was a shortage of Mexican restaurants. It would be a decade before the first Taco Bell opened in Downey, California. With the lack of Mexican food or even ingredients in Iowa in the 50s, Ella May created a new thing, an answer to the longings inside her, a taste to remind her of home. She assembled a supper of chips, beans, cheese, and vegetables, and the concoction was so well received that a copy of the recipe made it into the local newspaper where it was labeled “Hartlein Special.” As the dish spread and the recipe was shared, it colloquially became known as “haystacks” from the maker creating a larger and larger stack of food on their plate. Tonight we feast on the story of Ella May, and in doing so, I hope you are able to practice telling your own story, to practice being yourself—hold the onions, extra sour cream, and salsa on the side. It’s scary, I know, to fumble around into uncharted territory, to make a discovery, to try something new, to maybe not do it right. What if you find you don’t like black beans, or that you didn’t take enough cheese at first? I promise, even these scary revelations are bringing you a few steps closer to uncovering how wonderful you already are, allowing people to see the real you. In all honesty, I still don’t really like eating haystacks, or taco salad for that matter, and yet the more I think about them, the more I am able to marvel at the many facets of the story they tell. Like in college, when we all seemed to be at our poorest and most hungry. We’d hang out in the park on a Saturday afternoon, or if we were lucky someone lived off campus and out of the dorms. We didn’t have enough money to even order a pizza and so someone would bring over a bag of tortilla chips, someone else a can of beans. Someone would find half a block of cheese in the back of their fridge and we’d dice up a sketchy tomato. Sour cream was a luxury, but you could count on an old crusty jar of salsa to appear from who knows where. And when we all gathered, bringing what we had, what at first didn’t seem like enough somehow manifested into coffers overflowing and able to nourish us all. Click here to read John’s Friday night meal introduction from Hutchmoot 2019.

For the past twenty years or so, Pip Squeak the mouse has held a spell over me. Pip Squeak Joins the Band is a picture book chronicling preparations for a festival in the sylvan village of Oak Wood. The reader follows a young woodland mouse who longs to play his piccolo with the town band. As far as children’s books go, it’s just one of thousands of tales about talking animals scurrying around the forest, wearing doll-sized dresses and breeches, dealing with crafty predators (a ubiquitous lesson: never trust a fox). But something about its soft, gorgeous, richly-colored, and detailed illustrations and its jovial, stalwart characters captured my heart and mind. Pip Squeak wasn’t the only animal I loved spending time with. My siblings and I adored Richard Scarry’s books (how could you not hold a soft spot in your heart for Huckle the Cat and his trusty friend Lowly the Worm?). I never got tired of The Poky Little Puppy and I still feel a delicious prickle of fear encountering the terrifying rats in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Samuel Whiskers. As the years went by I lost myself in countless hours of battle in the Redwall series, listened to Charlotte’s Web read aloud, and rooted for the field mice in Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Recently, though, I was discussing children’s literature with someone who expressed skepticism about the merit of animal stories. Our conversation forced me to mull over a premise I’d always taken for granted: that animal stories are an invaluable part of the children’s literature canon. But why? Why choose a story about mice when you have the complexity and relatability of human stories? We look to children’s literary characters to model lives of courage, kindness, and cleverness or warn us through their mistakes. How does a child learn from a mouse’s example? When it comes to story-telling, what do animals have to offer that humans don’t? There is no strict need, I suppose, to write stories about spiders who weave words out of web to protect their friends, or rabbits who disobey their mother’s directives and barely escape an angry farmer’s clutches, or toads who have a destructive lust for automobiles. Similar plot lines with humans as protagonists could function just as well in getting a message across. I admit that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that I find delight in reading Brian Jacques’s pages-long descriptions of Redwall feasts—descriptions that, if they were about humans, I would skip. But in this lies the beauty of animal tales. Their appeal doesn’t fully make sense and yet they hold immense, captivating power. Humans crave mystery and magic, stories that incarnate the impossible. Animal stories do just that. They are often a child’s first exercise in learning to see and consider things from a foreign perspective—to put oneself in the shoes of a squirrel certainly requires strength of both the imagination and empathy. To put oneself in the shoes of a squirrel certainly requires strength of both the imagination and empathy. Maria Bonvissuto Whimsical art and literature often receive a bad rap. They’re dismissed as fluff, stuff to move on from once you’re old enough to appreciate “real” stories. But the whimsy that animal tales offer is anything but shallow. It embraces the hidden enchantment of the ordinary world and lifts us out of cynicism and jadedness. It gives us fresh eyes to see that life is a gift and an adventure, one in which anything can happen and nothing is impossible. Hope and faith reign. And children seem to learn best how to nourish this sense of the possible, this faith in the wonder and beauty of life, through stories about something that indeed seems impossible—animals that walk, talk, wear quaint country clothes, bake pies and hold feasts, wave swords in their enemies’ faces, and at the end of the day settle down to sleep in their cozy tree-root homes. I once heard someone describe reading fiction as playful contemplation. This kind of contemplation forms the heart of animal stories. They’re windows through which we drink in the goodness of the natural world, its immense beauty and its drama—a drama that we all too often miss. It’s also a reminder that God gave us the universe out of his abundance and generosity and creativity. Certainly the natural world is immensely useful, but our Creator fashioned it simply for our wonder and delight as well. Animal stories reflect this reality. Perhaps an adventure story featuring boys or girls would do just fine, and there are many good ones out there. But skipping the stories about animals deprives us of a particular world that offers its own particularly poignant beauty and charm. Perhaps we’re drawn to animal stories because they carry an echo of a prelapsarian world. They touch on a primeval relationship, the deep friendship that man originally had with nature. Adam knew each of the animals intimately—he named them, after all. Children, in their innocence, naturally connect back to a time when Adam and Eve really did walk with animals. Perhaps the appeal of animal stories is rooted in a longing to go back to that original innocence. Perhaps it’s a foretaste of what’s to come in eternity. But there’s no question that traces of the original bond between human and beast still linger in the pages of animal stories. From Pip Squeak to Babar the Elephant, there’s a whole cast of animals waiting to welcome us into their marvelous world. Let’s join them.

