Several months ago, I was browsing through the music section at one of my favorite thrift stores when I stumbled across an unusual looking Christmas album. Rather than the glossy, glowy sheen of most holiday album covers, this album had a simple, stark, black and white photograph of a winter pine, accompanied by the title Midwinter. Intrigued, I opened the liner notes, and was surprised to discover that one of my favorite singer-songwriters, David Wilcox, was mentioned in the acknowledgments and was involved in the project. Midwinter, by Minnesota singer-songwriter Peter Mayer, works in the same vein as Sting’s If On A Winter’s Night…, in that it explores both holiday specific tunes and themes of the winter season in general. What sets this album apart is Mayer’s beautiful lyricism, which is on display immediately in the opening track “Stables”: In Bethlehem a manger waits  Long ago and so today  Where hatred-weary people pray  Love will come and lay there And so do countless stables stand  In hearts as harsh as desert lands  Rough shelters in the wind and sand  That love may come and stay there Love that opens fists of hate  Heaps up gold on beggars’ plates  Love that shows a kindly face  To enemies and strangers And the walls of stables tremble so  When the winds of fear and judgment blow  For a stable hopes in love alone  And knows that love’s the answer O Love, the prophet’s only word  The only lesson left to learn  The only end of heaven’s work  And the only road that goes there Love that sees with mercy’s eyes  Holds its arms out open wide  Threads its loom with separate lives  And weaves them all together So may the lamps of stables glow  Brightly that their light may go  For miles in the darkness, so  Love will find its way there In “The Houses of Winter” Mayer poetically meditates on both the warmth and harshness of the darkest season of the year. Another song that stands out for me is the spiritually themed “God Is A River”, which sounds like it could’ve been written by our own Andrew Peterson. If you’re looking a holiday/winter album a bit off the beaten track this year, I’d highly recommend Peter Mayer’s Midwinter.

