What are you looking for?

“Sure, okay, let’s say for argument’s sake God is always present and at work in my life…what difference does that make? What about all the times I can’t feel God’s presence or see God’s work? You telling me all this feels like a taunt; like something I’d wish were true but I can’t find any way to access that truth in my life!” My friend, Bernard, was dealing—not holding back. He and I had been meeting for a few weeks to chat about his life that was careening out of control. One kid was constantly in trouble at school, another never left their room, and his marriage was tanking. He felt powerless and hopeless, and all data points in his life indicated he had failed as a father and husband. What do we do when we want God to move—when we know we need God’s presence and power—but it seems like nothing is happening? Or worse, when it seems that the opposite of what God would want is all that keeps happening? If we’re honest, this question isn’t just for when all hell breaks loose and our life hits the fan. This question could be asked about mundane, ordinary moments as well. How do I know what God is doing, where God is working, when I can’t seem to discern him anywhere? Learning how to meet God in our messy reality—right where we really are—is an ordinary practice that will transform us over time. Matt Tebbe Bernard was angry and sad, but we spent most of our time discussing how he wished things were different. A breakthrough came for him when he decided to meet God where he really was: angry and disappointed. Here are three pitfalls we can encounter when it comes to meeting God in our everyday life: Pitfall #1: We try to get God to show up and do things we think are good rather than have the courage and humility to meet God right where we really are. It’s much easier to design outcomes we think are good and recruit God into those schemes than it is to befriend our anger and just be angry with/at God. There are a couple of reasons this is hard. First, some of us have been taught it’s wrong or unfaithful to ever get angry at God. Additionally, most of us don’t like being angry or sad, so we create bypassing strategies to distract or deny unwanted experiences. So for Bernard, he felt anger at God and sadness over his family wasn’t faithful or good. He worked hard to hide and change his anger and to deny and conceal his sadness. We kept dealing with external realities when God was knocking on the door of his heart. But what if that anger and sadness weren’t obstacles, but opportunities? What if they don’t need to be eliminated or bypassed, but faced and befriended? Pitfall #2: We fail to realize how important things like anger and sadness are in the Kingdom of God. How many times in Scripture do we see God’s people crying out to God? Tears or rage at suffering and injustice and violence and greed. We can’t pray with the saints of Scripture if we don’t treat our human responses to evil as a meeting place with God. I’m a lot like Bernard; I work hard to minimize and silence my unwanted emotions and reactions. I’ve learned that when I express my anger, it doesn’t always go well. Sometimes I hurt people, and other times I look foolish. More often than not, I say something I regret. Sadness, too, is treated like an unwanted guest in my body. Somewhere I picked up the message that “sadness is wrong,” so I treat it as something to avoid or get over quickly. But even in, and especially in, a life situation like Bernard found himself in, we can start right where we really are, taking agency and responsibility over our bodies and facing God’s presence there. What if anger and sadness don’t interfere with our life with God but are portals into the Kingdom? Maybe God’s presence and power are most available to us when we decide to be right where we really are. God is so real that he most fully meets us in reality. Are you angry that your family isn’t turning out as you wanted? Frustrated at yourself and others for making bad decisions? Sad that you can’t seem to make amends or make things right with your spouse? God is waiting to meet you in that messy reality, but many of us don’t know how to do this. Pitfall #3: We don’t know how to be where we really are with God. In the book I co-authored with Ben Sternke, Having the Mind of Christ, we talk about how to settle down into the silence and intimacy of our bodies via the breath. Being present to God who is present and at work starts with being present to that which God breathed into us: our very life. Each breath is a token, an embodied prayer, of God’s very life animating us. Let’s say we are in a similar place to Bernard today. I am. This past week, I lost my father-in-law suddenly to an illness from which we thought he’d recover. But he didn’t. I feel the ache of loss, anger toward death, and the sadness of losing such an important part of my life. Here’s all I have, even as I type, to meet with God in this: 1. Breathe 2. Be present to how the loss, anger, and sadness come online for me in my memories, in my body, and in my emotions. 3. Just tell God what I’m feeling and what I’m thinking. It doesn’t have to be a ‘prayer’ or proper or presentable. It’s just me trusting my pain to God with whatever words I can muster. 4. Be patient and sit in it for a bit. To do this, some of us may need to walk or journal or put on some music. The important part of this is giving God access to what’s actually going on, consenting to his presence in what matters the most to me. Learning how to meet God in our messy reality—right where we really are—is an ordinary practice that will transform us over time. It’s nothing less than an invitation to God to be with us where we need love, healing, and salvation the most.

Editor’s Note: This year’s return to an in-person Hutchmoot gathering also allowed our favorite chef/writer John Cal to bless us with his thoughtful essays before each evening meal. What follows is his Friday night pre-meal address from Hutchmoot ’22. You can read his opening night essay here. Needle and Thread by Sleeping at Last When the world welcomes us in We’re closer to heaven than we’ll ever know They say this place has changed But strip away all of the technology And you will see That we are all hunters Just hunting for something that will make us okay Here we lay alone In hospital beds, tracing life in our head But all that is left Is that this was our entrance and now it’s our exit As we find our way home And all the blood and all the sweat That we invested to be loved Follows us into our end And we begin to understand That we are made of love And all the beauty stemming from it We are made of love And every fracture caused by the lack of it “You were a million years of work” Said God and His angels, with needle and thread They kissed your head and said “You’re a good kid and you make us proud So just give your best and the rest will come and we’ll see you soon All the blood and all the sweat That we invested to be loved Follows us into our end And we begin to understand That we are made of love And all the beauty stemming from it We are made of love And every fracture caused by the lack of it Caused by the lack of love He said that he and his mother just finished prayer meeting, and somewhere along the way he lost his wallet. He had already asked a handful of people, all of whom had said no. “Who is so cruel as to leave people stranded after a prayer meeting?” he said. He just wanted gas to get home. I had $3 in cash in my wallet and offered it to him, but he said that wouldn’t get him far enough. “I’ll Venmo you the money once I get home,” he said as he handed me his business card. It had his picture on it, a real estate broker, it said. “Sure,” I said. “$20, okay?” he asked. “Just want to make sure I get all the way home.” I stuck in my debit card and punched in the PIN number. He looked away as I did, and then began to pump gas into his Toyota. I was there to get gas myself when he approached me. The indicator light had been flashing now for over 30 miles, and I was beginning to get nervous. I pulled into the Kroger to fill up, and that’s when Aaron Martin, the man on the business card, approached me. I have a complicated relationship with beggars. When I was younger, my mother was in nursing school, and for one of her papers, she studied the effects homelessness has on human development. As an adult, I understand this, but as a five year old, it was strange to see her stop and talk to vagrants. Even after her research was over, while walking through the park, or the mall, or at the beach, she’d see someone she recognized from her study and strike up a conversation. Often, she’d buy them a little food, or slip a five-dollar bill in their pocket when my father wasn’t looking. During lunch or on the drive home, she’d recount their stories, like Ken, for instance, has a son who’s a dentist, or that Peter became a vagabond after his wife died. “LuAnne lost her job when the hotel closed,” mom prattled, “and there wasn’t anything else she was trained to do.” I didn’t know it at the time, but it was making them humans. They weren’t just beggars or transients, but they were people. They had names: Ken, Peter, LuAnne. When I lived in the mountains near Sisters, Oregon, there weren’t many beggars. Winter saw to that, chasing most of the homeless population away come December. A woman from town created a little camp of sorts outside the city limits, and you could occasionally see her hauling a cardboard box or bags of groceries on her derelict bicycle from place to place. Gladys, I think her name was, but even she would disappear from November to April. Portland was different. In Portland, while I lived in a fairly safe and very gentrified neighborhood, just a few blocks away were many of the city’s service organizations—soup kitchens, overnight shelters, city churches, methadone clinics. Walking downtown or driving over the Burnside Bridge, you’d see clusters of dozens of men, women, and families waiting for services to open, or just biding their time, spending their days in limbo. Further up on Glisan Street, towards Kings Heights where I lived, you could feel removed from the fervor of downtown. Less city bustle, more neighborhoods, the homeless population dwindled in my corner of Northwest Portland except for a few regulars that most in the area could distinguish as part of the backdrop of our locale. There was the man who was always checking the parking meters for forgotten change. He wore a scruffy black beard and tattered converse. The woman with the blue backpack was known to steal food from the grocery store down the street—just walk in and grab a loaf of bread or an apple or two and just walk back out. I remember hearing a produce manager once said of her, “What’s a lost banana every now and then?” And the man who was often outside the coffee shop down the street, tapping you on your way in, asking you if you had any spare change, or if you’d be willing to get him a cup of coffee too. Then there was Wheels. Wheels wasn’t his real name of course, and I don’t think anyone else in the neighborhood called him that, but it seemed an appropriate moniker because he was often riding on the back of a large grocery store shopping cart like a skateboard, or a scooter, or sometimes even like a soap box derby car. Wheels would travel around the Alphabet District in Northwest Portland and fill his cart with aluminum cans and glass bottles that he’d find on the street or deep in trash cans, before taking them down to the neighborhood recycling center for five cents apiece. And how much more lavish the love of God to bless us, even when He is never fooled by our deceptions, even when He already knows how we intend to misuse his gifts. John Cal You could tell he was young, in his late twenties or early thirties maybe, young but weathered, his skin made leathery by the sun and the cold. His fuzzy blonde hair stuck up at odd angles in light wisps of sand-colored candy floss circling a tan patch of shiny scalp. He wore army green cargo pants (yes, of course, he did), a black multi-pocketed freezer coat that suited him, and the most pleasant, often smiling, demeanor. I know how trite that detail sounds in an essay about a homeless man, but it’s true, he was, so often, smiling. Wheels never asked for money, never asked for anything—food, a cup of coffee. So many of the other neighborhood regulars were aggressive in their panhandling, being able to distinguish between the neighborhood locals and tourists or weekend suburbanites coming to the city to do some shopping. And in the middle of seeing a poor unsuspecting Californian in town just wanting to experience the hipster Portlandia magic get harassed by a beggar, you’d turn only to see Wheels coasting down the street, weaving in between traffic on his shopping cart, going about his businesses picking up cans and bottles. Before I continue on, I’d like to apologize to you (and to Wheels, really) for insensitively using the terms beggar, homeless, panhandler, vagrant, and vagabond somewhat interchangeably, even when I was trying to profess our shared humanness. It’s easy enough to feel like we’re all part of some sort of community, some family of faith, that we’re all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve when it suits us, when the labels compliment who we are, or rather, who we hope we are, but then someone falls on some hard times, or is dealing with mental trauma. They steal a little food, or harass the tourists, or have their main source of income from collecting bottles and cans. I want to believe that we’re all equal, that God is fair in his dealings, that both the lamb and the scapegoat have equal chances with the Lord, but then I see Wheels, or Ken, or Peter, or LuAnne, and whether it’s my fault or theirs (who even needs to think of fault in times like these?!), the facts of the story seem much less palpable. I gave him a box of cans once. Wheels, I mean. I saw him pushing his cart just uphill from my apartment building and told him to wait if he had a minute, and I’d go get him the recycling from under my sink. It was a good-sized box and quite full, as I am a lazy recycler, and Wheels was ever so grateful. “Here, I want to give you something,” he said happy and flustered, his hands darting in and out of his many pockets. “Oh, here, take one,” he said, as he produced three links of warm unwrapped salami from the depths of a coat pocket. “No, thanks. Those are yours,” I said, trying to keep a straight face despite the distinct smell of rotting meat. “Well, these cans are yours,” he said. “No, those are yours too,” I said. “Well, thanks man,” Wheels said before loading up his cart and rolling down the hill. “If you change your mind about the salami, just let me know.” I guess you give what you have, and hope that most days that’s enough. But of course, Aaron Martin never sent me the money on Venmo. He sped away in his car before I could input the info into my phone to find that there was an error. The phone number didn’t work when I sent a text to it either, nor when I called it. Anecdotally, we all know stories like these, when giving worked out for the good, and when we were lied to and got shafted out of $20 at the Kroger gas station. After Jesus is done preaching the Beatitudes, he continues his sermon, talking about murder, adultery, and divorce (I know right? Yes, this was directly after he preached the beatitudes). Then he gets to fairness and giving. “If someone wants to take your shirt, give him your coat as well.” “Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.” “He causes the sun to rise and fall on the good and the evil, and causes the rain to fall on the sinners and the saints.” I often find it so fascinating that we needed murder explained to us. Why wasn’t, “Murder: Don’t do it” enough, as found in Exodus 20? But then it wasn’t clear enough, I guess. And if we don’t comprehend the ramifications of murder, what hope do any of us have in comprehending grace? I constantly need to be reminded, like I needed to be reminded that day that it wasn’t really my $20 that Aaron Martin ended up using for gas. Perhaps, I was its steward for a while, but so often I forget that everything here is freely given—the air we breathe, the sun that rises and sets on us all, the rain that brings refreshing and flood. Yeah, even that $20 was, as the hymnist Stuart Hamblen puts it, “only borrowed for a while.” And while, yes, it didn’t feel honorable to lie to me to get some gas, just as I feel anxious when I hand over a few dollars to someone asking on the street, more often than not it’s not really about the money. The hurt comes from the shame that I was swindled, that I was foolish in believing the lie. And how more lavish the love of God to bless us, even when He is never fooled by our deceptions, even when He already knows how we intend to misuse his gifts. He does know after all what it’s like to be human, to be tempted, and all it takes to overcome that temptation, which most days I find myself lacking, when I forget that’s how grace works, that we are lavished with the unconditional love of God, and how silly of me to make the distinction of his love being unconditional. For if it is love at all, there is no other kind. If it is conditional, then it isn’t really love. I asked my mother about Ken recently. It’s one of the most palpable memories of my childhood. I was five and he was sitting on a bench at the mall across the way a little from a Mcdonald’s. My dad held my hand and we stood at a distance while they chatted, while my mom slipped him a little money, and went into the McDonalds to buy him a burger. Later that day in the food court, while sitting at the table to my own meal, my own burger, my parents tried to explain to me what a homeless person was, and I cried. Five-year-old me just couldn’t comprehend that homelessness exists in a world with such abundance. As an adult, it’s easier to gloss over that sort of pain and injustice. “He had a good job at the dairy,” my mom said over the phone, “before he became an alcoholic.” “His son is a dentist and lives in Manoa,” she continued, Manoa being one of Hawaii’s most affluent neighborhoods, “and his son would be happy to let his dad live when him but he keeps refusing because of all those mental health issues.” The tone in her voice glazed with a thin veneer of what I perceived as judgment. “Then why’d you keep doing it?” I asked. “Why’d you keep giving him money and food when he was just going to keep making bad choices?” “Because none of that matters,” she said without pause or hesitation. “None of that matters when someone needs to be loved.”