Some time ago, a friend and I were discussing the sufferings of a mutual acquaintance, which include a major car wreck that occurred several years back. A drunk driver had barreled his semi truck into, over, and through a handful of other vehicles. One man had died. The man we knew had escaped serious injuries, but his wife required surgery and a long and painful recovery. We were thankful that they had both survived, and that by God’s grace their children hadn’t been in the car, but my friend professed a discomfort with people who had said that this accident—or any other tragedy we hear about—was “God’s will.” My companion felt it made God out to be cruel, to chalk up to his will any and all suffering that befalls humanity. “I think there’s room for accidents,” he said. This answer to the problem—which I had not felt to be a problem until I heard my friend’s solution—dissatisfied me immediately. It didn’t seem to let God off the hook at all, and I said so. If the Power behind the cosmos is both omniscient and omnipotent, what does accident mean in relation to his will? Whether or not he liked a thing, don’t we have to admit he’s at least consenting to every fact of the earth’s history if he has allowed them to come into being? The all-knowing, all-powerful God we both believe in was fully aware of every event, momentous or minuscule, tragic or triumphant, and had the ability to intervene and prevent any of them. Was God any less responsible, I asked, if he sat passively by and allowed suffering to go forward, than if it was one of his own acts? My buddy wasn’t inclined to wade into these waters, and veered off into a parsing of Calvinism. But I couldn’t see that it mattered whether the car wreck had been ordained to happen as soon as the universe was created or could have been prevented by our free will: the result was the same. God, who held the last and highest veto, hadn’t used it. People had been hurt, someone had died, and to say the Almighty hadn’t been implicated seemed like nonsensical, wishful thinking. The conversation rolled over in my mind for days and then weeks. And the more I wrestled with it, the less it seemed that God was shying away from initiating suffering—or was interested in passing the buck as to his part in it. Paul says he was given a “thorn in the flesh” to keep him from getting big-headed over all the visions and insider news he was receiving. The precise nature of the “thorn” he leaves us to speculate over, but he does disclose it to be “a messenger of Satan to buffet me,” which I find just a bit terrifying. And when Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, peeker into the Heavenlies, prays for the affliction to be removed, what he gets is an eloquent but firm Nope. “That devil-thorn is doing my will in you,” God says. Okay, yes, we know that the Lord uses pain to refine us, bring us closer to him, make us more like him. I acknowledge its efficiency as a tool for spiritual surgery on the diseased soul. I’ve had some work done myself along those lines. But then I got to thinking back over the Job story. You can’t fool around with the Problem of Suffering and/or Evil for long without smacking headlong into miserable, potsherd-scraped Brother Job—the actual first of us to say, “I wish I’d never been born.” But what had never jumped out at me before was how Job’s woes get started, or you might say, instigated. At the opening Job is sitting fat and happy, acknowledged to be a really good dude, “a blameless and upright man.” Things are going great for him, and when the Devil saunters into God’s court, he isn’t thinking of Job at all. And then God points to Job and calls Satan’s attention to him. He throws down a gauntlet, knowing full well it will be snatched up, and what that will mean for his golden-boy Job. Now we’re looking at something different from using suffering in order to bring us to repentance or prune off something wicked in us. Job was blameless and upright. He was thinking of God day and night, getting up early to pray for his kids and offer sacrifices not just on his behalf, but theirs. The Lord himself holds Job out as the model. But he also holds him out as Devil-bait, and when the hook is set he says, to our ancient enemy and his, “Behold, he is in your hand.” Might the first sin signify not the derailing of God's intended purpose for humankind, but the commencement of our journey toward that purpose? Matthew Cyr How this aspect of the story had never joggled my brain before, I couldn’t fathom. God had not just green-lighted Job’s anguish; he had all but whistled to the Adversary and said “Sic ‘em!” But it was so much worse even than that, I realized. Because how did there come to be such a thing as a Satan at all? If it bothered me that my Lord had put Job in the crosshairs, knowing all that his words would set in motion, how was I to think of God creating the archangel that he knew would go astray and become the Devil? Like building an angelic Doomsday device that would unleash every horror and hurt that’s ever rained down on us. I worked the thing backward and forward like it was a Rubik’s cube, and there was no getting around it; at some particular moment in the all-of-this that we call Creation, there had existed no such entity as would go on to open Pandora’s box, and the next moment, there had been. And in that moment of calling Lucifer into being, God had been aware of every sad and loathsome particle of our pain down through the centuries, and of our participation in evil which he was making not just possible, but inevitable. I thought back to an essay by Helena Sorensen from a couple years ago, “The Failings of Eden,” in which she suggests that the eating of the forbidden fruit was something more than our tragic and disgusting rejection of God’s divine Plan A, to be answered with a cobbled-together Plan B involving millennia of Curse and Law and Blood. What if, she asks, what we call The Fall was a necessary step in God’s raising of children that are not just of him, but in him? Joined to him, at one with him? Might the first sin signify not the derailing of God’s intended purpose for humankind, but the commencement of our journey toward that purpose? These words troubled me when the essay went up. Sin is bad, God hates sin…how could it be part of the plan? I remember feeling that the piece minimized—even attempted to justify—that which we’ve always been warned against, that which has separated us all these generations from the One who is our Joy and our Life. But now, the longer I think about all the arrangements the Lord has made for sin to exist, the harder it becomes to disagree with Helena. There’s the Enemy’s existence: if we can’t quite say God made a Devil, he knowingly made a being ticking down to converting itself into one. But going on from there, he made a garden and gave the serpent access. The intimidating cherubim watchdog wasn’t set at the gate until after Adam and Eve were evicted. God intervenes to keep them away from the Tree of Life, but not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And what of that tree? How did it come to be in the Garden, and why? Who was it for? Our Father even creates opportunity by his absence; he is clearly not immediately at hand while the firstlings are listening to snake-talk and eating fruit. He has withdrawn, the training wheels are off, and the moment he’s orchestrated has come. They will either obey or eat, and God knows they will eat. What do we do with this? We’ve long heard and said that God saw the Cross and chose the Cross from before he fashioned a man from dust—from before the words “let there be light.” God made a dark place knowing he would bring light to it. But I’m not sure how I ever believed words like omniscience and omnipotence had