There’s a character from The X-men, known simply as “Beast.” His name is actually Hank McCoy, and he was a public high school teacher before his beastly form took over and he had to take up residence at the Institute – a private school for teenage mutants. My oldest son, Sam, has several episodes from the cartoon version of this comic on DVD. (Yes, you can blame my husband for turning him into a comic book nerd at such a tender age). One of the episodes tells how Hank was permanently transformed into Beast. When he was just a teenager, he discovered his mutant power: a beast type person with incredible, hulk-like strength and power would emerge whenever Hank found himself in a tense or frustrating situation. When Hank’s rage subsided, he would resume his normal body. Why am I telling this story in the Rabbit Room? Because I am a regular person who sometimes morphs into a raging monster and finds herself in dire need of an intervention, just like the one in that final scene; and I have the distinct feeling I am not alone. I can totally see the shocked looks on all of your faces, but let’s pretend there are no church people watching or listening and I’ll share an example. There are days. When I’m exhausted from being up all night with my baby boy who refuses to sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time, and my oldest son brings home notes from his school teacher that make me feel like I’m raising a delinquent, and the little, middle, girl child (which is incidentally who I was) is playing alone in the corner cutting up tiny pieces of paper–and oh yeah, it’s dinner time and I don’t have anything cooking. Yeah, those days are not very nice around this house. And the volcano usually bursts a few minutes before my husband walks in the door.

That’s when I have to get alone and give myself a little pep talk. These are only feelings, Janna. This is not the real you. You love your kids. You don’t really want to trade lives with the blonde in the jaguar who sped past you in the Wal-Mart parking lot this morning. You’re just really tired. Tomorrow will be a better day … I promise.

And it usually is, especially when I reach out to other friends in my life who say even more things I need to hear. But since we’re being brutally honest, I’ve been know to have beastly moments on good days too. Days when I’ve had plenty of sleep, and my kids are well and playing nicely, but still need me enough that I don’t get to sit at the keyboard for an hour or so; that’s when the me-monster shows up, and my skin starts to feel a little furry yet again. It would certainly be nice if there really were a serum I could drink to make my beast disappear forever. I believe the apostle Paul was also hoping for a permanent cure when he kept asking God about that little thorn. I can’t speak for Paul’s answer, but what I’ve been learning is that “daily” can mean hourly, and “bread” is not just about physical nutrition. My spirit and soul need just as much food, every day, as my body does. So, like Hank, I am learning other practices to keep my beast at bay. I do not know any Shakespearean passages by heart, but I intentionally try to fill my life with artistry and beauty. Yes, prayer and scripture make the healthiest breakfasts, but sometimes it’s the song I hear in the afternoon that waters those seeds and helps them take root. Also, reading a good book, even if it’s only minutes at a time in the bathroom, goes a long way on a rough day. And soaking in the sunshine or the view from my back porch is like conditioning for a marathon. I’m not sure where the finish line is in this race of life, but I hope when I cross it, my transformation will be more than physical.

Derek Webb said a bad word. And the chaos has ensued. Of course, chaos is relative, so that might be overstating it a bit. But the blogosphere, if you will, certainly has picked up on the “controversy” and laid out its thoughts on one side or the other. Various sites post their reviews, their essays, their op-eds weighing in on both Derek’s use of the word s— on his new disc, Stockholm Syndrome, and its overarching themes of the church’s position on race and sexual orientation. As for me? I couldn’t care less. Let’s break this down quickly, because Webb’s formula is quite simple. As someone easily bored with a rebellious streak, he’s bound to create the music that he does. The inner child he describes as constantly getting into trouble, even into high school, is naturally geared to bring up the topic that everyone’s avoiding. And the evaporating musical interests lead him to jump from bluegrass to art rock to plaintive acoustics to lap-pop on Stockholm. And THAT is the beauty of Webb’s artistry. There’s no fancy flow chart in Webb’s house lining his home studio walls with himself on one side and the church on the other – with keen war-like strategies to take down the religious establishment. There’s no glorious campaigning to expose the wrongs of society. There’s no representative, six-foot-long spoon on the wall, reminding him to daily “stir the pot.” (That’s a bit ridiculous, I know). Instead, Derek Webb is a guy who has followed his heart and his talents without allowing fear to keep him from movement. And that’s taken him to this very place. If you think about things this way, that means Derek Webb is simply doing what he was created to do. And it’s not some self-prescribed notion of “changing the world” or some righteous quest to overturn the tables in the modern temple. It really is just about following the interior interests and passions and seeing what comes out – and then being unafraid to release those results because “someone might be offended.” Our churches are full of people afraid of that very last line. And instead of following Webb’s example and doing the same thing (not mimicking his artistry, but being unafraid ourselves to release what’s inside), it’s easier to stand and scoff or mock or start a debate. After all, if everyone is looking at Derek Webb then that distracts me from having to look at my own self. And, by default, we usually choose the safer, more secure option. But who really wants to think about all of that. After all, Derek Webb just said a bad word.

“Smoked pork chop, brined in tequila and chipotle, served with poblano skillet corn, haricot vert, and oaxacan molé.” So read the menu for the entreé I ordered last Friday night, while my friends enjoyed similarly delectable entrées. And yes, it was every bit as mouth-watering as it sounds, especially when paired with a glass of red wine. What was the occasion, you ask? We were on our way to see Julie and Julia following our dinner. And we realized it would be a bit obscene to eat at a fast food joint before seeing a movie that tells the story of someone trying to cook through Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,”–all five hundred and twenty-four recipes–in just one year. Meryl Streep is great as Julia Child, and many of the best scenes are her interactions with her husband, played by Stanley Tucci. And it may just inspire you, as it did for both me and my friends, to order your own copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But the point of this blog post is not to talk about the movie–I mean to spend more time talking about food. Just before heading out for dinner and the movie, my friend Clint and I drove a couple blocks away to another house in our neighborhood to pick up our weekly order from a local CSA—Community Supported Agriculture–grown by an Old Order Mennonite farmer in Kentucky. Every Friday afternoon, we get approximately a quarter bushel of fresh produce and split it between Clint and his wife, Anna, and myself (this week’s bounty pictured above). I’ve had friends telling me about how great the CSAs they’re a part of are for the last couple years, but it was watching the documentary Food, Inc. six weeks ago, about the state of the American food industry and the methods used to produce much of the food you find in your local supermarket, that finally provided the impetus to research those close to me and sign up for one. As Clint and I were leaving the theatre after watching Food, Inc., I mentioned that I owe much of my thinking about food to the writings of Wendell Berry, and as I’ve tried to explain to other friends in the following weeks why I think being mindful of what you eat is so important, I’ve found myself quoting longer and longer passages from him. Berry opens his essay, “The Pleasures of Eating,” from What Are People For?, by writing, “Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, “What can city people do?'” His answer? “Eat responsibly.” A central idea in Food, Inc. is that you vote three times a day about what kind of food you want and how it should be produced, how the workers involved in the harvesting and distribution of that food should be treated, etc. But does it really matter?  Why would we change our eating habits? So we have another way to feel superior to those not as “enlightened” as us? No; not for me, anyway.  I view eating locally–and by doing so supporting a local farmer instead of a faceless corporation, spending more time in the kitchen, and having more fresh food around that will go bad if I don’t have friends over to share it with–as all part of trying to live a more holistic lifestyle. In Berry’s aforementioned essay, he goes on to say this: “But if there is a food politics, there are also a food aesthetics and a food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics. Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. “Life is not very interesting,” we seem to have decided. “Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.” We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to “recreate” ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation– for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the “quality” of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world. One will find this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the advertisements of the food industry, in which food wears as much makeup as the actors. If one gained one’s whole knowledge of foods from these advertisements (as some presumably do), one would not know that the various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all come from the soil, or that they were produced by work. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.” It would be a transgression of the highest order to conclude a blog post about movies and food without mentioning Babette’s Feast, but instead of taking up more space here, let me point you to a recent essay by my friend Jeffrey Overstreet, written for Christianity Today Movies: Feasting on Film. Jeffrey begins by mentioning great scenes about food in a couple of films, including the scenes about a cup of hot coffee in Wings of Desire (one of my favorite films) and some highlights of Chocolat, before focusing on three of his favorites, Ratatouille, Sideways, and Babette’s Feast. It is, as with everything Jeffrey writes, well worth your time. Here’s the link. And to leave you with some practical advice: Eat responsibly.

