Light for the Lost Boy received two Dove Award nominations. Congratulations, Andrew! Don’t let Kanye steal your mic.

Each summer she descended like a migratory goddess—rare, hard to catch, easy on the eyes. During the school year, she lived in Panama City, Florida, but each summer she arrived in Baton Rouge to visit her dad on Ridgely Road four houses down from mine. In the eyes of us neighborhood boys, Gwen was a goddess, and regardless of the girlfriend situation at the time, a crush on Gwen inevitably superseded any other. We were red-blooded adolescent boys, always thinking of this and that—mostly that—each vying for the attention of a girl, any girl. As go the minds and assumptions of the male kingdom, we supposed that bravado, toned muscles, and tan skin were surely the qualities to win a girl over. As the gods or fate would have it, Gwen seemed to favor me and my brother, with whom I secretly competed for her attention and the chance to hold her hand. I hoped that my adeptness at sports, occasional attempts at humor, and feathered hair would be enough to tip the scales my way. In truth, there was no competition; I was outgunned by my year younger brother. My brother was outgoing, brash, boisterous, perpetually golden-tanned, and full of muscles. He made friends easily, put people at ease, was wild and brave. I was the older sibling, cautious, dependable, eerily quiet, pensive, painfully shy, physically unimpressive. My brother played on motorcycles. I played golf. He got concussions. I got tongue thrust orthodontics. He took out engines. I took out the trash on his trash day. And every Friday, whether it was my turn to or not, I mowed the lawn because I could not bear the sight of my brother’s gangly attempts at lawn work. One of those puppy-love summers, a popular radio song was “No One Is To Blame” by ’80s synth star, Howard Jones. In it, the writer lists example after example of wanting something, being so close to it, but not being allowed to have it. Sitting on the street curb late one night talking with my friends, listening to this song on the boombox, I took the chorus to heart: “And you want her / And she wants you / No one ever is to blame.” Like a good song ought, it rang true, resonating, giving voice and words to an inarticulate soul. One summer, Gwen did not make her annual trek to the neighborhood. We never heard from or saw her again. Instead, we were forced to redirect our attentions to mere mortal maidens, which, of course, was really no trouble at all for pubescent boys. Perhaps the lures of Florida panhandle beaches were louder sirens than those of land-locked Baton Rouge, perhaps a boyfriend gained Gwen’s attention, or perhaps her parents ceased the visits. Whatever the reason, despite infatuations and summer crushes, even gods and goddesses fall to earth, and fate must be what it is. In the end, Gwen chose neither me nor my brother, but the song that has since become the soundtrack for that youthful season of my life chose me out of all the others to hold its hand.

In Volume 1 of The Molehill I had a story called “The Flintknapper.” The events of that story were inspired by the following true story about a cousin of mine who was once mistaken for an alligator poacher. One Mother’s Day my cousin Todd went out to see our grandmother, who at the time lived halfway to Hawkinsville. The visit was uneventful enough, but on the drive home Todd saw something he had never seen in his life: a roadkill alligator. He stopped the car and got out to get a good look at the poor alligator. It was a big one–eight or nine feet long with a great scuted tail and the same dreamy smile in death that it had worn in life. Todd marveled at the thing for a while, then got back in his car. His friend Brad was expecting him. When Todd got to Brad’s apartment, the television was on, tuned to a National Geographic nature documentary called “Realm of the Alligator.” Brad, fascinated by the program, didn’t even take his eyes off the screen as he greeted Todd and motioned for him to join him on the couch. A scientist was swimming in a lagoon full of alligators and snapping their pictures. “Look at him,” Brad said, gesturing toward the screen. “They could eat him right now. Can you imagine?” “That reminds me,” Todd said. “I saw a dead gator on the side of the road today.” Brad snapped around and stared wide-eyed at Todd. “A real alligator?” he breathed. “Dead?” Todd nodded. “It was there today?” “It was there half an hour ago. On 247, almost to my Granny’s house.” Brad was already getting up from the couch. “We’ve got to go get it!” he said. “We’ve got to go get it this minute!” Brad was a young man of great enthusiasms, almost to a fault. He was determined to wring every bit of life out of each day. That particular hour he was more interested in alligators than anything else in the world; he wasn’t going to let an unclaimed alligator molder by the side of the road. It took some doing to get the alligator in the back of Brad’s truck; an adult alligator weighs several hundred pounds. But they managed. Todd’s dad’s house wasn’t far from where they picked up the alligator, so they went there to skin it out. Todd got the alligator hide, since he was the one who found it. Brad got the head; he hadn’t decided exactly what he was going to do with it, but at the very least he planned to scare girls with it. They cut up the tail meat and put it in Todd’s dad’s refrigerator to marinate, planning to reconvene in a couple of days for a gator fry. Todd didn’t know much about tanning an alligator hide, but he figured drying it out was surely one of the first steps. So he flopped it over the privacy fence behind his apartment. When Todd left for work the next morning–he was assistant manager at a shoe store–the flies were already buzzing around the gator hide in the growing warmth.Hmm….he thought to himself as he got into his car. I probably need another plan for curing that hide. Shortly after lunch a man in khaki came into the shoe store. “I’m looking for a Todd M______,” he said. “That’s me,” Todd said. “I’m Todd M_____.” “Mr. M_______,” the man said, “I’m Officer Osborne from the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Could you step outside with me?” Somebody from the apartment complex, perhaps offended by the smell and the fly-buzz around Todd’s gator hide, had ratted him out. “Mr. M_____,” said the game warden, “did you know it is a violation of Georgia law to possess an alligator carcass?” “I didn’t know that,” Todd said. “Well it is,” said Officer Osborne. “It’s a serious violation. I confiscated an alligator hide from from a fence in the Sandpiper Apartment complex. I have been given to believe that it was your alligator hide. Was it your alligator hide, Mr. M_____?” “Well, yes, it is. But…” “I’m going to need to confiscate the remainder of the carcass,” Officer Osborne said. “And I’m also going to confiscate the vehicle you were in when you harvested the alligator, as well as the gun you shot it with.” “The gun I shot it with?” Todd fairly shouted. “I didn’t shoot any alligator! I found it. Dead. It was roadkill. A sneer curled the game warden’s lip. “Roadkill,” he said. “You’re not the first to tell me that one.” “It’s the truth,” Todd said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.” “Can anybody corroborate your story?” “Sure. Brad W______ was with me. He helped me get it in the truck. Or I helped him.” “This Brad W_______,” the warden said, “you tell me where I can find him. If he tells the same story you tell, you might be off the hook.” It was a long and worrisome hour that Todd waited for Officer Osborne to talk to Brad. He hoped Brad would just tell the truth and tell it straight. But Brad, in his youthful exuberance, had had occasion to speak with officers of the law before this; in previous interviews he had been known to fall short of the standard of “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” He could be a little cagey. In the end, Brad’s story and Todd’s story and Todd’s father’s story all checked out, and all was well. But Officer Osborne insisted on confiscating as much of the carcass as he could. He already had the hide from his initial visit to Todd’s apartment. He drove to Brad’s place and pulled the alligator head out of the freezer, never to frighten a girl or anybody else. He even drove out to Todd’s dad’s house and got the tail meat out of the bowl in which it was marinating. The gator fry was cancelled.

[I wrote this to encourage every single person on earth to purchase Beyond the Frame, the new album by Andy Gullahorn. Get it here. There’s also a great review of the album by Jonathan Rogers here. –AP] “Write it like you would say it.” I can’t tell you how many times over the years that maxim has snapped me out of whatever florid garbage I was writing. It’s a good idea to emulate your heroes, to ask yourself when you get to the bridge, “What would Paul Simon do?” Or when you happen upon a guitar part which, miracle of miracles, sounds unique enough to try and build a song on upon, to ask, “How does James Taylor get into a part like this?” Steal boldly, I say. But most often, when I’m scribbling in a notebook the nonsense that I hope will become a not-unbearable song, when it’s late and I’m sleepy and I’m stuck, stuck, stuck, I remember these words: “Write it like you would say it.”  It usually opens the door to the lyric I was looking for. It keeps me from putting on airs, which we’re all prone to do. People can spot a fake a mile away. It’s the difference between reading a speech from a podium and looking someone in the eye and telling them “I love you.” It communicates to the listener that you’re not pulling any punches but you’re not blocking any either. “Trust me,” it says. “This might hurt, but if we make it out alive we’ll be better for it.” If I had to name one bit of advice that has brought me back to center more than any other, it would be that. “Write it like you would say it.” Who gave me that advice? Andy Gullahorn. And on each of his albums he provides example after example of honest, excellent songwriting which always invites me in to a face-to-face conversation that leads to something genuine and healing. Sometimes it’s humor. I’ve seen a lot of concerts over the years but I’ve never, ever seen anyone else make the room laugh merely at the word “Hello.” Ben and I always look at one another in wonder when, yet again, the crowd chuckles at Andy’s greeting, whether we’re in Sweden or Connecticut or Texas. The Gullahorn Hello, apparently, is a universal language. And few things delight me like sitting on the side stage and watching the crowd react to a song like “I Haven’t Either.” They have no idea what’s coming, I think. And then I realize that, though I’ve heard the song hundreds of times, it’s still doing its work on me too. Tears spring to my eyes, conviction comes quick on the heels of my laughter. It’s one of the best working examples I know of C. S. Lewis’s principle of sneaking past “watchful dragons.” Lewis wrote in an essay called “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” “I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.” Enter Andy Gullahorn, stripping away the audience’s self-righteousness or shame or their expectation that they were going to have to listen to a bunch of uptight, guilt-ridden Christians blubbering about Jesus. Instead they get a song about skinny jeans. Or about country music or shopping malls. “I could hang out with this guy,” they think. (And they actually can, if they’re in a certain Nashville bowling alley on Wednesdays.) And then, gently, lovingly, Gully slips past their watchful dragons and surprises them with a moment of grace. Not judgment, not high-falutin’ Bible talk. Just an honest conversation. That grace may bring conviction for the self-righteous, or it may be a gentle assurance to the lowly sinner that, despite their worst fears there is a great and graceful Person in the world who loves them as they are and not as they should be. I find myself on both sides of the coin from one minute to the next. Amazingly, both can happen at the same time, to the same person, when they’re listening to an Andy Gullahorn song. Gully’s humor is often the first thing people mention, but the conversation never stays there. It quickly moves to awe at his ability to do what some call a ninja move. Let the record show that he is no comedy act, however often people tumble into the aisles in guffaws—even if he is, truly, one of the funniest people I know. His best songs are the ones that cut to the heart, and what I see in those songs is that—you guessed it—he writes it like he would say it. That, my friends, is the real ninja move. We all live with our defenses up. Ron Block has written much about the “false self,” something we’re all familiar with. We’re afraid to be known. I’m terrified of it. We’re all hiding the Mr. Hyde lurking inside our Dr. Jekyll. But Andy asks us to be brave enough to open the cage. Maybe, he suggests, the best way to kill the monster is to expose it to sunlight. And he leads by example, writing about his own inconsistency, his own pain, his own silliness—each song daring the listener to open that dungeon door a little wider, asking us if we’re really happy with the way things are. We know we aren’t, but we’re too scared to take another step. Andy’s songs are a hand in the dark. He tells us in the opening song of Beyond the Frame, “If you need a friend to do some dying with you, I will.” It’s easy to imagine Jesus saying the same to us, isn’t it? Jesus doesn’t just tell us in the New Testament that the Christian life is a hard one, that death is a prerequisite to finding the life he offers—he also showed us. He blazed the trail, laying down his life for the glory of the Father. The Master tells us as we timidly open our hearts to the pain of love, “I’ve done this before, and I know it hurts, child. But this is the only way. I’m right here with you. Don’t be afraid.” I’ve been a fan of Andy Gullahorn since Old Hat, his first indie record about 15 years ago. I’ve seen him grow at great cost, and I’ve seen him pour that hard-earned wisdom into his songs. I’ve also seen, first-hand, the effect of his songs on people in the audience, and it not only causes me to praise God for Andy Gullahorn, it reawakens my wonder at the power of songs as an art form. Three or four minutes, a few chords, a few words—and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, a heart is changed. At the very least, in a world where we walk around numb as lepers so much of the time, a song can make you actually feel something, a tingle in a place you thought long dead. That’s what this album did for me. Beyond the Frame, from the first track to the last, is Andy’s most evocative work yet. Not only are the songs arguably the best and most passionate he’s ever written, the production bar has been raised. There are colors in the palette that we haven’t heard on a Gullahorn record, but it’s so tastefully and naturally done that I can’t put my finger on exactly what has changed (other than the welcome addition of piano). The last third of the album leads us into that dungeon I was telling you about. Into the darkness of the tomb. But then with the final song comes Easter morning. Birdsong. And with it the strong, gentle and wise reminder that all that time I was afraid of the dark, so afraid that I wore myself out building walls, laboring long to keep every single shaft of light from illuminating the truth, there was nothing to fear. Something good was, and is, coming, and it’s worth the cost. So next time I sit down to write a song I’ll ask myself, as I have for years, what my songwriting heroes would do. Right at the top of that list is a guy named Andy Gullahorn, reminding me to have the guts to write it like I would say it. It’s a principle that’s simple and yet packed with meaning, just like his songs. It’s not just advice for songwriting, though; it’s a good way to live. Dash all pretense; be who you are; kick down the walls; love the listener. It’s scary, sure. But good songwriting is a call to courage, on both sides of the exchange. Andy Gullahorn is one of the bravest people I know.