(I wrote this last December, and while the circumstances are different this year, the sentiments are not. Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.) I am so sick of death. It’s been a year of bereavement. Even before Daddy died we were mourning the cruel progress of disease, hearts fainting before the horrors of each new stage. There were bright moments of sweetness and light, to be sure, little triumphs of love and glimpses of a glory beyond our ken. But there were also moments I long to forget—and know that I never will. In the midst of one of these more . . . challenging . . . seasons last spring, we found out that our darling Great Pyrenees and barn babysitter, Diana, was gravely ill. We brought her home from the emergency vet clinic with broken hearts, presumably to die. But after one night in the house, Di made a break for it—I found her at the barnyard gate, where her goat and sheep charges were keeping an eager lookout for her return. She wagged her tail with a pathetic effort, looking up at me with that gaze of hers that plunged right into my soul. Di and I had always had a very special relationship; from the very beginning she talked to me with her eyes, and I understood her. “If I’m going to die,” she told me then, “I’m going to do it right here, in my barn, with my charges around me. Don’t make me leave my job until I have to.” “All right, Di,” I told her, rubbing her silky head. “Have it your way.” And she did. She rallied. God’s mercy and alternative veterinary medicine gave us hope. Our vet was cautiously optimistic, and I was determinedly confident. She started making her rounds again, patrolling the pastures and barnyard, and even frolicking a bit with our Pyr pup, Flora. “I need a miracle, God,” I kept insisting. “I need You to let Di get well.” Diana was the most valiant dog I ever seen—her heart kept fighting, even after her body couldn’t. But at the end of May she gave up. And something inside of me gave up, too. We buried her on a hill in the eastern pasture—one her favorite spots, and one of the first places the sun touches in the morning. I’d never dug a grave before, and I know I wasn’t really that much help. But it made me feel a little less helpless to work beside my husband in the warm silence of that May night. Plunging that shovel again and again into that stubborn red earth with tears pouring down my face: it was the last thing I could do for her. Less than two weeks after Daddy’s funeral, I got the news that the wife of a childhood friend had been killed in a horrific accident, leaving three young children behind. A few weeks later, my beloved housekeeper, Joan, died of cancer. For fifteen years of Friday mornings, Joan and I had kept this old place from coming apart at the seams, talking from room to room as we worked, tackling windows, woodwork, floors and cat hair with a rhythm that seemed almost choreographed. More than just a housekeeper, Joan was a dear friend and extra mother: I cannot tell you how many cans of Scott’s Liquid Gold we’ve gone through together—or how many hours I’ve spent propped against the kitchen counter taking a goodly dose of advice drawn from the wells of Joan’s practical wisdom. I loved her so much. “I don’t know how to do Christmas without Joan,” I told Philip the other day. (But there’s one thing I do know, and it’s that Joan would roll over in her grave if she could see the state of my heart pine floors. She took such pride in them, you’d think they were her own. I’ll never be able to maintain them to her standard.) In November, Philip’s first cousin sickened and died rather suddenly. It was a hope-laced funeral. But another funeral. I never want to see that stupid black dress again. A few weeks ago found us racing our beloved pet Nubian goat, Puck, to a university veterinary hospital a couple of hours away. It was one of those maladies wherein every second counts—I could have kissed the ground when we finally pulled up in front of the large animal wing. The vets were skilled and confident, and set our hearts at ease; we hated to have to leave him, but we knew he was in the best hands in the entire state for the particular surgery he required. A week of persistent hope ensued, with twice daily calls from the doctor on the case, a few niggling concerns, and general reports of the sweetness of Puck’s disposition. Finally, I decided that he just needed to see me in order to rally enough to come home, so I filled up a bag with his favorite greens from the farm, cedar and pine, and headed across the state. He did perk up when he saw me; everyone marveled at it. But, after all, Puck was my baby—I’d had him since he was less than twenty-four hours old, and, for all his—puckishness—he would let me scratch behind his long Nubian ears and kiss his Roman nose just as long as I pleased. In the evenings, we walked back to the barn together, my arm slung over his back. He’s even been known to let me tie Christmas ribbons around his neck. So, of course he was glad to see me, and I him. And even though the treat of the greens I’d brought had to be forestalled because of the second surgery the vets deemed entirely necessary that day, he knew I’d brought them. And he knew I was there. I got to spend a lot of time with him in his stall, and when the surgeons were ready, I was able to walk with him all the way to the surgery bay. I told him I loved him. (If you’ve never had the love of a Nubian goat in your life, you’re missing out: they’re sensitive, playful, wise and loyal—and what’s more, they love you back.) Then I went to the car to wait. As I waited, a dark anxiety crept over me. I thought of something a wise older friend once said: that she was learning to praise God, not just for deliverance from crisis, but in the very moment of crisis itself. It was worth a shot—the darkness was so suffocating I had to do something. So I thanked Him for everything I could think of. I prayed for everyone I knew who had known sorrow that year. I prayed for the refugee crisis and I prayed for my sweet, sick goat. I praised God for the comfort of His presence I had known in the past, and I praised Him—falteringly—for withdrawing that comfort. And I remembered something—or, God brought it to mind, which is more likely. I remembered back in May, after Diana died, how I’d wandered for days in a paralyzing fog. Daddy was doing so much worse I could neither believe nor bear it; my heart shrank from each visit with him. And then I’d come back home to a world in which there was no Di. It was awful. I couldn’t pray; I couldn’t talk to God. I couldn’t feel joy. I couldn’t feel anything, really, but this dull ache of sadness. And even that was blunted, numb. One morning I went through the motions of a prayer time, but I didn’t know what to say. “I’ve been mad at You in the past,” I whispered. “I’m not mad at You anymore—I’m afraid of You.” The moment the words were out of my mouth it was as if something unfurled in my heart. I suddenly had this startlingly clear mental image of how I must have appeared to God at that very minute: balled up like an armadillo, curled imperviously around my own heart to protect it from further bruising. In an instinctive act of subconscious self-defense, I had rolled myself into a big ball of ‘No’. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get to God—God couldn’t get to me. I believe that He respects our free will too much to violate it, even out of earth-shattering love. But He woos and He waits—which is incomprehensibly astonishing. And when the moment is right, He pulls back the tiniest corner of the veil between what we can see and what is real. The pain is real, yes. But the joy—and the love and the heart of redemption behind it all—is more real. Armed with this rather unflattering picture of myself, I began to see how resisting the “bad stuff” in life was essentially denying myself of the “good stuff”—the tender mercies and comfort of God; hope, joy and peace; the tang of adventure and the sweet song of dreams. The psychologists all affirm it: shutting down to one emotion is shutting down to all—it’s why people wake up one day unable to feel anything. It seems natural enough to protect our hearts from grief—to grimly endure or anesthetize with busyness or distraction or exhaustion. But to protect our hearts from grief is to protect our hearts from love. And that’s no way to live. I had forgotten. I had forgotten that the opposite of joy is not sadness, but fear. I had forgotten (again) that joy and sorrow are twin eggs of the same nest. I had forgotten that love is always worth the pain—always. I had forgotten that battered hearts are the most beautiful in the end. And so, I sat there in the early light, with my hands open, whispering ‘Yes’. Yes to losing Daddy in such a slow and tragic way. Yes to the complexity of life. Yes to the death of my darling Diana and Yes to all the creatures I’ve loved and lost. Yes to the fact that the seed of Love is shaped exactly like a thorn. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And then the miracle happened: the sun started coming out again. ~ “Stay open,” I pleaded with my own heart, sitting there in the car, waiting for news of Puck. “Stay open—the love is worth it.” Into that little capsule of pleas and imperfect praise came the sudden, sharp ringing of my cell phone: Puck hadn’t made it through the surgery. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone in my entire life. Even in all the heartache of the past year, there had always been a hand to hold—my husband’s, a friend’s, my sister’s. Now I was all by myself, in a strange town, with a grief that just felt like one blow too many. I cried all the way home, back over all those hours and miles, in rain and rush-hour traffic—for my darling Puck, for Joan, for Daddy, for suffering friends, for the sorrow of the whole world. It’s a wonder my little roaster didn’t fly apart under the pressure of such grief. But it was all just too much. Blinded by pain and tears, I raised a wordless lament, pounding the steering wheel for good measure. But underneath, a rebellious little refrain was gathering, mounting to a final crescendo of agony: This is not the way it’s supposed to be. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. All this sadness and bad news and dying. All these anxious phone calls, wars, scary test results, car accidents, terminal diagnoses, ruptured marriages, dogs with cancer, infertility, prodigal children. We hate it, not only because it all hurts like hell, but because eternity itself is encoded in our hearts, telling us that things should be different—in fact, will be, someday. But that doesn’t seem to help much when we’re staggering beneath the bereavement of the way things are. Of course we feel this way—of course. But it’s only when we bare our hearts to the pain of this brutal paradox, that our hearts are fully open to the beautiful mystery: God sent His Son right into the very middle of this mess. He broke His centuries-long silence with a baby’s cry. Almighty God became helpless, humble, vulnerable to the hurts and evils of this world, so that we—and our hurts into the bargain—might be redeemed. What on earth does redemption mean but to get back all that is rightfully ours, not because we’re good enough, but because we’re loved enough. Not because we deserve it, but because it’s the way God wanted it to be all along. The story is clear all the way through the Bible: God doesn’t want our sacrifices and our stuff—He wants our hearts. And I believe that He is gathering up everything that has ever broken our hearts to make it all right again in our redemption. I don’t claim to know what that means, particularly this side of heaven. But if there’s one thing I’m not afraid of (and, believe me, there are plenty of things I am!), it’s that God will turn out to be less loving, less good, less tender than I always hoped He’d be. ~ I wept when I got home that night and found Philip and Bonnie, our Aussie pup, waiting for me on the back steps. I wept when I went down the barn in the dark, into the goat stall that was now only Hermione’s and Perdita’s. I wept when I thought about Puck’s untasted Christmas greens, and about all the children to whom I’d have to break the news. ~ Years ago, not long after Philip and I got married, I was lamenting playfully with some of my girlfriends over my fierce sentiments surrounding Christmas. “I cry when we put the tree up, and I cry when we take the tree down!” I chirped. Everyone laughed, but a well-intentioned older woman in our midst spotted a teachable moment. “Lanier, someday you’re going to have a lot more to cry over than taking down your Christmas tree,” she said. Her words fell like a pall, and everyone stopped laughing. I was too shy to say it out loud, but mentally I replied, “Well, then, I’ll cry about that, too.” She was right, of course. But so was I. Because if the buffeting of years has done anything, it’s deepened my delight in Christmas. It’s made my Dayspring’s visit more precious than ever. The candles on my Advent wreath blooming out against an early winter twilight reach some deeper, keener place that sorrow has opened in my soul. The dawn of a December morning baptizing the world with rose-hearted gold is almost too beautiful to bear, for I know what it points to. For passed is yon dully night Aurora has the cloudes pierced, The Sun is risen with gladsome light… And when we sit quietly in the barn in the evenings and listen to the contented clucks and grunts and hay-munchings of our animals, my heart kneels to the wonder of it all. O magnum mysterium. ~ Our hearts are battered. There is an empty chair at our table, and a bright spirit has gone out of our barn. And, yet—strangely, impossibly—I have more to celebrate, not less. A fragment of a verse has been humming away at the back of my mind this Advent season, so persistent I finally looked it up. Yet will I rejoice… It comes from the book of Habakkuk, that singular little Old Testament tussle with the most bothersome question of all: if God is supposedly so good, why does He permit such awful things to happen? It’s a one-sided quarrel with God (I might know a thing or two about those), but after a series of complaints and honest questions, the good prophet wraps up his argument with one of the most beautiful assertions of faith in the whole Bible: Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. Why? Because God is not limited by appearances or bound by our circumstances. Because there is always, always more to the story—as George MacDonald said, “Good is always coming.” What the prophets saw afar off we now celebrate in present actuality: Immanuel. God did not leave all this brokenness unredeemed. He went straight to the very saddest thing of all—our separation from Him—and He made it untrue. ~ Sorrow isn’t meaningless, and it isn’t permanent. But it’s tempting to think He owes me something for all this sadness. Okay, I reason with Him, I know there’s beauty in the bad. Now do something good. Which only goes to show how much I have to learn. ~ Advent, like grief, is such a keen time, loaded with expectations and longings for impossible things. Advent is audacious with hope; it is pregnant with miracle. Which is why, I believe, it’s also haunted with the inconsolable sting of the way things ought to be. More than any other season of the year, perhaps, we feel our loss and our lack; we grieve alike for things that are no more and things that never have been. We all want our own Christmas miracle, our own personal annunciation and supernatural fulfillment. (I want my Daddy back. So bad I can hardly stand it.) But when God comes to us bringing good, it’s usually not what we expect. Jesus’s birth was exactly not what people were expecting. And yet, God in Christ flung Himself over the chasm between the way things are and the way things ought to be. This yearly celebration of that fact gives all of us permission to acknowledge the paradoxes and seeming discrepancies of life—to open our hearts and hands to the life that is, to the gifts just waiting to be mined in our present circumstances. To the Light the darkness just cannot comprehend or overcome, and the Dawn that knows no setting. Fra Giovanni was right: no heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. So was Wendell Berrry: We live the given life, and not the planned. And yet we will rejoice. We will rejoice and rejoice and rejoice because He didn’t do it our way. We will honor the re-routed life of an obscure young Jewish girl and we will search our own hearts for the least glimmer of such trust. We will drag live trees into our homes, knowing full well we’ll be cleaning up needles and sap for the next twelve months, and spangle them with some of the most beautiful and breakable things we own. (I mean, think about it—it’s gloriously ludicrous!) We will stand in drafty cathedrals choking over carols we’ve known all our lives while angels throng the air around us. We will wear ourselves out over holly boughs and flour and spices and prickly cedar needles and roses and cakes and casseroles and Yorkshire puddings as if our King were coming for dinner. We will remember more lighthearted days, when we thought things would be like that forever, and we will smile at our beloved ghosts and thank God that those days have been. We will step out into the frosty silence of Christmas Eve and look at the stars and suddenly find them brilliant, elongated, expanding under a quick burden of tears. (Perhaps we will even steal down to a barn at midnight, if we happen have one handy, just to see the animals kneeling.) We will, if only for one miracle-laden feast of days, draw near to the greatest mystery of all time: God is with us because He loves us. ~ Isn’t that just the astonishing thing about Christmas—that after all the centuries of hurt and brokenness and disappointment and despair, the world still turns itself upside-down for joy? As the years pass, I’m less and less concerned about getting caught up in the trappings of the season for their own sake. More and more I’m thankful for all these very touchable, tangible ways to honor the mystery, to draw near with all my senses, to create a space—through ritual and tradition, taste, touch, scent, sight, sound—for eternity to intersect with domesticity. It’s not just commercial to celebrate Christmas, or indulgent, or naïve. It’s brave, friends. It’s courage incarnate. ~ If you’re hurting this Christmas, know you are beloved of a God whose special concern is the brokenhearted. If you’re rejoicing, don’t let fear have your joy, even for a moment. And know that you, all of you whose eyes may happen to fall on these words, are dear to me. For you I pray on this frosty December morning, that, now and forever, your day may break and your shadows flee away.