Editor’s Note: This year’s return to an in-person Hutchmoot gathering also allowed our favorite chef/writer John Cal to bless us with his thoughtful essays before each evening meal. What follows is his Saturday night pre-meal address from Hutchmoot ’22. Click here for his opening night essay and here is his Friday night essay. Sing with me. Father Abraham had many sons And many sons had Father Abraham I am one of them and so are you So let’s all praise the Lord RIGHT ARM! Father Abraham had many sons And many sons had Father Abraham I am one of them and so are you So let’s all praise the Lord I always hated that song… I thought it was so weird with the arms and the flailing and the kicking. Maybe there is a short time in elementary school when all that flapping about is kind of fun, but by middle school, you’re spending so much time and energy trying to be cool that there isn’t anything left in you to consider Father Abraham let alone any of his sons. I wasn’t always a Christian. I didn’t grow up one. We didn’t not believe in God in my house, but we didn’t pray before meals, or have the right bumper stickers on our cars. We didn’t go to church, not even on Christmas, and so that added a layer of silliness to the music. I did grow up going to a private Christian school, one of the non-Christian kids. I had to sing the songs I didn’t believe were true. I had to say the prayers when I didn’t think anyone was listening. I memorized the verses from the ancient Hebrew texts like all the other kids. We had to say them before they excused us to lunch. And just to clarify, I was a pretty good non-Christian kid—never smoked cigarettes behind the gym, was on the honor roll, and was in advanced math. I was the yearbook editor, then the newspaper editor. I was freshman class president and represented my school at the state geography bee two years in a row. The one time I remember swearing at school was in the second grade. It was the F-word, and Miss Nomi turned around, immediately making eye contact. Without another sound from either of us, I walked back into the classroom, quietly put my head down on my desk, and voluntarily skipped the last twenty minutes of recess. So when I did, on my own, decide to become a Christian in high school, there were all these layers to peel through: Like in the fifth grade when they asked all the honor roll kids if they wanted to be baptized, but not the kids who were getting regular grades, or like when the other kids pointed out that my dad was a lawyer and that lawyers are liars and that liars go to hell, or like in the eighth grade when I was asked to pray and told I was doing it wrong, that I wasn’t being reverent enough. “I thought we’re supposed to talk to God like he’s our friend,” I remember asking Mrs. Cobalt. “Yes, He is our friend, but not that kind of friend,” she said, “and we don’t talk to Him like that.” I understand that childhood is easy for almost no one, and still, there’s something unsettling and perverse about a kid feeling like they’re on the outside of Christianity. When I decided that I wanted to be a Christian, I was fourteen, old enough to have very clear memories of so many firsts. I remember responding to my first altar call, and whether or not it was the Holy Spirit or just peer pressure, it felt like I was sitting on a fire compelling me to stand. I remember the first Bible text I ever studied, the story of Zacchaeus. “Some scholars think the cross was made of sycamore wood,” Pastor Gary said, “and so when Jesus is telling Zacchaeus to come down from the tree, it’s almost like he’s telling us to let go of our burdens and He’ll pick up the cross for us.” I remember the first time I heard contemporary Christian music. It was the green double disced WOW 1999 album with such classics as “Testify to Love” featuring the 4 part harmonies of Avalon (number four on the silver disc), and “The Devil is Bad” by Ska and Swing Revival Band, the W’s (number eight on the green disc). And it’s a very palpable memory to me the first time I went to church as a Christian, even after all the years at the school with the songs and the memory verses and the prayers, and being at church for school programs or with a friend’s family after a sleepover. There’s something about choosing something for yourself, about setting out on an adventure all on your own. There was a church in the same denomination as my school less than a five-minute drive away from my house, but I wanted to go to the church on the far side of the island—45 minutes away, where more of my friends went. I thought it prudent to wear my best, and as a 14 year old deciding to go to church for the first time without the supervision or prodding of his parents, it meant the coolest clothes I owned or at least the clothes that I thought were the coolest. It was 1998, the era of garish color-blocked patterns and stainless steel jewelry. That morning I put on my favorite pair of canary yellow chinos and unironically (because I grew up in Hawaii) a teal flower print Hawaiian shirt. I slipped on a coordinating yellow bucket hat, yellow terry cloth flip-flops, and a pair of orange round-framed glasses. I looked awesome. Maybe you feel it coming, a slip-up, the not belonging, someone saying something awful to the kid who doesn’t quite fit in. And the trouble is, the way we fit in in church, and in circles of church people, is different than the ways we do or do not fit in everywhere else. If you grew up in it, it’s just normal. You learned with time and through osmosis, through little learned proddings. And even within the language of the culture of Christianity, there are so many sects, so many tribes with different dialects. It can make us distinct, but it can also separate us. It’s both blessing and baggage. I didn’t know it at the time but the church where I decided to attend was the sort of tribe that exclusively used the organ and the piano for singing, even used the little placard with interchangeable numbers to indicate which hymns would be sung, not an overhead projector for indication or lyrics. It was the kind of church that sang all of the stanzas in each hymn. There was never a one, three, and four announcement. We all raised our hymnals together in unspoken choreography. You could identify those who had been in the tribe for more generations, because they could close their hymnal and quietly begin putting them away in the back of the pew in front of them before the hymn was even over, having memorized all the words and all the prescribed appropriate emotions. There’s a story in our ancient scriptures of a man who had two sons. Both he and his wife believed they were too old to have children. In fact, when the Lord appeared to him and told him his wife would get pregnant, she laughed at God. “Why did you laugh?” God asked. “Is anything too hard for me?” The wife tried to walk it back, “I didn’t laugh,” she lied because she was afraid. That’s how so many lies start, to God, to others, to ourselves, because we’re afraid of what might happen. In her fear, the wife took her handmaid, an African slave woman, and asked her husband to lay with her. The handmaid had a son. Then years later, just like God promised, the man’s wife also had a son—two sons from two different women, but when the man’s wife saw her handmaid’s son making fun of her son, she turned to her husband and said, “Get rid of that slave woman and her son. He is not going to share in the inheritance.” So often it happens this way, someone hurts us and our instinct is to hurt them back, to hurt someone, anyone back, when we know the way to redemption is to turn the other cheek, to go the extra mile, to give to the one who asks, to love one another. I arrived at church too early that day. I didn’t know what time any of it started, and in the days before texting and the internet, I didn’t know a good way for me to find out. The doors to the sanctuary were locked. The youth room was empty. There were a few people milling about the grounds doing I’m not sure what, but not knowing what to do I just took a seat in the courtyard on a little stone wall in my coolest outfit, feeling silly and alone, like I had gotten it wrong. Across the way were two older men, in their sixties or seventies maybe, sitting on two folding chairs by the entrance of the courtyard. “You visiting today?” one of the men asked. “Youth group doesn’t start for thirty minutes,” the other one said. “You can come sit by us,” the first continued. “You don’t have to wait by yourself.” I wonder if we just treated each other with dignity and kindness and love, real love without conditions, I wonder if the other things would slowly begin to work themselves out. John Cal I don’t remember much of what we talked about. I think they asked me about my parents, what high school I went to, and if I knew any of the other kids in the youth group. But it helped me be less afraid—to not be alone. We sat there for the next half hour, keeping each other company, and against our better judgment, contrary to all our fears of what might happen, we discovered that maybe we could belong to each other. Author and scientist Michael McHargue defines creativity as nothing more than the ability to make unexpected connections, to take two things that seemingly don’t belong and make them relate to each other in ways that other people may not see. You begin to see it when you start to look closer at the stories of creation—the unexpected—stories that just don’t make any sense, like when a Samaritan saves the Jewish man beaten by the side of the road, or when the widow’s tiny offering is the one that is most treasured. Like when the vineyard workers, who only toiled a short time, get the full blessing from the master, or when a baby was sent to save the whole world. You also see the pain that is caused when we choose to stifle the creativity of redemption, like when Hagar was cast out when Sarah didn’t want their sons to share in the blessing. Moses writes in Genesis that Abraham gave Hagar some food and a container of water and sent her away with their son, his own son, and she wandered aimlessly in the wilderness of Beersheba. When the water was gone, she put their son in the shade and sat down at a distance, alone. “I don’t want to watch my son die,” she said, as she started to cry. “But God heard the boy crying,” Moses continues, “and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, “Hagar, what’s wrong? Do not be afraid! God has heard the boy crying as he lies there. Go to him and comfort him, for I will make a great nation from his descendants.” God showed Hagar a well full of water. Seems like such a small thing to us when we can just turn on a tap, but that’s how privilege works, in the words of Ani Defranco, “like fish in the water who do not know they are wet.” Hagar fills her water container and gives her and Abraham’s son a drink. The boy lived, and Ishmael grew up to become a skillful archer. He settled in the wilderness of Paran. He married a woman from Egypt, his mother’s homeland. Beyond that, our ancient texts don’t say much about what happened to Ishmael, but I want to believe that our scriptures are true, that God keeps his promises, that He too made Ishmael the father of a great nation. As it got closer to 9:30, and more kids started showing up, my two morning companions turned to me and said, “Looks like youth group is going to start soon. You better head in.” It was the Manoa-Japanese Seventh-Day Adventist church that I first attended when I started going to church, where many of the members who grew up in Hawaii or elsewhere in the U.S. were interned in concentration camps under executive order 9066, signed by Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, who also established Social Security and a National Minimum Wage. Roosevelt was the first to take action against employment discrimination, moves at the time that had a huge impact on the lives of African Americans, Catholics, and Jews — I guess even the best of us can sometimes make mistakes. Colonel Karl Bendetsen said of the ordeal, “I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp.” More than 100,000 Japanese women, children, and men were imprisoned, men so very much like Mr. Tamanaha and Mr. Fukutani, who lived through a time when people kept telling them that they didn’t belong. Maybe someone told you once that you didn’t belong. Maybe you’ve felt like you were sent out into the desert. It’s easy to keep passing this pain on, to retaliate with more and more bitterness. Stephi Wagner, MSW, once said, “Pain travels through families until someone is ready to feel it.” “You staying for potluck?” they said to me as I got up and began heading to the youth room. “Yeah,” I said, waving back at them as I got up to join the rest of my friends. After youth group, after the singing of hymns, after the sermon, after the parts of church that I used to believe were the most important, I walked back into the courtyard and was confronted with six large tables covered in creativity, six tables that to the naked eye were covered in things that didn’t belong together, but were connected through the beauty of community. Like Helen Uechi’s Chawanmushi, or Linn Madsen’s Manju. John Obata would always bring a big green salad. Mrs. Tamashiro would bring her homemade granola bars, and Ree Hiatt, who was the secretary to the head of the Dole Plantation, would always bring a huge bowl of pineapple. It’s easy enough to have an idea of what church looks like, what community looks like, what our lives look like when we picture it in our imaginations. If we got to choose these things—the perfect home, the perfect spouse, the perfect family, if you got to design the perfect meal, very few of us would put Jell-O salad next to green bean casserole, next to Cool Ranch Doritos, next to leftover chili, next to a bundt cake, next to a bucket of KFC. But then people show up at a table together, real people. Breathing and full of entirely irritating flaws—sometimes irritating because they’re the opposite of yours, sometimes irritating because they’re flaws you share. I can start to resent the imperfections in the system unless I remember that I am people too. I wonder if we just treated each other with dignity and kindness and love, real love—without conditions, I wonder if the other things would slowly begin to work themselves out. Maybe I’m naive. Maybe that’s too simple, but it was enough that day for John Tamanaha and Saichi Fukutani to treat the scared little boy in the yellow bucket hat with a little bit of kindness, to help me find the water. I hope you’ve experienced some of that belonging at Hutchmoot. Sometimes it can feel like the rest of the world is a vast empty desert, and there’s so much water here. Sometimes it’s easy to give up when you feel like you’re alone, but I believe that our God is the sort of God who keeps His promises, who blessed Father Abraham and his many sons, and many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them, and so are you. So let’s all praise the Lord.