Let there be rejoicing and CD buying in the streets, and in stores, and upon amorphous internet music-selling entities, for today marks the release of Eric Peters’s new album Chrome. Last year, Eric invoked a modern form of the old artist’s patronage system as an experimental way to manage the financial burden of going back into the studio.  He humbly asked those who believe in and love his music to make a small donation to offset to cost of the album’s production.  In return, his patrons received two copies of the album a few weeks early (one signed), and inclusion in the special thanks of the liner notes. In Eric Peters that faith is well-placed. His new album is a beautiful, fluid collection of songs about finding faith and hope amid the brokenness and heartbreak of everyday life.   Chrome (produced by the ubiquitous Ben Shive) is full of Eric’s catchy melodies, his vulnerable falsetto, and the wealth of insight he’s gained from his own struggles with issues like pain, doubt, and fatherhood. So Eric, as one of your many patrons, I want to say thank you. Job well done. If you readers didn’t get the chance offer your patronage at the beginning of the journey, I hope you’ll offer it now.  Head into the Rabbit Room Store, or over to Eric’s website and secure yourself a copy of a fantastic album.

This week, 119 years ago, master horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was born. Lovecraft believed imaginative fiction to be “art in its most essential sense.” While Lovecraft was an atheist, there are surprising commonalities between his own view of art and that of J.R.R. Tolkien, as brilliantly expounded by scholar Amy H. Sturgis in “New Shoggoth Chic: Why H.P. Lovecraft Now?“. Dr. Sturgis has a collection of Lovecraft links at her blog in honor of his birthday. Lovecraft can be difficult to get into at first. Dr. Sturgis gives some helpful tips for “Getting into the Lovecraft Zone.” Some recommended starting places, in my The Outsider,” “The Music of Erik Zahn,” “The Rats in the Walls,” and “The Colour Out of Space,” as well as the lengthier “The Haunter of the Dark” and the novella “At the Mountains of Madness” (del Toro has plans to make a film version of this, though I’m guessing The Hobbit has much delayed his original plans to have it done by 2010).  Lovecraft is best known for his Cthulhu stories, including “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” Our own Pete Peterson, you might remember, has been inspired by Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s view of supernatural horror in literature informed my analysis of the theme of Fear in the Harry Potter stories in chapter three of Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds. #HPLovecraft

I spent two weeks in July with my family up at my in-laws’ ranch up in the Peace River country of Alberta, about an hour from Dawson Creek, BC. My father-in-law came up to the Peace River and homesteaded with his dad at the the ripe age of seven years, back in 1929, to settle on this very spot. He speaks casually of trappers, of delivering mail by snowshoe, wild people, horse thieves, stolen cows, and hunting and tracking moose through hip-deep snow. At 85 he still cuts his own wood with a power saw, an expert log splitter. I’d only been there in December’s subzero temperatures for about ten years. Minus 40 isn’t pleasant. I remove my glove to take these kinds of pictures, and my fingers begin to go numb in less than a minute. But this was summer at 75 degrees. I saw things I hadn’t seen in ten years – a stern bald eagle standing at its nest, watching us, in a tall dead tree on the edge of the flat field above the river. My boy wanted to build a raft, so I gathered and sawed logs while he built a wickiup and my daughter sank her feet into the deep and squishy Peace River mud. The lake up on the next level was serene with floating deadwood and a beaver dam. The old log cabin, dating probably from the 1930s or 1940s, was overgrown and fallen in much more than I remembered. My son and I built a lean-to out of big poplar branches, spruce boughs, and twine. Tracks were all over the ranch – bear, moose, and beaver tracks at the river, wolf tracks out on Moonlight Canyon, and deer tracks everywhere. It is so still and serene there. God’s creation is; it’s just simply being itself. There is an immutable silence in nature that mere noise and activity can’t eradicate; the silence is always there under the noise, patiently waiting. On the ranch there is no noise. Out on Moonlight Canyon, or by the lake, or out on the big flat, the silence is tangible. It pours in your ears and digs deep into your soul, bringing forth things long forgotten. There is something I recovered there this summer, a boy I used to be, barefoot, fishing, swimming, or digging clay out of the hillside to make model dinosaurs. I lived a Huck Finn existence that was mostly lost when I turned thirteen and moved to middle class suburbia; playing music and escaping into books took Huck’s place, and life was never the same. Plenty of good things happened in my teens, of course; waterskiing trips, playing banjo and guitar, working at my Dad’s music store, and eventually bluegrass festivals, bands, and more. Without these things my life’s track would have been radically different. But Huck Finn, that kid who lived every day by dirt and creek and frog and catfish, he had to shut his eyes and sleep for the eighties and nineties and beyond. Something in us gets cooked by microwaves, drowned by iPods, blinded by laptops, a thing recovered outdoors in the cool morning air, in the heat of a sun that makes us feel so small but so alive.At the edge of a cliff, looking over an ancient river rolling for centuries to the sea, a truth in us wakes up. This inner truth is fed and watered by nature, by fresh air, by silence; technology and hustle-and-bustle and malls and traffic seem to starve it. There is an aspect of self-importance and self-absorption in modern life that is wonderfully crushed by nature. Hills and rivers and trees and grass make me feel so humbled and awed and yet significant; they’re immense and soulful, and artistic, God’s gift to man as a sign of His love. Something came alive in me during those two weeks that isn’t going away.

The big day has arrived. NORTH! OR BE EATEN is on the shelves. It took a year to write, and it clocked in at about 120,000 words. I wrote at home, on the road, and more than anywhere else at a coffee shop down the street. I read it aloud to my wife and children and took out the boring parts. I drew seven illustrations, two maps, and put the book through three edits. August 18 has been marked on my calendar for a long time, and it’s arrived at last. I Amazon or to the Rabbit Room Store and pick up a copy of North! Or Be Eaten. (The ones in the Rabbit Room are autographed, by the way, and you can buy books one and two for a deal, in case you aren’t caught up). You can also head to your local bookstore and pick it up (though I’d call before you made the trip, in case they don’t have any in yet). I hope you’ll find a comfy chair and a cup of coffee or curl up in the bunk bed with the kids and lose yourself in this story. But beware. The toothy cows are on the loose. As are the horned hounds, snickbuzzards, and Stranders. Thanks for supporting me and mine. Sincerely, AP P.S. Here are a few blurbs from some authors with impeccable literary taste: “Peterson deserves every literary prize for this fine book. It is obvious that his musical talents have been put to good use as his use of words, plot and narrative read like a well scored film script. A very fine book, by a very fine writer and future talent. Amazing – thrilling and well worth reading again and again.” –G. P. Taylor, New York Times best-selling author of Shadowmancer and The Dopple Ganger Chronicles “Toothy cows are very dangerous. Andrew Peterson convinced me and shivers run down my spine at the very thought of meeting a toothy cow face to face. The author spills characters like Podo and Nurgabog onto the page, then weaves a tale of danger that holds the reader captive. Believe me, you will relish being held captive by this master storyteller. But be sure you don’t get caught by the Stranders. Those people just ain’t civilized.” –Donita K. Paul, author of The Vanishing Sculptor “In a genre overrun by the gory and the grim, Peterson’s bite-sized chapters taste more like a stew of Gorey (Edward) and Grimm (the Brothers). North! Or Be Eaten is a welcome feast of levity–and clearly a labor of love. Andrew Peterson has awakened my inner eight-year-old, and that is a very good thing.” –Jeffrey Overstreet, author of Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight “An immensely clever tale from a wonderful storyteller – filled with great values and even greater adventure!” –Phil Vischer, creator of VeggieTales “Thrills, chills, spine-tingling mystery, and lots of smiles. It’s not easy to combine heart-pounding danger with gut-busting laughs and make it work, but Peterson pulls it off. For readers who want nonstop action infused with powerful, life-changing themes, North! Or Be Eaten is a must-read.” –Wayne Thomas Batson, best-selling author of The Door Within Trilogy, Isle of Swords and Isle of Fire “Andrew Peterson is a gifted storyteller, scene painter and wordsmith who takes you on a rollicking white-water ride of adventure. Readers of all ages are sure to find North! Or Be Eaten worthy of a big mug filled with a favorite beverage and a cozy nook near a crackling fire for hours on end. Here there be tales within yarns within stories. Listen, reader, bend your ear, but keep an eye peeled lest the dreaded Fangs of Dang be near!” –R. K. Mortenson, author of Landon Snow and The Auctor’s Riddle