meaning, yet failed to see the ramifications of Genesis 3. I can’t dodge that there is some sense in which God, not just man or devil, is at the back of the huge groaning weight of suffering and sin. And I still love him, to the feeble extent that I’m able, and call him “Father,” and believe that he loves me. To say that these two things are not easy to reconcile doesn’t begin to touch it. Why must we take such a long and rocky detour to endless Joy? Matthew Cyr And yet, there is the Cross. It stands searing and impossible in the dead center of history, the axis on which all creation turns. In my most lucid, clear-sighted moments, it’s an effective deterrent to any complaint or accusation I might bring against my Maker. Because the collective suffering of the cosmos wasn’t merely, or even primarily, suffered by us. He himself took the brunt of it like a titanic hammer blow, leaving us a mere tinge. All the most searing pains, the bottomless depths of loss and grief that we experience, are just a shade and a trace of what he got. It often doesn’t feel that way, and I’m not always clear-sighted, but when I look long at him sweating drops of blood into the dirt of Gethsemane—watering a garden, another garden, with his pain—I admit it to be true. I’ve known hurts I didn’t think I could bear, and still I’ve never experienced hematidrosis, when severe psychological stress overloads the sympathetic nervous system, and the body’s neurons fire to the point of bursting the skin’s capillaries. But Jesus experienced it, and that wasn’t even the actual suffering and sacrifice he made for us—only the anticipation of it. I am grateful, I am awed…and still I have nagging questions. Even if he paid the cost that is beyond my comprehension, it’s an answer to sin without being a why. Why must there be a cost at all? Why not seal out the serpent, annihilate him, never make him in the first place? Why plant forbidden fruit? Ought not our Paradise have been safe and secure, that we could have enjoyed it with God forever in innocence, our naked pink skins bathing eternally in his radiance? Why must we take such a long and rocky detour to endless Joy? I begin to suspect the inherent impossibility of such a thing as a free-will universe in which sin never occurs. This puts me in disagreement with my beloved C. S. Lewis, who said that if there turns out to be other sentient and soul-bearing species in the cosmos, we need not assume they’re fallen like we are. In his (ingenious) book Perelandra he even depicts a version of “Eden” rescued from its serpent and its fall, though this requires the protagonist’s—as well as divine—intervention, which I think undermines his argument a bit. But imagine for a moment that God had just skipped over the making of Lucifer. Was there no other capable of falling? Whichever of the angelic host was the first and most ready to follow the Enemy into rebellion, might he not have eventually found his way to mutiny on his own? And if this fellow was in turn omitted, could not another at some point have set up on his own and authored sin, and so on? Until everyone right down to me and you have to be excluded from Creation? Can God make a universe of free beings with the capacity to choose self, and none of them ever—ever—exercise it? Maybe by keeping them infants. Maybe by putting up baby gates around Eden—childproofing it within, hedging off or eliminating any negative influence from without—our innocence could have been protected, extended into infantile infinity. Though I’m not positive we couldn’t find our way to sinfulness even then. But how if no Tree of Knowledge had been made? Nothing off limits, nothing made available that was prohibited? The Lord who bled and wept will not make light of our sufferings, but will make Light of them. Matthew Cyr Yes, disobedience is rendered impossible. But is not also the fuller understanding of what it means for God to be good—and how much he loves us? Is ignorance, in the end, blissful? And even if blissful, best? Do we not then remain contented babies forever? But if we are to bear his image to the fullest extent a created being can, if we are to grow more in mind and spirit like him, if we are even to grow at all, must not we learn some of those things only God originally knew? Without ever experiencing godlessness, could one ever know a true God-full-ness? “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil,” says the Lord God when the fruit has been eaten. It has the tone not of lamentation or condemnation, but of pronouncement. It now sounds to me like an inauguration, like a “So it begins” that can perhaps be set against the “It is finished” upon the bruising of the serpent’s head. So here we find ourselves: pilgrims. We travel through darkness and doubt and despair, we take the long way around. We know Goodness as a gleam far off, as a whispered rumor, as a recurring dream. Evil we know because we slog through it either toward or away from those echoes, those glimpses of distant light. We come to God bloodied and torn, if we come at all. But the Light is real, blazing amid the darkness, and when we do come to the God who made us in his image before making himself into ours, there is another “So it begins” even more powerful than that first. A new birth, into something that can be both childlike and knowing, as free and innocent as the dove yet as wise as the serpent. And here, I think, I begin to see some of the why of the enormous sin and suffering that an all-wise and ever-loving God did not prevent. The twice-born grow to be sons and daughters that can know firsthand those murky depths the serpent wanted to drag us down to, and still behold the Father’s face with joy, and throw up their arms to him to be embraced. In her essay, Helena Sorensen quoted once again those oft-repeated lyrics: And when the world is new again And the children of the King Are ancient in their youth again, Maybe it’s a better thing, a better thing To be more than merely innocent, But to be broken, then redeemed by love “Don’t You Want To Thank Someone” —Andrew Peterson And with trembling I think I agree, despite the cost—to us and to him. I’m not discounting how hard it’s been for you, or for me, sometimes. The consequences of feeding ourselves on something beside God are so real and intense all around us. Dare we tell the grief-ravaged that it will be worth it in the end, that there can be anything to come that will balance the scales? I think we must dare. Because there are still more echoes and gleams of something in the distance, something we are coming to. The Lord who bled and wept will not make light of our sufferings, but will make Light of them. I think we must dare believe that when evil and pain at last are slain, the revealed beauty and goodness of the Lord will make us glad even of our sufferings—glad that his love and power have been shown forth through them. Then we will have grown to be the kind of children capable of loving him with such abandon that even our most heart-rending experiences in the Shadowlands will be significant in that they display his glory. “To glorify God and enjoy him forever” to degrees we can’t now comprehend: that is the end he was shaping for us when he laid out a garden with serpent-sized gaps in the hedge. To remember the hellishness from which we were rescued and yet bask in God’s love, to have once marched with the rebel forces and now be cherished sons and daughters, these are the things that the angels can never know, but “long to look into.” As the Great Story unfolds, they will only be able to marvel in deepening astonishment and praise as we, God’s later children, grow ever closer to him in love, our capacity for joy in him ever increasing, and his likeness shining out from us ever more clearly.