Ron Block’s new album, Walking Song, released two weeks ago, and although it has Ron’s mug on the cover, there’s another person that’s responsible for the lyrical content inside. Rebecca Reynolds, long-time Rabbit Roomer, joined up with Ron to co-write most of the songs on the album. I spoke to her about what it was like to participate in a collaborative artistic endeavor like Walking Song. You began this journey simply by reading The Rabbit Room and contributing to the discussion once in a while. In fact, you weren’t even aware of who Ron Block was at the beginning. How exactly did a sometime Rabbit Room commenter end up writing lyrics for a big-time album? Hmm. Well, it’s not my natural bent to think about music in terms of “big-time” or “small-time.” My mom has an undergraduate degree in music, so I grew up surrounded by all sorts of songs. Some of my earliest memories are of her sitting at the piano for hours upon hours practicing [Dmitry] Kabalevsky or [Robert] Schumann. In my home, music was not perceived as a business, rooted in what was popular or influential. It was seen in terms of a language used by people to communicate ideas. It was kind of an unspoken principle in my home that a song used simply for business was a prostitution of art. Growing up, we listened to classical records or turned the radio to “A Prairie Home Companion.” We attended folk music festivals. Mom would break out an ancient plainsong or one of those early experimental digital pieces like “Celestial Soda Pop” from Ray Lynch’s Deep Breakfast. However, I almost never heard rock, pop, or country. Those sorts of music (and the concepts of charts, popularity, etc.) were introduced to me in bits and pieces as I became more integrated with teenage culture. I was never one of those kids who knew much about the top ten. When I’m getting to know someone, the music they like is important to me, because it tells me about the dialect of their personality. It is a venue for knowing their soul. But I care very little about whether their music or mine is popular. So, as far as I can remember, I never had aspirations to “be” any sort of name in the music world. I wanted to write songs, because I felt like I needed the other half of my voice. I walked around with an uncomfortable sense that I was half an artist in this regard. Lyrics would come, but I could not make music to match them. That was very frustrating. Ron and I became friends via RR theological discussions. I knew he played guitar, but I didn’t understand the music business enough to realize all of what he really was—and I’m glad now that I didn’t. My context for pursuing art making was delight, the ache to express, and hunger for beauty. I needed someone to play and discover with me. I tease Ron sometimes about being my Annie Sullivan. I was caught in darkness and silence, and he gave all the words stuck inside me an outlet. You hear about supernatural healings, the mute being given speech and the blind sight. That still happens, I think. At least it did to me. My patron saint just happens to play the banjo. You and Ron worked closely together for this project. What’s the collaborative process like between the two of you? I think it is a very unique gift we have been given. He and I are very similar in personality. We have read and loved many of the same books, and our core values are nearly identical. We share a native tongue, and that is not something people can create. Decades of separate lives wove that language into us, and we realized this similarity instead of creating it. This means we don’t have to mess with a lot of the translation many artists encounter when communicating with one another. We can hit the ground running. There is a line from an Andrew Peterson song that says, “A thing resounds when it rings true.” Creating with Ron is like that. We share an artistic alert system that says, “Yes. This is it!” or “No, that is not it.” So, creative dialogue is very fluid. Very easy. Also, because we are fairly divided in our tasks, there is zero competition. He trusts me with words. I trust him with music. We’ve both lived enough life to value respect, affirmation, patience. We help listen for one another, speaking out snags we notice, but there is never any serious struggle for power or identity. We are wholeheartedly for one another. You know, Ron’s already been successful, and I don’t care much for becoming known. I’m content in the shadows. This allows us to focus on art for the sake of art, which is incredibly freeing. As the record began to move past the writing stage and into the production stage, you had to give over your contribution to the musicians. What was it like to watch the record actually being made? Well, that’s funny. I had never been around record production, so I didn’t know enough to worry. Actually, production kind of made me mad at first, because I wanted to keep writing songs. We had written 40-50 songs that first year, and I hated the thought of that creative flood stopping, just to make some CD. I’m horrified now looking back at some of the things I said to Ron during those months. “Who is Stuart Duncan? Sheesh. Just get some fiddle player, I mean, you live in Nashville. Surely there is more than one person who plays fiddle there.” But as Ron sent me bits and pieces of the growing thing, as I saw him move into the role of composer instead of just creator/musician, I was humbled. I began to hear layer after layer of beauty emerge. I didn’t know who Jeff Taylor or Jerry Douglas were before I met Ron, but I heard their instruments make the ocean sound like the ocean. I heard the magic of a fiddle that makes stories come alive. The work of their hands made me cry with joy. Same with the other creators who contributed to the album. I began to regard my co-writer with a new kind of awe. He was pulling a two-dimensional thing into three-dimensions and four. I hated the time that took, but I was thoroughly enchanted with the results. I still am. You’re a pretty prolific poet. Was this your first time writing lyrics? What’s the difference between writing poetry and writing lyrics? Density. Flow. Where vowels and consonants hit. I’ve always loved the oral element to poetry, and my MA is in Storytelling. So, I have a natural focus on the sound of literature. However, my early songs were way too dense. Ron has helped me with this. He’s a great teacher. Let’s talk method. How do you write? Are you disciplined or easy going? Are you deadline driven? What’s your methodology? I cannot not write. I know it doesn’t work like this for every creator, but I’m one of those people who can only survive life on planet Earth by means of hovering with my Lord over life’s chaos, shifting words on paper, and speaking order through the darkness. Writing is certainly work for me, at times it is painful. But I cannot avoid it any easier than I could avoid prayer. That process is one of the most spiritually intimate things I ever do. It is a must. When I read about people procrastinating writing, trying to find time for it, complaining about how hard it is, etc., I am baffled. That is not a critical statement, I just don’t understand that mindset. I need to write more than I need to sleep or eat, and often do. I have a full-time job, and I have three children. So yes, I am what some folks would call “disciplined” or “driven,” a.k.a. “willing to be exhausted.” But that is not a matter of performance or deadlines. It is a matter of passion for a central idea that must be caught before it fades. It is a matter of a question which must be sorted through. There is an urgency inside me for art that could never be inspired by external demands. The record is out now. The details are all finished. The CDs are shrink wrapped. What now for Rebecca Reynolds? Well, school starts next week, and I’ll be teaching a full load of literature/philosophy courses to the best teenagers on the planet. My husband and I are also praying about moving to Dublin to help with an arts/faith project. And there are some new record ideas in the works, as well. Walking Song is available at The Rabbit Room Store. #RebeccaReynolds #RonBlock #WalkingSong

I haven’t written in a long time. Not just at the Rabbit Room, but anywhere. I wish there were some genuinely good reason for this, like transient loss of finger movement, or that my brain suddenly started thinking only in Japanese for a few months straight. But there isn’t. At the end of very long days of work, I’ve been defaulting to iPad games. The days are long, I say. I’m busy. Right? We’re all busy. “How are you doing?” our friend/family member asks. “Oh, good, just so busy.” That’s how we answer. And because I’m so busy, at the end of the day, I quite plainly haven’t wanted to think about anything deep – God, myself, other people, a story, a poem, a song. No, thanks. I am, however, a level 92 player on Clash of Clans, with my own clan that will one day rise to the top 100. I am also at level 123 of Candy Crush. Because that matters. And I haven’t written a thing. Not only have I not written a thing, I’ve barely read a thing. The two are related, of course. By why am I not reading and writing? Thankfully, two weeks ago, I was completely jarred out of this by the unexpected revelation that J.K. Rowling had a new book, already out, under the name Robert Galbraith. A mystery novel! I started with the e-book and then switched over to audiobook, because of my long hours on the road. I finished it last night on the way to a Gordon Lightfoot show. When it ended (great book, by the way), I felt a sudden longing, something I hadn’t felt in a while and deeply missed. This story is over. I need another one. I downloaded Neil Gaiman’s newest book and listened to the first half on the way home from the Lightfoot show (great show, by the way). Back to my question: Why wasn’t I reading and writing? These things have been so important to me for so many years. What happened? I’d been running from emptiness. The problem was, as Neil Gaiman says, that it turns out wherever you run, you bring yourself with you. This morning, over breakfast at a local restaurant, somehow in the middle of keeping the kids from smearing maple syrup all over everything, Tricia and I had a conversation about the things we do to avoid the emptiness and longing we each feel as human beings on planet earth. Most of the time, instead of facing it, we add another layer of meaninglessness above it. We get ourselves unhealthily attached to anything; it doesn’t have to be a traditionally “dangerous” addiction. It’s not easy experiencing all the internal conflict of being a fallen person in a fallen world with longings for beauty and truth and community but equally strong longings for the exact opposite. Clash of Clans isn’t bad. Candy Crush isn’t either. Whatever games, or shows, or other distractions you like aren’t evil. I’m still going to have a top 100 clan some day (Tricia is rolling her eyes as she reads this). But I avoided story because story doesn’t let me avoid. It makes me think, imagine, feel, and experience life. It puts me into conflict and resolution, despair and relief, dyscatastrophe and eucatastrophe. So here I am again. To be completely honest, Clash of Clans is open on my iPad, just to the left of this computer. But I’m writing, and I’m feeling and hoping and opening up, just a little, to the memory that there’s a big, gaping emptiness in me that can be filled only with Jesus.

Congratulations on the new record, Andy. Thanks to everyone who listened, commented, and shared during our Beyond the Frame launch party. If you missed it, you’ll find Andy’s compiled song descriptions below along with previews of each song. 1. “I Will” Written for you, the listener. Andy: Everybody tries to present the best version of themselves on a first date. The opening song on a record is like a first date. This song is the best version of myself – or at least what I aspire to. [audio:IWill.mp3] 2. “The Surface of Things” Written for a friend in a hurting marriage. Andy: I have seen a number of marriages that were almost left for dead before they realized there was more to their relationship than figuring out which parent was going to do the dishes while the other one started the bed-time routine for the kids. It can be hard ground to stand on some times, but I trust the soil is way deeper and richer than we can imagine. [audio:TheSurfaceOfThings.mp3] 3. “Any Less True” Written for a couple of friends who endured the kind of suffering that can’t be appeased with answers. Andy: I am a mathematical person. I like mathematics. This is my mathematical explanation to myself of God’s perceived silence in the midst of suffering. [audio:AnyLessTrue.mp3] 4. “Line in the Sand” Inspired by my bowling league and written (at least partially) for some the people at a live TV taping I was a part of years back that will remain nameless, both because I forgot the name of it and because I don’t think they would be flattered by my dedication. Andy: When I started bowling regularly, I used to make fun of the other people there who took it seriously. Now – five years later – I roll in a bag every week that holds three balls, my custom skull-decorated bowling shoes, and a towel from the Bowling Hall of Fame in Dallas, TX. Just one example of why I like to reserve the right to change my mind or position on any given thing. [audio:LineInTheSand.mp3] 5. “The Same Song” Written in a Memphis Marriott hotel late one night during Folk Alliance after seeing a room full of people sing a Robby Hecht song to Robby Hecht. Andy: After all of these years of traveling the country and singing songs, I still feel like one of the things people still need to hear the most is that they are not alone. We have more in common with the people around us (and not around us) than we think. [audio:TheSameSong.mp3] 6. “Favor Is A Foreign Tongue” Written for a girl I know who stole stuff from me and my friends. Andy: When I get upset at people, I write songs about them. Sometimes these songs start out in an attempt to exact some kind of passive-agressive revenge. But by the end of the song, I usually find myself – surprised – somewhere on their side of the equation. [audio:FavorIsAForeignTongue.mp3] 7. “Flash in the Pan” Written about Tom from MySpace, Lou Pearlman and my dad. Andy: It felt like Britney Spears’ reign atop the music world would last forever. At least it felt that way when it was happening. Now, she is about to start a stint at a Planet Hollywood casino. That is good news for all of us who are currently in the middle of something that feels like it is lasting forever when we don’t want it to. [audio:FlashInThePan.mp3] 8. “My Language” Written for my wife, Jill, when I was in Sweden with Andrew Peterson and Ben Shive. Andy: It takes time to learn to communicate with someone just through eye contact. Sometimes those glances are saying “I love you”. Sometimes they are saying “I can’t believe you just said that in front of my mother. You are in BIG trouble!” Sometimes it takes a visit to a land where strangers won’t look you in the eyes to understand that the glances are a gift no matter what they are saying. [audio:MyLanguage.mp3] 9. “The Other Side” Written with Jill. Andy: This song is pretty self-explanatory. And if it is true that “love will be the bags we pack for the other side”, then I have a lot more work to do. [audio:TheOtherSide.mp3] 10. “Skinny Jeans” Written for the super cool hipster band I saw at the Nashville airport. Andy: I write a lot of songs out of my insecurities. This is most definitely one of those. [audio:SkinnyJeans.mp3] 11. “Sleeping Sound” Written for my neighbor who has become one of my best friends. Andy: I had a conversation with my neighbor one day about his anxiety surrounding his son’s future and happiness. During this conversation, his son was running happily in circles around us. This was my feeble attempt to assure him that he had nothing to worry about. [audio:SleepingSound.mp3] 12. “Nowhere To Be Found” Written for and with my friend, Nathan Tasker. Andy: I have no clue what it would feel like to hold my dying baby, but I know that I have felt abandoned by God in situations that were much less dire. I truly felt honored to cry my way through writing this song with Nate in an attempt to honor the real feelings that come to the surface in the midst of deep suffering. [audio:NowhereToBeFound.mp3] 13. “Grand Canyon” Written for the Taskers. All five of them. Andy: The first time I played “Nowhere To Be Found” live, I wasn’t sure how to transition out of it and ended up just sitting there in awkward silence. I wrote this song to be that transition out of despair. When there is no hope in sight, sometimes it is good to know that our sight is very limited. [audio:GrandCanyon.mp3] #AndyGullahorn #BeyondtheFrame