So I was having a bad day. I woke up, for no apparent reason, at 5:30 in the morning, and my brain was already two hours ahead of my body. It was the kind of day that usually lands me in front of the mirror with a mental baseball bat. But on this day, I did not have the wisdom to walk away in defense. Instead, I moved in closer for a beat down. My arms would not reach up to fight, but remained stubbornly, helplessly at my sides. My face, totally unprotected from the oncoming head blow, narrowly dodged clear at the very last second, and I closed my eyes in relief. A minute or two passed and I gained strength enough to push away from the glass and head for the safety of my computer. I put my head down and got to work, hoping to shake off the shadows, but an hour later I found myself crying through the proofread because I hated every single letter on the screen. Not the time for happy, drummy rock bands, but certainly not come-to-Jesus-worship-time either. What’s left? How about a little Eric Peters? Yep, he might just do the trick today. Maybe he can silence the zombies in my head. So I popped in the disc, and was greeted by a catchy, familiar “Dooh dah do da doo, Dooh dah do da doo” beat. Followed by the words: One of these days I’m gonna shed my skin Become somebody who I might have been Look outside and jump right back in The very next day Of their own accord, my fingertips drummed the steering wheel, and the scene through my sunglasses grew brighter as I pulled out of the driveway. Scarce became the perfect soundtrack for that day, each song digging a little deeper to pull me out of my funk. And by the time I reached the restaurant, this human had seen the grace in the sky and was ready to point another in the direction of hope. My husband first tried to interest me in Eric’s music years ago, when he bought a Ridgely CD after seeing them in concert. I liked a song or two, but it connected more with John than me. Later, when Eric went solo, John kept tabs on him and would always tell me when a new album came out. The thing is–my husband always has something new for me to listen to. That’s what happens when you spend lots of time in a car alone, commuting to and from work. Conversely, what happens when you spend time driving a minivan filled with small children is that you never listen to said music, until you’re really ready. My readiness came last year in the form of a concert we held for the young married life groups at our church. John had recently joined the church staff and had the idea to bring Eric over for a show. I did not want to be totally clueless in the audience, so the week before, I listened to our CDs enough to know a few choruses. And the concert experience that night won me over. Imagine sitting in the same room you’d visited a hundred times as Kindergarten leader for children’s worship where you sang words like “higher, higher, higher, higher, higher, higher, lift Jesus higher,” and hearing a short guy in faded jeans and a plain white t-shirt sing “faith feels just like murder.” Not something you’re likely to walk away from without pause. But the way Eric delivers the line is what makes the impact last. Here’s a guy who writes melodies both the Beach Boys and James Taylor would envy, with meaningful lyrics to boot, whose demeanor and humility suggest someone sincerely seeking affirmation and encouragement. That’s not to say you feel sorry for him (you can’t help but admire a man brave enough to sing falsetto), it’s just that his presence on stage is a serious one, despite the jokes and jibes he makes. Perhaps it’s seeing the emotion he still shows for a song he must have sung a hundred times, and knowing it’s not contrived, that fills your tank equally with amazement and thankfulness. I left the concert that night determined to make time to get to know this music, and Eric, a little better. And the months of driving (and reading) time it took have certainly paid off. The content and honesty of songs like “The Maginot Line” and “Dust to Dust” impress me every time I hear them. While the sweetness and light of tunes like “Waterloo” and “You Can Be Yourself” help brighten the darker days of my life. The collection is more multifaceted than five CDs should allow, but for me, the best thing about Eric’s music is his questions. There’s a familiar saying: to get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. If the saying is true, then I believe Eric Peters has a head start on the rest of us. My favorite of his songs, “Kansas,” asks weighty ones like these: How deep is love? And how long and how wide? Can there be living, when we’re all dried up inside? Of course questions and struggles, though not often found in popular Christian music, are really nothing new. But rare is the seeker who can relate the answers God has given him in a lyric like this: A picket fence with a gate that freely swings wide Out here is Kansas where the groom takes his bride Nice, huh? Eric and I have exchanged a few e-mails over the last few months, and it seems to me he is as genuine as his music. Of course, the only way you can find out for sure is to invest some time (and maybe even money) in Eric Peters yourself. If you’re a regular Rabbit Roomer, you’ve probably read a pleasant little essay or two by Eric and are no doubt aware of his impressive vocabulary as well as his upcoming album release. For the rest of you out there, Eric’s new record is called Chrome and you can check out the cover art, as well as the rest of his music, at his main website, here. Eric has also detailed, with more than one fancy word, a bit of the recording process for this album on a blog located here. Oh yeah, and for the “already fan”s, be sure and leave some comment love for EP below.

The following was written for the Your Jesus is Too Safe blog tour. Thanks to Jared C. Wilson and Kregel Publications for a copy of the book to review. It seems fairly evident that the Christian faith is about Jesus. But that this is obvious doesn’t mean it’s not neglected or distorted. We are prone to place all sorts of other priorities above getting to know our Savior. As bad, we have a bent toward remaking him in our image. As Michael Card wrote, “We’ve made you in our image, so our faith’s idolatry.” Two books in the past have helped me get a better handle on how we read our culture into God, instead of bring God to our culture: Donald McCullough’s The Trivialization of God, and Erwin Lutzer’s Ten Lies About God. Jared C. Wilson’s book, Your Jesus is Too Safe, is a welcome addition to volumes that set our thinking straight about our faith, and it’s focused on Jesus. And that is the greatest value of this book: It sets our thinking right about Jesus in an age in which he’s been fit into every other mold we can think of, and there can be nothing more “relevant” to our culture than presenting the “not safe but good” Jesus. If Christians get Jesus wrong, we get everything else wrong. Every generation of Christians needs to know and love Jesus, and every generation has its own challenges and obstacles to doing that. Wilson’s book faces these obstacles head-on with chapter after chapter of lucid writing about Christ. The book lends itself very well to use in Sunday School classes or smaller group studies, and I can’t recommend it highly enough both for personal and group study. It’s the kind of edifying book about Christ that we all need. There is one, and only one complaint I have about the book, and it is very serious: In a footnote on page 51, he insults Alf. That is almost unforgivable. Apart from that heresy, you need to read this book.