Every time I see a plane, my heart breaks a little. Twelve years ago, I went to Dundee, Scotland, for the first time, meeting friends whom I’ve grown to love and whose work inspires me. There, in the middle of their city, they are loving people with the Gospel, whether it means listening, talking, preaching, serving, waiting, or opening their homes. In two-week installments, over subsequent years, I learned from them what the Church looks like in a post-everything society: it’s a tiny, warm light, a hurricane lantern that will not flicker in the dark and gale. Life happens, however, and despite my intentions to go back and visit—and to take my wife and children along—many things have gotten in the way. Yet I’m still connected to my friends in Dundee. I watch planes trail across the sky, and I ache for that good company. Mostly, though, what I can do is pray. My friend Bruce, a community worker there and pastor of a church, is an avid runner, so I pray when I go running. This is silent prayer in my head, mind you, as I have not mastered the military art of sing-songing whilst I jog. I don’t know what I’ve been told, Praying while my lungs ex-plode! Dear Lord, hear my wheezing song; Help my Scottish friends a-long! —Adam’s silent jogging prayer Okay, in seriousness, running is an inspiring time to pray for one’s friends, especially in the realm of endurance. In truth, though, it doesn’t feel like much. Who can say, within the one-way train that is spacetime, what the fruit of my labor is? God answers, but I can hardly see it. It reminds me of our ongoing and worldly-wisdom-driven conversations on social justice. A meal fed to the hungry is commanded, wonderful, and much easier to perceive. Money that helps to dig a well for clean water is worth giving in obedience to Christ. Yet the injunction to pray is just as powerful. I feel like even James, the brother of our Lord—and writer of a famously practical epistle—might have wrung his hands at us, seeing how we often divorce caring and neighborliness from Christ and the Spirit. You can see it in the smarmy way we write and share memes. “Our thoughts and prayers are with Gondor,” proclaims Theoden’s grim face at the news that Gondor is under attack. It’s irony stacked on irony, a layered lacework of cynicism covering the reality that the Scriptures tell us: “Always pray, and never give up.” “In everything, by prayer and petition, bring your requests to God.” It’s a question that paws at our doubts: does prayer work? No. But does God work in response to our prayers? Absolutely. I needed it reinforced, so I got to attend my own Hutchmoot session this year. It was the session of the absent. I wanted to spend my days in Nashville, catching up with a few friends, participating with all of you who got to go. Hutchmoot! A glorious refraction of God’s superabundance which we cannot quite define (because we are inside it). Who wouldn’t want to swim in those waters? Yet the schedule didn’t work out, but I was reminded of previous years and requests from Pete Peterson and others to pray—for presenters, for attendees, for any within the concentric ripples of influence. I tried to take these little nudges to heart, and though I can’t prove it, I believe that I did participate. No, I did not sup upon John Cal and Company’s glorious repast (the mouth waters at the very thought). No, I did not sit awash in heartbreaking lyricism. No, I did not burn tobacco near my face with friends (though I did do it alone, thinking of John Barber). But by God’s grace, where I submitted to the Spirit and prayed, I learned that prayer is a particular and curious way in which we are the Body of Christ. Who can say, within the one-way train that is spacetime, what the fruit of my labor is? God answers, but I can hardly see it. Adam Whipple The world holds a double standard in regards to these things, and we grow increasingly infected by it. People beg for and promise nebulous “good vibes” to each other on social media yet grow derisive at the idea of Christians praying for this or that thing. It’s a method of guarding one’s heart against the whelming tide of Gospel truth. If we can pluralistically allow people their prayers while also contending that such prayers are naught but ethereal word-spillings, we can keep ourselves from obligation. Yet if the notion ever creeps upon us that something is actually happening in response to these privately spoken half-poems, something transactional or conversational, we may resort to irony as a defense. Otherwise, we’re obliged to change our minds. “Instead of praying, why don’t you do something about it?” people ask. And we do. We pray. If The Rabbit Room had a flagship book, it just might be the liturgical prayer collection Every Moment Holy. Its very existence is an injunction against the diabolical lie that the Body of Christ can be sundered by miles. Through prayer, we participate in each other’s pilgrimages, shouldering burdens, standing alongside each other in an unseen war. It’s not magical; we cannot by formulaicism in prayer expect quantifiable results. It is, however, mystical, in that we are playing some part in things hidden, not thralled to the laws of physics. The God of All Creation interacts with us not merely as the adoptive Father of one, but of many siblings. We see a clannish—and, to my mind, beautiful—evidence of this in that we account our blood families unbreakable by distance in the final earthly analysis. The Bride of the Lamb is no different. Indeed, she is more so, by dint of the wholeness imbued through the Peace of Christ himself. Jesus defined the family of God as grounded in a greater reality than blood ties many times. When his family came to take him in hand over what they might have seen as antics, he used language that seemed disdainful of his own mother and brothers. “Who are my mother, and who are my brothers?” Jesus replied to the man. Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” —Matthew 12:48-50 When describing his incarnational mission, quoting Micah the Prophet, Jesus talked about the sword he had brought that would divide father and son, mother and daughter. This too is a reality. Blood may be thicker than water, but the God the Holy Spirit is immutable. To you Hutchmoot attenders of 2019: I’m pleased that you got to participate in person. I hope the fruit of that weekend is growing even now. Perhaps next year, or some year after, I’ll get to participate in person. For all of us who were absent, though, we join you in prayer, and we are grateful.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In today’s episode, Jonathan Rogers talks with Tish Harrison Warren (author of Liturgy of the Ordinary) and Doug McKelvey (author of Every Moment Holy). Tish Harrison Warren is an Anglican priest and the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, winner of Christianity Today’s Book of the Year Award for Spiritual Formation. She is joined by Doug McKelvey, author of Every Moment Holy. In this episode, Jonathan Rogers talks with Tish and Doug about what Tish means by the word “ordinary,” the power of liturgical rhythms to quietly transform our daily lives, and personal liturgies surrounding the practice of writing. Writers who make Tish want to write: Flannery O’Connor Annie Dillard Scott Cairns C. S. Lewis Rich Mullins Eugene Peterson Anne Patchett Click here to listen to Episode 26 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