The honeybee, that busy little alchemist, is a marvel. No other insect has inspired so much poetry, so much rapturous prose. After a few of my friends got bee hives and raved about the contemplative pleasures of beekeeping, I decided to take up the hobby myself. Here is my story. I got a beehive this spring. I set it in my yard right by the patio and eagerly awaited the arrival of my bees. They arrived on a truck, which I met at the Exxon station beside the Tennessee Titans stadium. The truck was stacked high with a hundred or more shoebox-sized cages (“packages” is the lingo), each containing about five thousand bees. You have heard a bee buzz; imagine the buzz of five hundred thousand bees, agitated from an hour’s ride on the interstate. The bee truck, thrumming with so much life, was the first great spectacle of my beekeeping career. When I got the bees home, I put on the bee veil and goatskin gloves that Andrew Peterson either loaned me or gave me (I was a little vague on this point). I opened up the top of my hive. Then I opened up my box of bees, just enough to remove a tiny cage containing the queen, and shut it again before the other five thousand bees came blurring out. The queen cage I attached to the frame in the middle of my hive. The queen is the center of the whole operation; wherever she is, the rest of the bees will want to stay. Bees are free to come and go from their hive, but they always come back to their queen. The queen is held captive in the hive for the first few days to ensure that the whole hive doesn’t light out for the the next county as soon as they’re out of the package. The means by which the queen gains her freedom is quite ingenious. The exit from her cage is plugged by a piece of marshmallow that takes several days for bees to chew through. By the time she is able to get out, she is accustomed to the hive and chooses stay. And therefore the rest of the bees stay put. Once the queen was secured, I opened the bee package, turned it upside down, and shook five thousand bees into the hive. I stood there in a swirling cloud of bees. It was thrilling, I don’t mind telling you. Andrew Peterson claims he has never been stung in three years of beekeeping. Maybe that’s true. It wasn’t my experience. My bees hadn’t been on the premises 24 hours before they started stinging me. I am willing to accept at least part of the blame here; I wasn’t always diligent about wearing the protective gear. I watched quite a few Youtube videos in which beekeepers handled their bees with neither veil nor gloves. It seemed so peaceful and symbiotic and, well, right. It later occurred to me that perhaps those beekeepers had smoked their bees to oblivion before turning on the camera. I don’t know. I just know that my unsmoked bees were surprisingly active–more active than some folks care for. The first time I opened the hive top after installing my packages, one of those enterprising little rascals flew into my right nostril and stung me. I cavorted and windmilled in ways my alarmed children had never seen. Also, I cried. If you can get stung in the nostril and not cry, feel free to consider yourself my better. I don’t think you can do it. There were four or five other stings on that first day, but the direct hit to the nostril was by far the most memorable. The next day my upper lip had swelled like a prizefighter’s. I congratulated myself that I had survived the worst bee sting I was likely ever to get. Later events would prove me to be wrong on that count. I am a forgiving man, and I bore my bees no ill will; the principal offender was dead in any case. The bees had a lot of work ahead of them: they needed to “draw comb” before they could start storing honey, and that would require a lot of energy. So even though it was May and the nectar was plentiful, I installed a hive-top feeder made from an aluminum turkey pan to help them along, regularly filling it with a syrup of sugar and water that I mixed in a five-gallon bucket. You may be surprised to know that it only takes a few days for a hive of bees to empty a turkey pan. The bees began to do what bees do. They zoomed out of the hive and zoomed back in with pouches of pollen tucked behind their back legs. On the frames they began building those precise hexagons that almost look too perfect to be natural. As often as I could, I sat on the patio and watched the bees come and go. Most days I found an excuse to open the hive and have a look inside. It seems cliched to speak of their busyness, but the impression is unavoidable. Bees look like they know exactly what needs to be done, and they are on it. Watching honeybees quickly became one of the great pleasures of my life. A couple of weeks into my beekeeping career, I left to spend a month at a boys’ camp. I left the bees in the care of the house sitter. My nostril healed. I missed my bees—less than I missed my girls, but more than I missed my dog. I thought about them every day and assumed they were thinking about me. I texted the house sitter for reports on the bees, and he assured me that they were doing fine. My leaving them for a month, I figured, was the best thing that could happen to them. They could establish their hive in peace, without my taking the lid off every day and bothering them. The whole drive back from camp, I envisioned a happy reunion with my bees. I could hardly wait to pull the frames and see what my little colonists had accomplished in my absence. Would there be comb drawn on every frame? Would the queen be laying eggs? Would there be honey? We didn’t even have the camp trunks out of the car before I was at the hive. If the bees were as glad to see me as I was to see them, I figured, there would be no need for any veil and gloves. I opened the hive and saw the bees busily attending to the matters at hand. And, yes, they did seem glad to see me. Inspired by a strong sense of my oneness with nature, I began to pull one of the frames out for a little peek-a-loo. Within one second I found myself in a cloud of bees that sounded to me exactly like the buzz-roar of the bee truck. One of the bees stung me squarely in the left temple. Reeling, I dropped the frame back into the hive, which caused a whole new commotion. Within minutes, the swelling from my stung temple produced a pretty impressive black eye. It really, really hurt. I believe in facing one’s fears, getting back on the horse. So the next day I returned to the hive–suited up this time. When it comes to bees, however, I discovered one problem with facing one’s fears: bees smell fear. It whips them into a frenzy. When I opened the hive, it was as if I were a pork chop and they were a pack of 5000 hungry dogs. They covered me up. But what did I care? I had my veil. I had my goatskin gloves. Apparently, the gloves that Andrew gave me were some kind of gag gift. Four bees stung me through the gloves. Through the gloves! One of those four stings got infected. My middle finger looked like a thumb, only bright purple. When I went to the Kroger Minute Clinic for medical attention, the nurse practitioner looked at my black eye and purple finger and said, “Wait–you’re saying that you have these bees on purpose?” My black eye healed. The infection cleared up (thanks to a course of antibiotics). I left the bees to their own devices for a while. We left for another two weeks of travel. I brought a couple of beekeeping books to read at the beach, but I didn’t open them. The wounds were too fresh. A couple of Sundays ago, I finally ventured back to the hive. I suited up, removed the top, and pulled a couple of frames. The bees were much calmer this time. Actually, they were more than calm. They seemed listless, even aimless. The only thing sadder than a bee with no sense of purpose is 5000 bees with no sense of purpose. There were very few eggs or larvae in the hive. But there were hive beetles. An experienced beekeeper like me knows how much heartache hive beetles can cause. I immediately went to YouTube to find out how to make hive beetle traps. But it wouldn’t be necessary. My opening the hive, it seems, was the last straw for the honeybees. I was still looking at YouTube when my son said, “Look! The bees!” My lethargic honeybees had come to swarming life. They streamed out of the hive and formed a bee tornado. They looked like the bees you’d see tormenting a bear in an old Warner Brothers cartoon. They were still swarming when we left for church that morning. I told my family to get a good look at them, for it would be the last we would ever see of our bees. When we got back from church, I opened the hive. Five or ten bees crawled around the frames, looking confused and lost. They were far outnumbered by the beetles, who seemed glad to have the place to themselves. I was consoled by the fact that the absconding bees left behind two frames of capped honey–a good three to five pounds, probably. But when I crushed it out of the wax, it wasn’t even honey. It was straight sugar syrup. The bees had taken my sugar syrup from the feeder and deposited it directly into the combs where other, un-fed bees would have put honey. It was their final insult: “So long, sucker–and you can keep your sugar syrup.” Still and all, I hope they’re happy. I hope they have found a hollow tree beside a blooming field of clover. I hope they are busily drawing new comb and filling it with nectar they have had to work a little harder for. I hope they find purpose in their work. And I hope they know I meant well.

[Editor’s note: This post was written about a month ago. Do not be led into a space-time paradox by the opening line.] [All photos by Aedan Peterson.] Can I tell you about last night? Part of the reason for this self-indulgent post is that our time in Wales is possible in part to an anonymous donor, and this is the best way I know to show my gratitude. We’ve been gone for more than a month now, and so much has happened that I won’t burden you with the details. The highlights: a wonderful 3.5 weeks in Sweden, during which time I made good progress on The Warden and the Wolf King and visited the ruins of the cottage where my great-grandfather was born. Then I got a kidney infection, an illness that knocked me out of the game for six fevered days and ended in a hospital visit on the island of Gotland. I recovered, and we pushed on to Norway, then hopped across the channel to London, where, like good Americans, we did everything we possibly could between the four concerts last week. That means the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, a play on West End, the British Museum, the National Gallery, Platform 9 3/4, and too many London Underground train rides to count. Needless to say, I didn’t get much Wingfeather writing done that week. (I’m leaving out our visit to Oxford for now, because there’s no time. But trust me: it was magical.) During the London stay we had a single show in Wales, so we took a train from Paddington Station to Bridgend. When we got off the train we were greeted by two great guys, Phil and Von. Phil is a South African pastor, Von is an American musical missionary. Stepping out of the station in Wales after having spent a hectic-but-awesome week in London was like easing into your favorite chair after a good day’s work. The countryside! It’s impossible to avoid comparing it to the Shire. I even heard that Tolkien may have based the Shire on Wales (and hobbits on Welsh folk, a comment that rankled the one whom I mentioned it to). We spent the day in the ancient town of Llantwit Major, played a blast of a concert in an old church (along with a local folk band called Valhalla), and even paid a visit to a 1,000 year old pub in the country, which was started by monks. It was a lovely day. The next morning we took a deep breath and boarded the train back to London for two more concerts. I SO wish I had the time and energy to tell you everything, and that you had the time and energy to care. We’ll have to save it for Hutchmoot or something. The reason I mention that excursion to Wales is to demonstrate how excited we were for some real rest at a place called Bryn Cottage in Newport, Wales after the glorious bustle and energy of London. At a concert this spring I mentioned Bryn to someone who I think had spent some time in Wales, and they insisted on paying for our week here. My mind was blown, and they wouldn’t let me refuse. So let me tell you about it. We drove four hours from Oxford, west toward a setting half-moon. The kids fell asleep, and for the last two hours it was me, Jamie, and the GPS lady’s comforting voice telling me when to exit the roundabouts as we drove into this unexplored land after dark. By that ancient, mysterious sense in our bones I was aware without looking at a map that somewhere to my left was the sea. Later, looking at a map, I learned that it was the Irish Sea. The roads wound between steep hedges and stone walls, and Jamie and I wished the sun was still out so we could see the ocean or the rolling hills or whatever beauties lay beyond our headlights. At last we reached a town called Fishguard, where the road narrowed even more and led us between old pubs and flats and walls, built long before the invention of the automobile. I held my breath to aid the car through the narrowest spots. Down, down into Lower Fishguard, closer to the water and boats, closer to the rivers and streams that poured into the quay, then up, up again into the countryside. Jamie read our directions aloud. “Seven miles from Fishguard, as you pass the 30 mph sign, turn right at the sign for Cwm Gwaun and drive up the hill past the cattle grid. Take the right fork, steeply uphill to where the tarmac turns to cobblestone, then take the first lane on the right to Bryn Cottage.” By now, of course, we had roused the kids. When we turned up the hill we saw in our headlights two wild horses, a mother and her foal, with long, beautifully unkempt manes and tails. Following the directions was like reading a treasure map in the dark. And a treasure it was. We climbed wearily out of the car at 1 a.m. and marveled at the stars. The milky way was a swath of mist overhead, hushing the Petersons and the wild horses and the rolling hills alike. I had to use my phone flashlight to make our way through the iron gate along the stone pathway to the red front door. We were sleepy and giddy at the same time—and a bit creeped out, I confess. Who knew what ghosts were sleeping in the old cottage? The ceilings were low, and I bumped my head more than once on beams and doorways. We more or less collapsed into bed, all of us wondering what the sun would reveal when we woke. At 8:00 a.m. I sat up, happy as a kid on Saturday morning, and ducked my way downstairs and out the door. The morning was bright and cool. The first thing I heard was the bleat of a sheep not twenty feet away. It was irritated that I was interrupting his breakfast. After the shock of my companion’s presence, I looked around and the world that lay under that blue sky. We were on the slope of an enormous hill. “Mountain” feels like the wrong word, because it’s so pastoral; green as a garden, and soft as a pillow. Below us stretched pastureland divided by stone walls for perhaps two miles before the earth fell away in cliffs to the sea. The cottage overlooks Newport Bay, flanked by Dinas Head, a peninsula on the left, and Newport Sands on the right. Imagine the Igiby Cottage, but wisely built well away from the edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness. Then I heard more bleating, and now a company of wild sheep trotted into the front yard, fertilizing and eating in equal measure. Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars! Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens! Let them praise the name of the Lord! For he commanded and they were created. And he established them forever and ever; he gave a decree, and it shall not pass away. Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and mist, stormy wind fulfilling his word! Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! Beasts and all livestock, creeping things and flying birds! Let every creature in the sea And every flying bird Let all the mountains, all the fields And valleys of the earth Let all the moons and all the stars Throughout the universe Sing praises to the Living God Who rules them by His word Hallelujah! Glory be to our great God The kids had been playing a made up game of tag, hopping from rock to rock and howling with laughter as they tried not to step in sheep droppings, but when they saw the sun about to go to sleep and heard Fernando’s praise, they each stopped and watched in the gloaming and glory. Words. Music. Beauty. Praise. Rest. We were meant for these things. Thank you, Anonymous Giver, for last night. Thank you, God, for the anonymous giver, and for thinking up this place called Wales.