If you are a writer or artist of any stripe, chances are you know a thing or two about disappointment. Perhaps, like me, you have found yourself blinded with false visions of breakthrough—publishing deal, critical acclaim, virality—only to stub your pride on the doorframe of reality. I’m an avid dreamer, so I hobble around with serious bruises thanks to my artistic ambitions. Writing, like other crafts, is not an easy vocation to pursue. But today, I don’t want to throw a pity party for writers—I think there are enough of those already and I am partied out. Instead, I’d like to offer writers and artists of the church a reminder: we have a responsibility to steward our disappointments. Disappointment is a norm in the post-fall world, not just for writers and artists. When Adam and Eve reached out and made their sinful choice, they planted the seed of disappointment in each of our hearts to grow and bear fruit for ages to come. Disappointment is now sown into the soil of our reality; it has perverted our nature. To neglect this is to cave into one of the most fundamental lies that the enemy tries to convince us of, that we live in the garden today, that our world is as it should be. Believe this, and you are bound to slip into a spiritual passivity that will corrupt your soul and further poison the ground around you. When I talk about “stewarding disappointment,” I do not have a mind to denigrate or minimize our grief in any way. Grief is grief. Our sorrows do not always have to be justified, explained away, or made use of. There are moments when we should simply take grief for what it is, to cry and experience the weight of our sadness. Jesus himself, when standing before the tomb of Lazarus, bent down and wept. Are we too proud to weep with him? This is one of the most powerful ways to steward our grief—to simply experience it rather than flee, hide from, or neglect it. But there are other ways to steward it too, ways that we might not always have the strength to muster. Sometimes God orders our disappointments in ways that meet others in their disappointments. If I, in my pain and isolation, could reach out and grab hold of the hand of a neighbor who is also enduring their own form of grief, could this perhaps partly remedy what is ailing both of us? One of my dearest friendships was formed and given its depth during a time we were both experiencing the pain of heartbreak and our paths collided. I sat with him in his confusion and loss just as he sat with me in mine. Those who have strength amid their troubles should strive to keep their eyes open for whom God might ask them to share their disappointments. Deep community forms not in the absence of troubles, but when individuals, in the midst of their troubles, band together to bear each other’s burdens. The world doesn’t need people who live without disappointment. The world idolizes such individuals—celebrities, self-help gurus, spiritual sages. These people hide their disappointments by putting on masks; they conceal the truth, calling evil “good” and good “evil.” In doing so, they lead their flocks blindly into ditches. What our society needs instead are people who stand boldly and honestly in their brokenness because they understand that the power and grace of God are most clearly demonstrated there. For us, disappointment is no longer our defining reality. Imagine this scene: The disciples hide in an upper room. The other Jews hold them in contempt. They have brought shame to their families. The words they spoke and the lives they led the last few years have proven empty all because their Messiah has been crucified on a tree, utterly humiliated. To say they are disappointed would be an understatement. Isn’t it remarkable that God would use one grievous disappointment as a means of liberating us from the disappointment that characterizes our lives? Jesus’ death frees us from sin; Jesus’ resurrection gives us the hope of new life. In Christ, all our disappointments can be redeemed. That is not to say they will not leave their mark, but even the holes in Jesus’ hand demonstrated the legitimacy of his new body. Indeed, the resurrected Christ demonstrates how we ought to properly steward our disappointments. We are wounded and killed, but by God’s power, we rise again. So we do not have to lose heart when a manuscript gets rejected, when our hearts get broken, or when we face the death of a dream. When Jesus said, “Behold, I am making all things new,” He meant all things. He intends to incorporate every sad and stinging disappointment into the great melody that our lives will sing in Christ. When we submit our disappointments to Him and steward them for His glory, we can trust that He is fulfilling His purposes for us, both in us and through us. He alone is our hope.

Tanka is a cousin to the popular poetic form of the haiku. The word tanka translates to short song. Originating in medieval Japan, it is a free verse poem consisting of 31 syllables. Early Japanese writers composed these in one unbroken line; contemporary Japanese tankas are now written in three lines. English tankas are also 31 syllables but in five lines and a 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 syllable/line pattern. Like a haiku, a tanka focuses on one thing; but it is different from a haiku because it is not just about capturing a moment in time and in nature. A tanka describes something in a stirring or profound way while also holding onto something universal. Key to a tanka is the emotional response starting around the third line. A Trilogy of Advent Tanka Poems was written in December 2021. While reading several passages in Isaiah and ruminating on a series of Advent sermons, I challenged myself to write one tanka a week. Hope in Christ’s return, the final fulfillment of our salvation, and the renewal of creation tug strongly at my heart and imagination during Advent season. I tried to bring that into these poems. Annunciation “. . . and the stillness the dancing.” -T.S. Elliot As if Mary’s yes opened the dark skies for the light to appear and then blink along smooth waters, while kingfishers and herons sat still, waiting for the dawn. Isaiah 35:1 A fir tree’s fresh scent— a hint that one day streams of living water will flow through the wilderness and the deserts will blossom bright. Matthew 1:19-25 This time of year I often remember Joseph giving up his life for Mary and also how you follow in his footsteps.

“If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change.“ This is one of the great insights of the Sicilian aristocrat, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, in his great, but only, novel The Leopard. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking about Hutchmoot exactly when his character Prince Tancredi utters this pearl, but he might as well have! It is entirely apt. As the first international offspring of Hutchmoot Nashville, Hutchmoot UK has so far taken place twice in Oxford (in 2019 and then 2022) to great acclaim and rejoicing. But for various reasons, we are moving in 2023 to Derbyshire. St Andrew’s Church in north Oxford was the perfect venue to launch and establish the event but we have quickly outgrown it (quite apart from the fact that being a lively and active local church, we are restricted to the few windows in their hectic calendar). So we’re stepping out in faith to build on what we have done so far and are very excited to see what will come of it. There are a lot of benefits of moving to Swanwick. The Hayes Conference Centre is a huge site, in which we’ll have exclusive use of half the space (including performance and exhibition spaces, breakout rooms and lounge areas). Expect all the regular features of HMUK like: Music in the round and concert performances Scores of Seminar sessions on all kinds of topics related to the arts and creativity, Christian discipleship, and spirituality. A keynote address and plenary gatherings Plenty of time and space to relax, meet and chat with friends, take time out, do as much or as little as you would like to do New for HMUK 2023: Exhibition space at which attenders can display and sell artwork Opportunities for writers, musicians, and artisans to sell merchandise The chance to meet Rabbit Room friends from your area in the UK and beyond. The Derbyshire countryside is glorious! The Peak District National Park is on the doorstep, and wonder that is Chatsworth House is only 40 minutes away. We are acutely conscious of the economic pressures that many are under this winter and one major factor in moving is the fact that Oxford is an incredibly expensive city at the best of times. So while the price of tickets may seem initially greater, by the time you factor in full board and lodging it actually works out considerably cheaper. So our hope and prayer is that few will be prevented from coming for financial reasons. Details of speakers and performers will be released as they are confirmed – but save the date and spread the word! Tickets go on sale Wednesday, January 4th at 7am in the UK (that’s the middle of the night in the US). Visit www.HutchmootUK.com for more information. #semifeature

If you’ve followed along with the Rabbit Room over the last few years, or have been on the lookout for meaningful music, you’ll likely recognize the name (and potentially the tunes of) John Tibbs. Not only have we featured him here on the blog in the past, but he’s been a guest at The Local Show as well. The last few years have served as a real turning point in John’s life with significant life events occurring alongside the seismic global changes that have marked us all. In the aftermath of it all, John says depression set in and the future seemed uncertain and it took some time for the music to come back around. “After the Night” was the first song to “reappear,” a hopeful sign that there was more for the Midwestern native to say/sing. He recently detailed the story behind the song for us here at the Rabbit Room. Check out the song below and John’s explanation in the text below. I wrote “After the Night” in the fall of 2021. It was the first song I’d written since COVID began. My wife and I found out we were expecting our first child one month before the pandemic hit. The inability to tour for 15 months, the stress of pregnancy and birth in a world sheltering in place, the ongoing political and spiritual turmoil, and the adjustments of being a dad … it all felt like too much. Like a square peg being crammed into a round hole, my new world no longer felt in sync with my old one. I wanted to write, but I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t the same person anymore and writing felt like the old me. How was I supposed to just sit down and write a song? Becoming a father made me feel, more than ever, a deep need to make every single moment count. Was songwriting really how I wanted to spend this gift of the present? In the face of so much sickness and death, in the midst of so much political and social unrest, I am supposed to just sit down and write a song? A song about faith, no less? What do I have to say that hasn’t already been said? Who am I writing for? For most people, the fall of 2021 began to feel like normal again, but I fell into the worst depression of my life. I was figuring out what it was like to be a father, trying to get touring back off the ground, and navigate the small and large details of both of those things. It felt like a bridge was being built between the old and new me. Building a bridge is not easy. Sometimes it hurts. And then one morning in my living room, this entire song showed up in my mind and it was written in just a matter of minutes. It surprised me, a lot like hope does. It caught me off guard. I still had something to say in this new world. In fact, more than ever I now know the importance of hope. Sure, it’s a simple message: Hope is and is to come. But to me, it’s a necessary one, and one that I need to sing. I hope that whatever season you find yourself in today, that you will see the good that is on the horizon and “just keep walking.” Much love and peace to each of you on your journey. Check out more about John Tibbs and his music here. Matt Conner is a former pastor and church planter turned writer and editor. He’s the founder of Analogue Media and lives in Indianapolis.

In the spring of 1758, as the pale yellow primroses trumpeted their arrival, a young pastor sat down to write some poetry. Robert Robinson, a twenty-three-year-old pastor serving at the Calvinist Methodist Chapel in Norfolk, England, had lived his early adult years running away from the haunting guilt of his sin. But God, in His great mercy, had saved this young man, and Robert had decided to give the rest of his life to the ministry of the Gospel. On this particular spring day, Robert labored to pen what has become one of the most well-loved hymns of all time: “Oh to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be,” the song of “Come Thou Fount” declares. In one of the verses, he wrote: Here I raise my Ebenezer; Hither by Thy help I’m come. And I hope, by Thy good pleasure, Safely to arrive at home. Jesus sought me when a stranger Wand’ring from the fold of God; He, to rescue me from danger, Interposed His precious blood. If you’re anything like me, the mention of the word “Ebenezer” brings to mind a picture of a silver-haired Scrooge with a hooked nose and a snarl across his lips. But that couldn’t be farther from the word’s actual meaning. In its original Hebrew form, the word “Ebenezer” literally means “stone of help”. Robinson borrowed from the Biblical portrait of Samuel and raised his own Ebenezer of verse, bending a knee to all God had done in his life, and all he believed God would continue to do. This Biblical symbol and perspective come from 1 Samuel 4–7, which unfolds a rollercoaster of events for God’s people. Israel had again rebelled against God, and then suffered great defeat and humiliation. Not only had they lost in battle against the Philistines, but they had witnessed the capture of the Ark of the Covenant. They returned home, mourning their loss and grieving their sin. After much repentance, prayer, and fasting, the people of Israel cried out to God for help. And under the guidance of Samuel, the people set out again for battle, this time listening to God and trusting in His Word. The resulting conquest of the Philistines was complete the next time around; God had given the people a triumphant victory. In memoriam to what God had done in that moment, Samuel set up a stone in the place of victory “…and called its name Ebenezer; for he said, ’Til now the LORD has helped us.’” (1 Sam. 7:12) The wise prophet Samuel knew human nature. He knew that, as humans, we forget to remember our sin. We forget to remember God’s help. We move on past our triumphs and internalize the glory for ourselves. Samuel’s Ebenezer forced the people of Israel to stop and remember that it was God who had given them victory in trial. His hand was the initiator, victor, and sustainer of their success. An Ebenezer illuminates God as the hero of our stories. Jodi Hiser Robert Robinson used the words “Hither by Thy Help I’m come”. These words have a connotation of looking into the past while also looking into the future. Samuel did this well. He looked into the past and remembered Israel’s defeat and anguish. He wanted to memorialize their repentance, prayer, fasting, fighting, and victory. But by erecting the stone of remembrance, Samuel also looked toward the future, wanting to remind the next generations to look at that stone and remember God’s faithfulness and power when the next tough trial came their way. The book of Samuel is not the only place in the Bible where we see the memoriam of an Ebenezer. Jacob set up a stone to mark the place where he heard the word of the Lord in the night (Gen. 28:10–19). And Joshua set up a group of stones at Gilgal to mark the place where God parted the waters of the Jordan River (Josh. 3:14–4:7). But before you begin to conclude that the concept of Ebenezer is limited to simple stones, think about Moses, who, while nearing death, was told by God to compose a song to commemorate all that the Lord had done for His people in the wilderness (Deut. 31:19–22). Think about the authors of the Biblical narratives, known and unknown, who were commissioned by God to write their stories, commemorating the events as God had ordained them. Whether by pillars of stone or song or story, we see evidence that the practice of Ebenezer runs throughout Scripture. This is because we need it. An Ebenezer, in all of its forms, grounds us in truth and identity, reminding us that all of our strength, hope, weaknesses, and successes are rooted in the powerful, loving, sovereign hand of God. An Ebenezer illuminates God as the hero of our stories. The necessity of naming God as the hero of our own personal narrative is the very reason we still need this practice today. Through our art, our songs, and our stories, we remember specific acts that God has done in distinct moments of our lives. In fact, God gave us copious amounts of creativity and imagination to mark His hand in many artistic ways. Certainly an Ebenezer is not limited to these forms. It can be any way in which we record the Lord’s mighty deeds, hailing our testimony of God’s faithfulness to His people. It can be any creative marker that commemorates the trials, sufferings, weaknesses, journeys, hope, prayers, help, and successes that we experience. Let’s allow the concept of Ebenezer to be an inspiration in the manifold expressions of artistry that God gives to us. And when we experience a monumental moment in the story of our lives, let us not allow it to pass without marking it and naming it after the Lord. This practice brings not only beauty but purpose to our art as it collectively looks backward in remembrance and forward for the next generations. Our Ebenezers of today can be visual, musical, and literary memories of God’s steadfastness, granting courage for the next generation to believe that God will do what He has always done, and be Who He has always been.