A few weeks ago, Matt Conner got the chance to sit down and talk with Jason Gray about all the elements in his life that have combined to make his newest project, Order, Disorder, Reorder, and we’re pleased to share that conversation with you here on the blog. Matt Conner: You have a newer song called “Order, Disorder, Reorder,” but if I understand it right, that’s also the series of projects you’re in the midst of recording and releasing, correct? Can you explain? Jason Gray: Yes! Well, let me go back to before there was a formal concept for the next record. A couple years ago I was thinking about how I’d read that [Bruce] Springsteen wrote eighty-plus songs that were pared down to the twelve that make up Born In The U.S.A. I’ve also heard that Michael Jackson had something like three hundred songs in consideration for Thriller. So I wondered what would happen if I just wrote and wrote and wrote a bunch of songs, not worrying about a theme or anything like that, and looked for which ones rose to the top. I’ve typically written fifteen or so songs for an album and then picked twelve of them to record, so this was a new approach for me. Seventy-five songs later I had a considerable well of songs to draw from, which meant that I could pretty much make any kind of record I wanted: pop, singer/songwriter, rootsy acoustic, worship. I had enough material to take a record in any one of those directions, but what was the right record for me to make right now? Personally, I’m always inclined to make Americana singer/songwriter kinds of records, but the audience I serve doesn’t always embrace that kind of thing, and I see what I do as an opportunity to serve. Those kinds of songs always make an appearance on my records, but I haven’t ever made a definitive project of that sort. I hope to one day. Though I will say that I enjoy writing thoughtful pop music that is commercially viable—it’s so challenging! People often think of pop music as a sellout, but to do it well… it’s the peak of the mountain. “Artist types” should check their self-righteous contempt for pop at the door. It’s not easy to write and requires great, great discipline. I personally like how it sharpens me, even though the Americana singer/songwriter vibe is more like “home” to me. Initially, I wanted to make a record of songs based on words my mentor and friends have spoken to me that changed my life—right word at the right moment kinds of songs. I felt like that could be very personally meaningful, and I’ve always believed that if something helped me, surely it could help someone else. In this case, I was thinking a lot about the life-changing power of words. Here’s an example I’ve thought about a lot that makes me laugh: I was at a coffee shop on the road with my buddy Nathan when he ordered a ristretto americano. Watching him enjoy his purist espresso drink, I said to him, “See, I’ve always wanted to like the kind of drink you’re drinking, but I enjoy my lattes so much and how the milk mellows out the bitterness of the espresso.” “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Nathan said. “I used to like those, but I started to feel like I was just drinking a lot of hot milk.” That was all it took. After years of me trying to develop a taste for more espresso-forward drinks and not making much progress, it happened in a moment when I heard Nathan’s handful of words: “I started to feel like I was just drinking a lot of hot milk.” A moment before I was happily enjoying my caramel latte, but the moment after he spoke those words my drink tasted gross to me. I thought, “oh my gosh, he’s right…I’m just drinking hot milk!” I couldn’t get over how abrupt the change was and started thinking about the way words shape us. I was reminded of something my mentor told me once. He believed his job was to help heal people’s language. “If I can help heal a person’s language, they’ll heal themselves.” Which makes sense when you think of the power of language. God spoke the world into being. Jesus is the word made flesh. Words have the power to form worlds and to heal hearts. So I began combing through my story for times when someone spoke a handful of words that changed everything. In each season of my spiritual journey, God has brought one voice that cut through the noise of my doubt and confusion to give my faith back to me, making the unbelievable believable again. Jason Gray I still think that’s a pretty strong idea for a record, but my management was concerned that it might be hard for my team to convey it to others in a single sentence. The elevator pitch, you know? He was very conscientious of helping me create an easily relatable record with a simple concept that my team could re-articulate as they talked to radio and retail about it. Then I wrote a song called “Order Disorder Reorder,” which was definitely one of those “right word at the right time” examples that changed my life. The journey of transformation is the thing I most want to be talking about right now! And this song felt unique to me, as well. I couldn’t imagine someone else in our industry writing a pop song called “Order Disorder Reorder.” So between my passion for it, my sense that it was unique to me, and the simplicity of the idea, I was very excited to share it with my team. When I played it for my manager he immediately caught the vision for it and we started wondering if this might be the song to build a record around. I began to look through the songs I had written to see how many of them I could put into categories of order, disorder, and reorder. At that point we were off to the races. Originally it was going to be a full length album that we released all at once, but the more we thought about it, the more it seemed right to release it in three parts. Part of that on the label side was because it made sense for how they wanted to market the record. But for me personally, I loved the meaningfulness of not only the concept of the record but also the way we were releasing it. There is a religious discipline called statio which has to do with finishing one thing—or letting it finish with you—before moving on to the next thing. It’s taking a moment to let what you just experienced sink in before chasing after a new experience. It’s a discipline I try to observe in my daily life, so I loved the idea of building the practice of statio into the timed release of this project. So Order, Disorder, and Reorder will release separately over the course of the next year. MC: As an avid reader of Richard Rohr, the labels of our life involving order, then disorder, then hopefully coming back to a healthier place of reorder was familiar to me. Was that source material for you as well in the writing of this? JG: Absolutely. In each season of my spiritual