Today we begin the Rabbit Room Advent Calendar 2016 with a verse by Jen Yokel and an image by John Hendrix. (Click the image to enlarge.) Each week this December, The Rabbit Room will combine an image and a verse, celebrating the coming of the one who restored humanity to hope and glory! We want you to be a part of this celebration. Here’s how: Share the image online. We’ve formatted the image and verse so that it can easily be shared as an image on social media without clicking through to the blog. Share your own advent-themed art! Your favorite poems, paintings, sketches, quotes, recipes… they are all welcome in the comments section below! The Savior has come. Rejoice!

A few weeks ago, I stumbled onto an online video of an event near Las Vegas. It looked kind of cool, so I decided to check it out. I figured I’d just watch for a minute or two, but I couldn’t look away for the entire seven-and-a-half minutes. Why? Sheer, wondrous beauty. Check it out: You know what that makes me think of, don’t you? An animated film from 2010. Once upon a time, a princess was stolen away and hidden in a tower. Her parents, the king and queen, suffered a horrible loss as the princess was stolen away, her light hoarded from a world that longed for her presence. But every year, on her birthday, she saw lights in the sky, and those lights drew her out of her tower. She found the means and determination to seek out the source of those lights, and it turned out to be a lovely little kingdom where, on her birthday, the entire population had come together for a festival of lights. The world beyond the tower was everything Rapunzel had dreamed of and more. But inside another tower – the royal palace – the scene looked very different. Why does the king mourn? Because he lost his child. So every year, the king sends a light into the sky—an emblem to remember what was taken from him, a token of love for his daughter, a beacon so bright and beautiful that it calls out to the lost princess. And throughout the kingdom, everyone follows his lead and lifts their lanterns. They make the lights beautiful, not turning in a half-hearted response but carefully preparing something worthy of the occasion. They make the day festive, honoring their king and their lost princess, not with a mournful dirge but with a holiday worth remembering. They lift their lights together, combining a thousand beautiful notes into a symphony of astonishing brilliance. The servants of the secret fire were gathered there The embers of the ages like a living prayer And all at once I saw the shadows flee Shine your light on me Be a light unto my path And a lamp unto my feet Somebody come and get me when I’m gone Somebody come and get me when I’m gone – ‘Shine Your Light on Me’ by Andrew Peterson The stories are true. This is the power of redemption and restoration. We are lost children, drawn by lights in the darkness. We are citizens of a kingdom, unleashing the power of beauty into a dark night. Flower, gleam and glow Let your power shine Make the clock reverse Bring back what once was mine Heal what has been hurt Change the fates’ design Save what has been lost Bring back what once was mine What once was mine – Tangled, 2010