Hutchmoot UK is only a few weeks away, so to celebrate a weekend of conversation about art, music, community, story, and the Great Story, we wanted to do something to include you in a small part of the festivities. We are going to bring you a sneak preview of, “The Psalm Code: Genesis Imagery in the Psalms,” one of the lectures that Andy Patton is giving at Hutchmoot UK. Andy is on staff at the Rabbit Room and is a former worker at the English branch of L’Abri Fellowship. You can find more of his writing at the Darkling Psalter (Andy’s Psalm poetry project), Three Things (a monthly newsletter of three good food-for-thought resources), and BibleProject.com. Though only our members can participate in the discussion live, the lecture will be available to our Rabbit Room Community in the coming months. The Psalm Code: Genesis Imagery in the Psalms Have you ever wondered why God fights with sea monsters (Psalm 74:13, 14), why there are trees in the temple (Psalm 92:12-14), or why God is so often compared to a cliff, a mountain, or a fortress? (Psalm 18:1, 2)? It all goes back to Genesis 1. Genesis is the fertile soil out of which all of the core biblical images grow and the Psalms are the trellis that spreads their fruits out to the sun. We’ll be looking at the Sea of Chaos, the Mountain of Refuge, and the Garden of God. Sign Up for the Lecture Lecture Details—When, Who, and Where Date: Thursday, May 4, 2023 Time: 6:00 pm, Central Standard Time Where: We’ll have the lecture on Zoom. Who Can Join: The lecture and discussion will be posted for free for the whole Rabbit Room community in the upcoming months, but only members get to join the discussion live. Let us know you’re coming by filling out this Google form. How to Become a Member: To become a member, just go to our member portal and follow the instructions. What is Membership at the Rabbit Room? Rabbit Room members make it possible for us to do all the things we do. Membership is about coming together as a community in common belonging and purpose. It’s made up of those who feel called to this mission and people, who recognize that they have a place in this work and want to share in its stewardship. Members get to: Support the mission and help make the work possible. Get backstage updates and advance notice on Rabbit Room happenings. Connect with staff and other members. Share your creative work at monthly Zoom meet-ups. Give input or assistance on current projects and needs. Receive our gratitude through gifts like the annual Member Mug, Hutchmoot Audio Archives, and Quarterly thank-you gifts.

If you’re like us, then you’ve got a weathered copy of Watership Down somewhere on your shelves. The classic adventure novel by Richard Adams has been an important read for 50 years, and now we’re excited to see the book receive a beautiful new graphic novel adaptation featuring the work of a two-time Eisner Award-winning cartoonist James Sturm and our good friend and illustrator Joe Sutphin. Today is the official cover reveal for the book and it makes us even more excited to see the final work in full. You can check out the new cover below and pre-order the book here from the Rabbit Room store. And our own proprietor Andrew Peterson has already taken a look and loved what he saw. “I’ll never forget the first time I picked up a copy of Watership Down. I read a blurb on the back that said, ‘I announce, with trembling pleasure, the arrival of a great story.’ I was immediately hooked, and as I turned the last page and sat in the glow of Richard Adams’s masterpiece, I heartily agreed. Translating a great story like Watership Down into a great graphic novel would require a truly great illustrator, and I believe Joe Sutphin has proven to be just that. I’ve walked the real Watership Down, wandered through the churchyard, and stood at the river where Hazel and Fiver and their company escaped—and I can honestly say the next best thing to being there is savoring every frame of art Sutphin crafted for this story. His attention to detail, his dogged determination to capture the look and feel of the English countryside, the care with which he designed the characters we know and love, are all expressions of his dedication to the craft, his respect for Adams’s tale, and his towering talent. I don’t think there’s another artist alive who could have pulled this off. And so I’m thrilled to announce, with trembling pleasure, the arrival of a new and beautiful adaptation of a great story.”

I spend a lot of time reading books to my three little ones. Some days my throat grows hoarse from reading lengthy Beatrix Potter books to them, only to find my children waving yet another hardcover book in front of my face with pleading eyes. Eventually, supper must be cooked, and I gather up the books back onto the shelves for another day. After reading a book like Potter’s, I can’t help but marvel at the wonder and imagination hardwired into her. She must have looked at nature with eyes wide open and a mind twirling with questions and what-ifs. What if a dog and a cat operated a dollhouse store? What if a poor and sickly tailor discovered mice had finished the sewing project he had begun? What if there was a mouse who was tidy and particular about her little burrow? I remember thinking that way as a child. I watched a mallard and his mate swim in the pond and believed they not only mated for life but also worked together each year to plan and raise their young. I imagined my horses forming friendships with one another. I saw birds fight for a spot in the bird feeder and made up conversations for them. As I grew, that kind of wonder and imagination faded from view. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be: the turn to adult things? There’s a real world out there, and you can’t be preoccupied looking for love stories between toads. Get good grades in every class and start thinking about what you want to be when you grow up—and it better not be an author with her head in the clouds. As a little girl, I faced my nightmares and trials through imagined stories, but as I grew up, I became weary and cold-hearted as I distanced myself from those stories—both the ones in my head and the ones in books. I traded in my fiction for commentaries, theology textbooks, and Bible studies. And while those are good things, I lost something in that trade-off: wonder and child-likeness. What started to bring me back? Kidlit, like Beatrix Potter’s books. But not just any kidlit—good, true, and beautiful children’s books. How do we know the difference? First, we must understand childlikeness and childishness. Childlikeness Versus Childishness When reading kidlit, we may wonder: Am I moving towards childlikeness or childishness? I learned the difference between these two categories from a pair of homeschoolers. Two years ago, I had a two-year-old son and newborn twin boys, so my in-laws hired two homeschooled sisters to help me throughout the workweek with feeding babies, changing diapers, and staying on top of housework. One was a storyteller like me. She wrote entire novels, short stories, and poetry, and she wanted to try her hand at nonfiction as I had done for the past several years. As I helped her learn to write for Christian nonfiction publications, she reminded me of the beauty of stories again. As I read her stories and listened to her talk about them, I felt the wonder I had pushed aside for so long begin to swell again. She had a dream to write novels, and she hadn’t allowed “reality” to crush it. The younger sister, despite the suffering she had seen as well, still carried an untameable joy. I loved listening to her as she talked about climbing trees and watched her make imaginative games with my toddler. I saw something in them that I didn’t see in other teens their ages; they had remained childlike without being childish. What is childlikeness? The childlike person stands firm in who they are, , not pretending to be someone else to impress others. Those who are childlike play with little kids, even if it means looking silly. They can laugh at themselves when the twins puke down the back of their shirts. They trust in God’s goodness even when everyone else shakes their heads cynically. They find beauty even in the most aesthetically displeasing places. I’m still learning this from them, and I’m also learning it through children’s authors like Potter. I’m trying to look at the world with the eyes of a child to see the stories, the beauty, and the jungle gym before me. Most children have yet to be jaded by this world, and good fiction written for children helps us regain that innocence. Choosing the Right Kind of Kidlit Good fiction truly captures the real child experience. On the Worthy podcast, young adult and middle-grade author K. B. Hoyle laments the state of YA books in recent years, and how many of them have become about adults in teenage bodies. These kinds of books fail to capture the wonder that should be found in those books. Again, they embody that childishness that’s trying to fill out adult clothing too soon rather than a childlike quality that’s working toward maturity. As adults, we need the former because we’ve grown jaded and weary of this world. We need to be reminded again of what it’s like to hope and dream, to look up at the sky with innocence instead of cynicism. When they tried to wave the little children away, Jesus told his disciples to let them come to him because “anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:14–15). This is a call to receive Jesus’ gift of salvation with unhindered joy and faith. When suffering makes us bitter and cold-hearted, we must find ways to renew our hearts and minds. When we’re becoming more downtrodden, maybe kidlit can help spark that light for us again. Kidlit also harnesses the power of humor and levity. As cynical, weary adults, we take on a solemnity and seriousness that can make us feel heavy and dead. But children’s authors, especially those writing for children and middle-grade readers, must approach their writing with some levity. Their prose must have a lightness to it, and it thrives even more with witty or even silly humor. Some of our beloved and tattered books are both beautiful and hilarious—like The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies by Beatrix Potter. As we get older and more hardened by life, this part of childlikeness becomes less natural. As G. K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy: Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One “settles down” into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man “falls” into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky … It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do … For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity. With such a natural disposition towards solemnity, we need to make room for books that cultivate this gaiety in us as they draw light into our lives. To move from cynicism and bitterness, we all need not just a bit of wonder and an eye for beauty, but a heart that can laugh. This is the life God created for us: “Light is sown for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart” (Ps. 97:11). As believers, we have much to be joyful about, and we know laughter is a gift from God. Do we want others to see a dreary or joyful faith? I wonder if kidlit can help lighten our heavy hearts so we can better embody the joy God has given us. Kidlit for All Ages Some of you may not have grown up with a love for reading. Maybe you weren’t exposed to many books—whether good or bad. Perhaps all you remember of reading is being forced to consume dreadful books in school for assignments. You might feel like you’ve missed out. When it comes to choosing literature for children, Leslie Bustard writes in Wild Things and Castles in the Sky, “A steady diet of dumbed-down stories, illustrations, and conversations will not prepare them for all the glorious ways words can be used in times of joy and delight and in times of sorrow and suffering” (p. 9). She goes on, “These young image-bearers of God will be formed by many, many things. Therefore, we must provide the children in our lives with words, conversations, and stories that will plant the seeds of abundance in their hearts and minds … And with these seeds growing in their lives, our children will have deeper roots to draw from in how they love, think and speak” (p. 11). We need to do the same for ourselves; we can change the relationship we had with books and find wonder and formation in the kidlit we missed out on. As you’re rounding out your book list for the new year, don’t feel ashamed for sticking some middle- grade or young-adult books on your list. If you’re a mom or daycare worker reading countless books to little ones, keep your eyes open to the pages. Don’t zone out through the familiar and simple words, but engage your own mind and heart with these pieces of literature. All good kidlit offers something timeless, true, and beautiful to all ages.

I am by nature a thrifty, proceed-with-planning kind of person. So what exactly is it about a garden center in spring that makes me lose all restraint? Something about a hint of warm air, the smell of dirt, and a “We’re Open” sign by the road makes me immediately shift gears. More specifically, downshift! Because I can’t risk missing this abrupt turn! I’ve just got to hightail it in there and peruse all that green glory. What is this thing that commandeers my being, that makes me throw all normal practices right out of that rolled-down car window? I guess I’ll blame it on the spring air blowing up my nose. It seems to flush the stuffiness of the months of closed-window car trips right out my ears and take any good sense with it! Those full-chested, crisp inhalations are intoxicating and make me hallucinate about those green-tipped trees along the roadway. I’m just sure they are those infamous money trees, and they’re going to share their bounty. That makes it completely fine to buy whatever I want. When it’s cold, it seems that somehow I don’t even notice these temporarily shuttered greenhouses. I want to be out and about as little as possible, so there’s no time for pausing in the brisk air to smell the lack of roses. But somewhere along the journey through slush and frigidness, there is always a magic moment of change. The air somehow feels cleaner and the sun feels like it’s smiling. And as if out of nowhere, there it is! This beacon of windows and glass-walled rooms stands waving its “OPEN” banners like a race track flagman! Every gardener knows the emergency detour that is suddenly created in their soul. Spring itself is a waypoint encouraging us onwards. Gina Sutphin Were you headed to important plans? Well, they’ll just need to be rescheduled. Were you supposed to meet a friend for coffee? Nothing says “I’m sorry for my late arrival” like a potted plant. Were you on your way to work? Surely you’re coming down with a case of Spring Fever, and are likely very contagious. The day has now officially taken charge of its own schedule and must be tended to! After all, it is one of the most Hope-Filled days of the year. And isn’t that really what this is all about to us? We who garden, garden because we hope. We hope in the seed and the labor and time invested. When winter is cold, we hold that hope that the truth of spring will still find us no matter how dark it has been. When all around us feels bleak, we hope in this thing that we know cannot be changed or shaken: that spring, glorious spring, will always come and there is nothing we can do to change or stop it. In a world that has felt so very uncertain, spring is certain. It cannot be moved, cannot be injured or stricken with sickness, cannot be tainted, and cannot be bought. Year after year, it has literally and figuratively stood its ground, pressing through unfriendly soil to spread forth tiny tendrils reaching toward the sun. And that enduring hope is what we all carry inside of us. Spring itself is a waypoint encouraging us onwards. So okay, maybe don’t throw all caution, or financial sense, or promised appointments out the window when the opportunity arises. We do all have a certain level of maturity and character that helps us be mostly reasonable about such things. But just know you’re not alone when you consider hitting the brakes to take that squealing, unexpected turn. And if you do have a moment of weakness and shuck responsibility for the day, you can count on one of us other gardeners to help cover your rubber-laid, tire tracks. After all, we know you weren’t being irresponsible. You were just being Hopeful. And that’s exactly what true Living and Breathing feel like.