Vincent van Gogh put the barrel of his pistol to his chest and pulled the trigger. Earnest Hemingway, three weeks shy of his 62nd birthday, used a shotgun and aimed about a foot higher.  Heroine and cocaine took Belushi and Farley.  It appears, at least in part, that small armies of sycophants with the power to prescribe presided over the waning moments of the lives of Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith and Elvis Presley. But you knew that, didn’t you. Truth is this world is filled with celebrity meltdowns.  Some huge.  Some you saw coming a mile away.  For others, the collapse hasn’t happened yet, but you know its only a matter of time. In this world, you can’t just be a celebrity.  You also have to be human living in a relational world.  And relationships are hard work. What broods beneath the surface of every public spectacle of self-destruction lies buried in all of us, like the plastic explosive C4–stable until the right charge sets it off.  Then, look out! There’s the man who quietly packs his bag and abandons his family because they aren’t fulfilling him as he thought they should. (He’s been thinking about this for over a year now.)  Or the woman who builds an artificial community through her online social network, logging hours each day checking and commenting on statuses and pictures, but never emerging from her home to speak to actual living souls.  Or the boy in the hoodie with his headphones. Or the mom who can’t help but see her kids as the thieves who stole away the best years of her life and can’t wait until they’re out of her house. What about you?  What are the reasons you want to blow up?  Or bolt?  How close have you come?  And under what refuge would you have to flee to make a clean break? Have you ever felt that maybe becoming a bomb specialist overseas would be easier than your current domestic gig? The Hurt Locker is a story about a group of specialists in Iraq charged with the job of diffusing improvised explosive devices (IED’s), often in broad daylight and quite possibly while the architect of the bomb in question looks on, casually fingering the disposable cell phone he married to the detonator in the specialist’s hands. Still, with no margin for error, the members of the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) squad volunteer for their work.  They sign up for it!  Would you? Jeremy Renner, the lead actor, gives an oscar-worthy performance as an ordinary civilian and glorious warrior who can’t figure out how to be both at the same time.  His work in Iraq is about one thing–diffusing bombs–and if he adds anything else to it, he’ll die.  His mission is clear and his work is suited to his skill-set and personality type.  People in authority over him are in awe and those beneath him are dumbfounded by how he could still be alive. He’s happy as a pig in mud. Technically, the film is riveting.  Borrowing from Roger Ebert quoting the Master of Suspense: “Hitchcock said when there’s a bomb under a table, and it explodes, that’s action. When we know the bomb is there, and the people at the table play cards, and it doesn’t explode, that’s suspense.” This film is about the game on the table. But it’s also about Van Gogh , Hemingway, Belushi, Farley, Jackson, Smith, Presley, the man leaving his family, the woman in isolation and the mother who quietly resents her children. It’s about public excellence and personal failure.  It’s about what it takes to detonate stability. The Hurt Locker is about how hard it is for so many of us to be about more than one thing at a time. Most of us, at some point or another, want to run.  We dress this urge up in our best rationales: no one understand us; we’re not appreciated for who we are or what we do; we’re not the same person we were before; we’re not being our “true selves” anymore.  For many of us, this comes when we’re chin deep in our vows before God and witnesses to have and to hold until death do us part. Or in parenthood. So we sit alone in our garages, at our desks, in our studios, or wherever thinking life is passing us by while we waste our formidable years chained to another person’s wants or needs. Life isn’t what we thought it would be.  Our work isn’t clear or suited to our skill set or personality type.  What we wouldn’t give for some det-cord–blow the whole thing to hell. We begin to think we’re losing our identity because that child or spouse or job seems to demand that we be about just one thing. But we dreamed we were going to be so much more. If this is you, here’s where you’re dead wrong.  No one is asking you to be just one thing.  They’re needing you to be more than one thing at a time–and some of it you’re not that good at.  The rock star butts up against the reality that every night unknown fans reach for him on stage, but his own daughter seems to just want mommy. The brooding writer easily enters the tunnel which takes her deep into the world of words, ideas and characters, but feels detached at the dinner table and gets uncomfortable and annoyed when asked about her day. The salesman lives for the pitch, knowing he’s prepared to do whatever it takes to hit it out of the park, but tries to spend as little time as possible tucking his own kids in so he can be done for the night and zone out to SportsCenter. The network specialist can’t fix his own leaky faucet, and wonders if his wife respects how hard he works as he dials the plumber’s number. Tragically, rather than deal with the inadequacy, many surrender to the temptation to just leave the hard stuff in favor of the glory.  The problem is the hard places are usually where our relationships attach. Jettison the hard stuff and what’s left?  Glory? _____________________ Full disclosure: I am going to Texas to visit my only brother Ryan next week so we can get some time together before he deploys for his second tour in Iraq.  The first time he went, his daughter Reagan (yep, named after the other Reagan) was a toddler.  She didn’t know what was happening then.  She barely understood the passing of time.  Now she cries most days because she doesn’t want her daddy to leave. And I don’t either. Please pray for them, for his wife Nancy, and for all our soldiers. Some don’t come home, but none come home unchanged. Pray for the soldiers coming home, that they’d love the home the return to.

Well, as if my asinine original post wasn’t inflicting enough stupidity on you, here’s an unlooked-for follow up. It’s sort of comforting, and sort of disturbing, to think that there are so many of you who have weird imaginations. I feel at home. In a weird home with weird people like me in it. You guys make me laugh. Also, I see many of you are brilliant namers of things. I might actually post a little blurb about my own novel sometime and ask for suggestions for names because you guys obviously can come up with some names. Also. It must be noted that while I judge this stiff competition of thousands of entrants I am listening to/sort of watching Beck on Austin City Limits. This is something I taped a few years back on a device called a VCR. Beck is weird. So is/are the Flaming Lips, who back him up. I love it. Now, to the competition. At stake, one hug and one autographed copy of my autograph –as promised. I have no idea how to fulfill this guarantee, but we’ll give it the old college try (the new college try never works). There were so many amazing entries. I assume getting a hug from me is like, one of the top things. Or you people just have pent-up brilliant silliness that is oozing out and you need a place to put it. I’m here for you. Note: I posted this here at the Rabbit Room and at my website, so I chose from the pool of both. OK, without further ado. Here’s the top five in descending order, along with some honorable mentions (though many more were hilarious). Honorable Mention: The Fancy Timepiece –Aaron Roughton An Unencumbered Beard -Matt C Breaching the Ordnung –Chad Ethridge So You Think You Can’t Dance –Russ Ramsey’s much cleverer wife 5. Hannah Yoder: Elf-Queen of Arcola –Rob “Highfive” Dunbar 4. Mennonite in Black –Aaron “The People’s Choice” Crossley 3. Love’s Light-Reflecting Triangle –Jessica “On the Medal Stand” Crossley 2. Obadiah’s Wormhole –Aaron “Bridesmaid” Roughton 1. Matthew Lapp and the Enchanted Hatband –Kevin “No Relation” Smith I ended up going with ones that truly had both the Amish and the Fantasy elements. Congrats to Kevin, get ready for that hug. And the writing sample. Also, just to update, Beck is now dancing while some guy follows him around with flashlights. “Bottles and cans and just clap your hands.” Fin. 8.10.09 11:50 PM

I read here and there about what publishers are publishing a lot of now. Those can sometimes be opportunities for despair. A down-side of a market-driven approach is that broad readership is not always the best indicator of quality. Though, to strike back at the snob in us, it’s not always an indication of tripe either. This book called The Lord of the Rings has sold a few copies. One of these popular categories for fiction these days is Amish Romance. You heard me: Amish. Romance. The Romance category in general mystifies me somewhat, and I have many memories of scoffing at the titles of some books of people I’ve been around–in ignorance, it must be admitted. Historical Romance was always a big hit with many ladies I knew growing up. Just make some combo of the following words and you can come up with a title. Love. Wind. Hope. Promise. Prairie. Softly. Gently. Whisper. Choice. Season. Did I already say Wind? Anyway, I think my sister was reading some Historical Romance one day when we were kids and I was making one of my usual forays into misnaming the book using some combination of the words above. And I got it right on. First try. Having never seen the book.  That was a happy day for me. I think my sister even laughed. I will allow that Fantasy probably sounds just as strange to people who don’t read it as Amish Romance sounds to me. Anyway, the point of this isn’t to alienate the entire reading public, but to announce my intention to almost totally cave to trendiness in publishing and yet hold on to something of my own inclinations. I am starting an Amish Fantasy series. Your mission? To help me name my first book. Best Amish Fantasy book title in the comments section gets a hug from me, and an autographed copy of my autograph (that’s right, I will autograph my autograph and give it to you). So help me out here. What’s a good name for the first in the series? Note: This post was not intended to be hurtful either to Amish people, Amish Romance readers (which apparently is everyone), or Fantasy readers, or the readers of the Lost Ark. The views in this post do not necessarily represent the opinion of the staff and management of the Rabbit Room, S.D. Smith, or any of his slush funds, shadow governments, or multinational corporations, or his chain of hot-dog stand/tanning beds.