Back in 2005, scientists in Arkansas said they had seen an ivory-billed woodpecker. The news sent an almost electric shock through the scientific world, because this bird, one of the largest woodpeckers, was long thought to be extinct. The reports captured the imagination of the non-scientific world because of the majesty and mystery of the ivory-billed woodpecker. In fact, the bird has the nickname “The Lord God Bird” because of its size and scarcity. A hushed “Lord God” was often the awed response of people who saw it. Writer and former University of Georgia English professor Dr. James Kilgo saw other connections between this bird and the majesty and mystery of God. His 1988 book, Deep Enough for Ivorybills, began as a column he wrote for the Athens Banner-Herald that contained his hunting and fishing tales. These stories, he found when he compiled and re-wrote the columns in book form, were really about his own hunt for a deep place in the soul, a quest for a blank spot on the map and in the heart that contains room enough for both beauty and mystery—a wilderness “deep enough for ivorybills.” The book’s opening scene masterfully sets the stage. Kilgo remembers a boyhood trip from his home in Darlington, S.C., to Myrtle Beach. As his family crossed the Big Pee Dee River Bridge, his father observed, “I bet there’s still ivorybills in there.” “Really?” the young Kilgo wondered. “Could be,” his dad replied. “There’re places in that swamp nobody’s ever been in.” That opening story became the theme of the book: to go, or at least to approach, places “nobody’s ever been in,” searching for mystery, beauty, and truth. Jim Kilgo did that in his own life. In the “publish or perish” culture of the modern university, he decided instead to become a master teacher. He poured himself into his classes and his students, winning at least five campus-wide teaching awards—that on a campus with so many teachers that almost no one else won the award even once. In an environment hostile to Christianity, Kilgo’s Christian faith was also well known. He was never ideological or dogmatic in the classroom, but he made sure that his students knew and understood Flannery O’Connor’s famous assessment of Southern writers, that they could “outwrite anybody in the country because [they have] the Bible and a little history.” Kilgo eventually did publish. When Deep Enough for Ivorybills came out, he was in his 40s. It instantly put him on the literary map. The New York Times reviewed it glowingly. Ivorybills received favorable comparisons to Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Indeed, Dillard became a fan of Ivorybills and she and Kilgo ultimately became friends. With this mid-life success, Kilgo made up for lost time, over the next decade publishing a critically acclaimed novel and several books of non-fiction. But in the early 1990s, as his literary star was on the rise, he entered a swamp that contained other mysteries and other truths. He was diagnosed with cancer. I would occasionally see him during this time, or speak with him on the phone, and he would call his cancer a “damned thing.” I knew him to be neither glib nor profane. Ever the master teacher and always precise with language, he used these words to help me understand what cancer was teaching him: that God is a God of life, and anything that destroys life would—count on it—be damned. Kilgo was simply doing with his cancer what he had always done with the mysteries he had encountered: look as deeply into it as he dared, and tell the truth about what he saw. I detected something just short of glee—call it joy—in calling cancer a “damned thing.” It was Kilgo’s way of telling me that God, not this cancer, was sovereign, and that he was not—and I should not—be afraid. But the cancer, we must admit, did win a temporary victory. Jim Kilgo’s body finally succumbed on Dec. 8, 2002—14 years ago this month. He was 61 years old. His family and members of his church gathered around him on that last day. They prayed and sang hymns. During the decade since his death, critical appreciation of his work has grown. In 2011, he joined Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, and W.E.B. DeBois in the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. When I heard about the possible sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas, I thought of Jim Kilgo. I think he would have delighted in the news, though he may have feigned disappointment that the bird wasn’t discovered in his beloved Pee Dee River swamp. Of course, it’s important to note that since 2005 we have had no other ivorybill sightings. Some have even doubted that those sightings in Arkansas were legitimate. Not me. I continue to believe the great ivory-billed woodpecker, the “Lord God Bird,” is out there. Why? Because Jim Kilgo taught me—by his life and his work—that just because you don’t see something right away doesn’t mean it’s not there. Some river swamps—like the human heart itself—yield their secrets only slowly. But looking deeply into these mysterious places and seeing what God has for us there … well, it is always worth the cost. ———————— Warren Cole Smith has been a friend ever since we met for an interview at a coffee shop a few years back and we spent the whole time talking about Annie Dillard and Flannery O’Connor. Warren is vice president of mission advancement for The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview and the host of WORLD Radio’s Listening In. Follow Warren on Twitter @WarrenColeSmith. This piece was first published at World.wng.org. –The Proprietor

Rebecca Reynolds and I began writing songs together in August, 2011, and in Spring of 2012 she sent me these image-filled lyrics, inspired partly by an early morning she spent on Lake Barclay duck hunting with her Dad. It’s one of the few songs on the record that isn’t quite like an old gospel song, but it has a very reflective, peaceful, meditative feeling and thought behind it. Back when we wrote it I did a recording with just two guitars and vocal and we put it up here at the Rabbit Room for fun in April, 2012. I used my 1938 Martin D28 and D18 of the same year, recorded with Neumann KM-54s and quality preamps and eq. This recording became the basis for the version on Trouble Go Down; Jeff added piano and accordion, Tim Crouch did strings, Mark Fain played bass, and the great Ellie Holcomb sailed her voice on the harmony lines during the choruses. [Trouble Go Down is available in the Rabbit Room Store.] “Everything Broken and Everything Beautiful” Music: Ron Block/Moonlight Canyon Publishing/BMI Lyrics: Rebecca Reynolds/Wynken Owl/BMI Low, low flies the shadow owl, Across the morning waters. Low makes her gentle way. Low, low lies my soul before Thee, Beside the morning waters. Low have I come to pray. The wild heron cries with the wind in her eyes the carp dances honest and free stirs my soul, to see O, Lord Welcome everything broken, and everything beautiful, trembling and holy, and drifting and brave. There’s a cup of a moon, sleeping white on still waters, climbs a silver ladder, in the fracture of the waves. Low, low burn the stars in waiting, Across the womb of heaven. Low make their tender way. Low, low stirs the hymn of promise, beneath the womb of heaven. Low in the birth of day. The fog angels bathe in a choir of praise yield to the sun as it rises sighing in silent reprises O,Lord Welcome everything broken, and everything beautiful, trembling and holy, and drifting and brave. There’s a cup of a moon, sleeping white on still waters, climbs a silver ladder, in the fracture of the waves.