Waking up to joy can feel like spring. One day, it’s all gray skies and brown sticks. The next, the ground has softened into mud and the trees are covered with flowers you barely noticed were budding. That’s the feeling of Andrew Osenga’s new EP Living Water, five songs that prepare the way for his upcoming album Headwaters like a garden bursting into bloom. Longtime fans know Osenga for thoughtful story songs with a melancholy yet ultimately hopeful and often playful edge. He’s taken us on a journey into deep space with a lonely astronaut, explored his genre versatility through his Heart and Soul, Flesh and Bone EP collection, and explored the depths of pain and hope in 2018’s The Painted Desert. After over two decades of music-making, he’s ready to take a different turn, from the desert to the waters of life. “This is definitely the most gospel-forward project I’ve done personally,” he said in a recent Rabbit Room interview. After years of processing sadness and struggle through music, now he finds himself ready to offer something new to his daughters and the Church—something joy-filled and hopeful, telling stories of resurrection and restoration. A couple of different styles come together on this EP. On the one hand, it shows Osenga’s flair for rock ’n roll, something we haven’t really heard since his (incredibly fun) Flesh EP. “Living Waters” explodes from an electric guitar solo and keeps The Killers-esque driving momentum all the way through. At the EP’s midpoint, “Hold On To Me” rides an easy rock groove for a song about keeping hope alive, even in darkness. The rest of the tracks explore territory we haven’t really heard much on Osenga’s past albums: Church-centered worship songs. On the first listen, “Rejoice Again” may catch longtime listeners off guard. Its straightforward melody and singable lyrics wouldn’t feel out of place at your local church, but it feels intentional in its simplicity. The themes of resurrection continue through “Risen One,” and “Peace of God” rounds out the collection with a gentle acoustic prayer: “Peace of God / Reign in me / Beyond my understanding / Beyond my unbelief.” For fans of worship artists like Mission House, these songs will feel like an easy choice to include in a Sunday morning playlist. Happy songs are everywhere in the world of Christian music, but genuine joy? That’s challenging to capture. But the hope in these songs feel earned, real, and truthful, like a balm for weariness or cynicism. For Osenga, this is only the beginning of a fruitful new era of music — from producing community projects like Anchor Hymns and The Faithful Project, to hymns released under the name The Quiet Hours, to even more solo singles leading the way to Headwaters. Living Water is the sound of new life breaking forth, the year of the locust giving way to a season of spiritual and artistic abundance. Jen Rose Yokel is a poet, freelance writer, and spiritual director. Her words have appeared at She Reads Truth, CCM Magazine, and other publications, and she released her first poetry collection Ruins & Kingdoms in 2015. Originally from Central Florida, she now makes her home in Fall River, Massachusetts with her husband Chris, where you can find her enjoying used bookstores and good coffee.

What a friend we have in Jesus.” We sing those words, and we take comfort in our personal relationship with the Maker, but just a moment’s pondering reveals our inadequacy. We do not rate such access. We have never before known a friend so giving, so interested, so committed. We can only fail in our half of the relationship, but somehow that’s okay. This grand friendship is the subject of Friend Forever, the fourth release from Mission House. Members of the Rabbit Room community are likely familiar with both Jess Ray and Taylor Leonhardt as beloved singer-songwriters. Jess can be heard on the 2019 Behold the Lamb of God reissue, and Taylor was the featured musical guest at Hutchmoot 2022. It’s possible, though, that many have missed the pair’s convergence as a folk worship duo called Mission House. If that’s the case, Friend Forever serves as a great introduction. The project’s nine songs include fresh versions of band favorites—both solo offerings and revisited Mission House songs—along with hymns, a folk song, and a Delirious? cover that lends the album its title. These are technically studio tracks, though they were recorded live at a friend’s home. They retain the spontaneity and connection of a live performance but are rendered with a warmth and intimacy that’s often difficult to capture with a concert recording. The songs are quiet and peaceful, and it is apparent from the opening track, “Place to Land,” that this is comfort-bringing music. That’s not to say it is lightweight or that it lacks depth. Instead, the lyrics often feel hard-won, like the gentle compression of a pillow under a weary head. “I need a peaceful pasture / I need a steady hand / You are the one I’m after / You are my place to land.” What a friend we have, indeed. Production is delicate and understated, taking a back seat to the meaningful words and expressive vocals. In this setting, the bridge to “Behold” arrives with reassuring confidence: “We’ve been struck down, we’re not destroyed / We’ve sown in tears, we’ll reap in joy.” This proclamation is not in-your-face but matter-of-fact, like a faith that is quiet and wise and not boisterous. Similarly, “Take My Life” is no empty platitude here. It carries the earnestness and desperation necessary to lead one to real surrender, and it demonstrates the kindred nature of brokenness and worship. We are often struck paralyzed by the paradox of our kindred Creator. We contemplate omnipotence and wrath, and we rightly tremble before such might. But the unique mystery of Christ is the coexistence of omnipotent wrath and omnipotent friendship. “Friend Forever” is a soothing balm for those who need a friend, and an opportunity to rest, ponder, and praise him.

A year ago this month, Rabbit Room Theatre launched with my stage adaptation of Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. It was a project that stretched me and the whole theatre team in a wealth of ways, and we were overjoyed with the reception. The show ran for 4-weeks to sold out performances at the Soli Deo Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and since then theater-goers and Corrie-lovers all over the world have been asking, “What’s next?” Well, the time has come to tell everyone what we’ve been working on for the past year. What most folks don’t know is that during the run of shows in Nashville, the stage play was filmed for cinema audiences over the course of two marathon-days of shooting. Today, I’m SO excited to announce that, in partnership with Trafalgar Releasing, WTA Media, Matt Logan Productions, and MA2LA, Rabbit Room Theatre’s production of The Hiding Place is coming to a cinema near you. First, on August 3 & 5 for the U.S. and Canada, and then August 16 everywhere else. I am beyond proud of the entire cast and crew and cannot wait for folks to see their work on the big screen. Tony and Laura Matula have worked tirelessly in post production to edit, add foley effects, score, record additional dialogue, color correct, and export terabytes upon terabytes of files for editorial screenings and testing. These two friends are also the creative all-star team behind the design of all the show’s posters and title treatments and photography (in fact they’ve done that work for my other shows as well, The Battle of Franklin, Frankenstein, Sonata at Payne Hollow, and Lindenfair), and none of this would exist without their patience, hard work, and dedication to creating something amazing. Corrie’s story is one that changed me for the better. It’s been changing people for a generation. It’s a tale that deserves to be told over and over again, and I’m humbled to be able to play a part in her legacy. We hope you’ll come see it, and then we hope you’ll spread the gospel that Corrie spent her life declaring: that Christ plays in ten thousand places and there is no pit so deep that he is not deeper still. Christus Victor. Tickets are now on sale at TheHidingPlaceFilm.com. To inquire about groups sales, or to find out how to request a showing in your hometown theater, visit the website link above.

I’m guessing that many of you may feel like I do a lot these days when you look at the news—both angry yet impotent to do much of anything significant about the world’s ills. It’s one of the problems of our age, that our sphere of knowledge dwarfs our sphere of impact. In these moments I often find myself “doomscrolling”, thumbing through one bad thing after another on the Internet until I’m in a bad mood. On one such day recently I just had to ditch my phone and go for a walk in the woods. This poem emerged mostly as a message to myself, but I hope it meets you where you are too. Dear you, yes you, scrolling past this post, on your way, to another dose of despair. Lift up your eyes, look out your window at the real world. Leave your smartphones and smartwatches behind and go. Lift up the limbs that you’ve been given to the sun, breathe in the oxygen, the trees have so lovingly made for you, see and smell the blossoms they have bloomed for you. If you can, hold the life of a small creature in your hands, and feel its tiny life and beating heart, so much like your own, both of you so small in this vast world. You are small, yes but you are not nothing. You can smile at another, you can plant seeds in earth, you can love your friends and your family, you can speak a kind word, you can give a few dollars to a good cause, you can even, write a poem. Shut out the voices of the megalomaniacs making money off your fear, feasting on your paralyzed flesh like a pack of crazed hyenas. Do not despair, do not give up, do not give in, but stand in your small earthen self and be. This poem was originally posted on Chris Yokel’s Substack Beauty Is Truth

“Oh, Mom! JJ Heller!” my two-year-old, Shiloh, exclaimed in the backseat as the song shuffled through the speakers. I didn’t know she was listening, much less processing and correctly identifying the singer-songwriter. I was proud, but it made sense. Heller has filled our house with daily anthems, lullabies, anxiety-soothing balms, and beautiful music these last two years. Shiloh was born in early 2021, while the world was still plagued by uncertainty as COVID fears stretched on. We didn’t know if anyone would be able to greet her, so the privilege of my family being present to welcome my daughter home from the hospital was meaningful enough. My sisters came prepared, keyboard in tow. One sister held my tiny newborn while the other sang Heller’s “Hand to Hold.” This Christmas, we brought our son, Judah, home from the hospital. My sisters repeated the ritual, and it became a beloved tradition. May you never lose the wonder in your soul May you always have a blanket for the cold May the living light inside you be the compass as you go May you always know you have my hand to hold. Experiencing the newborn phase the second time makes me want to go back and offer grace to myself as I struggled through several first-time mom moments of crippling anxiety. Even now, I feel the thirst for grace as the floods of worries and inadequacies creep up. I type these thoughts out while sitting on the floor, caked in layers of spit-up, cooing nonsense babble, in the twenty-minute window where Shiloh naps and Judah is semi-content. Heller’s songs offer me the grace I struggle to give myself: “It feels like forever / But it’s gonna get better / Hold on.” When I look back on certain seasons of my life, hindsight highlights ebenezers of artwork. Art marks time; it helps me characterize and see beyond immediate vantage points. In this physically demanding season, I don’t have time to linger slowly through my favorite museums. My emotional tolerance for great plot has tragically diminished. Reading and writing used to fuel my faith, but I’m so tired even when I’m gifted time to engage in these acts. Instead of feeling shame, I feel hope because the cornerstone in this season’s ebenezer is music, and Heller’s songs are a foundation in that pile of rocks. Her songs are gentle reminders to pay attention. I sit on the porch with my babies and play “I spy.” I notice the sparkling beads of water that pool up on top of the grass blades. Shiloh’s learning colors, so I wonder what color to name that bit of shine. A pinecone falls from the tree across the street and rolls down the hill. I don’t have time to capture it in a poem, but I appreciate Shiloh’s laughter. And later, when I listen to Heller sing, “Every park bench is a pew / There’s a sanctuary everywhere that I go / When my eyes are open / I see you,” I remember the pinecone rolling down the street. I’m glad JJ Heller’s music, like all good art, helps me in the sacred work of understanding, of believing, of glimpsing, of loving. Sarah Bramblett I had never pondered the poetic truth that “All who live in love are Thine / Teach us how to love each other/ Lift us to the joy divine” until Shiloh requested Heller’s version of “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” be played on repeat as we play with a bucket of water. Shiloh stomps on a sponge so she can see her footprints. Judah coos. I’ve heard it said before that children are sponges, but I didn’t fully appreciate it until I saw how my mood can impact my four-month-old, until I heard Shiloh lift up a teacup and say, “Ah, delicious!” just like I often do. All who live in Love are Thine—stomping on the sponge, soaking up the water. Teach me how to love my children—a footprint. Let them soak in their belovedness. I might not utter long, thoughtful prayers these days. But as “Joyful, Joyful” plays, Shiloh is absorbing truth and I’m letting the Spirit intercede, through Heller’s voice. Because we’re listening on repeat, these songs are becoming my voice, too. Before I had kids, I never sang. I loved music, but I doubted my voice. Shiloh strips me of my self-consciousness, and I sing for her, “You are poetry in motion and you want to dance with me.” I also catch myself singing when I’m alone, fighting ants for the crumbs scattered under the kitchen table, no music playing, “Big magic in the mundane / The big picture in a small frame / Everything is sacred when you take time to notice / Big love happens in the small moments.” These songs root in the heart; they speak to moments and lifetimes. Shiloh asks to read “the light book,” Heller’s picture book Hand to Hold (she calls it the light book because of the little lamp with stars in the corner). We turn to the page with the photo album, the picture with the words, “Every day, you’re changing, sometimes I wish it wasn’t true. Hearts are made for giving, I’ve given mine to you.” I struggle to maintain an even, happy tone since Shiloh can’t yet understand why the beauty of growing up makes me want to cry. And if she asks her favorite question, “OOT (what) that, Mama?” I’m not sure I’d be able to explain the profound mystery. I’m glad JJ Heller’s music, like all good art, helps me in the sacred work of understanding, of believing, of glimpsing, of loving. You can find more about JJ Heller here.