journey, God has brought one voice that cut through the noise of my doubt and confusion to give my faith back to me, making the unbelievable believable again. C. S. Lewis, Brennan Manning, Frederick Buechner, Thomas Merton, Walt Wangerin Jr., G. K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, N. T. Wright, and now Richard Rohr—all of them have played such a crucial part in my spiritual development. Rohr’s emphasis on integrating our experiences and tendencies rather than…well, I guess demonizing or exorcising them, has been very formative for me. As a guy with a speech impediment who is a public communicator, I have had an opportunity to explore the virtues of weakness—figuring out how to integrate my “weakness” and making good use of it rather than fretting over it as a liability. Very early on in my ministry I would’ve used language like, “God will use you in spite of your weakness.” Rohr’s work has really shifted my language to something more like, “God will use you because of your weakness.” I wrote a song called “Dear Fear” that is one of my favorites from this last season. It’s about integrating and making good use of our fear and anxiety rather than thinking of them as problems we need to be rid of. Anxiety really tunes us into something, rallying all of our mental and emotional resources to point them in a single direction, which can be very useful for solving problems and being attentive to situations. I hope the song makes the Reorder record. We’ll see. So it’s that way of looking at things. “Transcend and include” is one of my favorite Rohr-isms. Integration. Using what’s in your life rather than trying to throw it off. This was very important to me, especially after my divorce which was dramatic and traumatic. I had this hellish experience that haunts me every day, even still. What am I to do with it? If I can find a way to let good use be made of it, I think that’s my only hope for surviving it and maybe even rising above it one day. We’ll see, I guess. But in regards to this project specifically, I love Rohr’s valuing of disorder as a necessary and good part of our development. When I was younger, I only understood trouble and pain as evils to be avoided at all costs, and if they came upon me, it was because A) I had done something wrong and God was punishing me or allowing these things to happen, B) he didn’t care about my life, or C) he didn’t exist. Another favorite option was the notion that I was “under spiritual attack.” At any rate, any kind of disorder was “bad” and it was only something to be delivered out of. This way of seeing things made me more miserable and anxious when the hard times hit, tempting me to see myself as a victim. Understanding disorder as a necessary and useful part of my journey of being made into the kind of person I most want to be took the anxiety and self-pity out of me and helped me learn to face it head on—engaging with it as an opportunity, bringing a teachable spirit. And that changes everything. It’s something like the difference between being the hunter or the prey. If trouble is headed our way and our posture is only to evade it, we are acting like prey. But if we turn and face the trouble head on, it does less damage and becomes the thing that can potentially make us stronger. Same trouble, but our posture makes all the difference. If I could write some songs that helped others face the storms of life head on, seeing themselves not as the victim of their problems but as the force that confronts their problems, well, that seemed like a good thing to be doing with my time. MC: You mentioned changing your writing habits to include so many songs. How did that work in batching the songs together, especially for this first project? JG: The tricky thing with volume one was, “Who cares about order?” [Laughs] I mean, we watch movies and read books to see the protagonist overcome some difficulty. That’s where the drama is and the inspiration is. Originally, when the project was going to be one full-length record, there was just going to be one song depicting order and then the rest of it would be about disorder and reorder. Switching to the three-volume format meant I had to come up with five songs that would depict order, which was difficult at first! Then I realized that seasons of order happen when we are putting our lives together with all that we’ve learned so far. Which means that today’s order is yesterday’s reorder. That helped me to look for songs that represented a kind of baseline wisdom that, in my mind, form a foundation for future growth. The humility that recognizes we are works in progress (“Becoming”), the simple gratitude for the gift and giver of life and the fundamental experience of being loved (“Maker Of Mornings”), the wisdom of childlikeness (“The Wonder”), the peace of living surrendered (“I’m Gonna Let it Go”), and the hope that the author and finisher of our faith is always at work in the roller coaster ride of transformation (“Order Disorder Reorder”). It was fun to live in the settled hopefulness of those songs, but I’m excited for the next volume, because that’s where transformation begins. As sweet as seasons of order can be, disorder is where I am made new and learn the things that, even though it cost me so much, I wouldn’t go back and change the circumstances that made me more of who I most want to be. MC: So is there a timeline in place, given that you know the next three projects that are coming? What else is on the horizon for you? JG: There is a timeline, though I can’t remember the specific dates. They’re basically spaced six months apart, so I think March and then August 2020, but with songs released here and there throughout. Beyond that, you know, that’s the big question for me. Music will always be part of my life, but I find myself continually curious about if there’s something more for me to do. I’ve felt a pull to write a book for a long time and have done a good bit of writing for that, but that’s been a daunting task for me. Some of it is pride disguised as humility; some of it is fear of letting people into the inner parts of my mind and heart. What will they think? Will it be boring? Will I be brave enough to tell the truth? Will it, or will I, be good enough? Does anybody care about books anymore? Is that the best place to have the kind of conversation I’m most interested in having? Some of it, too, is…well, if I’d written a book three years ago, I’d probably disagree with half of it today, meaning that I feel like I’m in a very reformational season. So it’s hard to be transparent and vulnerable about what my mind is working on today when it’s possible I’ll feel totally different about some of these things a year from now. But I’m writing anyway and finding a path forward. It’s exciting and challenging and producing good things in me, so we’ll see. The way I see things today, Christian faith is the locus for transformation and healing. It looks to me like that’s what the whole thing is about. It’s the buried treasure in the field, so I’m trying to sell everything I have in order to buy the field.