For the occasion of our final meal at Hutchmoot 2016, Doug McKelvey wrote this liturgy. He gave me permission to reprint it here in hopes that some of you might find use for it as you gather for the feast today. If it moves you like it does me, check out the Every Moment Holy project. This liturgy (or one very like it) is sure to be included. A Liturgy for Feasting with Friends Leader: To gather joyfully is indeed a serious affair, for feasting and all enjoyments gratefully taken are, at their heart, acts of war. People: In celebrating this feast we declare that evil and death, suffering and loss, sorrow and tears, will not have the final word. But the joy of fellowship, and the welcome and comfort of friends new and old, and the celebration of these blessings of food and drink and conversation and laughter are the true evidences of things eternal, and are the first fruits of that great glad joy that is to come and that will be unending. So let our feast this day be joined to those sure victories secured by Christ. Let it be to us now a delight, and a glad foretaste of his eternal kingdom. Bless us, O Lord, in this feast. Bless us, O Lord, as we linger over our cups, And over tables laden with good things, as we relish the delights of varied texture and flavor, Of aromas and savory spices, Of dishes prepared as acts of love and blessing, Of sweet delights made sweeter by the communion of saints. May this shared meal, and our pleasure in it, bear witness against the artifice and deceptions of the prince of the darkness that would blind this world to hope. May it strike at the root of the lie that would drain life of meaning, and the world of joy, and suffering of redemption. May this our feast fall like a great hammer blow against that brittle night, Shattering the gloom, reawakening our hearts, stirring our imaginations, focusing our vision On the kingdom of heaven that is to come On the kingdom that is promised On the kingdom that is already, indeed, among us, For the resurrection of all good things has already joyfully begun. May this feast be an echo of that great supper of the Lamb, and a foreshadowing of the great celebration that awaits the children of God. Where two or more of us are gathered, O Lord, there you have promised to be And here we are And so, here are you. Take joy, O King, in this our feast. Take joy, O King! Leader: All will be well! Participants then take up the cry: All will be well! Nothing good and right and true will be lost forever. All good things will be restored. Feast and be reminded! Take joy, little flock. Take joy! Let battle be joined! Let battle be joined! Now you who are loved by the Father, prepare your hearts and give yourselves wholly to this celebration of joy, to the glad company of saints, to the comforting fellowship of the Spirit, and to the abiding presence of Christ who is seated among us both as our host and as our honored guest, and still yet as our conquering king. Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, take seat, take feast, take delight! Copyright 2016 by Douglas Kaine McKelvey Click here for more information on Every Moment Holy.

It’s no secret that I’m a Swedophile. Not only have I toured there a lot, not only have I made some great lifelong friends there (looking at you, Samuel and Kaj and the Petersons), not only have I tracked down my relatives (looking at you, Sanna and Ingrid), but I’ve consistently been amazed by the quality of the music that fair country has given the world. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I’ve never listened to ABBA (though I sometimes call God that when I pray). But the piano work of Ola Heden and Ted Hektor (a.k.a. “The Swedish Ben Shive”), the band Folk, which includes Jon and Emma and Linus Peterson, and Erik Tilling (a.k.a. “The Swedish Fernando Ortega”), Erik Ljunggren (who translated Behold the Lamb of God into Swedish), not to mention all the Christian music festivals that happen there every year, all testify to the vibrant music scene in my fatherland. So when my friend Samuel Åhl sends me a music link, I pay attention. Yesterday he told me about a band called A Treehouse Wait, fronted by singer/songwriter Jenny Wahlström, and I’ve listened to the song “Faith” about nine times today. Her voice is amazing, and the song brought tears to my eyes. “What do we do with your feet on the ground and the sky is asking us to dance?” she asks. “Don’t you have a little faith?” Even if your answer is no, her passion and the joyful music might spark the courage to admit that there’s a spark of it there, waiting to catch fire. It’s a song I didn’t know I needed to hear until I did. One more reason to love Sweden.

At Hutchmoot this year, Russ Ramsey and I spoke about being a hospitable critic. How do we bring a critic’s voice to the public square in a hospitable way? I am particularly interested to explore how we can do this with our technologies. Hospitality is hard enough in person. It feels like moving mountains online. Below are some thoughts on hospitality in our technologically-mediated times. I am going to start with some definitions. When I am hospitable I welcome others into my experiences as they are. My job as a critic is to raise questions, not seek compliance. Therefore, if I am to be a hospitable critic, I must welcome others into my experiences as they are and raise questions about their experiences without seeking their compliance to my own experiences. How does this work in practice? Let me give an easy to understand example and then a more difficult one. This past summer our family hosted an exchange student from Spain. We welcomed her into our experiences as she was. That is, when we drove her home from the airport and invited her into our home and settled her into the room she would have for the summer, we made no demands for her be American. We did not say as we pulled into the driveway, “Welcome to our house. Now, as soon as you walk through the door, no more accent. And you will have to start eating huge portions of food like Americans. And none of that napping in the afternoon and then staying up late nonsense.” We did not do that to her. Instead, we welcomed her into our experiences. All of us kept our accents. We gorged like Americans and she picked at food. Throughout the summer, the light in her room remained on after we were all in bed. She was welcomed into our experiences but as she was. That is the way hospitality works. Describing hospitality this way is intuitive. We think of hospitality in terms of dinner parties and house guests. It gets more difficult to describe hospitality when we put it into the context of ideas and opinions. How do I welcome others into my ideas as they are? How do I welcome others into my opinions as they are? Remove a dinner table and add technology, and the difficulty of being hospitable with one’s ideas and opinions becomes acute. I believe there is a reason why technologies make hospitality difficult. Disembodiment. When we disembody an idea or opinion, we separate it from something concrete and real––like us and them. A table of food, glasses of wine, a house and, most of all, breathing persons all combine to embody hot-button conversations. Remove the meal, drinks, place and animated bodied, and all we are left with are ideas and opinions. Actually not entirely, we also have our imaginations. That is, if we have trained ourselves well, we can empathize with the persons on the other end of the tweetstorm or comments section. Yet, without the physical reality of their presence, it becomes a chore for us to balance getting hot in the head and also imagining others being a lot like us. When we are in the same room we see that, despite our different views, we all nibble on the same snacks, drink the same drinks, wear the same kinds of clothes, use the same sorts of hand gestures, pause to laugh at the same witty puns and so on. Separated physically and united only by technology, all the same is true. But we do not see it embodied. So we have to muster the energy to not only express our ideas and options but also the energy to employ our imaginations to see in our mind’s eyes that others are much like us. Do the technologies we use help us with this juggling act? I want to keep writing about that question, but will hold off. For now I will simply assert what I plan to discuss later, namely, that technology makers are financially disincentivized to make hospitable social technologies. For the most part, scaling and monetizing social technologies happens when users are less embodied and less imaginative. If that is right and our technology-mediated environments discourage hospitality, how do we go about inviting others into our experiences using technology? How do we “see” them online? That is the challenge of the Civil Language Project. And like I confessed in my last post (the oddest thing I have ever published), I struggle to be hopeful. Let me wrap it up and try to encourage myself by remembering Rivendell. Recall that in The Fellowship of the Ring the Council of Elrond was held in Rivendell, the “last homely house.” Boromir was there. Dwarves were there. Gandalf spoke empathetically of Gollum there. What might it look like to create a Rivendell-like technology: an app or website or social platform where people of differing opinions and little hope could convene to seek common purpose? It strikes me how everyone was invited into Elrond’s house as they were. And during the Council, questions were raised without seeking compliance. No one forced Boromir to go with the fellowship. There was no expectation that Gimli and Legolas should leave the Council fast friends. There was purpose without compliance. In the face of hopelessness, they placed their trust in what could be if they trusted their companions to handle their own lives. The pronouns in that last sentence are confusing. So is hospitality. The more we resist the ambiguity of hospitality and try to make it comfortable and predictable, the less it works out.