THE ALLIANCE The farmer stood on the side of this hill Lord knows how many years ago, Before anyone ever heard of Normandy Or Iwo Jima or the Bridge Too Far. The man scratched his whiskery chin, Brushed a fly from the brim of his hat, And decided the cattle needed a pond. He ambushed the creek and raised a dam, Built a brick chimney that led to a heavy stone pipe Under the embankment, an overflow so the bravest Waters stood a chance at escape. Then he waited for rain. For years the deer and cattle drank here, The frogs and songbirds and waterbugs came And rested on the banks like tourists In the sun on summer vacation. But late one night, when no one was watching, The seeds on the dam broke open. Carefully upward they crept. Seedlings stretched tall like waking children. Before the farmer knew it, they were trees With deep roots, fingers in the earth That wrapped around the stone drainpipe Like a soldier grips a gun. One night, a storm descended. The bending trees on the dam grew bold, And squeezed till the pipe burst. The creek rejoiced and ran free. In the morning the cattle complained. The frogs and birds and waterbugs Packed their things and left. Catfish cooked in the mud. The elder waters gurgled their thanks To the trees on the dam, then nodded And ran home eventually to the sea, Where they wanted to go all along. The farmer, old now, woke to discover His work undone. “Hmm,” was all he said. The cows looked away to allow him his dignity. When it rains now, the pond fills partway Then drains away overnight, Young waters pausing to honor their forbears, Who bought their freedom. But the birds and the frogs and the fish and I Have been meeting in secret. The creek doesn’t know it yet, But the old trees are thirsty. ———————– There’s no deep meaning in this one, so don’t bother looking. There’s an old dry pond at the Warren, and whenever I sit in the woods I dream of repairing the dam and stocking the pond with catfish.

Vampires seem to be more popular than ever. Underworld, Twilight and True Blood are the newest expressions of the vampire story, and at this year’s Comic Con it was announced that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp will be reincarnating Dark Shadows in movie form after the Alice in Wonderland project is complete. The vampire is a great Gothic figure, if we consider Gothic literature as that which gives us stark images and symbols of fallen humanity. Having lost immortality in the Fall, the vampire is a picture of humanity seeking deathlessness by taking the blood of others – a stark contrast to the gospel, wherein Chris gave us deathlessness by letting others take his own blood. Three links might be of interest to the fan of vampires (via The Kibitzer): Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan: Why Vampires Never Die. This article takes a shot at explaining out love for the creepy immortals. The current vampire pandemic serves to remind us that we have no true jurisdiction over our bodies, our climate or our very souls. Monsters will always provide the possibility of mystery in our mundane “reality show” lives, hinting at a larger spiritual world; for if there are demons in our midst, there surely must be angels lurking nearby as well. In the vampire we find Eros and Thanatos fused together in archetypal embrace, spiraling through the ages, undying. Neil Gaiman explains that we’ve become over-saturated with them already, and it’s time for them to take a rest in the coffin for about 25 years. And here’s a list of vampire novels.

Here is a small excerpt from John Piper’s excellent book Don’t Waste Your Life (which you can read here for free, or buy here for a pittance) wherein he expresses thankfulness for Clive Staples Lewis and details some of the ways he has cleared a path for us all. I’ll only add that I vigorously concur, and that JP is among the very few men who rank with CSL for impact in my own life. -sam Someone introduced me to Lewis my freshman year with the book, Mere Christianity. For the next five or six years I was almost never without a Lewis book near at hand. I think that without his influence I would not have lived my lfe with as much joy or usefulness as I have. There are reasons for this. He has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valu¬able for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day I get most of my soul-food from centuries ago. I thank God for Lewis’s compelling demonstration of the obvious. He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively—even playful—imagination. He was a “romantic rationalist.” He combined things that almost every¬body today assumes are mutually exclusive: rationalism and poetry, cool logic and warm feeling, disciplined prose and free imagination. In shattering these old stereotypes, he freed me to think hard and to write poetry, to argue for the resurrection and compose hymns to Christ, to smash an argument and hug a friend, to demand a definition and use a metaphor. Lewis gave me an intense sense of the “realness” of things. The preciousness of this is hard to communicate. To wake up in the morning and be aware of the firmness of the mattress, the warmth of the sun’s rays, the sound of the clock ticking, the sheer being of things (“quiddity” as he calls it). He helped me become alive to life. He helped me see what is there in the world—things that, if we didn’t have, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He made me more alive to beauty. He put my soul on notice that there are daily wonders that will waken worship if I open my eyes. He shook my dozing soul and threw the cold water of reality in my face, so that life and God and heaven and hell broke into my world with glory and horror. He exposed the sophisticated intellectual opposition to objective being and objective value for the naked folly that it was. The philosophical king of my generation had no clothes on, and the writer of children’s books from Oxford had the courage to say so. You can’t go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transpar¬ent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to “see through” first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To “see through” all things is the same as not to see. (CSL) Oh, how much more could be said about the world as C. S. Lewis saw it and the way he spoke. He has his flaws, some of them serious. But I will never cease to thank God for this remark¬able man who came onto my path at the perfect moment. #CSLewis #DontWasteYourLife #JohnPiper

Rachelle Gardner, who runs a great blog called Rants and Ramblings (On Life as a Literary Agent), ran a post last week that I thought would fit in well here at the Rabbit Room. She graciously gave me permission to cross-post it but be sure to check out her blog as well (CBA-Ramblings.blogspot.com). Finding Truth in Unlikely Places by Rachelle Gardner How many Christians can deal with that? How many people can deal with that? One of the biggest themes on the program is secrets. Characters are always hiding things from each other – and often from themselves – but never without consequence. The pitfalls of secret-keeping and living a double life are made abundantly clear. Over and over the characters learn that it’s best to live in the light rather than the dark. Even though Desperate Housewives has a reputation for being raunchy (and parts of it definitely are), the themes are solidly on the side of good morals. Characters don’t have affairs without major negative repercussions. They don’t lie without it coming back to bite them. They don’t embezzle millions of dollars and then go on to enjoy living off the money. They don’t screw up as parents without learning their lessons and having broken hearts over it. The show consistently delivers the message that being married and having an intact family is better than divorce or promiscuous singlehood. It also repeatedly portrays the significance of the family in shaping children’s lives and futures. Most of all, the show is built on the friendships between these women, always coming back to the theme that we all need each other, we’re not meant to be alone. I was particularly impressed with the show’s handling of faith in a couple of the episodes. One of the housewives, Lynette, has no heritage of religion, but has been through countless traumas. One Sunday morning she suddenly decides, “We need to go to church!” She realizes she can no longer handle life on her own. She wants help, and she wants answers. What transpires is a funny but insightful series of attempts to find a church and find faith. Most of the other characters on the show are regular churchgoers; Lynette’s struggle exposes the roteness of this, and encourages at least one other character to examine her faith more deeply. Viewers see the difference between religion and real faith. We hear a minister explaining, “Faith is not about answers; it’s about the questions.” In the touching conclusion to one of the episodes, we see Lynette and another housewife sitting on the porch, heads together, sticky-note-laden Bible between them, deep in conversation. It gave me chills to watch it. This writing comes from the “secular” world but reinforces that the divisions we Christians create between “religious” and “secular” are artificial. Here are some of the things I’ve been pondering while watching Desperate Housewives: 1. Christians may rob themselves of potentially life-altering insights (and possibly some worthwhile entertainment) when they try to insulate themselves from the secular world of art, television, movies, and books. 2. As writers, we should be paying attention to the best writing wherever we can find it – television, books, movies – and examining how and why it works. 3. As writers, we can’t be afraid of the truth. Sometimes it feels too messy for Christian writing. Sometimes it may seem too dark. But we must grapple with human experience as it actually exists, not as we wish it were. That’s where our best writing will come from. 4. We might shake our heads at the portrayal of upscale, spoiled housewives as desperate. But that’s the point of the show. The outer trappings of our lives are unimportant; inside, we’re all humans, we all struggle with faith and friendship and marriage and living lives of integrity. In our quiet moments, every single one of us has moments where we feel desperate. (If you haven’t yet, perhaps you are not old enough or have not experienced enough of life’s hardship.) 5. Finally, as Christians, it’s important to be discerning about what kinds of entertainment we allow into our lives. But we need to be careful that our discernment doesn’t turn into fear. We can’t be afraid of the world. God has a way of making Himself seen and known in the most unlikely places. So what about you? Found any spiritual truths in unlikely places lately? I’d love to hear about it.