Jennifer Trafton needs no introduction here, but I’m doing one anyway because of my zealous commitment to the rigid terms of the Story Warren/Rabbit Room Peace Treaty of 2012. Jennifer is the author of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, a wonderful tale about a girl named Persimmony Smudge (you love it already, I know). It’s a Smith family favorite. Jennifer is also a popular creative writing teacher for children in the Nashville area. But do not despair, non-Nashvillians. She recently launched a creative writing website which now features on-line classes! If you have a child who loves stories and dreams of writing, Sleeping Giant: Creative Journeys For Kids is just the thing. Please enjoy this insightful, funny, and inspiring post! –Sam I’ve been in a tempest of lesson planning for summer camps, library workshops, and online classes. Part of the planning has involved looking back over the past year and figuring out which activities have worked well for the kids I’ve taught and which haven’t. I want to share with you one that worked—because it occurred to me that it would be an easy and fun activity for a family to do together. The inspiration came from my favorite book on writing craft (so far), Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. An avid word collector, Wooldridge describes cutting words and phrases out of magazines and taping them onto blank raffle tickets. One day, for fun, she and her kids put these “word tickets” on objects all around the house: abandon boundary on a globe, anger on a burnt-out green candle, answers on a squash, diamonds on a scrub brush. “Suddenly,” she writes, “it seemed the objects could speak. They’d become poems themselves. Their labels changed the way we saw them.” The object + word-ticket combinations created surprising metaphors—bridges between seemingly unconnected concepts. This appealed to my imagination in a dozen different ways, because of course metaphor is the love language of artists. That is, essentially, what we do—we connect things. We connect words, notes on a scale, strokes of a brush, movements, ideas, outer landscapes of things with inner landscapes of the soul. I began thinking about a further set of connections that I make as a writer of fiction: bridging the bridges, leading the way through the metaphors to a destination. To get from a green candle to anger, or from a squash to an answer, it takes a poem. But to get from the burnt-out wick of fury to a wisdom-dispensing vegetable, it takes a story. When I was growing up, I turned my bedroom—and my entire house sometimes—into other places. My bed was a mountain or an island. The space under my desk was a witch’s cave where unsuspecting Barbies were held captive and hung upside-down by their pointy toes. The bookshelves were treacherous cliffs. The bathtub was a vast ocean. The sink was a pool where dolphins and humans lived and played in harmony. Every parent knows that the best toy ever invented is a cardboard box, because a box can be anything at all—a bed, a spaceship, a car, a robot, a castle, a dragon’s lair, a pirate ship. You just have to think outside of it and inside of it and under it and over it and through it. Once my bed was an island, my bathtub an ocean, and every available shoebox an adventurer’s hideout, I didn’t stop there. I sent my dolls through these new landscapes on quests. I strung symbols together into epics. So for a few of my classes this spring I decided to take Poemcrazy’s exercise in metaphor or stretch it a step further into the realm of story. Before the kids arrived, I wrote dozens of words on slips of paper and taped or laid them all over the space where I was holding the class—in one case this was a living room, in other cases a bare classroom or a church fellowship hall. The more surprising the combination of word and object, the better—vast on a teacup, tickle on a window pane, dinosaur on a coffee maker, mountain on a fuzzy, holey, white bedroom slipper. When class began, I asked the kids to walk around with their notebooks and pencils. And this is what I told them: This is not the room you thought it was. It’s a landscape—a city, a nation, a planet, a world—that only you can discover. Go explore it. Each time you find an object with a word on it, take those two ideas—slipper and mountain—and knock them together in your imagination. Perhaps in this landscape there is a mountain shaped like a shoe, or a fuzzy mountain with a hole in the middle, or a mountain that can only be approached by stepping on a trail of white marshmallows, or the mountainous bedroom slipper of a giant. Notice. Imagine. What treasure lies here? What danger lurks there? What is this place? Take notes on what you find. After they had explored the landscape, they took the class on a quest through it—in writing. A quest needs an object, a goal, a destination, so I first gave them a list of possibilities: ·     The Beginning of All Adventures ·     The Last Dinosaur’s Funny Bone ·     The Place Where Dreams Live ·     The Island of Lost Socks ·     The Silver Key to Happiness ·     The Answer to Every Question ·     The Upside-Down Moon ·     The First Footprint ·     The Secret Colors of the Rainbow ·     The City of Forgotten Memories ·     The Gruesome Pit of Grossness ·     The Saddest Smile ·     The Place Where Stories are Born Some chose to come up with their own quests. Then they wrote instructions telling the rest of us how to navigate the mysterious landscape, overcome its dangers, unlock its magic, or appease its inhabitants in order to reach the destination. The results were hilarious, lovely, and sometimes profound: Start at the ticklish waterfall and collect a silver wave of frozen air, then hop on one foot to where the dancing snake and the snail with lightning nostrils meet every time a brick falls into the Inky Pit. To get to the place where stories are born you must first leap through the picture where two worlds meet. Go over Monarch Mountains and let out the deranged dinosaurs. Find the Pit of One Thousand Ants and ask the one in the corner where you can find the King of the Trees, who will give you the Stone of Oozing Twist. Open the door by saying, “Crunch, crunch, crunch,” and you will be on the Upside-Down Moon. But beware! The dragon lurks in the stacked caves. Hidden in a secret chamber in the waterfall oozing with magic, you will find the Gruesome Pit of Grossness. Ask the moon monarch for her windswept chair so you can fly over the vast desert and over the silver waves to get to the place where stories are born. When you reach it, ask for Mr. Bartholomew and he will give you the key to where stories are born . . . in your imagination. So on a rainy day this summer, try this with your family: Fill the kitchen table with small pieces of paper (Post-It notes would work) and have everyone write words on them—any words at all—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, silly words, beautiful words, dangerous words. Then elect one person to be the Hider of Words. Send everyone else into a separate room to wait until the Hider has put your words on objects all over the living room—or downstairs, or whatever part of the house you choose. Then go be explorers, taking notes and writing Quest Instructions—or entire stories—about this familiar yet utterly new landscape. See how this same room with the same set of words conjures up completely different places and adventures in the imaginations of each family member. It’s not simply a game. It’s not even about writing at all, or only secondarily so. It’s about making connections. It’s about training our eyes to behold the many layers of reality. Look further. Look deeper. Look inside. This activity reminds me of the region of the seven dimensions in George MacDonald’s novel Lilith, where two things can exist in the same place—the flowers of one world comingle with the piano in the drawing room of another world, giving a “peculiar sweetness” to the music. Once we have flown in the moon monarch’s windswept chair, will we ever look at that old armchair the same way again? The Romantic poet William Blake talked about “double vision”—seeing another layer of reality and meaning beneath the outward appearance of things. He took it much too far, in my opinion, to the point of devaluing the material world, but I was thinking about this concept of double vision when I stood in front of a hill in England one summer and saw a snoring giant—the seed of a story that grew into my first book. That is one of imagination’s gifts to a child and to an artist: the ability (a fragile one, easily trampled by the literalism of adulthood) to “see a world in a grain of sand” as Blake put it, or an ocean in a bathtub. How flat the world must be to those who see a chair as just a chair, a hill as just a hill, a box as just six cardboard walls around an empty soul.

For four years now, Andy Gullahorn has hosted a weekly event called Bowling Lunch. It’s exactly what it sounds like: men gather in a bowling alley, eat lunch, and bowl. Andy keeps a spread sheet of everybody’s scores and sends out a weekly email showing the current standings and communicating any administrative issues. The regulars have nicknames, typically assigned by Andy (Frank the Killer, Beyonce, Smoothie, Patasaurus, etc.). And once a year Andy hosts an awards ceremony complete with speeches, trophies, and printed certificates. About two hundred men have attended Bowling Lunch since its inception. It’s a funny mix of people–musicians, retirees, the self-employed, the under-employed, and even a few people with real jobs. When the Anglican Archbishop of Rwanda visited Nashville, Andy invited him to Bowling Lunch. His Grace had never bowled before; still, he beat Andrew Osenga. Bowling Lunch is a laugh a minute. And why wouldn’t it be? You’re bowling in the middle of the day. You’re eating bowling alley food. You’re hanging out with some very interesting people. But now I begin to come to my point. Yes, Bowling Lunch is a laugh a minute. And yes, the whole concept, like the American Idol Fantasy League that Andy operated a few years ago, seems like a big joke. But it’s more than that. Something quite important happens at Bowling Lunch. Grown men, a notoriously lonely lot, connect with one another over terrible hot dogs and two games of bowling. I don’t want to overstate the case; Bowling Lunch isn’t church. But it is a place where men from many walks of life feel that they belong. Recently my teenage son went right by himself and had a great time bowling with a couple of retirees, a singer-songwriter, and a property manager. If you were to scan the crowd at a Bowling Lunch, you’d be hard-pressed to guess what they share in common. What they share in common is that they all know Andy Gullahorn. And Andy seems to take quite seriously his role as the bringer-together of this rag-tag group of fellow pilgrims. I tell the story of Bowling Lunch because I think it offers real insight into the rest of Andy Gullahorn’s work. Andy has a well-deserved reputation for being a hilarious guy–the kind of guy who would originate Bowling Lunch and the American Idol Fantasy League. If you’ve ever seen him perform live, you know that his patter between songs is on the level of a stand-up comic; you laugh even before he starts talking. His funniest songs are among his best-known songs. But underneath all that hilarity is real depth and spiritual sensitivity and a genuine interest in other people’s lives and struggles. At Hutchmoot last year, when Andy and I did a session called “The Gospel Uses of Comedy,” I asked him to play his song “I Haven’t Either.” Halfway through the song, people were crying laughing. By the end of the song, a few of them were crying crying, moved by the song’s honesty about the realities of living with a broken self. Andy’s new album, Beyond the Frame, includes one of the funniest Gullahorn songs of all time. “Skinny Jeans” posits a theory that might explain why Andy isn’t as well-known as, say, Justin Bieber. The other day somebody remarked on Facebook that “Skinny Jeans” is reason enough to buy and listen to Beyond the Frame. That’s true as far as it goes, but the person who comes to this record in order to be amused is liable to get gobsmacked. Consider the first words you hear when you listen to Beyond the Frame: Nothing. All you hear is silence. Feels like you’re alone and Drifting off of the map. But many souls have gone Down this road you’re on. At least I have. Life isn’t all bowling and skinny jeans. Andy puts the listener on notice: this is going to be a record about hard things–marital trouble, the death of loved ones, addiction, persistent shame, the growing doubts of middle age. But even more importantly, this is a record about bearing one another’s burdens, acknowledging our common humanity and our shared need of a Savior. You’re not the only one who’s been down this road, Andy says. He’s been down it too. In the liner notes, every song is dedicated to somebody, usually a person or persons whose story inspired the song. Those little headnotes make the songs feel more personal and intimate even than songs of straight self-revelation would. It’s no rare thing for a singer-songwriter to explore his own suffering in his music. The most striking thing about Beyond the Frame is Andy’s willingness to explore the suffering of his friends, to dive into that suffering and to find hope like a glimmering pearl in its depths–not the false hope of easy answers, but hard-won hope. Beyond the Frame is a deeply compassionate album. Like a good friend, these songs enter into the world of a hurting fellow pilgrim and feel his pain, but they also take a step back to speak words of wisdom that the sufferer may not be able to speak to himself. I especially love “Favor Is a Foreign Tongue,” which addresses a person too bound up in shame and addiction to receive proffered grace: You’ve got friends trying to help, reaching out to you, But it’s not adding up with the little you think you deserve. You’re content with a loss ’cause you’ve got nothing left to lose, So you burn every bridge ’til they can’t reach you anymore. … I hate to imagine what happened to that little child That convinced you that goodness was too good to be true. Who knows what it was; maybe drugs had the final say When you took any trust and pawned it like a wedding ring. Oh but there’s so much more that I wish you would steal away, Like the mercy and peace and forgiveness you can have for free. The hope of Beyond the Frame revolves around the truth that we don’t have all the answers; we cannot see what God sees. That’s what the album title means. The refrain from the title track is haunting and a beautiful end to an album that has looked at hard things without blinking: I took a picture of the Grand Canyon So I could remember that day. But the beauty of the Grand Canyon Stretches way beyond the frame. The person in the midst of hardship can’t see the whole picture. But neither can the person who hopes to offer comfort. We speak the truth to one another, we remind one another of the big picture as best we can, but the more important thing is to come alongside one another and bear one another’s burdens. I hope I haven’t portrayed Beyond the Frame as grim. It isn’t. Yes, it addresses hardship and suffering, but it does so in a way that brings the hope of the gospel to bear. Maybe this will help: Imagine if the coolest kid you knew in school also happened to be among the most compassionate and wisest and most generous-hearted. Wouldn’t you want to hear his record? [Beyond the Frame is available in the Rabbit Room store.]

A few months ago I saw a very interesting  piece in the New York Times called “Has Fiction Lost Its Faith?” It was written by Paul Elie, the author of a most excellent quadruple biography of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day, titled The Life You Save May Be Your Own. (Elie is also an editor at Flannery O’Connor’s publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Elie’s article generated a lot of discussion when it was published last December; now, in the spirit of better-late-than-never, I offer it up for discussion in the Rabbit Room. Contemporary literary fiction, Elie argues, treats Christian belief “as something between a dead language and a hangover.” Forgive me if I exaggerate. But if any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called “Christian convictions,” their would-be successors are thin on the ground. So are works of fiction about the quan­daries of Christian belief. Writers who do draw on sacred texts and themes see the references go unrecognized. A faith with something like 170 million adherents in the United States, a faith that for centuries seeped into every nook and cranny of our society, now plays the role it plays in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House”: as some statues left behind in an old building, bewildering the new ­occupants. It’s a strange development. Strange because the current upheavals in American Christianity — involving sex, politics, money and diversity — cry out for ­dramatic treatment. Strange because upheavals in Christianity across the Atlantic gave rise to great fiction from “The Brothers Karamazov” to “Brideshead Revisited.” Strange because novelists are depicting the changing lives of American Jews and Muslims with great success… Now I am trying to answer the question: Where has the novel of belief gone? The obvious answer is that it has gone where belief itself has gone. In America today Christianity is highly visible in public life but marginal or of no consequence in a great many individual lives. For the first time in our history it is possible to speak of Christianity matter-of-factly as one religion among many; for the first time it is possible to leave it out of the conversation altogether. This development places the believer on a frontier again, at the beginning of a new adventure; it means that the Christian who was born here is a stranger in a strange land no less than the Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Soviet Jews and Spanish-speaking Catholics who have arrived from elsewhere. But few people see it that way. People of faith see decline and fall. Their detractors see a people threatening rear-guard political action, or a people left behind. Elie goes on to make an interesting point about Flannery O’Connor’s well-known claim that the novelist with Christian concerns has to shout and use large, startling figures to get the attention of indifferent readers. These days, Elie says, real-world believers are shouting more and drawing larger, more startling figures–from pulpits, in political rallies, on the Internet. “In response, writers with Christian preoccupations have taken the opposite tack, writing fiction in which belief acts obscurely and inconclusively.” There’s our beloved Marilynne Robinson, of course. But, Elie argues, “[Gilead’s] originality conceals the fact that, as a novel of belief, it is highly representative: set in the past, concerned with a clergyman, presenting belief as a family matter, animated by a social crisis.” It’s hard to find literary fiction that depicts Christian people wrestling around with what it means to be a Christian person in the twenty-first century. Even here, in the Rabbit Room, where we are intensely interested in what it means to be a Christian person in the twenty-first century, none of us who write fiction are writing about the world where we actually live and move and have our being. Andrew is writing about Aerwiar; Jennifer is writing about The Island at the Center of Everything; Pete is writing about the Revolutionary War; I’m writing about feechiefolks. To widen the net to include Hutchmoot speakers, Walt Wangerin has told stories about talking animals, Phil Vischer has told stories about talking vegetables, Nate Wilson writes about dragon’s teeth, and Leif Enger writes about the 1960s and earlier. I’m not being critical. We write about these things because we want to write about them, and our readers seem to like reading about them. Even if  authors with Christian convictions were writing piles of literary fiction about twenty-first century America, many of us would still be reading fantasy and historical fiction because that’s what many of us in the Rabbit Room community like to read. Still, it’s an interesting question: why are so few Christian authors writing straight non-fantastical novels about twenty-first century America? I realize that “Christian publishing houses” publish lots of contemporary novels. I would prefer to leave those books out of this conversation because they are published for and marketed to a specific subculture and don’t really aspire to speak to the culture at large. I hope our conversation doesn’t become a discussion of the relative merits of the fiction to be found at Lifeway stores. You can read the rest of Paul Elie’s very insightful and nuanced essay here. My summarization and quotation don’t do justice to it. For additional reading, you might check out this article from First Things by Randy Boyagoda, which is what reminded me of the Elie essay in the first place. (The first sentence of Boyagoda’s article reads, “I’m sick of Flannery O’Connor.” But it gets better.) I’d love to hear the thoughts that are provoked by this thought-provoking article. Note: NYTimes.com is a subscription site, but it lets you read 10 articles per month for free.