Back in 2007, I got an email from Andrew Peterson asking me if I would like to be one of the contributors to a new blog he was going to start. The site would be a place where artists, writers, pastors, and musicians would write about ideas and art that interested them. I was living in Kansas City at the time, and I jumped at the invitation to become part of a community like this. In September of 2007, The Rabbit Room went live. (That means that The Rabbit Room now has a full ten years of archived content under its belt.) One of the earliest posts (I believe it was actually the third Rabbit Room post ever) came from Jonathan Rogers. He told the story about the time he boarded an airport shuttle with a man who was carrying a banjo case. As the bus circled the airport, one of the other passengers started “egging the banjo picker to play us a song.” To everyone’s surprise, the man with the banjo complied, and played the Ballad of Jed Clampett as they made their way to long-term parking. (Turns out, that banjo player was the incomparable Bela Fleck, but only a couple of people recognized him in the moment.) Jonathan was telling the story to make an observation about generosity. Jonathan wrote, “I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget how that little space was transformed the moment the first few notes rang out. At the risk of overstating the case, something resembling a community began to emerge among people who would have normally treated one another with jealously guarded indifference.” When the Rabbit Room started, we were not unlike that airport shuttle— strangers in many ways to one another. We were people en route— as we always are. And the words we wrote for the blog, and the ideas we tried to form, were gestures inviting each other to be part of the formation of a new community. For that first couple of years, we were all still figuring it out. Back then, no one really knew what the Rabbit Room would become. We were finding our way. Some people in the original line-up of contributors were far more accomplished in the craft of writing than others (I was a novice), but none of us were bloggers. We were throwing things out there to see what might resonate. But not only were we finding our voice. We were also finding our audience. We were writing letters to whom it may concern. Who those people were, we had no idea. We did not know who our readers would be. So we wrote to a nameless, faceless void. That is hard to do— writing to everyone and no one in particular. So Pete wrote about his love for Godric. Jonathan spun anecdotes about paint cans and a fifth grade art class. Matt Connor wondered if we’d really have mansions in heaven. Jason Gray told the world he loved Harry Potter (and was taken to task for it, and defended for it). Ron Block opened up his files on Lewis, MacDonald, and L’Engle. Andrew took us behind the scenes of the creative process of making a record. My first piece ever was a review of Andy Gullahorn’s Room to Breath record. I was relatively new to writing. I had kept a journal for years, and was accustomed to writing a sermon a week, but writing for a format where the words would be for general consumption was a new voice for me. I wasn’t much good at it, but I had been given something that would shape the rest of my life: I had been given a place. A place to learn how to write. A place to learn how to curate words. A place to grow as an artist. I remember how in those early years we helped each other. We would send each other our posts in process, and listen to each other’s feedback. From my fellow contributors, I learned some rules for good writing— rules like: Adjectives and adverbs are guilty until proven innocent. Interrogate them all. If your writing requires lots of descriptors, you’re probably choosing the wrong nouns and verbs. Good writing permits only three exclamation points per 100,000 words. And even then, only if you must. Assess whether your attempts at humor are actually funny. Humor is an art form, and not easy to pull off gracefully on the written page. Awkward humor, that’s easy. Unfunny attempts at humor, easier still. Effective humor, however, is a learned skill. Do away with the ellipsis. An ellipsis is an indication that the sentence you started wasn’t even worth… We wrote, and we edited, and we opened ourselves up to feedback. We developed thicker skin, better instincts, sharper focus, and clearer writing. We developed. And this is the process by which people become artists. While this was happening, we also gained readers – people with names who would interact in the comments section – names like Redhead Kate, Dave Bruno, Carrie Givens, April Pickle, and Tony Heringer – people who would become our friends, and friends with each other. As I reflect on ten years of The Rabbit Room’s existence, one of the things I see, and am personally grateful for, is that what started as an experiment in community and creative development has, in fact, become a community through which many artists have developed. It became a place. Back when all this started, we were strangers on the airport shuttle. Each had an instrument case, and though we didn’t know each other well, we gathered up the nerve to say to one another, “Why don’t you play us a little something?” I think we’ve all gotten better over the years, but what’s more important is that we’ve all developed a deep desire to keep developing in our crafts. One of the lasting legacies The Rabbit Room can already claim is that there are people making art, contributing truth and beauty to a world that desperately needs it, because they found this community, this place. For some, the Rabbit Room was where they began. For others, The Rabbit Room has been a resource that has helped them keep going. I am grateful for this community of people, and thrilled still to be part of it. In the words of my dear friend Jonathan Rogers, “I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget how that little space was transformed the moment the first few notes rang out. At the risk of overstating the case, something resembling a community began to emerge.” And ten years later, here we are. Here’s to many more.

Last night’s Rabbit Room LIVE event was a huge success. Allow me to give a sincere thank you to everyone who came out and also to everyone who watched on Facebook. I can’t recall the last time I enjoyed a live event so much (The Battle of Franklin excepted!). It was an enormous privilege to be able to present the Rabbit Room community with the music and words of so many talented friends. The evening served as a fitting picture of what we’ve spent the last decade doing—drawing folks together, creating music and books and pictures and stories and events, illuminating the gospel each in our own personal ways. We can’t wait to see what the next decade brings, and we’ve already got great things planned for 2017. Rabbit Room Press will publish Jennifer Trafton’s brilliant Henry & the Chalk Dragon, and Doug McKelvey’s Every Moment Holy (with your help), and The Molehill Vol. 5, and maybe a surprise or two. Hutchmoot is going to grow in new and exciting ways (yet to be announced). We’re planning to partner with Art House to bring some great new events to Nashville. And we’ve got some exciting plans for the website that we hope to bring to fruition in the next year. The future is bright. We’re grateful that each of you are helping us make it happen. Thank you for your support. If you missed the show, you can still view the livestream via the Andrew Peterson Facebook page. Check out the video below. It’s a summation of what we’re about and where we’re headed. We hope you’ll consider supporting the Rabbit Room with a donation using the red button at the top of the page.