Do people everywhere say they covet prayers? I have heard a thousand people say that they coveted my prayers, or the prayers of everyone. I’m glad there’s nothing in the Bible against coveting your neighbor’s prayers, because man would we need a lot of repentance in the south. Do not be deceived, people of the listening audience; this post is all about the craft of writing (or singing, clogging, etc.) and not about prayer coveting. But is there a parallel in the world of writing? Let’s force one through, shall we? You shall not covet your neighbor’s writing? OK. Let’s go with that, I guess. I usually chafe a little beneath the bridle of our popular culture’s religion of selfish rebellion, with all its focus on originality and uniquity. Uniquity is defined (by me -because I think I just invented it –original!) as a sinful preoccupation with your own uniqueness. Witness the fad of denying the sufficiency and inerrancy of the Scriptures and the rush to express and encourage private, personal, non-binding, accommodating, and feckless meanings (which just happen to be fashionable). But it can also be a humble approach to aim to express your own gifts. If we see them as that –gifts- then we should not be tempted to take too much credit for them. Nor will we be too surprised when the way we express ourselves as writers (or painters, or banjo pickers) is different from others. Maybe we’ll also be better prepared for criticism. Bonus. Imitation, they say, is the highest form of flattery and I’m sure there are cases when it’s appropriate. But if you are a gifted writer, then be yourself. We do not need another C.S. Lewis. If we did, he would still be here. But we might need you. Clones are boring. In my youth (and adulthood as well) my wise father frequently quoted from that great fount of philosophical wonder –the Tooter the Turtle cartoon. In this show’s conclusion Mister Wizard would invariably remind young Tooter that his desire to be someone else (a knight, a baseball star, etc.) was misplaced.  He argued for contentment, and his exhortation to use your own gifts and be your own self is folk wisdom in a grand, glorious gulp. “Always, always I tell you, Tootor. Be just what you is, not what you is not. Folks what do this has the happiest lot.” Sounds good to me. Now, about actually doing it…

“I don’t want to analyze a story. I don’t want to find hidden meaning. I just want to escape from the real world for a bit.” I’m guessing you’ve either heard some variation of those words or said them yourself. Books are for “escaping.” Stories are for entertainment value. A page-turner is all we want – something that will help us to “veg out,” to leave the day behind. Authors: Mindless Entertainers, or Careful Artists? I can’t begrudge someone entertainment. I like entertainment. I watch a few TV shows just for the mindlessness, and I watch others because they make me think. But a line often gets crossed in this type of thinking, which goes something like this: “Authors don’t have imaginative keys to their works. They’re not keeping secrets. You’re just looking for a ‘Da Vinci Code’ or something. You’re looking for some secret gnostic meaning.” The reason I think this crosses a line is that the one who quickly dismisses, out-of-hand, that books have deeper levels of meaning, claiming that authors just writing exciting books for the profit and fun of it all, is insulting the craft of writing. Why is it the default assumption that authors don’t have imaginative keys to their work?  Why is the author, by default, put in the role of mindless entertainer, instead of careful artist? Escape to More Permanent Things The real “gnosticism” in this discussion is not the artist who builds a story on an imaginative key, but one who thinks that books provide some “escape” from the “real world,” and that this escape is a good thing. Tolkien wrote, Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? For Tolkien, the pejorative use of “escapism” was married to the false belief that current trends define Real Life – the electric street lamp, for example, is nowhere near as permanent as Lightning. But most of us know more about the lamp, because it’s more relevant to our daily existence. The fairy-tale takes us to the lightning, the “more permanent thing.” This also answers the person who thinks that escape is simply a mindless, page-turning getaway, a vacation in your own armchair. The Escape is most certainly a delight, a joy, and a “break” from the daily mundane activities of life, as well as the more prison-like aspects of our existence. But it is an Escape that puts us in contact with themes and symbols and a cohesive, magical world from which we should not return unchanged for the better. And if this is what Escape is, why would the careful artist not deliberately choose her imaginative key, what Michael Ward calls the kappa (or secret) element? Tolkien believed that the true escapist, or the “fugitive spirit,” will be drawn by the “oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death.” This “Escape from Death” is at the heart of the best books – the ones that stir our hearts, give us deeper understanding of our pain, and glimpses of joy to come. Adapted from the post “Escape Into the Perilous Realm,” which applies these thoughts to J.K. Rowling’s books.

I just finished Roald Dahl’s short autobiography Boy: Tales of Childhood, which was a fine gift from Russ Ramsey last time I saw him. I closed the book with a greater belief than ever in the work God has given me. In the last chapter, after Dahl tells the story of his funny, delightful, and often painful childhood, he says that he worked for a few years as a businessman. “I enjoyed it, I really did. I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do.  The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman.  The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer.” I wasn’t expecting to read a paragraph that encouraging when I started this book. I suspect a businessman would read that paragraph and wonder what all the fuss is about. It might sound awfully like complaining. But it isn’t. I sighed a weary, happy sigh because Dahl assured me I’m not as crazy or as wimpy as I’m afraid I am. The same can be said for songwriting too. God has arranged the process (for me, at least) in such a way that after every song is complete, I get amnesia. I think, in the fast-fading thrill of having written a song, that I’ve finally unlocked the secret formula, discovered the missing number, solved the timeless mystery of how to write a song. I have answered for myself the question of whether the music or the lyrics come first! And the answer is–er, wait, I had it a second ago. What was it again? And it’s gone. Even as the last note fades to silence, amnesia sets in. I can’t remember how it works. So the next time I pick up the guitar or open the notebook, I do so with fear and trembling, unsure how to proceed. It’s a wonder anything ever gets written. It made me wonder, why did he write at all? Dahl confesses a disbelief in God based mostly on his abuse at the hands of several wicked men of the Church–and it’s hard to blame him. It’s struggle enough to believe, even without a priest beating you with a cane. Then why did he suffer the long toil of the written word? Where did that urge come from? That he wrote books for children makes me think that the suffering of his own youth softened his heart toward the young. Perhaps he hoped to give them some light, some escape, some comfort in their own fear. He was beaten by wretched men at boarding schools, made to bleed, made to grab his ankles and weep while they hit him, sometimes while the Headmaster quoted Scripture. It’s fascinating that this poor boy grew into a tough man who would work to spin fantastical stories for children. I’ve never been a big fan of his stories, though I do appreciate his whimsy. But in this book especially his descriptions of people and of the beauties and horrors of his childhood were vivid. Dahl remembered what it was like to be a little boy. And he remembered that it is terrifying. It reminded me how vital it is that Christians bend low and speak tenderly to the children in our lives. These boys and girls at our churches, in our schools, down the street, are living a harrowing adventure. Every one of them falls into one of two categories: wounded, or soon-to-be-wounded. The depth and nature of those wounds will vary, but they’re all malleable souls in a world clanging with hammer blows. The bigger they get, the easier the target. I get a lump in my throat every night I sing “After the Last Tear Falls” (which I co-wrote with Andrew Osenga), when I get to his line, “After the last young girl’s innocence is stolen…there is love.” It’s because I’m certain there are people in the audience for whom that line must bring a terrible memory. I sing the final chorus with all the ache I can muster because I want them to believe that love outlives all the pain that ever was. Those of us who write, who sing, who paint, must remember that to a child a song may glow like a nightlight in a scary bedroom. It may be the only thing holding back the monsters. That story may be the only beautiful, true thing that makes it through all the ugliness of a little girl’s world to rest in her secret heart. May we take that seriously. It is our job, it is our ministry, it is the sword we swing in the Kingdom, to remind children that the good guys win, that the stories are true, and that a fool’s hope may be the best kind.