Back in April, I saw two movies in theaters: CREED III and the theatrical re-release of the Indian blockbuster RRR at the magnificent Belcourt Theatre in Nashville. If you’ve never heard of RRR, it’s an overwhelming and rollicking piece of epic historical fiction that quickly became the highest-grossing movie of all time in India last year–and you can watch it on Netflix. The story follows two real-life Indian revolutionaries who fought against colonialism, imagining the two of them as near-mythic heroes who go from the worst of enemies to the best of friends. More to the point, seeing RRR and CREED III back to back got me thinking about an emerging pattern within many of the blockbusters we’ve received since the pandemic. Let me explain. The plot of CREED III hinges on a long-lost friend (he’s described as being ‘like a brother’) who resurfaces in Adonis Creed’s life after a betrayal years earlier tore them apart. The enigmatic Damien, played by Jonathan Majors, feels let down by Adonis’s lack of loyalty to their friendship and wants to offer payback in a myriad of ways. The ultimate fight in the third act is a near-Shakespearean confrontation between Adonis and Damian, not just feuding as wrestling opponents, but doing battle as former brothers torn apart by the wounds they’ve inflicted on each other. Watching that brutally engaging, anime-inspired final fight, I was hit by something: we’ve been seeing this a lot recently. My favorite movie of last year, The Banshees of Inisherin, might best be summarized as a movie about broken brotherhood as well. Pádraic Súilleabháin and ColmSonnyLarry have been “the best of friends” for years, going to the pub at 2 pm every day to idly chat about Pádraic’s donkey, until one day Colm decides that he’s done denying the obvious: Pádraic is not an interesting friend, and Colm has better things to do with his time than listen to his nonsense. Pádraic is, of course, deeply wounded by this betrayal—and the movie’s central conflict spins out from there. Top Gun: Maverick might have more of a father/son-type relationship than a friendly one, but Maverick and Rooster certainly have brotherly conflicts. Rooster resents Maverick for his involvement in his father’s death, and for holding him back from flight academy at his mother’s request. Maverick doesn’t know how to make things right. Then there’s Avatar: The Way of Water, where the tension between Lo’ak and his older brother Neteyam—and their tension with the other boys in the reef tribe—drives much of the drama in the second act. Not to mention Jake Sully and Colonel Quaritch, who were in some sense military “brothers in arms” in the first film and have since taken completely opposing sides in a war. Even AmbuLAnce, the first great movie Michael Bay has made in 20 years (!), has a fascinating adopted-brother relationship (and conflict) between Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. And then there are the movies that have come out this year, like Disney’s Peter Pan & Wendy, which imagines Peter Pan and Captain Hook as former best friends who betrayed each other and eventually find a way to reconcile. Or John Wick: Chapter 4, where the sinister High Table forces one of John Wick’s former allies (Cain, played by Donnie Yen) to attempt to track him down and kill him. I won’t spoil John Wick: Chapter 4, but that friendship plays an interesting role in the finale. When I think about a movie that best exemplifies the ideal concept of brotherhood, though, it’s definitely RRR. Indian revolutionaries Ram and Bheem are mortal enemies who don’t know it, and through a seemingly coincidental twist of fate, accidentally become the best of friends. There’s a montage set to a song called “Dosti,” which literally means “Friendship,” including lines like “an unpredictable gust of wind has erased the distance between the two of them,” and “won’t this friendship break one day in the form of betrayal?” As their bond grows, the lingering threat of their eventual conflict does, too—and it all culminates in the second half. I think it’s pretty clear: there’s a pattern of brotherly conflict and betrayal in all of these movies. In most of them, both ‘brothers’ are somewhat sympathetic to the viewer; sometimes the conflict comes from misunderstanding, or difference of priorities, or unresolved pain of the past, or a sense of masculine duty. But in all of them, things eventually come to a head. The brotherhood breaks. And then something new rises from the ashes. Maybe, in some sense, these movies resonate deeply with audiences because they acknowledge that male friendships can be just as difficult and complex, and just as integral to human flourishing, as romantic relationships. Houston Coley The masculinity in these movies is interesting to dissect. It’s been a season of bromances—even in movies like The Batman, which doesn’t quite have the ‘broken brotherhood’ element. I think what’s so refreshing about bromances is that they go hand in hand with sincerity; male friendships in the real world are typically defined so heavily by their irony and sarcasm and macho-posturing, and to see two guys onscreen earnestly expressing non-romantic affection for each other requires a total lack of that sardonic self-mockery, both from the characters and from the artist portraying them. One of the reasons RRR felt so fresh to American viewers was that the friendship between Ram and Bheem was pure and wholesome and affectionate in a way that we’re rarely bold enough to depict in our own blockbusters. Speaking as a guy myself, it’s the kind of ultimate-bro-friendship I’d dream about having, but have never fully managed to attain. Even with my closest friends, there’s still a level of self-deprecation and posturing that has to be breached to have a truly sincere conversation. It’s taken 14 years for me and my best friend to be able to say “I love you, man” every now and then. Maybe, in some sense, these movies resonate deeply with audiences because they acknowledge that male friendships can be just as difficult and complex, and just as integral to human flourishing, as romantic relationships. The role of the female characters in some of these films is an equally interesting component. Kerry Condon’s Siobhan in The Banshees of Inisherin is probably the most reasonable and even-tempered character in the film, intuitively reading between the lines of the juvenile and stubbornly masculine conflict around her. Eiza González’s character in AmbuLAnce has a similarly clearheaded disposition toward the macho insanity of Danny and Will. When the boys fight for her sake in Avatar: The Way of Water, Sigourney Weaver’s Kiri just rolls her eyes and laughs at the absurdity of it all. In Top Gun: Maverick, Penny provides Maverick with the parenting knowledge he needs to realize that he can let Rooster make his own mistakes. And even in RRR, Ram’s fiancee Seetha is the one who selflessly saves Bheem’s family and provides him with the revelation that Ram is not a traitor, catalyzing their reunion and teaming up in the third act. The women in these movies, then, are often able to see the ways that the men are seeing past each other—and kindle something that looks like a true relationship. It’s always important to me to ask why a certain theme might be resonating through such a huge set of movies in a given period. When I ponder this “brotherly conflict” playing out in the real world, I can only think about the countless friendships and family relationships that have been impacted by the contentious events of the last few years. The pandemic felt like a time when everyone was pushed to the brink and showed their true colors; I don’t have the stats to back it up, but it feels like we could all probably think of at least one person in our lives who has, intentionally or not, become more distant from us post-2020. I guess some people came out of the pandemic feeling like we “beat it together,” but I think for the majority of people in the US especially, the world feels more divided than ever before. The tension had been bubbling beneath the surface for years, but COVID brought it writhing and wriggling into the light, and nobody has been exactly the same. The good news about these movies, though, is that they all seem to suggest one thing: conflict built on honesty is better than peace built on denial. Colm and Padraic’s conflict reveals the way that Padraic’s ‘niceness’ has been intertwined with the repression of negative emotions, and brings Colm’s true struggle with depression into the light, forcing him to decide that he has something to live for. When Ram and Bheem finally learn the truth about each other after multiple butt-kicking misunderstandings, it allows them to team up and wreak havoc on the imperial forces like neither of them could’ve done alone. Rooster and Maverick being forced to sit in the same cockpit together and fight for their lives—and accept that they have been saved by each other—ultimately brings closure for both of them around Goose’s death. I don’t know exactly what all of this says about our current world, but maybe it’s an encouragement that actually facing our division and conflict with honesty and clearheadedness (like Siobhan in Banshees) could lead to something more livable, even if it’s not exactly friendly. “Can’t we all just get along?” isn’t working. I’m not exactly advocating for a simplistic “both sides” narrative where we’re all just completely reasonable people seeing past each other for exclusively innocent reasons, but I do think that our division often comes from willful misunderstanding or mischaracterization of what the other person is trying to say or communicate. I’m particularly drawn to 14-year-old Kiri’s summation of the brotherly brawling in Avatar: The Way of Water: “This is so stupid!” Maybe we need some kind of divine mediator who can see through the stupidity. Fascinatingly, I think the real revelation of these movies is that seeing two brothers fight is just as integral to the experience as watching them join forces. Watching Damien and Adonis punch each other in the face at the same time, anime-style, in CREED III was awesome. The “fire and water” standoff between Ram and Bheem in RRR is profoundly cool, but seeing them both riding a motorcycle and a horse to fight an army together is even more gratifying when it comes an hour later. Maybe, even in our personal relationships, we need to embrace conflict to truly earn those epic team-ups. Maybe the two go hand-in-hand.

In many ways, we’re in the Golden Age of worship music. Great congregational music is released every week, it seems. But it’s a rare project that engages the listener with spiritual depth, passion, and musical excellence. Anchor Hymns’ new project Sing, Sing, Sing pulls it off, all while covering difficult subjects like doubt, lament, and suffering. Sing, Sing, Sing also accomplishes what few worship albums manage to do. These songs are completely appropriate for a congregational setting as well as being intimate and personal. The album allows the guest vocalists to shine and show their personality while never sacrificing the communal “singability” of the songs. Thematically, this entire EP centers around the idea that the good and right response to trials and difficulty is not to suffer in silence, but to sing. These songs bestow on the listener permission to bring their pain and lament to the feet of the Lord. This idea is summed up in the title track, “Sing, Sing, Sing.” The opening organ and vocal run immediately take you to church, and then the first verse hits hard, “Grandma taught me life gets hard / but one little melody has brought me this far / when you feel lost babe, just look up to God / and let this be your song/ sing, sing, sing / something happens when we sing.” The rest of the song, powered by the vocals of Sarah Kroger and Jasmine Mullen, along with lines from “Blessed Assurance,” reminds us that this phenomenon isn’t new. This idea that singing to God about our troubles is as old as stories themselves, but it can be our story now. “By the Savior’s Power” opens the album with a potent reflection on the idea that, while our sin drags us beneath crashing waves, Jesus’ power and grace are able to lift us out and drag us to shore. The theme of the song is the power of Jesus to overcome the darkness, and Dee Wilson and Ricky Vazquez’s vocals are the perfect way to illustrate that. The lead vocals here are stunning, and just when you think you’ve heard the best part, the final verse hits you like a freight train. ‘Oh, the mighty Great I Am, rules with victory in his hands/ he will crush the gates of Hell and bring us with him to dwell.” “Those Who Have Not Seen” is led by the trio of Matt Maher, Taylor Leonhardt, and Paul Baloche, and this meditation is like a soothing balm to those of us who struggle with seasons of doubt. Punctuated with sections of “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross,” this slow-driving hymn reminds us of Jesus’ words of comfort at the end of the book of John, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” It’s an incredible moment of comfort when the trio sings, “I have my doubts but you have my heart.” On “It’s Alright,” Dee Wilson and Jasmine Mullen reinforce the overall theme of the record with lyrics like “If I’m buried in suffering, don’t worry about me, it’s alright/ cause the tomb of my Savior stands empty.” And if you didn’t believe that it was going to be alright before, you absolutely will after you listen to this, because this is not a song about platitudes, it’s about the holiness of Jesus and that he is the source of our assurance. Maybe the best moment of the entire album comes on the bridge of this song, a rising affirmation of the foundation of our life and strength. “When We Walk Together,” sung by Travis Ryan and Andrew Osenga, is a simple yet anthemic pronouncement of the fact that, whatever we do, we are better when we do it together. Be it walking, mourning, or dealing with times of weariness, the family of God feels those things alongside you, and you aren’t alone. “When we walk together, no one walks alone / and we bear each other’s burdens so the road doesn’t feel so long.” This is a song to come back to when you’re at your lowest. It’s tough to call Anchor Hymns a “bright spot” in the worship music landscape, simply because these songs are so full of struggle and doubt. But Sing, Sing, Sing exhorts the listener to take these difficult subjects and do just what the title says—to sing. Powered by passionate guest vocalists and masterful instrumentalists, Sing, Sing, Sing is a challenging and hopeful record that encourages the listener toward Christ as the source of our strength. This collection of songs has personality, and it’s filled with artists at the tops of their game—nothing here feels empty or vacuous. Anchor Hymns is creating worship anthems that are worthy of your time and attention.