Whether you’ve already breezed through Adorning the Dark, it’s on your Christmas reading list, or you haven’t yet heard of it, here are some thoughts from Andrew Peterson about the relationship between our imagination and God’s creation—particularly what he has learned from the example of Annie Dillard. Click here to view Adorning the Dark in the Rabbit Room Store.

Sadly, the folks in Europe always get left out of the Gift Exchange due to the complexities and costs of overseas shipping. But this year they’ve had enough and they’ve taken matters into their own hands. Michael Tinker has started up a gift exchange just for folks in the UK and Europe. The sign-up deadline is coming up quick, so don’t waste any time if you want to take part. For the basic rules of the exchange, see the write-up for the US version. To join the UK gift exchange, click here.

[Editor’s note: Throughout Advent, we’ll be sharing one meditation at the beginning of each week, each taken from a delightful little collection called The Grand Miracle: Daily Reflections for the Season of Advent, published by the Christian History Institute. If you find yourself enjoying what you’re reading, be sure to check it out—there will be a link at the bottom of each post where you can learn more. Today’s meditation is from Jennifer Trafton, about the holiness and freedom of laughter in the presence of God.] I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. —Philippians 1:3-5 NRSV It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence. —George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie In college I had a friend who often laughed during prayer. Those of us who were more accustomed to solemnity were shocked at first, but soon we couldn’t help smiling at the childlike, un-self-conscious delight that bubbled out of her when she was praising God. Her spontaneous giggle in the presence of the Holy felt holy to us. George MacDonald would have loved her for it. What is more beautiful, he prompts us to consider again and again, than the pure joy of a childlike heart embraced by the most loving Father? The mute, abandoned boy in his novel Sir Gibbie is so delighted upon hearing the story of the prodigal son that he bursts into “a wild laughter of holiest gladness.” “I wonder how many Christians there are who so thoroughly believe God made them that they can laugh in God’s name,” MacDonald muses, “who understand that God invented laughter and gave it to His children. . . . The Lord of gladness delights in the laughter of a merry heart.” We are free to laugh in his presence because we have nothing left to fear. Jennifer Trafton But true laughter, holy gladness, requires freedom—from the weight of the world’s cares, from self-concern, from suspicion and envy, from regret and worry. It is the laughter of a child wholly at home in the arms of someone who loves her. And this, for MacDonald, is what it means when Jesus says we must become like little children: to trust that our King, the one toward whom all our prayers are bent, bends down to kiss us with the tender love of a perfect Father. We are free to laugh in his presence because we have nothing left to fear. Jesus, the Child in the manger, came to gather the children—the young ones and the old ones growing young again—and to lead us to the One whose arms are spread open wide, welcoming us with joy. Father in heaven, have mercy upon your child who comes before you weighed down by fear and sorrow. Break the chains of doubt that keep my heart from being free in your presence, and help me to trust that I am completely and eternally embraced by your love. Teach me to laugh again. Amen. Click here to learn more about The Grand Miracle: Daily Reflections for the Season of Advent.

I came to know Wendell Berry at the wrong time in my life. My husband and I, with three children in tow, had just barely gotten our feet on the ground after moving away from a place and a people that we had dearly loved for six years. We were walking into a two-year internship—where we would hover over another city before making the third move of our young marriage—when I picked up Jayber Crow for the first time. It seemed like a cruel joke, a mocking of my current situation, to be falling in love with the words of Berry who so values the consistency of staying in one place. Jayber’s ghost hovered over me saying, “Being fixed in a place is a good thing.” And I nodded my head and said—“Yes, I know. I know it is, and I’m already arguing that point and you really don’t have to keep telling me that.” And we both stood in the silence, staring, waiting for resolve that didn’t come. I longed to be a fixture on a street, in a town, in one state. I wanted to know the dirt underneath me and to be in a place long enough to be known. Because when memory calls me back to my childhood, I know that land. I can feel that grass under my feet. I know its broad green blades: fat-bottomed and rising to a rounded point. In my mind, I can split the blades into two pieces and I can remember the way the hanging fibers felt on my lips. I know the yellow dandelion blooms—and not only as a whole, but also, more clearly even, in its parts. I know the feel of the dandelion’s soft petals on the tip of my nose and the mustard-yellow streaks it would leave when I rubbed it across my palm. I can see its hosts of aphids working their way up the stems in crowded lines. I know the lemon clovers that grew by the ditch in the front yard and I can taste their sour electric-yellow petals in my mouth. And I know all of this because we stayed in one house for nearly my entire childhood, and my little dime-sized eyes spent time up-close with these neighborly wonders. But now, as an adult, I worry for my children who have had the grass of three different states under their feet. Have they been in a place long enough to become friends with the weeds? And this isn’t a rhetorical question— it’s one that’s been asked in hot tears into pillows under the dark cover of night. When will our hearts stop treading water? When will we find rest, Lord? What and where is home? And, I hate saying it—because it’s not his fault and because I still love his words dearly—but Berry has added insult to injury. And all of the other well-meaning voices in our Christian culture that shout for place-making and homesteads, they poke and pull at freshly-mended spots in my heart, places held together by fragile threads. And so: a word to my fellow pilgrims. To those of you who, like Abraham, have been called to leave home and walk out into the night toward a place unnamed: This is really hard. You have pulled up roots, and they are still dropping home-soil as you gather them in your arms. Maybe those roots are raw and sore from being pulled and re-planted several times. You may, like I, have had the great privilege of burrowing yourself down into a place for a time, practicing eternity there, only to be called to leave. And you realized it was just a practice, after all. And you had to pack your bags, because this was not home yet. Or maybe you can’t even remember the weeds of your own childhood. Maybe your whole life has been characterized by this feeling of placelessness, and others assume that you are unfazed by this because it’s all you’ve known. But you have a longing in you, and you do know. The truth is, of course, that we are all