[Hello, Rabbit Room. This is S.D. Smith, international human being, presenting you with another post from your allies at Story Warren. Most of you know Julie Silander, she of RR Book Club fame, she of Hutchmoot fame, she of seemingly innumerable encouragements spreading secretly all over this community…um, fame. Julie has been a queen-city-sized dose of encouragement and wisdom to my family, so many of my friends, and an indispensable contributor to Story Warren. She also writes pretty well, for a dancer. –Sam] Let me tell you about my two-year-old. He loves life. He wakes early in the morning, eager for the adventures of the day. He is inquisitive about the way things work. He transforms long-forgotten remnants of this and that into tools, and he builds wood-block cities where the good guys decimate the bad guys on an hourly basis. He has a kind, generous heart and notices everything extraordinary that adults religiously dismiss. He has a sense of wonder and whimsy for which I yearn. He exudes the very essence of life. I love my two-year-old. But the thing is, he just turned thirteen. It happened when I blinked. As my eyes refocus on this newer version of my boy, I’m acutely aware that so much has changed. He has almost matched me in height.  He is the one recommending books to me, and I learn as much from our conversations (or more) than does he.  My son is closer to a man than a boy, and the rate of change is just getting kicked into high gear. Yet when I consider the best part of that two-year-old, the truest, most human, most alive part of his soul, it is still just as present eleven years later. The best part of my son is that which is eternal.  It doesn’t slip away with years, although I’ve been granted the privilege to see it grow and develop.  His joy, his compassion, his curiosity for life, his kindness and his creativity. Those things remain.They were formed from a substance more foundational than atoms. They are not bound (or marred) by the passage of time. The best part of my vibrant son, of my elderly grandmother, of you, and of me, won’t vanish with the years. It can’t be ended by a milestone birthday. Or even by a funeral. Most of us have felt the twinge of (or gut-wrenching) sadness that accompanies the milestones commemorated in our photo albums. We sigh, and with a mix of melancholy, nostalgia, sadness and yearning, we chant the parental mantra, “Time Flies.”  Yet take heart. Yes, time flies. But I don’t want to stop it. I want to climb on its back and soak up every inch of the scenery. I want to drink in the laughter, the tears, the soccer games, the visits to the ER, the blues skies and the torrential rains that this world has to offer. For when the cosmic clock is finally grounded, I will climb off its back, grateful for the wild and wonderful (full-of-wonder) ride. So enjoy your toddlers, your teenagers, your grandchildren. Don’t miss one bit of the ride due to fear or regret. For the day is coming when the tarnish of time will be removed  from us all. And underneath will be revealed the beauty, the creativity, the wonder, the whimsy, and the perfected love that was imprinted on our souls from the very foundations of the universe.

“In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet, the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed forever.”  – 1 Corinthians 15:51-52 We were not meant to die. We were meant to live. We were meant to live forever. That may sound absurd to many, given that we all do, in fact, die. But as a Christian I believe death is an intruder. I believe it is the wage of sin (Rom 6:23) and an effect of living in a broken, fallen world. (Gen 2:17, Rom 5:12) I don’t believe this is a blind faith either. As a pastor I spend time with many grieving people, and one prevailing emotion they all seem to share is that the death of a loved one feels wrong—like it’s not supposed to be this way. I believe they’re right and I believe the way our bodies fight to heal themselves when they’ve experienced something traumatic supports this idea that we were not meant to die, but to live. A few weeks ago I had open-heart surgery. Something happened to me while I was on the operating table that has me thinking about how we were meant to live and not die. No, I didn’t talk to an angel or spend five minutes in heaven or have a prophetic vision. I had a stroke—a small one known in the medical world as a reversible ischemic neurologic deficit, or RIND for short. RIND’s last from 24 to 72 hours before the symptoms, which include paralysis, mental confusion, and slurred speech, begin to resolve. Once the symptoms do resolve, there are rarely any lingering side effects. RIND’s are caused by a disruption of blood flow to the brain. Blood wants to clot when it comes into contact with anything outside the body. Since my surgery required that I be hooked up to a heart and lung machine, my doctors put me on a blood thinner before starting the procedure in order to keep my blood from clotting when it passed through the pump’s plastic tubing. Usually the blood thinners do their job, but the body’s design to protect and heal itself means that sometimes even a blood thinner can’t stop a tiny clot or two from forming when human blood comes into contact with a man-made material. Most likely this is what happened to me. A tiny clot formed when it hit that tubing and then traveled up into my brain where it got stuck and shut a few things down. *** Coming out of the fog of sedation is very disorientating. I remember opening my eyes and seeing my wife and my parents a few hours after surgery. A nurse asked a bevy of questions to determine my lucidity. Did I know where I was? Did I know why I was there? I answered her as best as I could before drifting off again. A couple of hours later I woke, this time much more aware of my surroundings. The nurse asked how I felt. “I can’t feel my left foot,” I told her. She asked, “What do you mean? Like it’s asleep?” I said, “No. I can’t feel it at all.” She asked me to wiggle my toes. I couldn’t. Not even a little. It wasn’t just numb. My left foot was hanging limp off to the side like it didn’t even belong to my body. This presented me with a greater issue than just a lame foot. Without that foot I wouldn’t be able to begin the slow process of rehabilitation in the way they wanted me to. One of the early steps in recovering from heart surgery is to get back on your feet as soon as possible. I couldn’t do this without my legs. Not only was I unable to walk, I was unable to stand up on my own. Since my sternum was now a broken bone held together by titanium wires, I wasn’t able to use my upper body to push up out of a chair, which is how most of us perform that task without a second thought. I needed my legs to do all the work and I didn’t have them. It took three nurses to lift me out of bed for the first time, and two to hold me up as I tried to walk the five feet between my bed and the chair. Though I was in the care of amazing doctors and nurses in one of the best hospitals in the world (for which I am nothing but grateful to God and all involved) anyone coming out of open-heart surgery is, by definition, a mess. Add a little stroke to the mix, and when I woke from surgery I was even more messed up than I might have been otherwise. At the risk of sounding like I’m piling on, for the sake of the point of this article permit me to mention a few more complications and symptoms I experienced during this process. I experienced a loss of basic motor skills. The day after surgery, I tried to reach for a cup of water sitting on a table to my right. I needed it to wash down a small handful of pills. It was easily within reach and both of my arms worked just fine. But in that moment, as much as my brain was trying to tell my arm to reach for the cup and pick it up, my arm would not obey. It was as though my arm and brain were no longer communicating to each other when it came to the matter of picking up that cup. I could do many other things with my arm just fine. I just couldn’t reach for that cup. I also experienced a loss of speech faculties. During the first couple of days when someone would ask me a simple question, I couldn’t always speak the answer I was thinking. When I meant yes, I’d say no. When I wanted to say I was thirsty, I’d say I wasn’t. Some of these symptoms were due to the RIND and some to the sedation and medications in my system. And some, no doubt, were simply by-products of the trauma of open-heart surgery. But this was the picture of my reality for the first couple of days after surgery. *** How did my body respond to all of this? It fought. It fought with abandon. It fought like it was meant to live. Within a matter of hours after discovering my paralysis, I was able to wiggle the toes on my left foot. Within a day, I could move my ankle. Over the course of three days, I went from being unable to sit up on my own to walking the hospital halls with a walker and a special boot. On the fourth day I ditched the walker. On day five, I got rid of the boot. My arms soon fell in line and began to obey my brain’s commands. My answers to peoples’ questions starting representing what I was actually thinking. The five-inch scar down the middle of my chest began to heal and the soreness in my throat from the breathing tube went away. Are you impressed? Do you imagine the hospital staff gathered at the foot of my bed in awe of my progress? While they certainly were pleased, they were far from calling me a miracle. Why? Because my recovery was progressing precisely as they had expected. They’d seen guys like me bounce back like this a hundred times over. They even told me before going under the knife what the first five days would hold for my recovery, and as it happened they were spot on. They said I would get exponentially better with each passing day. And guess what. I did. How did they know this would happen? They knew because this is what a body does when it goes through a traumatic ordeal. The first thing it does is fight to put itself back together as quickly as possible, opposing anything that might stand in its way. The walls of my heart have begun covering my internal stitches with scar tissue to strengthen what the surgeon’s scalpel had weakened. My body has applied the nutrients from the food I’ve eaten to calcify the break in my sternum, leaving it stronger than before. My brain recognized the clot and immediately began to dissolve it. Even my pain has played a role. Pain is the body’s way of enlisting our cooperation in the healing process. Had my natural curiosity led me to want to touch my scar, I could have infected it easily. But it hurt to touch, so I didn’t. Even now, it hurts when I try to use my upper body to push myself up out of a chair. That’s because my sternum is still fusing together and doesn’t want me undoing what it’s done so far. Out of habit I just use my legs now. (Happily, my left leg has fully recovered.) *** Over the course of these past few weeks I have been living in a body at war with itself, and in my case my body seems to be winning the fight to heal. Sadly not everyone wins this fight in the flesh, like my friend Alice. That’s part of the brokenness of our condition. Death comes for us all. Still, even the weakest among us fight against death in a host of ways. With every attempt to eat, they fight to supply their body with strength. With every fever they fight against disease and infection. With every sensation of pain, they push against the darkness closing in and feel the battle raging in their flesh and bone. For every person I’ve ever known who has died, they died fighting death. And this, I believe, is because we were meant to live. C.S. Lewis said, “If I find in myself a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Even though I know that everyone dies in the flesh at some point, nothing about that seems right to me. Nothing. The longing in me, and I’d wager in you too, is that we would not die, but that we would live—forever. This world, as it stands, cannot satisfy that longing. All it can do is sound the distant echo of another world—one where, though I die, yet shall I live—and that by faith in the Son of God. We were meant for this. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt 1: The Sacramental Echo Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt 2: The Letters Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt. 4: Struck Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt. 5: Scowling at the Angel https://twitter.com/russramsey http://www.facebook.com/russ.ramsey

I’m reading straight through the Gospel of John early in the morning these days. It’s my second time this summer. I finished it once, paged right back to the start and savored the opening again: in the beginning was the Word. There are some books of Scripture I want to learn as I would the mind and soul of a beloved friend; with concentrated and affectionate attention. I want their narrative to shape my own story, their words to form my sight of the world. Isaiah is one of those. The Psalms. And definitely John. John’s Gospel is a luminous book. The other Gospel writers seem to tell the story more from the outside in, relating the miracles, the teaching, those high and holy days of Jesus’ life from the viewpoint of what was seen. John tells it from this inside. He tells what it means. At least that’s the sense I get as I read. I feel often that he had an interior room within himself, a place where the Beloved spoke with him. From there he looked out on the spectacle and brilliance of Jesus’ days and perceived, not just the events, but the meaning of each, the great Reality unveiling itself in each action, word, and miracle. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us… John is a storyteller of superb skill, and the first time through this book I became aware of a certain theme in his narrative; the way that Jesus invaded sacred or traditional spaces and retold their meaning with his words. He walked straight into days and spaces like the temple, the Sabbath, a Samaritan well, and by his narration freed them of the fear and false law that obscured the living presence of God within them. Take, for instance, the cleansing of the temple, the significance of the statement, “don’t make my Father’s house a place of business,” as if grace could be bought and sold, as if God’s favor were an object for which we could barter. Clean out, not just the doves and coins and dirt, but the assumptions that attend their presence, the consumer idea of salvation. In the cleansing of the temple, Jesus was renewing not just the physical spaces, but the ideas of the people who inhabited them. Because of this realization, on my second read-through of John, I encountered the story of the wedding at Cana in a whole new way. And it rather stole my breath. I had always assumed this first miracle ought to be special since it was the first flung challenge in the darkness, a sword of light unsheathed as Messiah began his unconventional conquest of men’s hearts. But the whole thing, if simply read straight through, is somewhat underwhelming. Jesus seems reluctant. Mary seems pushy. And after all, it’s just wine. What’s more, I’ve rarely heard this story taught with any sense of excitement. Maybe its just my own perception, but I think we tend to view this first miracle as a practice run, the flexing of Jesus’ miraculous fingers on insignificant wine before the real work began. A divine token to mark the first try. But early the other morning as I read this story for the second time in a month, read it with a mind not hurried, but willing to savor, I saw anew. I saw, I think, as John meant me to see, the way in which this story is is the prelude to the epic of the gospel, an embodied poem that told the tragedy of the world and hinted at a coming eucatastrophe. The story of the very world is told, I think, within this tale of a rural wedding feast. A feast that Messiah was about to save. For in the beginning, not just of Jesus’ ministry, but in the making of the world he had come to save, there was a wedding. Body and soul, God and man, a joyous joining that was a love story told by God himself and called life. Joy was the order of existence. Laughter the beat of heart and gladness the thrum of the very earth. The wedding that was creation was meant to inaugurate a world of harmony, of order, and continuous new creation. But the wine of life ran abruptly short when sin crashed into the midst of God’s feast. And it was God’s beloved who brought the sin, who spilled the wine and spurned his love so that life itself ran suddenly short. And the marriage was brought to the very brink of collapse. But God was not a husband to be so easily defeated. No lover He, to be so quickly cast aside. The ages of the earth marched on and it seemed that the feast was ended, the joy forever disrupted, the wine run short. But God never abandoned his Beloved. The feast was delayed, but by his own love it would be renewed, for even as we wept, he was planning the great gift that would save the wedding and cause the wine to freely flow again. The gift was himself, bundled up in flesh and blood, invading the earth so that he could take the hands and save the heart of his beloved. And when he came, the event he chose to announce his arrival, to inaugurate his work of redemption? A wedding feast. There was Jesus, the answer to the broken heart of the world about to announce his presence at the celebration of a marriage. He seemed to be just one more young man at a rural wedding party, but he sat amidst a broken people and knew that he was the answer to every yearning of their hearts. The host and maker of the universe, if they but knew it, was the unassuming guest at a marriage that would become the event to announce the reconciliation of the world. All was set. The story was about to be renewed. I love that Mary set the tale in motion. She saw the lack of wine and knew the shame at stake. But I think her insight carries a larger understanding. Perhaps  Mary, with her remarkable, contemplative heart, intuited the symbolism of that moment. She was the human mother of God, more aware than any other human on earth of what had come, what dwelt so silently among the fallen and was about to be revealed. Perhaps when she confronted her Son with the disaster, she knew she was speaking of a larger lack, speaking to the deepest void in the human heart when she said, “the wine has run short.” Jesus, in a voice I fully believe was playful and grave at once, says, “what is it to me?” A lively challenge. A parry and thrust, a question that could be our devastation if she really had to answer. For in the end, what ought it be to God? God gave humankind the world and we, the Beloved, cast it away. We flung his love back in his face and by our own choice squandered life itself. We are a band of impossible ingrates forever choosing against the one lover in all the world whose great affection gave us our being. What is it to God? Why should he stoop to save us from disaster? But the mother of God knows. She knows that it is everything to God. I can almost see her steady eyes as they peered from a face shaped by a lifetime of “pondering these things.” This woman who has known the Holy Spirit and borne the baby God into the world looks steadily at Jesus, the Word made flesh, Messiah come. If this weren’t everything to God her Son would never have been born. She smiles at her holy child and turns. “Do exactly what he says,” she tells the servants. And her words are an affirmation of faith in the action and grace of her lover God. He has come and he will save. Despite the stupidity of his Beloved, the fallen hearts, the corrupted loves, he has come to renew the feast, to save the marriage. And the lost ones will be saved if only they will do what He commands and believe in the love of the great, redeeming Bridegroom. Jesus, with just half a smile I feel sure, acts. He points to six great vats set aside for… what? Ritual cleansing. Vats set aside to hold the water that has been humankind’s attempt to make themselves enough before God, to keep the wine of mercy from running short. Throughout the long ages of sorrow, we have struggled toward God, reached for the mercy he still offered. Humanity has always attempted to become enough, to keep life and love and joy alive. But the wine always fails. And now, those symbols of man’s struggle and man’s failure to ever be clean or enough, the perennial symbol of his “fallen shortness” are what Jesus chooses for his first miracle. “Fill them with water,” he commands. Brim them afresh at the bridegroom’s command. “Then,” he says, “take a dipper full to the steward and let him taste.” And the water is turned to wine. Because Jesus has come, the struggle is about to end, the thirst will be slaked, and the wedding feast of the world will swing back into being. The revelry will be such as the world has never seen. Jesus has come, and the wine of life will never run short again. This symbolic act began the ministry of Christ. “You have saved the best for last,” sputters the astonished steward, stumbling up to the wedding party, holding out a wine finer than any he has tasted in his life. And the best One in the world sits quietly amidst his people. Mary grasps the arm of her son, feels the pulse of his warm, sweet, human blood, touches the skin that houses God himself and knows that the wedding of the world has been restored. Perhaps she aches as well, knowing somehow that the wine required for this restoration is the blood of her son. But its giving is the seal of an eternal love, a marriage that never again will be broken. The feast begins anew, never now to end. The final word of the great lover God, the best word, is Jesus. And the wine of life will never run short again. See what John is teaching me?