Join our book club to read Corrie Ten Boom’s beloved memoir The Hiding Place ahead of the global cinematic release of A. S. “Pete” Peterson’s new filmed stage adaptation. Starting July 6th through August 10th we will meet weekly at 6pm CST over Zoom to discuss the book and the upcoming theatrical film adaptation. A. S. “Pete” Peterson will lead the group and welcome a few cast members into the discussion along the way. Join the book club by signing up for our Rabbit Room Theatre email list here. The Zoom links will be available to access in an email every Thursday. View the reading guide below and download a copy here: Week One: Chapters 1-4 July 6 @ 6pm CST: Zoom w/A. S. “Pete” Peterson. Watch the recording here!Week Two: Chapters 5-8 July 13 @ 6pm CST: Zoom w/A. S. “Pete” Peterson & Nan Gurley. Watch the recording here!Week Three: Chapters 9-12 July 20 @ 6pm CST: Zoom w/A. S. “Pete” Peterson & Carrie Tillis. Watch the recording here!Week Four: Chapters 13-15 July 27 @ 6pm CST: Zoom w/A. S. “Pete” Peterson & Deborah Seidel. Watch the recording here!Week Five: Movie Night August 3 & 5: No Zoom. Watch The Hiding Place in theaters across the U. S. A. and Canada Week Six: Movie Discussion August 10 @ 6pm CST: Wrap-Up Zoom w/A. S. “Pete” Peterson & cast and crew from the film. Watch the recording here! If you don’t have a copy of the book, you can purchase it through the Rabbit Room store here. Use the exclusive discount code: BOOKCLUB25 for 25% off your order. A. S. “Pete” Peterson’s filmed stage adaptation of The Hiding Place will bring Corrie Ten Boom’s story to theaters across the world for the first time in nearly 50 years. Seats aren’t guaranteed for this limited release, so secure your tickets now! Book tickets and learn more information about the film at https://www.thehidingplacefilm.com JOIN THE BOOK CLUB #semifeature

There was a time towards the end of Hutchmoot UK this year when I experienced one of those fleeting moments of sharpness in life. Do you know the kind I mean? The moments when you suddenly become painfully aware of the ordinary beauty all around you. The moments when, hurrying through a faceless crowd, dozens of extraordinary individual lives burst into instant bloom to your left and right. The moments when a line of writing hurls itself from the page to pierce through to your inmost being: to somewhere you thought no one else knew. There is a kind of poetry in these moments of sharpness. Oddly enough, when I experienced one at Hutchmoot, it happened during a Found Poetry workshop I was hosting in the leafy surroundings of Swanwick, Derbyshire. Around 180 of us had gathered at The Hayes for a few days of feasting together on music and story and art. Perhaps 20 or so had come along that afternoon to share a couple of their precious Hutchmoot hours with me. As I waited in the sunshine, the group came drifting back from the first task, which had been to roam the site finding fragments of text which we would then tear up and remake into poems. They had gone hunting in books, on signs, in leaflets. They had overheard shards of conversation, sifted through papers, and scoured the old wartime photographs on the walls. The sharpness came upon me suddenly as they pressed these “found: words into my waiting hands, scribbled on bright strips of colored paper. I was awe-shocked by these Hutchmooters: they had reveled in being given permission to look differently at their surroundings. There had been a thrill for them, I realized, in eavesdropping a little; in freeing text from its everyday moorings ready to make it new. (It is a thrill those of us who write regularly know well). As my hands filled up with paper and words, I was pierced once again with the sheer wonder of it all. There is earthy, God-fueled poetry everywhere. I mean: everywhere. Even on emergency exit signs. The moment flared and faded. I was soon absorbed in witnessing my newfound poets play with these fragments of text, in reading and discussing the extraordinary poems they forged. If you have never dabbled in found poetry, I highly recommend it. You may have had the misfortune to have been told—or indeed to tell yourself—that you are not a writer. Go tear up other people’s words and write them into something new. You will be surprised at what you find. Anyway, the day continued, the night passed. Hutchmoot UK was soon, with regret, finished for another year. I came away with my heart full and my hands aching to write. And yet I cannot tell you a polished, flowing story about what I, or any of us, found at Hutchmoot. I found it in fragments. I found it as poetry. Ruth Moore But as the weeks since have drifted by, I have noticed that found poetry is a strong metaphor for what it was like to experience Hutchmoot. I have not yet had the delight of visiting the mother ship, the original version in Nashville. I hear it can be a little tricky to secure a ticket! Here in the UK, this was our third edition—my second—and the first on either side of the Atlantic to be residential. We came from all over the UK, Europe, and far beyond. We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together; we bore witness to the joys and struggles of the creative life together; we prayed; we listened; we made. We slept, we woke, we dived in again. I came away with my heart full and my hands aching to write. And yet I cannot tell you a polished, flowing story about what I, or any of us, found at Hutchmoot. I found it in fragments. I found it as poetry. Take, for example, the moment when I looked around a crowded seminar room where people were claiming space on the floor and the window ledges to hear Doug McKelvey speak On Weakness. What an extraordinary thing: to know that it is not only me whose heart has been broken lately by community. To hear it ventured that, in fact, my very brokenness is what can make community anew. Or the first night, when our Music in the Round brought the wondrous voices of Andrew Peterson, Christopher Williams, Miriam Jones, and Matshidiso into conversation; when we listened to them trade smoky, tuneful tales from far-flung cities while the Derbyshire dusk deepened outside. Or joining strangers at the breakfast table one morning to find myself engulfed in stories of wild Alaskan adventures and joyous, cramped family caravan holidays in Wales. There was poetry in the hands of the people as we gathered to hear acclaimed artist Alistair Gordon’s keynote, as we pressed our fingers into air-dry clay to form physical responses to the hard-won words he offered on God and art. There was poetry in the bar late at night, as I eavesdropped on old friends re-finding each other, and as new friendships swirled over a sip or two of whisky shared. There was poetry—mischievous, brilliant poetry— in serving alongside the team, a heady blend of Brits and Americans. The year before, we had labored many hours together over chopping boards and sinks due to a last-minute catering catastrophe. This year, it was a joy to watch these gem-like sisters and brothers express their gifts at a more leisurely pace: there is a great deal of poetry, I find, in being unhurried. There were times when the sheer volume of this found poetry threatened to overwhelm. The fabric of the conference was rich and varied: you can see more for yourself here of the excellent artists who shared their work and wisdom from the trenches. It began to feel that every time I sat down to another meal, or outside in the unseasonably strong sunshine, I would find myself in the midst of something unbearably real, or funny, or deeply challenging. I wasn’t always sure there was enough of me to absorb it all. But that’s the thing with Hutchmoot poetry, isn’t it? There comes a time when it has been enough, even if it breaks your heart a little. There comes a time when you must pick up your bag and return to the real world. But here I am, weeks later, and of course, the poetry is still with me, because its Writer is as close beside me as ever He was at Hutchmoot. It is He who leaves these treasure trails of sharp moments, of poetry found and remade. Whether you journeyed with us to Derbyshire this year, or whether such an experience or community feels painfully beyond your reach, hear this: There is an earthy, God-fuelled poetry everywhere. I mean: everywhere. Go find it and make it into something new. Get to work. *** A deep and heartfelt thank you to my fellow UK teammates: Glenn Johnston, Heidi Johnston, Jason McFarland, Mark Meynell, Jo Tinker, Michael Tinker. Thank you for welcoming me into your midst. And to the splendid fluffle of Rabbit Room staffers and supporters who crossed the ocean to labor alongside us. Thank you for everything, even the goat yoga…

November of last year, with autumn awakening in me again the desire to write, I set myself the task of fifteen songs and fifty poems. Any poetry I had written up to that point I had written for myself, as a spiritual and creative practice. But I wanted to see if I could make something beautiful, or at least good, in the realm of poetry, to see if I could make a warm little house on a rainy, treeless hillside, out of poems. The forthcoming collection, Snowmelt to Roots, turned into a little house of more than one hundred poems. But however cozy the house may be, sometimes I forget I invited God to stay here as well. And it hardly seems fit to welcome him… (let the reader understand) God and the Guest Room I asked God to come live with me only I didn’t mention what a mess my house is and now I’m in the guest bedroom trying to shove everything into the closet anxious sweat on my brow trembling hands, shuffling and shoving, but when I go out to explain the state of his room I can’t find him the living room is empty I look out the front window— maybe he’s gone? brow-knitted, I turn and decide to make tea put the kettle on, wondering walking down the hallway to grab my book from the nightstand only to find that God has taken my room and in a tone that betrays an amusement with my surprise he says, “thanks for having me” Check out more information and support Zach Winters’ newest project over at Kickstarter here.