Back by popular demand, the Rabbit Room Christmas Gift Exchange! But wait, what is it? It’s a “Secret Santa” program. Everyone who wants to participate signs up, then we pull names out of the virtual hat, and everyone gives a gift (or gifts) to the person whose name they receive. You can remain anonymous if you wish, or you’re welcome to be as open as you like. How much should I spend on a gift? We’ve set a suggested gift value of $30. We’d love it if you bought your gifts in the Rabbit Room Store (this is a great time to share your Rabbit Room wishlist—click here), but you don’t have to, and we encourage folks to give creative gifts, something handmade maybe, something you made maybe. Be creative! But please ensure that the gift you give is something you’d value at about $30. You’re welcome to lavish your recipient with more if you like. (And please feel free to disregard the wishlist and shopping options built into Elfster—see below.) Where do I sign up? The link at the bottom of this post will take you to the Elfster website where you can sign up for the exchange. The site is a little clunky (and we hate the ads) but the exchange has gotten so big in the last couple of years that we need to use a system like this to administrate it effectively. What if I don’t get a gift? We urge everyone to be sure they mail or deliver their gifts well in advance of Christmas Day so that no one feels left out. However, should your Santa drop the ball, please let us know on or after January 1st. We’ll do our best to remind them and resolve the situation, and if necessary, we’ll make sure that person cannot participate again next year. Can I be a backup Santa? Yes! You can! If you’d like to make yourself available in the event that someone doesn’t receive a gift, please let us know via email at info@rabbitroom.com. We hope you won’t be needed, but we’d love to have your help if the situation arises. When will I find out who I’m giving a gift to? Sign-up starts right now. The sign-up deadline is Monday, November 21st, and names will be drawn on Tuesday, November 22nd. NO LATE ENTRIES will be permitted. If you miss the sign-up window, you’ll need to wait until next year—this isn’t because we’re mean, it’s because it’s a closed system that cannot be amended once names are drawn. Everyone who enters will receive an email with their target’s name and address on Tuesday, November 22nd. Any other questions? Ask in the comments and We’ll do our best to answer. Have fun! And please use the comments section to introduce yourself. You might also want to let folks know what your interests are and what books and music you like in order to give your Santa some hints to work with. Click Here to Join.

Kate Rusby, if you’ve never had the good fortune to hear of her, is a fantastic singer and songwriter from Barnsley, England, in Yorkshire. I first encountered her music when Alison Krauss & Union Station played some shows in the U.K.  and Kate’s brother/recording engineer/soundman Joe Rusby came to a show and left some copies of her CDs with our soundman. I took one, put it in my laptop bag, finished the trip, got home, got on with life, and two months later found that CD in my bag. I put it in on a long drive. After hearing her sing about two lines Kate became one of my favorite artists, right up there in my pantheon with folks like Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell. When I came home off that trip I ordered every CD I could find. The thing is, she just keeps getting better. Life In A Paper Boat is my current favorite record. Here are five reasons to get it. Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. Gustav Mahler 1. If you love to hear music deeply rooted in tradition and simultaneously brand new, this is a record for you. I love rootedness, and the lack of it always seems a big deficiency in any art. But I love it best when tradition becomes a wide river and flowing source for creativity and innovation, not dammed into a stagnant pool. Or to switch images, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire,” said Gustav Mahler. Kate’s music takes the burning fire of English, Irish, and Scottish traditions and makes it all brand new. 2. If you love Story, this record is full of stories. From her bio: “What appeals to me about the old songs are the stories and the simple way they were written. Some are painfully sad and it is those that draw me in the most.” There’s “The Ardent Shepherdess,” who sets out to bargain thirty sheep for a kiss and ends up in love, and “The Witch of the Westmorland”: Pale was the wounded knight, that bore the rowan shield, And loud and clear were the raven’s cries as he feasted on the field. Saying, “Green moss and heather bands will never staunch the flood, There’s none but the Witch o’ the Westmorland can save thy dear life’s blood. Or “Hundred Hearts,” a song of lasting love, and “The Mermaid”: And three times that ship went round and three times round went she,
 It’s murky deep, love and far away
 from thee, on the sea, love, on the sea. 3. If you love high production values, tasteful, beautiful arrangements, and a top-level band, here you go. Yes, I recognize I just stuffed three reasons into one. Anyway, Damien O’Kane, Kate’s husband/guitarist/banjoist, aside from being an incredible musician and singer, is also one of the best arrangers and producers I’ve heard. He’s got a deep love of and sensitivity to tradition, of song, and combines it with his relentlessly innovative creativity. From Coleraine, Northern Ireland, Damien brings a sense of urgency and fire to Kate’s records, both in his playing and his production. His latest solo record, Areas of High Traffic, is extraordinary, highly acclaimed, and uses many of the same musicians – another record well-worth buying. On Life In A Paper Boat you’ll hear pipes and guitars and whistles and banjos and acoustic bass combined with moody and tasteful electric guitar, driving acoustic guitars, drums, percussion, and even Moog layered in there. Many of my favorite records create a unique sonic world: Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Hejira, Bonnie Raitt’s Fundamental, Pat Metheny’s American Garage, Fernando Ortega’s Shadow Of Your Wings. Though its instrumentation and arrangements vary beautifully, Life In A Paper Boat has this same character, a tangible, one-of-a-kind aural world that invites you in to soak in a sense of wonder and enchantment. The players are all top-notch and at the top of the game – Duncan Lyall, Steven Byrnes, Nick Cooke, Steven Iveson, Nick Cooke, Michael McGoldrick, Josh Clark, and of course Damien. Dan Tyminski sings a couple of guest harmony vocals, and I played banjo on four songs. The tracking and mixing by Joe Rusby and Josh Clark are stellar as well. 4. If you love music that makes you feel what C.S Lewis called “the inconsolable longing,” you’ll feel it with Life In A Paper Boat. The record is deep and full of feeling. It’s sad; it’s joyful. It aches; it’s playful. It resounds with human experiences and emotions. This is the real deal. Enough said. 5. If you love artists with integrity, Kate Rusby is one of the best examples. Kate’s words: “Around the time of Sleepless various people waved contracts at me, all saying ‘Come with us, we’ll make you a star’. They wanted me to cut a ‘pop’ record, but I’d just reply, ‘you must be joking – why would I do another kind of music just as I am starting to succeed with I want to do?’ I’m from a strong, close family in a small village just outside Barnsley: that whole celebrity, music chart, be as famous as you can hullabaloo is so far from the things I care about in life. For me it was the worst idea in the world!” In 2012 I played on tour with Kate and the boys, and have been on several recordings. I’ve witnessed that integrity – in all these musicians – first hand. Love of the music comes first. In a fancy old theatre in Los Angeles built by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, a plaque is above the silver screen: “The Picture Is The Thing.” The same line could be over every Kate Rusby recording: “The Song Is The Thing.” So there you go. If you happen to dislike music along these lines, then this record might not be for you. But you should try it anyway; you’d probably like it. Life In A Paper Boat is available on Amazon and iTunes, or KateRusby.com if you’re in the UK or Europe. Here’s one of the songs on Soundcloud. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/281607816″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