Walking Song hit the streets today, and here’s a new episode of Table Talk in which Ron Block discusses what it’s like to step center-stage and play the front-man, opens up about the experience of co-writing with Rebecca Reynolds, and performs the title track with Sierra Hull. (There may also be an accounting of hats.)

Today we celebrate the birth of two awesome things: Ron Block, and his new record Walking Song (co-written with Rebecca Reynolds). That’s right, today is Ron’s birthday so wish him well and buy him a copy of his record. He’ll love you for it. CDs and downloads of the new album are now available in the Rabbit Room store. If you missed it last week, be sure to read Jonathan Rogers’s most excellent review. Once you’ve read the review, listen to this. Thank me later. “What’s Banjo?” by Ron Block and Ethan Blockhttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Banjo.mp3 Check back later for an exclusive video performance of “Walking Song” by Ron Block and Sierra Hull. Happy birthday, Ron, and congratulations on the incredible work you and Rebecca have done.

I have always been a five year-old about birthdays. I love them, and I get very excited about celebrating the day that God in His mercy chose to give me life. The most ordinary things seem tinged with magic, and I pray I will never grow out of that. But I am also very awed by the shining, unwritten gift of a new year. There is something a little untame about the enormous possibility that stretches before me, and a deep unction rises to take responsibility for my choices in the spinning round of days to come—to name my year with purpose and intention and love. To mark each age with significance and deep attention to the subtle ways in which God is bringing me into my own, as a woman and as His child. So, while all birthdays are important to me, this one seems especially so. Today, I enter the final year of my thirties. I’ve joked with Philip about how I’m turning 39 for the first time, but, in all seriousness, I’m not bothered a bit about growing older—I love the increasing freedom that comes with the passing of years, and the gradual shedding of non-essentials—be it the shedding of ideas or possessions or insecurities. My thirties have been a remarkable decade. I have had adventures and opportunities my 29 year-old self could not have imagined. It’s also been a quietly turbulent decade, in the good way that all true soul-growth is turbulent. I have been stretched in ways that sometimes seemed past endurance, and I have found God more loving, more tender, more unreasonably patient with me than I ever would have let myself hope He would be. My joys, too, have deepened into this widening space within, so that I begin to feel that all the tugging and pulling and broadening—which can be so uncomfortable in the moment—has only been God’s secret design of making room for even more joy. And so, as I enter into this last year of my thirties, I want to pay close attention. To listen to the story my own life is telling me. To pause long enough to see a pattern and notice how divinely suited it is to my personality. I cannot help feeling that I am on the threshold of something very important, and I don’t want to miss it. One thing that has been growing on me steadily of late is the thought that I want to live this last year of my thirties the way I really wish I’d lived all of my thirties: namely, actively believing the things that God has said about me. Believing that God loves me as wildly and extravagantly and unconditionally as He does. Believing the names He has given me. Believing that acts of love, howsoever small, are undying. Believing that it’s allright to say ‘no’ to things my heart is saying ‘no’ to and to live in a way that, as Macrina Wiederkehr so beautifully put it, is kind to my own soul. I have mentioned here before, to great empathy from my fellow introverts, a passage from Elizabeth Goudge’s A City of Bells, which I first encountered with a rush of tears and a burst of camaraderie, both for Goudge herself (whom I know the words describe) as well as her petite heroine: Henrietta, at heart a contemplative person, enjoyed alarums and excursions for a short while only. For her a background of quiet was essential to happiness. It had been fun to stay with Felicity, to be petted and spoiled by all her friends…to have lovely things to eat and to go to the zoo whenever she liked, but it had completely upset her equilibrium and she felt as though she had been turned upside down so that everything that was worthwhile in her mind fell out. She, like everyone else, had to find out by experience in what mode of life she could best adjust herself to the twin facts of her own personality and the moment of time in which destiny had planted it, and she was lucky perhaps that she found out so early……she found herself listening only to the lovely silence and it seemed to her that in it she came right way up again and her dreams, that had deserted her in London, came flocking back, so that with joy she flung open the doors of her mind and welcomed them in. Never again, she vowed, would she live a noisy life that killed her dreams. They were her reason for living, the only thing that she had to give to the world, and she must live in the way that suited them best. I am learning—again, and yet, as never before—how crucial it is for me to live in the way that suits my dreams, not only for my own equilibrium, but because this is the place in which I find God. When life gets out of hand—whether by excitement or stress or illness or over-commitment—two things happen in me, immediately and insidiously: I stop writing, and I stop dwelling in the peace of the love of God. You would think I’d see it coming, it’s happened so many times before. But it always takes me off guard and pulls the rug out from under my soul. I get muddled so easily, yanked off center by the varying forces at work in our age, and find myself wondering where my dreams went. Or, worse yet, wondering if they ever were. It’s because of this tendency towards muddle (“Beware of muddle!” warns Mr. Emerson so poignantly in A Room With a View. “Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.”) that I am taking the passage into 39 very seriously. I am taking heart to look more keenly into the things that make me alive—and to guard them with my life. I am willing to own, perhaps as never before, that what may not be “too much” for another person is justly “too much” for me. I am learning that I am much more of a sailboat than a steel trawler, excruciatingly (exasperatingly?) sensitive to the breezes and currents of life, but that when my sails catch the wind of the love of God, my work becomes seemingly effortless. Becomes, in the words of Kahlil Gibran, “love made visible.” In order to catch that wind, however, to know that divine conveyance, I must be out on the open seas with Him, riding wild waves of that Spirit which “blows where it listeth…,” in a solitude that can be terrifying at times. In recent weeks, I’ve felt a desire kindling that seems nothing short of a dare: What if, it whispers, you do indeed give the last year of your thirties to an unprecedented level of solitude with Him, for the love of God? Of communion and intimacy and wonder? What if you venture into the contemplative life you’ve dreamed of, a life that is a little more cloistered and a lot more loving? What if you actually took the time to recalibrate the compass of your life? What if you took a Sabbath Year? For me, a Sabbath Year means an intentional rest from the things that pull me off center, chief of which is my expectations of myself. It means laying aside, if only temporarily, some of the things I love in order that I may tend my soul more carefully. I’ve already made my little list of “offerings,” which, candidly, I’m excited about. (Though, equally candid, I’m tempted to say with each emerging item, “Ah, Lord! That too?”) But for as long as I can remember, I have not only admired, but panted after the monastic ideal: the dream of a cloistered heart that retreats from the world in order to love the world. More than that, even, a heart that values silence and solitude with God over all the “showier” aspects of religious life. A heart that is not afraid to love God extravagantly, whether other people see it or not. I have been drawn towards this ideal for years and years, encountering its recognizable essence in the people I most admire with a gasping sense of validation and joy. And I have been drawn, likewise, in these foothills of my forties, into the conviction I need to segue into this Sabbath Year with the great Christian tradition of a 40-Day Fast. This whole idea has been growing on me since last week, when one of my best friends sent me an email that said, in all simplicity, “Go dormant, Lanier.” All day yesterday I felt the longing growing within me, a living thing. A thing I am both exhilarated by and terrified of: the longing for the Great Silence. The specific longing to retreat for a time from the internet world and fully inhabit the smaller world of a bounded life. I realize, even as I’m naming it, that I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time, but I’ve lacked the courage. Suddenly, perhaps out of my great need, the courage is there, and the knowledge that the world is not waiting on tenterhooks for the next words to fall from my fingers and splash (or drip) out into the internet. It’s okay to be silent for a while. And so, kind friends, beginning Monday, July 29th, I am going quiet on the internet. For forty days, no email, no Facebook, no Twitter (which I actually have no idea how to use anyway). No browsing about on Ruche and accidentally buying things. No obsessing over Instagram pictures. No drinking from the great, flowing fountain of words and ideas that make the internet such a miracle to me. I need to step back into silence and heal from the trauma of “too much” for a while. I want to use this time to pray for clarity and wisdom in the choices my husband and I are making with our lives, to remember what it means again to be a child of God. To not only hear His voice, but know what questions to ask. In short, to find my bearings once more. And, that done, to put out to sea with Him. I dearly appreciate all of you, and the ways in which you have contributed to my journey. Hobbit-like, I wish I could give every one of you a present for my birthday. But know that I am sending my great love out into the great world of this crazy internet, and that I am looking forward to connecting once more in a few weeks. (I’d cherish your prayers, if you think about it.)

Oy, lads and lasses. I’m writing this from the front steps of a little flat in Edinburgh where the Petersons are shacking up for the week. This evening we walked the Royal Mile down from the castle to the sound of a dude playing bagpipes, and it was as awesome as it sounds. Something else awesome? The accents. I can barely understand what the Scots are telling me (especially the cabbie), but I’m happily oblivious. I just answer, “Aye,” and occasionally scream, “FREEDOM!” Last week my family and I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon in Oxford, England, where of course we stopped in at the Eagle and Child, the pub which inspired the Rabbit Room. It feels a bit like a tourist trap nowadays. Not only were there Lord of the Rings quotes on the walls, but I’m pretty sure every accent I heard in the place was American. We’re such suckers for this kind of thing, apparently. But still! That little back room with Lewis and Tolkien pictures on the wall, the fireplace, the copy of the document whereupon the Inklings, after eating a particularly good ham, signed their names and drank to the health of the proprietor of the Eagle and Child, casts an undeniable spell. It’s an irresistible stop for any traveler who loves Narnia or Middle-Earth. So this guy named Evan Weppler was visiting Oxford about a month before us, and when he learned Team Peterson was planning to visit the original Rabbit Room, he came up with a great idea. I didn’t tell the kids what it was, but I told them something pretty cool was going to happen when we got to the Eagle and Child. We found our table in the Rabbit Room, ordered our food, then I told them, “Watch this.” I looked over the books on the shelves until I found a little white one about the Trinity. I flipped it open and out fell a folded note that said, “To the Peterson family.” Evan told us a little about his visit, told us about an early edition Lewis book he found at an Oxfam down the street, and wished us well. It was like getting a secret message from Barliman in the Prancing Pony, and it made our visit that much better. Thanks, Evan, for thinking of us. When we left, bellies full of fish and chips, we walked to the Bodleian Library, which currently has an exhibit called “Magical Books.” Someone on Facebook recommended it, and I’m glad they did. It included Lewis’s hand drawn map of Narnia, as well as several original Tolkien paintings. They even displayed Tolkien’s handmade pages from the journal Gandalf finds at Balin’s tomb. Remember the part where he reads the dwarven script about the goblins being in Moria? “We cannot get out. The end comes…drums, drums in the deep…they are coming.” Tolkien, in a burst of delightful nerdiness, decided one day to have craft time. The pages are made to look burnt and bloodied, and the script is written in dwarfish—it even has the pen trailing off at the end, when the goblins interrupt the scribe. I love picturing Tolkien the Oxford professor hunkered over a desk, tongue sticking out like a little boy with a coloring book while he made the pages. Then we drove to Magdalen College, where Lewis taught. While there I saw a Twitter message from a guy named Micah Coston, who lives in Oxford. (You may remember the artist Katie Coston, his wife, who made the very first round of Rabbit Room mugs.) I’ve never met Micah or Katie, but I tweeted back that we were heading to Addison’s Walk, in case he had time to say hello. There’s nothing quite like bumping into someone you know (however tangently) when you’re on the other side of the world. We walked through Magdalen’s campus, one of the most  beautiful places I’ve ever seen, which boasted one of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen (the plaque said it was planted in 1801). We saw the great hall, where Lewis would have eaten meals, and found the windows of his classrooms. From Surprised by Joy: You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England. Then we passed through the gates to a walking path along a little river. It’s called Addison’s Walk, and it was there that Tolkien, Lewis, and Hugo Dyson walked one night and had a conversation that was crucial to Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. From They Stand Together: September 1931: He [Hugo Dyson] stayed the night with me in College… Tolkien came too, and did not leave till 3 in the morning… We began (in Addison’s Walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth – interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining…. We continued on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot…. We strolled the path on a beautiful summer day, and when we came around to the entrance again, there sat Micah Coston (a friend of Brannon McAllister, Justin Gerard, Corey Godbey, and some other artsy Greenville folks you may know). He very graciously walked us past Merton College and Christ Church cathedral, an impromptu tour guide with a comforting American accent. We bid farewell to Micah, then drove out to the Kilns for one of the most delightful parts of our visit. The Kilns, where C.S. Lewis and his brother Warnie lived, sits a little way out of Oxford, next to an old pond that’s now called the C.S. Lewis Nature Preserve. If you saw the film Shadowlands you may remember Anthony Hopkins strolling around the pond. I drove past it a few years ago but didn’t have time to schedule a tour; the house is now occupied by students, so you’re supposed to call ahead if you want to see it. Well, we got there and walked the nature trail, peeking awkwardly through the hedges at the house. I didn’t know exactly when we’d be in Oxford, so I couldn’t make an appointment. It was 8 p.m., and I was bummed that we had come so far and my kids couldn’t see inside the house. So I called. The woman who answered the phone was very kind and told me they were closed, but we could make an appointment for later in the week. I said, “Well, this is weird, but we’re right outside. Could we at least walk around a bit?” She said, “Meet me at the door by the path and I’ll let you in.” It was such a gift. She let us interrupt her evening and welcomed us in for an abbreviated tour. Then we drove a quarter-mile to Trinity Church, where Lewis is buried, and snagged a few seeds from the maple tree beside his grave–we’ll see if they grow in Tennessee. A quick Google search pointed me to three of the houses where Tolkien lived. Alas, we spotted no hobbits. It was getting late, and we had a 3.5 hour drive to our lodging in Wales, so we had to bid farewell to Oxford, “the city of dreaming spires.” Four hours wasn’t nearly enough time. Four weeks would have been more like it. But we saw some amazing things and met some great people, and hopefully planted some seeds of wonder in my children’s hearts. I hope you make it to Oxford someday, and that you have more time than we did. When you get to the Eagle and Child, there’s a note waiting for you. Look at the bookshelf to your right, just as you pass under the Rabbit Room sign. There’s a skinny white paperback book on the Trinity with a note inside. It says, On this day, the 15th of July,  in the Year of Our Lord 2013, Andrew Peterson, Jamie Peterson, Aedan Peterson, Asher Peterson, and Skye Peterson had scrumptious food in the Rabbit Room, the Eagle and Child, Oxford, England, with gratitude to the Inklings, whose friendship and stories have shaped our lives, to the glory of God. Let fellow Rabbit Roomers sign below. Safe travels, pilgrim. It’s a dangerous thing to go out your front door. If you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where the road might take you.