In the first part (which has Latin in the title, and which you can read here, even here, I say) of this random, semi-coherent series about why I write fiction I made an inexhaustive effort to answer a basic question of legitimacy in the minds of some folks I come across (usually with good intentions) who are afraid fiction is at best a waste of time, and at worst an evil distraction from truth. I think I also took a firm stance against run-on sentences. Having thus preached to the choir, I continue on with the following answer to the titular question. Why do I write fiction? Because I love and believe in the value of stories as powerful means of expressing the deeply human. Francis Schaeffer talked a lot about the importance of seeing “man as man,” and “the mannishness of man.” I think there is almost always a quality in the things we find in creation that can be explored and displayed as intended and that this will almost always be a good thing. We must remember, as Lewis has reminded us, that God invents and the Enemy perverts. Things were made right, but were subject to corruption because of our father Adam’s sin. So there is a proclivity toward sin in what we do. Things are messed up. When things become perverted, bent and twisted we are certainly in trouble. But the bentness of most art we are presented with does not argue convincingly against the joys of sub-creation. I feel a great passion to see the “thingness of things.” So I write partly in an effort to do a thing well. Whether I am successful in this pursuit might be irrelevant to the validity of the point. I think it’s a worthy goal. I believe in common grace. I can think of many experiences I have had in receiving art where I was able to look past the artists to the Creator who made and gifted them. Frequently these folks cannot seem to turn around themselves –for a million reasonless, suicidal reasons. But their art speaks to the beauty realizable in the world God made. Nothing makes sense without a world God created -not reason, or beauty, or love. Are these gifted and witless artist’s efforts often so bent that they are not worth seeing, and are actually harmful? Some will argue this, but I think that “Of course” is the obvious response. Without wandering into the murky grey of where to draw lines (which we all do, somewhere), I want to focus on the question. I write to express joy, to display beauty, to invoke laughter, to inspire truthful thoughts, and many other things. These can perhaps best be summarized this way. I want to tell stories that resonate with people on a level which invokes a proper sensibility toward God and the world God made. I write because people are hilarious, because pride is universal and destructive, because there is something around the corner to surprise. (It may be death, or light, love, or destruction.) I write because the Christian story is so comprehensive, coherent, and beyond belief. I write because God is sovereign and profoundly good; because I am grateful, because I am made in his image, because I am struggling with the bentness of things in myself and in my culture.  I write to relieve and direct pain, to be precise, to say enigmatically what is inscrutable. I write to say that there is that which is inscrutable and that which is so plain it takes years of deluding education to confuse us about it.  I write to belly laugh at that kind of folly. I write because this is my Father’s world. I write for the thingness of things. I write for the mannishness of man. I write for the glory of God and service of my fellow man. Frequently I think and write things that are very stupid. Maybe this is one of those times. I’d love to hear what you think. I think of this kind of post as more of a foray into unsettled territory and less of a definitive, final analysis. Be patient with me -I am learning here. So if you have suggestions for improvements, or contradictions, or a good recipe for chicken salad, please do us all the honor of speaking up. Wait, I need to add some Latin for effect. OK, here goes: barba tenus sapientes. Referring to mineself, of course.

A few years back, some friends–Boris and Martha–asked me to give the charge at their wedding. Here’s part of what I said… The old wedding ceremony from the Book of Common Prayer says that Christ “adorned and beautified” marriage “with his presence and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee.” You know that story. The wine had given out, so Jesus turned six big stone pots full of water into wine. A hundred gallons of wine. When they served it out, the guests were astonished—not because Christ had turned water into wine (they didn’t know that), but because it was better than the wine the host had served first. The steward marveled, “But thou hast kept the good wine until now.” Richard Wilbur wrote a poem about that miracle. It was a wedding toast for his son and daughter-in-law, and the two middle stanzas go like this: It made no earthly sense, except to show How whatsoever love elects to bless Brims with a sweet excess That can without depletion overflow. Which is to say that what love sees is true, That the world’s fullness is not made, but found. Life hungers to abound, And pour its plenty out for such as you. In one sense, the miracle at Cana isn’t as outlandish as it seems. God turns water into wine every day. I’m not speaking metaphorically here. I’m speaking as literally as I know how to speak. The rain falls to the earth by God’s grace, and it travels up the vine to plump the grape. And then, by some process that none of us understands, the drop of rain is translated into a drop of wine, that maketh the heart glad. The miracle at Cana is a picture of God doing what he does all the time. And yet, there’s no mistaking that on that wedding day, the grace of God was multiplied to an extravagant, an almost embarrassing degree. A hundred gallons of good wine! And the deliberate, sometimes slow process by which God blesses was foreshortened into a single, transformative moment. *** I heard about a man in Nashville who had the floor of his study covered in Moroccan leather. Can you even imagine that kind of extravagance, that kind of luxury? The very ground the man walks on is Moroccan leather! But it’s no more extravagant than what the two of you are doing. By taking the vows you’re about to take, you’re declaring that the very foundation of your life together is a promise more precious than any Moroccan leather. The ground that you walk on, the roof over your heads, the walls that surround you—the raw material for all of it is a love that is both rich and enriching. It’s an embarrassment of riches. If you don’t believe that—if that sounds like gross hyperbole—then what are you doing here? Why are you standing here in front of God and everybody, putting all your eggs in this one basket? “Forsaking all others.” Why would you do that, unless you really believed you were moving from glory unto glory—from good water to a hundred gallons of good wine. No, you must believe it. Martha, Boris, I don’t know what you deserve. You don’t either, by the way. But if marriage has taught me anything, it has taught me how little deserving has to do with it. Love is a kind of grace: the worthiness of its object is never what matters. No, worthiness is a poor basis for love. Rather, the worth of the beloved is revealed in the mere fact of being loved. Ahead of you stretches a whole lifetime of learning what it was that made you love one another. Maybe you think you know already. If you do, you’re the exception. None of us knows what lies ahead. I don’t know what kind of trouble and heartache lie ahead for me. But I know there’s a balm. And she’s the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning, the last thing I see before I go to sleep at night. That is an astonishing thing to think about. If life offers any richer blessing this side of heaven, I surely don’t know what it is. By standing here and taking the vows you’re about to take, the two of you are putting yourselves in a position to lay hold of more happiness than you deserve. Not everybody gets that chance. Plenty of people have the chance and they blow it. So here’s my charge to you: Live in the grace you’ve been given. There’s not much hope for a person who won’t live in the grace he’s been given. “Life hungers to abound / And pour its plenty out for such as you.” But life doesn’t usually force its plenty down your throat. If you would rather have your own way than be happy, life doesn’t mind shrugging its shoulders and saying, “Okay, have it your way.” Martha, Boris, I hope you won’t clutch so tightly to your own agenda, your own idea of the way your life ought to be, that you don’t have a free hand to scoop up the blessings that are being poured at your feet. Marriage is a state of grace. And it’s a great mystery. And Christ adorned and beautified by  his presence and first miracle that he wrought at Cana of Galilee—by turning good water into good wine, that maketh the heart glad.

It’s poker night. It’s 9pm and several of my friends are upstairs having a great time.I imagine there’s at least one cigar being smoked, a few potent potables sitting around on coasters, and a good deal of laughter. Meanwhile, I’m at the kitchen table with my laptop, it’s quiet, I’m alone, and I’m writing. There’s a big part of me that would much rather be upstairs. I’ve heard a lot of accusations in the last few months that I’m antisocial because I don’t go out to fellowship with the other guys very often and instead choose to spend those evening hours writing. It’s not a matter of being antisocial, though. It’s a matter of self-discipline. Whether the subject is Bill Gates working on computers for hours a day as a young boy, or Mozart composing a wealth of mediocrity before ever writing a timeless note, the story is that they’ve all done their time. Success at a skill requires practice and persistence and a minimum of ten thousand hours before you can expect to see the fruit of your labor. That got me thinking that I spend every minute of the day getting better at something. If I’m brushing my teeth for two minutes, I’m getting more efficient at it. If I’m building a table for three hours in the afternoon, I’m learning how to be a better carpenter. If I’m sitting on the couch watching TV, I’m getting better at doing that too. So what is it, I ask myself, that I really want to get better at doing, and why am I not doing that instead of practicing my channel surfing form. So every evening when I get home from the day job, it’s time to get to work doing what counts. It’s time to write. It’s time to get better at what I love to do. It’s time to tick off a few more of those ten thousand hours. The side effect is that the people around me have come to expect it of me just as much as I expect it of myself. Sometimes that expectation comes in the form of an encouragement or a reminder, but more often it comes in the shape of an accusation that I’m being antisocial. So be it. That’s something I can live with.I’m willing to let my poker skills wane in the short term because I’m betting my chips on the future.I’m refining my skills, I’m defining myself in my true occupation, I’m challenging myself, I’m creating something that I believe has an intrinsic worth far beyond that of an evening on the town. So here I sit, metaphorical pen in hand, practicing my craft and watching the hands on the clock tick ever closer to the hour of mastery.