On my expansive old porch stands a large, ungainly, potted plant. It is a night-blooming cereus (NBC). It is an exotic, meant to be vining up inside a tree in the tropics. I keep it compact—or I wouldn’t be able to keep it. I have had it for decades since I was given a typically indestructible cutting from a plant then decades old. (I carried it home, a trip of weeks, squashed in my suitcase.) I think that this plant is wonderfully ugly! (Partly due to its containment, I realize.) In no orderly pattern it produces skyward stalks, which transition into large, succulent flatnesses which might be leaves. These have nodes along their edges, out of which might come another stalk, another leaf, or… …a tiny reddish sputnik of a bud. That little alien swells slowly, retaining its shade of an angry welt on your skin. It enlarges eventually to the size of your hand. There comes a summer evening when you realize that the massive bud is bending to point upward, and its sepals are starting to stand out from it. (It reminds me a bit of a lion fish!) The time has come. Grab your lawn chair and your flashlight and your camera. Grab your unsuspecting neighbors, if they’ll let you. This will be an event. Snap a pic every five minutes or so. You can’t help it; you can Google any number of videos people have made! But you can’t capture the magic of the event. By morning, I note, the show will be over. Behold! A massive white blossom, the most stunning you have ever seen, opens out to you, like a generous hand, graciously uncloaking its majestic interior of ranks of stamens and a crowning pistil, perfuming the warm summer night! It’s as if the blossom looks you in the eye and says beguilingly, “Here I am!” That blossom opens and somehow invites you in. It’s as if it says, “Welcome to my home.” To which the only appropriate response is, “Whoa-a-a-h . . .” “Oh-h-h-h!” “Ah-h-h-h!” You now are no longer able to see that plant in the same way. In your rapturous encounter you gaze at it with a kind of surprised recognition. “So! It is You!” we might find ourselves saying. And then and there, you give your heart to an ugly plant, to love and cherish as long as you both shall live. For these decades, I have dragged my “NBC” indoors in the fall, and back out in the spring. I have pruned it with apology, adjusted its lighting and feeding, and attended to it continually in hope of other moments of bud glory. I have enthusiastically bestowed cuttings on unsuspecting friends. In all the places I have lived, I have invited neighbors over for the show. (The neighbors I invited most recently actually came back over and sat on my porch again later in the dead of the night, just to watch!) This event of epiphany and encounter typifies human persons’ involvement with the real. Real? What real? might be your first question. By “real,” I mean the things before you, everything beyond you with which it is your privilege to be involved. In my NBC blossoming I am describing that magical place of meeting where you and the real face and touch and encounter one another. I am here to say that this is the arena of the philosophical. You might have thought that philosophy concerns the abstract and universal and inscrutable. I dissent from this. Philosophy concerns you and your involvement with the real, in attuning, understanding and action, at its nearest, felt, and most concrete. Great philosophizing pours forth from the night blooming cereus! Great philosophizing permeates our day to day lives. We may allow it to shape and heal us philosophically. The blossoming of the real shouldn’t be a rare or occasional thing; it typifies—or ought to typify—every touch and seeing. In Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead, Rev. John Ames is an elderly, terminally ill, pastor writing at length to his very young son. Ames’ final exhortation: “Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.” Beauty is the real’s hospitable welcome. We respond in rapture. It attunes us to do so. Esther Lightcap Meek But sadly, we often don’t notice. We objectify, pragmatize, quantify, commodify the real. Or we suspect it, distrust it, disavow it. We “depersonify” it. Or, in a sense even more tragic, we degrade it by according it only spiritual utility: it merely marks some secret meaning, some divinity, hidden behind or within it. We put ourselves in the first person: “I.” We put the real in the third person: “it.” We blind ourselves to its second person in epiphany. The real shows up. It addresses us: “you.” We discount our own “second personhood,” blind to the invited encounter. But it is in the second person that we are meant to be involved with the real. Philosopher D. C. Schindler writes that human persons are “ordered to” communion with the real D. C. Schindler writes—meaning, that is our reason for existence! Human persons are made for communion with the real. We are meant to be lovers of the real. Knowledge, according to Schindler (and me) is intimate contact with reality. Epiphany. The real graciously shows itself. The real manifests in self-revelation. The blossom says, “Here I am!” Encounter. The real addresses you. It has found you and addresses you. To which you respond: “So! It is You!” Philosopher theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar writes that things—the everyday things of the real—self-show (beauty), self-give (goodness), and self-say (truth). There is no such thing as a passive object. All this heightens the gravitas of things; it heightens the gravitas of you. Encounter begins with epiphany—not mine, but that of the real. The real graciously self-shows, opening our eyes. Beauty just is this epiphanic appearing initiated by the real. Beauty is the beguiling “Here I am!” of a real thing. Beauty is the real’s hospitable welcome. We respond in rapture. It attunes us to do so. We respond, following its beckoning, following where it leads. It is giving itself; we give ourselves in response. We long and love to know the real—that is, come to commune with it. Our fidelity to it invites its further disclosure and our deepening understanding. This real opens out into joyously bottomless depths and vistas. “Things can fully manifest themselves in their being only to an intellect that is naturally ordered to being [the real],” Schindler says. Ferdinand Ulrich writes: “What everything in the cosmos seeks, we might say, is an ever deeper Yes to be spoken to it, an affirmation of its being.” The real is asking for our yes. Does this sound fanciful? Gullible? Marginal? This too would be a philosophical assessment. I would have you trim your philosophical sails and reset your course. My 2023 book, Doorway to Artistry, is a hospitable welcome of a book. In it I enact the face to face, second person, epiphany and invited encounter that is our everyday brush with the real. Hospitable welcome is tellingly not something you are satisfied only to hear a report about; you want to have been among those attending the party! Within this encounter, we trace our journey of involvement with the real, from threshold and hearth, through study, garden, workshop and veranda, to feast. This is the unfolding of any discovery we make. It is the unfolding of every relationship. It is also the unfolding of every creative act. The act of artistry is exceptionally attuned to the epiphanic encounter with the real; to be authentic, artistry cannot keep it at bay. Artistry is deeply philosophical: it gets at the “Here I am!” of our epiphanic encounter with the real. You as a human person are philosophical; you also are already artful: you already put things together creatively to produce new or better things. In artistry you attend to the things before you: your materials and skills and situation and guiding maxims. You attend from them in a manner which invites their farther depths of reality. You do this out of a posture of, I will say in the book: noble courtesy. Our noble courtesy reciprocates the welcome which the real has proffered. Again, Schindler: “A sense of beauty demands that we extend courtesy to things. In such a world, things may indeed serve human purposes, but if they do so it is not an abject slavery; rather, they offer themselves for this use in something analogous to a noble freedom in which their own reality preserves its integrity. The service takes the form of a gift gratefully received.” Things call forth from you (from YOU) a reverence, a courtesy, a reciprocated honor, and gratitude, a nobility in your manner toward them. This approach shifts how we look at and engage with the real. It is a shift necessary to our human personhood. It is necessary to our artistry. It is necessary to the real. Welcome to my home.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the church had a Music Problem. Check that—there have been lots of times when the church has had a Music Problem, but this is the one I remember. This particular Music Problem was born with the rise of so-called “Jesus Music” in the 1970s (if you’ve seen the Jesus Revolution film you’ve got some context). Jesus Music became Contemporary Christian Music, and many in the established church in the United States decried the perceived nefarious influence of “pagan” music on a format formerly reserved for pipe organs and hymnals. For me, a teenager who appreciated hymns, CCM, and, well, the other stuff, this meant I received photocopied pages from a well-intentioned lady at my summer job, all about the Satanic messages in rock music. I felt I had a good understanding of my faith and a good head on my shoulders, and these diverse genres (the other stuff included) could coexist in my ears. I thanked the lady, read the articles, and made counterpoints in my head. I’ve been moved to worship by many secular songs, I thought. I’ve experienced a very basic joy of living through good music, regardless of its genre. And besides, I added, there’s U2. I became a fan of the Irish quartet when my big brother let me copy his cassette of War, U2’s third studio album. I loved the urgency in the music, born of punk rock, and the earnestness, born of a decidedly post-punk worldview. The pounding drums from the teenage-looking Larry Mullen, Jr. shook me in the same mystic way that pounding drums have shaken adolescent boys since the dawn of time, the same way that moves well-intentioned ladies to declare that rock is the devil’s music. The ringing, soaring guitars of the mysteriously-named Edge evoked an emotional response in a boy that did not yet read poetry—goodness, I barely read prose back then. But it was the lyrics that were the linchpin. Because—and this is essential—the lyrics were Christian. Rarely is such a swirl of emotion, spirituality, and nerve expressed in such real-time: in chiming electric guitar E-minor chords, in gentle autumnal piano, in a Latin praise chorus, and in an overflowing wail of weather-worn joy. Mark Geil It’s right there in what became the U2’s first breakout hit, “Sunday Bloody Sunday:” an invocation of the name of Jesus, and a juxtaposition of the victory of Easter Sunday with the Troubles of our own bloody Sundays. Whatever lingering inner conflict I carried from the nice lady at work or the preachers who anguished over the number of unbuttoned buttons on Amy Grant’s album covers, it all crumbled in the face of U2. The band became my unassailable counter-argument: the non-CCM, very mainstream, very loud, and very Christian case-in-point. What I did not know at the time was that the very same tensions I faced here in the US were happening for years as well over there in Ireland, and almost brought the dissolution of U2 long before War ever came to be. To hear the story in real-time, you have to listen to the band’s second album, the one that a lot of people overlook, October. * * * The making of October is the stuff of legend. The band’s proper debut, Boy, occupied a particular space that could not be replicated on a sophomore record: it was a first-person exploration of the end of adolescence. October, then, would have to chart new territory, and its creation would have to compete with the relentless touring of an Irish band trying to make a name for itself around the world. Two particular stories from that creative process stand out. Story One: The band that has improbably maintained its original lineup since 1976 actually broke up during the recording of and touring for October. While in high school, three members of the quartet had become part of a fellowship in Ireland called Shalom. As the band’s success grew, leaders of Shalom came to embody the “secular rock naysayers” of my own youth, and essentially gave the band an ultimatum: It’s either God or this rock music thing. At various times, Edge and Bono quit the band. Larry quit Shalom. U2, on occasion, ceased to exist. The band that I contend has been used by God as part of the faith journey of me and millions of others were dissolved for the perceived purpose of being used by God. Story Two: We’ve all experienced the lost file. You forget to hit “Save,” the computer crashes, and hours’ worth of paragraphs that feel like pieces of your soul are irreparably gone. That’s what happened (in analog form) to Bono. He’d been writing while touring and had a notebook full of lyrics for their next album when, at a tour stop in Portland, it went missing, presumably stolen from his dressing room, never recovered. Back home, the band convened at their former high school, trying to cobble together what was lost before entering the studio. There wasn’t much to go on when it was time to record the album. Bono recalls writing lyrics at the microphone, feeling the pressure of the ticking clock (and the studio rental fee of fifty pounds per hour). Combine these stories and you’ve found the DNA of October. The band has decided that reconciling art, calling, and vocation is possible, even in the world of post-punk music, and they’ve had to rather hastily find the words to express it. To borrow a lyric likely written at the microphone, the band asked, “Where do we go from here? Where to go?” The shouted, wailing answer? “To the foot of He who made me see. To the side of a hill—blood was spilled—we were filled with a love. Jerusalem.” Given all that, what does October actually sound like? It’s glorious. It’s a polished sort of raw, with producer Steve Lillywhite allowing unbridled rock power to coexist with ethereal layers in a way that befits the unfinished feel of the songs. The opener and most well-known track, “Gloria,” fades in. Who fades their album in? Side two opens with the sound of Edge tuning his guitar before Uilleann pipes take over. One song, “Scarlet,” had a single lyric, repeated thrice—“Rejoice”—sung not with raised hands and a Sunday morning smile, but with fortitude and intention. * * * I had a pastor for a time who incorporated a call for evangelism into every single sermon. No matter the topic of Biblical text, he would at some point use it—however tenuously—to motivate us to share our Christian faith with others. You might not say October is evangelistic by nature. While the lyrics do include lines like, “Oh Lord, If I had anything, anything at all, I’d give it to You,” nothing directly implores the listener to turn to Jesus. However, I contend that it’s more evangelistic than some of those sermon applications. People criticize Bono for his earnestness, which is easy to intermingle with hubris, but behind the sunglasses he is, and has at least always seemed, genuine. In his 1981 Hot Press review of the album, Neil McCormick wrote: “’October’ is a Christian LP. People will react to this fact in different ways: snide, disappointed, alienated, unconcerned, overtly happy. I accept it because at the core of U-2 is honesty.” There, on this wonderful album, are the tense realities of early adulthood and the conquer-the-world earnestness of adolescence, and an unabashed, perhaps naïve, determination willing to shout it all to anyone who might be wandering by—not necessarily to proselytize, but to simply express what is bubbling over inside. Few would list October as their favorite U2 album. It’s likely that casual U2 fans have never listened to it. If you look at the list of all the songs U2 has ever played live, only one song from October features in the top forty (“Gloria”). “Is That All?” has never been played live. But I love this record. Rarely is such a swirl of emotion, spirituality, and nerve expressed in such real-time: in chiming electric guitar E-minor chords, in gentle autumnal piano, in a Latin praise chorus, and in an overflowing wail of weather-worn joy. October is not U2’s best album, but U2 would not exist without it.

Just over a decade ago, I discovered the TV show Being Erica. In the heroine, I found a character who works through past regrets in order to move forward in her present life (by doing time-travel therapy, but that part doesn’t apply here). I was inspired by Erica’s career journey, first starting out as an editorial assistant at a major publisher, then moving on to start her own boutique publishing house with a friend. I never once suspected my own journey would even vaguely resemble Erica’s (minus the time-travel therapy). I’d gone to grad school with the idea of getting into publishing and doing more of my own writing. I was even eyeing editorial assistant jobs in New York as I hit the halfway point of my studies. That fall, I did a presentation on how a writer could submit work to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, the publisher of greats like Madeleine L’Engle, T.S. Eliot, and Flannery O’Connor, and dreamt of submitting my own work there—or maybe even being on the other side of the desk. By the time I graduated in May of 2009, every single point of my presentation from six months earlier was moot. The entire landscape of publishing had changed following the economic recession, and FSG was now a subsidiary of a larger company, no longer accepting submissions directly from authors. The same was true nearly everywhere, and with the consolidation of publishers came the disappearance of jobs. I didn’t go into publishing. I turned to another skill and found myself starting a career working in the non-profit communications world, becoming facile in writing web copy and emails and social media marketing. But the dream of Being Erica never really left me. The idea of helping good books make it out into the world continued to niggle at the back of my mind as I watched the detritus of the post-recession publishing industry collapse settle, and then reform itself in new ways. The new ways were interesting—niche genre publishers with the weight of a 25-year industry expert at the helm or low-overhead business models that shared profit with authors through immediate royalties rather than advances. There were so many new ways to make and release books into the world, and so many writers and readers for them. Some of the gates of the traditional publishing industry were knocked down by little upstart independent companies. The old ways were no longer the only ways, and over the course of a decade, a new publishing landscape—far more faceted than the old—developed. But here’s the thing. Erica didn’t start her company alone. She had a partner—a frenemy of sorts—who had skills Erica didn’t, and who brought her own experience to the table. The vague idea that formed in my brain somewhere in the 2010s that I could start a publishing company always found itself face to face with the reality that there was no way I could run a business alone. Also just over a decade ago, I discovered the Rabbit Room, and one of the greatest gifts I found in it was a new community. It was a community of people who not only enjoyed critically examining art and culture the way I did (like my friends in my AP classes in high school had) but also did so through the lens of biblical Christian faith (which I’d missed among those AP classes in my public school). Over the years I build relationships among the Rabbits and pursued creative endeavors with some. The key relationship that matters in this story was one that started in the old Rabbit Room website forums. Someone had set up regional connection points, and Rachel Donahue posted that she’d just landed back in the Charlotte, North Carolina area after living overseas and wondered if anyone else was nearby. She had just started writing and was looking for a connection. I lived 20 minutes away, and we were both headed to an Andy Gullahorn and Jill Phillips concert the next week. We met there, set up a coffee date, and by the end of telling each other our stories, we were fast friends. Both of us had been praying for what I call a “soul friend”—a kindred spirit, to use Anne Shirley’s terminology—and God answered our prayers in each other. Those who love what is Good, True, and Beautiful often love small things—and that’s who we’re making books for. Carolyn Givens Rachel and I began co-hosting quarterly writers’ brunches under the umbrella of an arts group here in the Charlotte area and through those I met Rachel’s sister-in-law Annie Beth, another writer. One Saturday morning our brunch was composed of five women who were all looking for a critique group—so we formed one. We started by reading Diana Glyer’s book Bandersnatch about how the Inklings influenced one another and shaped our writer’s group on the principles she explores in the book. For a year or so, we met monthly, reading our work to one another and giving feedback, drinking tea, and eating gluten-free snacks. And then the pandemic arrived. Those early months of 2020 were mostly consumed with each of us keeping our heads afloat. I was running the website for a church that had moved entirely online. Rachel was homeschooling half her kids and trying to manage digital kindergarten at the local elementary for another while the youngest found herself bored with only brothers to hang out with. One of the women in our group had a young baby and a husband finishing seminary. We didn’t move our group online. It was just too much. But when the seminary grad was called to a pastorate in the Midwest that summer, we knew we needed to meet one more time before our friend left. So, socially distanced in a hot garage with the door open and fans blowing on a North Carolina July day, we gathered for one last meeting of the Band of Bandersnatches. Rachel, Annie Beth, and I each had a work that was about ready for publication, and our conversation that afternoon turned to how we could support one another in the work. Perhaps we could all self-publish, we thought, but help market each other’s books. And at some point, either aloud or in my head, I pondered, “Bandersnatch Books would be a good name for a publishing company.” Like any good communications professional in the 21st century, I went home and bought the domain name and grabbed the social media handles that evening, and then wrote a long email to Rachel with a crazy idea: what if we started a publishing company together? We had skills that many of the areas of publishing beyond the writing—especially if Annie Beth joined in, too—and we knew so many writers with great work but none of those skills. Should we do it? Should we see if Annie Beth would want to be involved, too? I had no sooner pressed send on the email to Rachel than a text from Annie Beth came through, “Twitter just informed me my friend Bandersnatch Books has a profile. Are we starting a publishing company?” I forwarded her the email and got a nearly immediate response. Yes, we should do it. Yes, of course she should be involved. The journey of becoming Bandersnatch Books has been an adventure for all of us. Even with the skills we had, we found so much to learn. While Erica and her partner started out as frenemies and I began Bandersnatch with soul-friends, we still had to learn to work together well, to push each other forward and respect each other’s boundaries. We’re proud of the work we’ve done and the books that have found their way into the world through that work. We also each want to spend more time writing our own books, so we plan to slow down a bit next year. We’ve got dreams for the future, like a Classics set and a children’s poetry anthology, but we take every dream one step at a time. In our very first business meeting, Annie Beth pointed our attention to Zechariah 4:10, “Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin” (NLT). It’s a theme for us—a reminder that we’re committed to the treasures found off the beaten path, and those are sometimes small things. But those who love what is Good, True, and Beautiful often love small things—and that’s who we’re making books for.