In the annals of Rabbit Room-inspired collaborations, Ron Block’s new album Walking Song, co-written with Rebecca Reynolds, ranks just below Pete and Jennifer Peterson’s marriage. Ron and Rebecca got to know each other online through Rabbit Room discussions. Rebecca thought Ron was a theologian; and though she had picked up on the fact that he played an instrument or two, she didn’t realize that he was a banjo superstar and a professional musician. Since Ron had always been complimentary of her writing, and since she had always wanted to try her hand at songwriting, she asked her new guitar-strumming theologian friend if he would be interested in writing some songs together. Which reminds me of a story my wife heard when she lived in Aspen, Colorado—a story I earnestly hope is true. A fellow she knew was invited to a shi-shi party, and since his parents were in town from the Midwest, he brought them along. Standing by the punchbowl, his father struck up a conversation with a silver-haired man who looked to be about his age. “Hi, there,” he said. “I’m Herb Knudsen. From Iowa.” “Hello, Herb,” said the other man. “I’m Ralph Lauren.” Herb pushed up his glasses and asked, “So, Ralph, what do you do for a living?” I digress. It was a mercy to Ron and to the listening public that Rebecca didn’t know better than to ask such a bluegrass icon to write with her. They were well into their writing partnership before Rebecca realized that Ron had guitars and banjos named after him, and that he had won Grammys and Dove awards. It made for real freedom, for Ron as much as for Rebecca. As Ron says in the album’s liner notes, “She gave me the freedom to fail. We were sitting there having a good time and writing a song, and there was no pressure. And if we didn’t come up with anything, it wasn’t a big deal. We didn’t waste the time; we learned something. At my age, to feel like I’m just beginning to understand what it means to write songs, that’s a gift. It’s a newness all over again.” The music on Walking Song is as brilliant as Ron Block’s listeners would expect, and the lyrics are as brilliant as Rebecca Reynolds’ readers would expect. Rebecca has a gift for writing lyrics that sound old without sounding contrived. Of the eleven original songs on the album, six or seven marry traditional-sounding music with traditional-sounding lyrics. “Nickel Tree Line,” with its coal train shivering and whining, is my favorite. Imagine what Hosea’s friends would say about Gomer if they all lived in Kentucky. Then imagine that Gomer sings like Alison Krauss. These traditional pieces build meaning from particular and concrete images in the way the best folk songs do. The poetry is ambitious while still remaining within the parameters of traditional bluegrass language and imagery (language and imagery which Rebecca identifies as more Aristotelian than Platonic; perhaps we could prevail on her to expand on this theme in the comments below). In the less traditional songs, including “Let There Be Beauty,” and “Chase Me to the Ocean,” the poetry is freer and even more ambitious. The chorus from “Let There Be Beauty” demonstrates how far Ron and Rebecca can get from traditional Bluegrass tropes when they choose to: So let there be beauty For beauty is good The made and the making And the bliss understood. So let there be beauty For beauty is free Come swim in the waters. Come drink from the stream. As for Ron Block’s music, anybody who has been listening to bluegrass in the last twenty years knows it’s going to be great, and it is. Ron’s playing is versatile, vibrant, and technically precise while still being incredibly expressive. His interpretations of three traditional tunes (“Devil in the Haystack,” “Shortnin Bread,” and “What Wondrous Love Is This?”) make you proud to be an American. His work on “The Fields of Aidlewinn” reminds the listener that Bluegrass, that most American musical form, owes plenty to the Scotch-Irish tradition (indeed, what could be more American than the Scotch-Irish tradition?). The musicians on this record are precisely the musicians you would expect to turn out for a Ron Block project—on every instrument, they are among best to be found in Nashville or anywhere else. Buddy Greene on harmonica. Jeff Taylor on accordion. Sam Bush, Dan Tyminski, and Sierra Hull on mandolin. Stuart Duncan on fiddle. Jerry Douglas on dobro. Barry Bales on bass. And Alison Krauss, Kate Rusby, Evelyn Cox, and Suzanne Cox are positively angelic on background vocals. Walking Song is a monument to great writing and great musicianship. But at least as importantly, it is a monument to friendship, which is one of the great forces of good in the world. This is what Rebecca wrote about this effort of friendship: Even though I think we will grow as a songwriting team, developing out of our weaknesses, maturing in our strengths, we will never have another first album. This is our sweet, first spark of creativity, wrought in innocence. Just two friends making castles in the sand. That’s a rare catch in a world bent on achievements. No matter what bigger or better thing we make in the future, I will always love Walking Song for that. It is the core of what I think art should be. Friends reaching out to friends, offering some small good thing to a broken world. Hear her, friends. #RebeccaReynolds #RonBlock #WalkingSong

“When times are good, be happy; but when times are hard, consider this: God has made the one as well as the other. Therefore, no one can discover anything about their future.”               – Ecclesiastes 7:14 In less than twenty-four hours I will be lying unconscious on an operating table. My wrists and ankles will be in restraints and I’ll have a breathing tube down my throat. My chest will be open and a machine on a cart beside me will perform the work of my heart and lungs while a surgeon and his team attempt to repair, or if that’s not possible, replace my heart’s mitral valve. Mitral valve repair is a relatively safe surgery, especially for a guy my age—major for me but routine for my surgeon, I’m told. I am confident everything will go according to plan, and I’ll emerge from the anesthesia sore but ready and eager to rehabilitate. Nevertheless, I have agreed to let a team of highly trained medical professionals stop my heart tomorrow in order to remove a part of it, and then sew it back up and start it again. So in light of that reality, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks writing letters. *** Ten years ago I met a woman named Alice. She was in the late stages of a very aggressive cancer. She moved to the Kansas City area so she could spend the last weeks of her life close to her daughters. One Sunday Alice and her girls visited our church. She wore a floral print bandana on her head because the chemotherapy and radiation had taken her hair. I introduced myself after the service and she asked if I could meet her for a cup of coffee. We met the next day and Alice told me some of her story. She had experienced more pain, loss, and grief in her fifty-one years than anyone I could recall, and that was all before she found out she had cancer. Somewhere in all her Job-like suffering Christ had taken a hold of her and, as she said with the joyful sincerity of a child, had promised not to let her go. I asked what brought her to our church. She said, “I want you to bury me.” *** In 1 Corinthians 4:1-5, the apostle Paul argues that what other people think about you doesn’t matter. He goes on to say that what you think about yourself doesn’t really matter either. All that matters is what God thinks about you because He is the only One who sees you as you truly are. I believe this is true. One of the sad burdens many of us carry in this life is accepting the lie that our worth is determined by what other people think about us. It is an incredible power we hand over to others—many never knowing we’ve done so. Whether it’s the young man trying to win the affection of the pretty girl, or the middle-aged man sinking into depression because he believes he has failed to accomplish anything anyone would ever regard as a legacy, or any one of us choosing our spending habits or clothing or words in order to be accepted into someone else’s tribe, we all want to belong, and we go to great lengths to establish our worthiness. The burden here is that we often lose ourselves in this process. Conversely, one of the great joys in this life is found in those rare relationships where neither person is trying to prove anything because they know, with confidence and a clear conscience, who they are to each other before God. Picture one of your most complicated relationships as a desk filled with all the clutter of your combined fears, ambitions, smoke, and mirrors. How freeing would it be if someone swept their arm across that surface, clearing away everything until all that remained was just the two of you as you really were—no distractions, no props, no clutter? Few things sweep away the clutter of our fears like coming face to face with our own mortality. Life gets simple in a hurry. *** “I want you to bury me.” Those six words swept across the table between Alice and me at our first meeting so that from the start we knew who we were to each other. She was a woman about to die and I was the minister who would hold her hand and speak words of truth until she did, after which I would commend her body to the earth and her soul to the Lord she loved and trusted so deeply, and comfort her family. At that coffee shop I told Alice I had never performed a funeral before. She told me not to worry. She’d been thinking about what she wanted and that we could plan it together. So we did, down to the songs, the scripture readings, and the balloons we released at her gravesite. I have always counted it a gift from God Himself that my friend Alice, the woman in the casket, helped me compose the first funeral I officiated as a young pastor. *** What does any of this have to do with my heart surgery? One of the things Alice asked me to help her do during the last week of her life was to compose letters to her children, letters I would give to them at her graveside. What goes into a letter from a dying mother to her weary, angry, grieving adult children? Intimate things I will not spell out in detail here, except to say that along with those intimate things, she also wanted to talk about ultimate things. What did she want for their lives? What prayers rose to her lips when she thought about them moving into their mid-twenties? “I want them to know Jesus,” she said. “Tell them I know this hurts. I know life has been hard lately. I know they’re confused and possibly angry with God. But tell them my deepest desire is that my children would walk with Jesus and know the comfort of His love, just as I have.” Alice knew she wasn’t long for this world. As far as I know, I have no reason to think such things about myself in my present situation. A lot would have to go wrong for me to be in any sort of mortal danger. But still, “no one can discover anything about their future.” Knowing what I know about what my doctors are going to do to me tomorrow, I’ve written some letters to my wife and my children about intimate and ultimate things. What Alice wanted for her children is essentially what I want for mine. I want them to receive what Job said—“Shall we receive good from God and not receive sorrow as well?” (Job 2:10)—as words of comfort and not bitterness. They will know good times but they will also certainly know sorrow. This life is filled with sorrow. When sorrow comes I pray they will have the humility to remember that God is still with them, though they see through a glass darkly. I pray they would see that all of history points to a gracious, loving God whose ways are higher than ours, but are nonetheless filled with unmatched mercy and grace. I pray that when calamity befalls them, they would not stand shaking their fists at the heavens demanding God give an account of himself. I pray they would trust him to be their Man of Sorrows, the one who has borne their grief and carried their sadness. (Isa 53:4) I want them to need Christ more than they need anything or anyone else in this world—even their dad. I want them to know that the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ are God’s inscrutable manifesto concerning what he thinks about them. I want that to be the truth in which they live and move and have their being. And I want the same for myself. I can be an impatient man. I can get lost in my work, my ambition, and my agenda. But these are the days where my Maker has used a blood-borne bacteria and a damaged mitral valve to sweep away the clutter and silence the noise, even if only for a while, so that I might put pen to paper to express my ultimate prayers and intimate hopes for my family’s lives. So for this congenital malformed heart valve I bless the name of the Lord, come what may. (Job 1:21) A dear friend is holding these letters for me and I look forward to getting them back so that I might deliver them in person. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt 1: The Sacramental Echo Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt 3: Meant to Live Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt. 4: Struck Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Pt. 5: Scowling at the Angel __________ https://twitter.com/russramsey http://www.facebook.com/russ.ramsey

One night, years ago, while tucking my brother and me into bed, my father started on the subject of stealing. Whether my brother introduced the topic or my dad simply felt the need to talk about it, I don’t recall. Dad expressed his utter contempt for thieves, saying that the lowest person on earth was one who would take something that did not belong to him. My dad’s words clobbered me, for that very day I had stolen a toy car from my friend, our next-door neighbor. That afternoon in my friend’s room, while contemplating the theft, my internal dialogue went something like this: “I don’t have one of these. I want this one. I will slip it into my pocket when I leave. It’s just a toy. He won’t miss it.” The purloined object was a small, black Matchbox Trans-Am. However, upon hearing my father’s feelings on thieves it might as well have been an anchor the way it made me sink, causing my palms to sweat out of the self-awareness and guilt that was drowning me. I did not dare tell dad how terrified and guilt-stricken I was, imagining he would no longer love me were he to know that I, his eldest child, had dabbled in burglary that very afternoon. That night while trying to sleep, my father’s speech tore at me. The following morning I sneaked out the back door without a shred of honor and tossed the stolen car over the fence into my friend’s yard, believing that somehow this gesture was enough to absolve me of any guilt or responsibility. I never told a soul. I am certain the toy was never found, was probably mowed over infinite times, and for all I know lies there still, buried beneath soil. A good thing gone bad. My days of theft, regrettably, did not end with that Matchbox toy car. I am a repeat offender. I habitually steal valuables from myself, whether it be my own joy and memories, or the contentment of my soul. I often wonder what it would be like to silence the chaotic anxieties inside me for long enough to breathe without a care in the world, to inhale and exhale without constriction, to resist the urge to pilfer my own heart based on my belief that God is predestined to pull the carpet out from under me. Maybe it’s the 200-proof midlife responsibilities talking, maybe it’s the caffeine, maybe it’s the physical exhaustion of working outdoors in the sapping summer heat, but like a young prince who cannot fathom the idea of giving himself away, I wander off glumly, staring out into the horizon but rarely taking steps towards it. I am a malcontent, a person long-tormented by the multitude of gifts adorning his abundant life, blind or oblivious to them all. The hope of heaven should be enough to release a soul from worry—over money, over material goods, over the war of artful words and creative subjects—yet I continue to steal, a thief who cannot come clean. I want to be a bad thing gone good. I know that my dad would not cease to love me because I stole a toy from a neighbor. Shame, however, is a burglary all its own. Living in the shadows, we forget the lonesome hope of ever finding contentment. I would never scold my hopes, I would never curse my dreams, I would never scorn the tangle of disappointments for they are the artful, Christ-laid stones along the path leading me to points of grace. Burial beneath a world of toil and trial is the miraculous way in which God redeems. It is the merciful method by which he steals our sad anxieties and reminds us that he has chosen to forgive and forget all our thievery, self-loathing, and shame. We are asked to do likewise. Behold, this miracle of forgetting is still in the world.