pilgrims in this world, and so there is something good for our hearts in this journeying through different places and people. There’s an honesty at work when our realities are not allowing us to anchor our hearts down to temporal things. But let me hold your face in my hands and tell you this, you weary-hearted pilgrim— It’s not the way it’s supposed to be, either. You are supposed to be pining. Jayber Crow should make you rest your head on your folded arms and weep. We were made for porch-sitting with friends; we were made for a home. But for some of us, our callings don’t allow for anchored roots on this side of heaven. And if this is you, you need a familiar place on which to cry. You actually need a table to lay your folded arms and head upon, that place where your hot breath will gather itself up and come back to you. If you’ve ever known the goodness of walking into your grandmother’s kitchen—all warm from the heat of familiar things in the oven—there’s something else like that. The Lord’s Table is like that, and it is the table we pilgrims need. When will our hearts stop treading water? When will we find rest, Lord? What and where is home? Elizabeth Harwell The Lord’s Supper is a place for people like you and me who are very aware of our in-betweenness. Jesus said he was leaving us; he was going to prepare a place for us. But in the meantime, he was setting a familiar table that would spread the expanse of the entire world and throughout time until he comes again. The Table is a place for the pilgrims. It’s a cozy stop-off on a chilly and unforgiving road. Here we are called to remember the place to which we are traveling. It’s a whiff of the feast coming, in the same way that the smell of lima beans on the stove takes you back to being hip-to-hip with your grandmother in front of her stove. The Table takes us back to the time he secured the promise for us, and it begs us to look forward to the time in which the promise will be fulfilled: A place. A home. The Table is a place for us to remember Christ, but as we share the one bread with brothers and sisters, it’s also a place at which we are re-membered back into the body—where we are reminded of our Family. We stare into the faces of our membership. Our place is coming, our people are here. These past three years, I have felt the pain of roots being dragged above the ground. And Sabbath after Sabbath, I have fallen on the Table. It has been a physical handle for my fainting heart to grab hold of. The Table is the place where Jesus can tell me, “I know the journey is hard. But here is my body to nourish you for your pilgrimage. I am coming back for you. I’m taking you home.” Jesus told us that he would not eat this meal again without us, which means that he is hungry for our homecoming feast. The chair is being pulled out for you and for me. The dandelions and the lemon clovers are dancing in the fields outside, waiting to be known. Weep, weary-hearted pilgrim…but not as one without hope. You have a home.

The Habit Podcast is a series of conversations with writers about writing, hosted by Jonathan Rogers. In today’s episode, Jonathan Rogers talks with Christie Purifoy, author of Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace. Christie Purifoy is the author of Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace. She says, “I believe that life, in all its pain and beauty and mystery, is a journey of love. Writing keeps my eyes wide-open to this astonishing reality.” In this episode, Jonathan and Christie discuss the analogy between writing and gardening, how to name and and rename “weeds,” and what it means to extend hospitality to your reader. Click here to listen to Episode 27 of The Habit Podcast. Special thanks to our Rabbit Room members for making these podcasts possible! If you’re interested in becoming a member, visit RabbitRoom.com/Donate.

We have two offerings for you this Thanksgiving: Doug McKelvey’s beautiful, classic “Liturgy for Feasting with Friends” from Every Moment Holy and a song from J Lind called “It Is Good”—a personal and sweeping affirmation of creation, from the first garden to the last. Wherever you find yourself this year, we invite you to remember with us that “nothing good and true and right will be lost forever. All good things will be restored.” And as J sings, “Arcing ‘cross the heavens, the rainbow bids you stand—a voice commands that it is good.” CELEBRANT: To gather joyfully is indeed a serious affair, for feasting and all enjoyments gratefully taken are, at their heart, acts of war. PEOPLE: In celebrating this feast we declare that evil and death, suffering and loss, sorrow and tears, will not have the final word. But the joy of fellowship, and the welcome and comfort of friends new and old, and the celebration of these blessings of food and drink and conversation and laughter are the true evidences of things eternal, and are the first fruits of that great glad joy that is to come and that will be unending. So let our feast this day be joined to those sure victories secured by Christ, Let it be to us now a delight, and a glad foretaste of his eternal kingdom. Bless us, O Lord, in this feast. Bless us, O Lord, as we linger over our cups, and over this table laden with good things, as we relish the delights of varied texture and flavor, of aromas and savory spices, of dishes prepared as acts of love and blessing, of sweet delights made sweeter by the communion of saints. May this shared meal, and our pleasure in it, bear witness against the artifice and deceptions of the prince of the darkness that would blind this world to hope. May it strike at the root of the lie that would drain life of meaning, and the world of joy, and suffering of redemption. May this our feast fall like a great hammer blow against that brittle night, shattering the gloom, reawakening our hearts, stirring our imaginations, focusing our vision on the kingdom of heaven that is to come, on the kingdom that is promised, on the kingdom that is already, indeed, among us, For the resurrection of all good things has already joyfully begun. All participants now lift their glasses or cups. May this feast be an echo of that great Supper of the Lamb, a foreshadowing of the great celebration that awaits the children of God. Where two or more of us are gathered, O Lord, there you have promised to be. And here we are. And so, here are you. Take joy, O King, in this our feast. Take joy, O King! Glasses are clinked with celebratory chime, and participants in the feast savor a drink, admonishing one another heartily with these sincere words: Take joy! All will be well! Participants take up the cry: All will be well! Nothing good and right and true will be lost forever. All good things will be restored. Feast and be reminded! Take joy, little flock. Take joy! Let battle be joined! Let battle be joined! Now you who are loved by the Father, prepare your hearts and give yourself wholly to this celebration of joy, to the glad company of saints, to the comforting fellowship of the Spirit, and to the abiding presence of Christ who is seated among us both as our host and as our honored guest, and still yet as our conquering king. Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, take seat, take feast, take delight! Click here to download this liturgy and peruse others at the Every Moment Holy website.