My family regularly attends children’s storytime at the Nashville Public Library where Library Pete, The Professor, and Mary Mary regale attendees with stories, rainbow drawings, singing, and the continuing puppet adventures of Cedric the Dragon, Spanish Fox, JJ the Lamb, and Tommy Dog. Beyond all the puppeteering aimed at the kids, though, the proceedings are layered with witty banter intended for the parents as well. I like this. At one point, the Professor juggles colorful rings while singing a song and Ellis, our oldest boy, immediately took to this.  He returned home to find a frisbee-like juggling ring of his own and promptly informed us that he was the “perfeshor”, complete with the final act of placing the ring on his head all crown-like. Once we picked up on what he was doing and saying (he still spoke Babel-like at the time), we were astonished at what a one-and-a-half year old was able to comprehend and retain. Since I’m anxious to relate to — and impress — my son, my wife gave me a juggling set for Christmas, complete with a how-to guide, colorful practice handkerchiefs, and three beanbags. I took up the challenge and quickly advanced to a daily regimen of juggling (by which I mean repeatedly dropping) beanbags.  With a few minutes of practice each morning, I slowly got the hang of it. At the very least, I can keep the three balls moving through the air in something resembling a circle, if only for a few seconds at a time (a veritable eon, in the hands of a novice). The best part is that Ellis excitedly joins me by throwing around the “han-ker-chips”, as he calls them, in playful mimicry. This, I truly enjoy. The same monotonous repetition required to learn a new skill is currently swamping my life. My ever-present acedia wants nothing to do with the “rinse, clean, repeat” cycle of being an exhausted and exasperated father of two very young children. You parents will, no doubt, understand these mundane rigors. I become apathy at its personified best — or worst. I wake in the early morning and glance in the mirror at the bags under my reddened eyes and realize, with grudging acceptance, that this day will likely be as utterly predictable as the one before.  It will be no less riddled with repetition than either yesterday was or tomorrow is likely to be.  It is a drug of drudgery that hardly elicits an “hurrah” from the shambles of my spirit. Wake me up when today is over, I grumble. And so it goes with acedia, that devil-god laying claim to my shoulder, neighbor to the self-righteous chip. Repetition surrounds me the way a rolled-up rug encases a poor soul run afoul of the mafia. Though I wiggle, squirm and fight, I cannot escape. I imagine there is an abundance of beauty and living art in our daily monotony, as Kathleen Norris observes in her insightful book, Acedia & Me, but I have yet to discover anything abundant in it save frustration, or anything lively save my own resistance. Practice and repetition are neither glorifying nor pleasurable, just ask any athlete. But perhaps the glory is never meant for the individual doing the repeating. Like juggling, it holds less enjoyment than frustration for me, the practitioner, but its greater fame is that of bringing something pleasant to the beholder, to those who witness the feat. In the case of my learning to juggle, my son invariably grins and seeks to mimic the act with the aforementioned handkerchiefs. Glory be, we learn together. I find myself, perhaps foolishly, selfishly and naively, wishing the current days away as if they were curses instead of blessings. Longing for what I don’t have is classic covetousness. It is a blanket of ingratitude that is all too human in its near-sightedness. As my pastor has been hammering into my head the past few weeks, we revel in the unseen promise of tomorrow at the cost of today’s grace and beauty, we give testimony to the revelation of things to come, and curse our proclivities for mistrust and false identities which have become “normal” or “everyday” in our hearts. In the ordinary, monotonous, and acedia-ravaged days to come I hope to pray a more perfect prayer.  May repetition be the means through which God, in his ironic clearinghouse style, continually unveils our daily need of Him. May Self surrender to that ever-unchanging will. May rote rehearsal reveal glory in the gift of every new day.  And may my beloved son see grace in the hands of a fumbling juggler.

C.S. Lewis famously warned us of the dangers of chronological snobbery, and he is right on. My own snobbery begins in my mind with this sentence, “I used to…” I try to stop it from coming out of my mouth, but don’t always succeed. Of course I want it stopped in my heart, and don’t want to be satisfied with merely not saying the wrong thing (contrary to our cultural dogma, social skills do not cause sinlessness). There is of course a sense in which a believer being sanctified by the Holy Spirit will be changing and so “I used to…” will not be an uncommon thought. But we must guard against the encroachment of self-righteousness. We must believe the actual Gospel, not Christ-languaged Moralism. We all strain against the fact that we have nothing to offer God but empty hands and a cry for help. The surrender is the victory. This is a pitfall for which artists seem to have a particular proclivity. Snobbery should be something we despise, not an avenue by which we despise others.

While I was on vacation I got an email from my editor and sat back to consider it with suspicion.  I was worried that it might contain good news and let’s face it, nothing is worse than good news.  Allow me to explain. It’s easy to look around and find ten people to read your work and tell you it’s wonderful, or gosh-wow great, or really, really nice but none of that is terribly useful.  On the other hand, try to find ten people to give you a thoughtful critique and offer suggestions on how to improve your manuscript.  The latter is the more difficult feat by far. One way to find good criticism is a regular writer’s group.  I try to meet with a small group of other writer’s whenever I’m home in Nashville.  I’ve unofficially dubbed us The Rabbit Room Writers’ Fellowship for the sole purpose of getting the library to let us meet in their conference room.  We’ve met probably half a dozen times over the last year and those few, small gatherings have been a well-spring of wisdom and learning for me.  The thing that makes it work is that we know each other and respect each other enough that we don’t need to pull punches.  If I write something that doesn’t work, they will tell me.  That’s a valuable thing. When I made the decision to publish The Fiddler’s Gun independently I was confronted with the reality that I wouldn’t have the benefit of a team of editors and copy-editors poring over my manuscript deep into the night to ferret out every misplaced comma, character inconsistency, and thematic indulgence.  Instead, the responsibility was all mine.  So I screamed in panic and hired a freelance editor. Kate (my editor) and I had already known each other for some time and I knew something of her work and trusted her editorial eye.  But once I had hired her I began to worry that I’d receive her edit and see something happy and terrible like, “It was really great! Don’t change a thing!” And thus did I eye her email with trepidation and suspicion. I squinted at the screen as I read it and then let out a long slow sigh of relief.  She hates it!  Hallelujah!  She hates it!  Okay, I exaggerate.  There was no hate.  She did however explain that she was working her way through the manuscript and offered a detailed critique of several thematic issues and plot points that she wished me to consider (or reconsider) while she continued her work. Even though I didn’t agree with all of her points, I couldn’t have been happier with her feedback.  Since then I’ve been chewing over things in my brain and working on how to solve the issues she brought up.  I’ve always felt that no matter how strongly I feel about my writing that I have no business arguing with a trusted reader.  The reader is the boss and if the boss isn’t happy then I need to change something.  So even though my initial reactions to some of Kate’s ideas were defensive, the more I think about them, the more I feel she’s probably right on the money. An objective critique is a valuable thing, especially when it hurts to hear.  I have no doubt that I’ve learned more about the craft of writing from painful criticism than I ever have from praise and compliment.  The former makes me want to do better, the latter makes me think maybe I’m good enough.  It’s easy to see which of those feelings is more productive. If you’re interested in how the book is coming along, be sure to check out the website at TheFiddlersGun.com.