If you were fortunate enough to support and score a copy of the newest Rabbit Room Press title, Subjects With Objects, then you know how enchanting the mix of Jonathan Richter’s painting and DKM’s poetic commentary can be. The book is both intriguing and inspirational, much like its writer, the mysterious poet known as DKM. In this Rabbit Room interview, I’ve probed the mysteries behind those initials to learn a bit more about the man as well as to discuss the beauty of the project itself. The bad news? We’re still no closer to knowing who he is. The good news? There’s more Subjects with Objects to come. Who exactly is DKM? Can you unveil any of the mystery behind the initials? In the standard English Alphabet, one typically has 26 letters to choose from. Occasionally one is able to slip a 27th past the gatekeepers, and if it’s late enough or those in authority are drunk enough, then there have been a handful of recorded cases of this or that writer in this or that obscure corner of the English-speaking world managing to wedge in a 28th letter (most-often disguised as one of the lower 26). Shakespeare is even rumored to have discovered a 29th and 30th letter during the writing of King Lear, but if the stuff of such legend has any basis in fact, those letters were quickly repressed or purposely obscured in translation. In order not to incur undue attention from those who monitor such things however, I restricted myself from the outset of the Subjects With Objects project, not only to the 26-letter variation, but to a subset of that: only those letters that have an utterly vertical line in their design. The reasons for this should be obvious, so I won’t condescend to explain them here. Plus, it wouldn’t be safe for any of us. At any rate, having narrowed my letter choice to 13 candidates for a 3 letter combination (any more would have been cost prohibitive!), I was faced with 2,197 (13 x 13 x13) possible letter combinations. To save time, I simply chose the first one I could think of: DKM. It has a decided lack of elegance. It was clearly the antithesis of mellifluous and therefore well-suited to being a repository of mystery, as it were. When people go by initials, it’s mostly JJ or AJ or DJ or JK or RJ (Are we beginning to see a pattern here..?). Something simple and easy to say and, let’s be honest, something that prominently features a “J.” There, I’ve said it. Somebody needed to. Let the chips fall where they may. Much rarer in recorded history are those who have been branded by three initials in the public imagination: MLK, FDR, LBJ, JFK, RFK, but again we begin to see a definite pattern: One must either be president of the United States, be running for president, or at least be a controversial national political figure before one is granted the three initial formation. So in adopting the DKM moniker, I was both subverting tradition, and making a statement: You do not know who I am. You will not know who I am. I might be hidden in the light, or the shadow. I might be your grandfather, your neighbor, or one of thousands of unfollowed bloggers in the grey Northwest. I might be a hacker, an anarchist, an artist or a theologian. I might be a fact, a fiction, or a fact masquerading as a fact masquerading as a fiction. In short, as DKM I might be anything you hope or believe me to be, and its exact opposite—at the same time. As DKM I am free to haunt the dim recesses of your imagination, poking and prodding as is necessary. I am the ghost in the machine, at the end of the day inexplicable even to myself. Also, it makes book signings 70% quicker, with less chance of hand cramps. It’s either presidential or serial killer-esque. Either way, why not enjoy the spotlight? First, I can’t allow your veiled insinuation to slide unchecked. Serial killers are commonly known by 3 names, not 3 initials. There is a vast difference. In the case of serial killers we seem to crave as much knowledge of the dark inner workings of their psyches as could possibly be coaxed to the surface, and therefore we instinctively think that by labeling them with the longest name possible, we will thereby gain additional insight into the subtext of their stories. Ah, yes, of course. Having been saddled with the middle name Orville it makes sense that he would have trod such a dark path in adulthood. That sort of thing. So please don’t confuse the situation. This is 3 INITIALS. Three initials bespeak influence, power, and a certain veil of mystery. There. Now that’s settled. We’ll move on. This book is it’s own thing, and has an existence entirely apart from its authorship. Perhaps it never was authored, anyway. It might have simply “arrived,” if you know what I mean. Stranger things have happened. Anyway, if people were forced by virtue of one man’s insistence upon onymity to associate the book and its quasi-prophetic contents with an individual identity, the power of the tome would almost certainly diminish. It is the stuff of the subconscious anyway, the stuff of dreams that upon waking are only half-remembered. It is neither my place nor my intent to stand between this book and it’s readers. So from the beginning I strove to remove myself from the process, erasing all tracks. Except for when I occasionally respond to an email from the wrong account and someone learns my name. Then again, that might just be a dodge. In fact, it almost certainly is. So nevermind. Anyway, on the most basic level, I number myself among those who have been personally affected by the substance contained within the pages of Subjects With Objects. Anonymity allows me to simply be a fan of the work and I must confess that I am. Partially because I still don’t know exactly what the book is or where it’s odd power is centered. But I revel in the mystery. Also, there’s the rise of Jonathan Richter as a force to be reckoned with in the art world. I observed the peculiar genius of his vision more than a decade ago and have been threatening for much of that time to enact some plan for making his artwork recognizable on an international scale. This is perhaps a beginning to the implementation of such a benign conspiracy. And I think it provides a certain balance to a collaborative work to have one creator in the spotlight while one remains in the shadows. What is it about Richter’s work that resonates so strongly with you? I spent many years professionally creating works for a genre of expression with somewhat narrowly defined parameters. I found that (with a few life-giving exceptions), any expressions that were attempts on my part to explore and/or document what I believe to be the wild and wide-ranging fullness of what it means to be a human being set down in the midst of a broken but still glorious creation replete with wonder, story, heartbreak, tragedy, beauty, joy, hope, and redemption, were typically met with something less than enthusiasm. Often with a blank stare. Companies do need to make a profit. But creating with mass commercial viability being the overriding influence on creative choices can quickly kill any power that a piece might have to actually stir something deeper than sentimentality in a listener, reader, or viewer. T-Bone Burnett once penned a lyric that stated “I have to meet the man who can crack this world of justice like a safe/Someone with the courage to allow room for good things to run wild.” I eventually stepped back from that industry, because there was so little room there for “good things to run wild.” And I just wasn’t enjoying it anymore because of that. Richter though, has always refused to let his work be anything but the beautifully disturbing and frighteningly indefinable stuff that it is. He has lost commercial opportunity because of it. He has been paid his share of kill fees by art directors who realized after the fact that they wanted something more controlled than what they got. Personally, I experience Richter’s paintings as something that demand my attention. They shout. You know when you see the crazy homeless guy on the street, a little on edge, angry, shouting at you or at the world or at some unseen ghost from his past or present, and you sense that he poses some danger but also perhaps some obligation as a fellow human, and that tension between your obligation toward some act of interaction and mercy and your desire to run away as quickly as you can, thoroughly unsettles you? The Subjects With Objects paintings can maybe do something like that. It is difficult to view some of the subjects without a knee-jerk aversion. But once we do really look at them, we see the brokenness and twistedness of our own humanity staring back at us. We recognize something shared between us and we grieve for them, and then, in a mysterious juxtaposition, realize that we’re grieving for ourselves. I think Richter’s paintings resonate strongly with me because they force me to interact with them. They don’t spell anything out too easily, and yet, the meaning is implicitly there. And I believe we have pretty good precedent for creating art that is not aimed at the broadest common denominator. We have a pretty compelling model for telling stories (via whatever medium) that require one to enter into to them if one is to be rewarded with understanding. We should more often resist the pandering impulse to say “And what that means is…,” but instead simply say “For him who has ears to hear….” I think it’s okay to leave it at that. I think it’s more powerful to leave it at that. To leave room for the good things to run wild. Was there a part of you that was nervous about adding text to the paintings at all? No, because initially there were no expectations. We decided to do a collaborative art & text project, but we had no notion of where the finished pieces would land in terms of tone or direction. The sky was the limit. Or so we thought. In actuality, the paintings themselves served to dictate what sort of written expressions might pair in a believable way. As I stewed on the various pieces, the possible interpretations usually began to narrow down pretty quickly. Reaching a final phrase could take days or weeks though, and often involved a process of returning to it every so often to see if there were any new secrets to tease from it. Only now that the book is finished and I’m faced with a new crop of paintings to interpret do I begin to feel a sense of inadequacy to the task. This time around there’s a certain expectation that didn’t exist before. So Subjects with Objects is definitely the first of a number of collaborative projects? Actually, it’s not the first book project we’ve collaborated on, but one of the first that’s come to fruition. Over a several year stretch Richter and I created multiple book projects together. The problem was, they tended to fall pretty well outside the common section headings of the bookstore aisles. We didn’t pitch any of them to more than a couple of publishers, but the reactions were very telling. One editor at a given publishing house would love it, and the rest of the staff would have no idea what it was even supposed to be. So we just continued to cook things up on various backburners at a low simmer. And then, along came Kickstarter. Crowdfunding was the answer to the question we had not been foresighted enough to ask. It gave us opportunity to take an unusual book like Subjects With Objects directly to the people who would most appreciate it, and to let them provide the momentum to actually make the project a reality. For that collaboration we are so, so, so, so, so, so grateful. Did I mention how grateful we are to all the funders who made this project happen? Anyway, we’re already planning Subjects With Objects, Vol 2. Because most of the Vol 1 paintings are already sold, in order to have enough material for another gallery show and for coffee shop shows that we have lined up, we must by necessity produce a new SubWOb crop. Whether that will be the next book we publish though, remains to be seen. There’s another collaborative art & text project called The Lost Rhymes at the Center of All Things Now Found Again that we’ve had tremendous initial response to, that we’d love to toss to the Kickstarter crowd as well. There’s also an animated feature idea we’ve been messing with for several years, and I just returned from a trip pitching it to a couple studios in Hollywood. That sort of thing is always a long shot, but Richter is a phenomenal stop-motion animator and we’d love to see that project eventually make it to screen. Additionally, we’re currently building a Subjects With Objects website (at the moment www.SubjectsWithObjects.com is just a glorified placeholder). We’ll have the art prints and originals available there, as well as dueling twitter feeds, info, and blogs. But the thing we’re really excited about is an event we’re calling SubWOb LiVE! We did a test run recently at a Nashville pub that a couple dozen people came out for, and we’re improving on the format for the next one. We want SubWOb LiVE! to become a real community event. We’ll hold them in public spaces. Richter will be there painting new pieces. We’ll have a musical guest each time. And a conversation host who will lead a guided roundtable discussion featuring a guest of peculiar interest. Food and drinks will be available. There will be some giveaways. A lot of fun. Each event will be recorded for podcast. But it’s really all about creating a space where community can begin to happen. We’ve really been inspired by what the Rabbit Room has managed in that regard, both online and with the Hutchmoot conferences. We want to figure out how to take some of that Rabbit Room mojo and reinterpret it in a SubWOb setting. #DKM #JonathanRichter #Kickstarter #SubjectsWithObjects

From the release of his incredible Leonard the Lonely Astronaut to his face-melting performance at Hutchmoot 2013, it’s been a great season for Andy Osenga. This week Andy announced that he’s venturing out this fall on a house show tour. If you’ve caught any of his recent StageIt shows, you already have some idea of how intimate his music can be. Head over to Andy’s website to catch all of the details and see how easy it is to host a show yourself! In addition, a portion of the proceeds from the tour will benefit the ministry efforts of Young Life. If you’re new to Leonard, you can hear Andy talk more about the new album here in our Rabbit Room interview. Also catch part of his performance at Hutchmoot below: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD4R952Bx4E] #AndyOsenga

I am often tempted to start sentences with the phrase, “What’s wrong with this country is…” and then finish with the fascinating facts about what I think is wrong with this country. Then I usually want to add how mad I am about it. I’m fed up, I might say. Can we last must longer if we do this? I might add. I may even allude to sacred forefathers sacredly rolling over in their sacred graves. This is because it’s pretty clear there’s lots of those wrong things. As we say in Appalachia, “Things is fouled up.” But, I believe this has roughly always been the case. A golden age of American purity has never yet occurred. Thomas Jefferson owned other human beings, (human beings who had been kidnapped and sold) for instance. Tempting as it is to spend a lot of energy decrying the state of the States, there is an unhealthy angle to this oft-repeated lament. The problem is that we are wrong to see problems everywhere around us and not another place. We—and I mean me and you and us—would do well to take a cue from G.K. Chesterton. In an oft-told story, it is said that The Times of London sent out a questionnaire to noted figures of the era asking them to answer the question, “What’s wrong with the world?’ Chesterton’s answer was unique in both brevity and insight. “Dear Sir, I am. Yours, G.K. Chesterton.” We would do well to at least incorporate into our evaluations of the “horrible state of things” the reality that part of the problem is us. What is inside us and what we do as a result. I’m sad and angry about the state of things in America, from losses of liberty to the ongoing slaughter of the smallest children, a horror advocated and (grotesquely) celebrated by many of our highest officials. But we are wrong to think we are only part of the solution and never part of the problem. Many political celebrities make their living by fueling anger and outrage. They do this by telling us a story about the problem and the solution. They give us a version of hell (often the other ideology or party’s rule) to fear/oppose. They then set before us a savior (the celebrity or/and the celebrity’s ideology), followed by a heaven to be gained (the rule of the right party/people). In other words, we are dealing with religion. On the right, the left, and the exotically self-righteous middle. Actually, it’s not just “moderates” who are exotically self-righteous. There does seem to be a real heavy dose in those who might describe political loyalties in the Facebook terms, “It’s complicated.” But we are all prone to pride and to see everyone else as the problem and ourselves—and people like us—as the savior. This is because, in our hearts, we naturally set ourselves up as kings. But that’s the problem, not the solution. What’s wrong with this country? I am, of course. We shall have to find a savior elsewhere. I would do well to remember it. We have all heard the expression, “It’s not you, it’s me.” The truth about what’s wrong with the world—and my own country—is not that it’s not you, but it is me.