I have been deeply connected to the Chicago Cubs for the last 33 years. My uncle Steve was a starting pitcher on the team in 1983-87. His father (my grandfather) Dizzy Trout was an All-Star pitcher for the Tigers, and threw a complete game victory in Game 4 of the 1945 World Series against the Cubs in Wrigley Field (that was the infamous “Goat Game”). Therefore, there’s a slogan here in Chicago that I know all too well—which is emblazoned on the DNA of Cubs fans: “Wait ‘Til Next Year.” It has been our end-of-the-season lament since 1908 and a hopeful optimism that maybe the big one will be right around the corner. Now, as the Cubs celebrate a World Series victory, the phrase “wait ‘til next year” does not go away, it simply takes on a new meaning. Instead of it being a whimpering mantra for a bruised ego, it is now a war cry and a warning blast to all other teams. We are no longer the loveable losers. We are no longer cursed by a billy goat. We are winners; we are champions—and we will fight hard to keep our crown! Wait ‘til next year! Under The Radar. It’s my passion and my calling at this time in my life, and I love what I do for a living. UTR’s mission is to build community around well-crafted faith-inspired music—a very similar mission to the Rabbit Room, except we focus almost exclusively on music. Around these parts, we’ve also been saying “Wait ‘til next year”—because we’re hopeful our organization can take some exciting steps forward in 2017. The long-term goal is that UTR can become the organization that best serves and support Christian (mostly) independent artists and the discerning ears that are inspired by that kind of thoughtful, honest, high-quality art. All the artists in the Rabbit Room are perfect “round pegs” in the landscape we want to nurture. Yet, we understand that the Rabbit Room songwriter section can only extend so far. UTR wants to be a musical advocate and an inclusive community that offers a platform to hundreds of artists who are making handcrafted music, the kind that turns lights on in people’s souls. My dream for our future is to have a robust staff all dedicated to serving the needs of music listeners and music makers. It’s a big dream, but it’s possible. The Cubs would not have won the World Series if the owners asked the team to use hand-me-down cleats, workout in a non-renovated clubhouse, and practice with used baseballs from 2009. Their championship was not just due to the plays you saw on TV. A lot of strategic investment needed to happen to help the club take steps forward and be a position to win it all. Frankly, UTR won’t be able to move our vision forward with an old website, dated look, and antiquated content strategy. And since we are still a start-up non-profit, we don’t have funds to cover above-and-beyond initiatives. This led to two key decisions that we hope will pave the way. First, we decided to pull the plug on the thing that started this ministry, and the thing that most people know us for—the UTR radio program. (Watch this video for an explanation why we’re doing this.) In short, this is an act of pruning—we believe we can use the time we were pouring into one radio program and accomplish an array of multi-media on-demand content. Second, we launched a Kickstarter Campaign to help fund a set of six initiatives that will allow us to take steps forward in our vision and even better fulfill our mission. We’re in the final days of our campaign, and I would be honored to have your participation. Not only do we have some stacked reward tiers (including donated albums, concerts, etc. by 60 different artists), but I believe the real reward will be in seeing the growing spiritual fruit the Lord provides through UTR and knowing that you helped to make that fruit possible. In addition, if we are able to complete our base goal, our first stretch goal is one that will likely resonate strongly in this community: a Rich Mullins tribute album. It’s a pretty safe guess that there will be some Rabbit Room artists on that project if we reach that goal. Thank you to Pete for the invitation to share about these exciting days at UTR. Thank you in advance to any rabbits who decide to back our campaign. (If you are reading this after 11/15/16 and missed our campaign, we are always in need of new regular supporters.) And for those who can’t contribute financially, we appreciate prayer support as well. Lastly, thank you to the 2016 Chicago Cubs…for not sucking. With the support of good people like you, I truly can’t…wait til’ next year!

Almighty God who has given us an abundance of good things, has set our feet about these boundaried shores, and has called us to give an account for the work of our hands, we ask your blessings upon this Election Day. Forgive us for thinking your love is a zero-sum equation in which we are held harmless in loving only those who think, speak, and vote like us. Forgive us for refusing to let go of the hopelessness found in cold hypocrisies and bold untruths. Forgive us for painting in the light of partisanship and fear your call to love all your children. Forgive us for tending poorly to one another, separating one from the other, and dividing prematurely those worthy and those lost. Give hope to us, oh Lord, that these days are not unknown to you. As we powerfully proclaim that you are not a God of darkness and chaos, let us with steadfast hearts participate in this beautiful exercise of democracy. Give love to us, oh Lord, as we deepen our need to love one another. Remind us that you, not our candidates, are the fount of all holiness. Let us recall with humility our own sins as we remember that all are welcome at your table. Open our hearts to new days, new leadership, and new ideas as we pray for those who will begin the work of directing this country. Give courage to us, oh Lord, as we act with scrutiny of word and deed toward those whose names are listed on our ballots, heard in our conversations, and spoken in our homes. Guide us as we separate what is good, beautiful, and true from the rubbish and noise of all that inevitably will come. Ignite in us the holy desire to carry out your work regardless of the outcome of this day. Give us mercy, oh Lord, to lose with dignity and win with compassion, remembering that all those on the ballot were made in your image. Let us rise again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow with an urgency to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, shelter the traveler, comfort the sick, and set the captive free. Lord, hear the prayers of all those gathered in voting booths, in precincts, in campaign rallies, and those huddled around computer screens. Hear the prayers of your children who raise their hands with confidence just as you continue to hear the prayers of those whose hands will always tremble in silence. See in us, Holy Father, what you love in your Son as we offer great thanks that our citizenship in Heaven will never rest upon our political allegiances, but on the sacrifice of the Cross. Remind us of the promise of your salvation as you bestow upon this land your protection and your guidance. We give you this day, and every day, to shelter and bless this country we love. Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, hear our prayer. Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, hold our beloved states. Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.

On November 4, 2014, when I wrote the “Voting Day” poem that later turned into this song, I wrote it in the midst of what felt like a disproportionately high stakes rhetorical battle. Advocates from both sides of the ballot wrote editorials to local newspapers begging voters not to be on the wrong side of history. Friends, family, and coworkers on both sides talked about last chances to take a stand for truth. For many, Wednesday’s morning news would reveal whether or not the sun had risen or set on what they believed to be the American way. The pressure was on, but it all seemed to be singularly focused on an act that would take place in a matter of minutes on the way home from work. I began to wonder about all the other minutes of that day. Throughout the day I wrote the lines of “Voting Day” as my own little way of trying to redistribute some of that pressure. I had some help. In class my students discussed “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau, particularly the line “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” Also, two related quotations posted on my whiteboard fed my meditation: “Everything matters if anything matters at all.” —Pierce Pettis, “God Believes in You” “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” —Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation I do not intend to diminish the powerful voice given through the right to vote for government officials and policies, but this week is also an opportune time to celebrate just how many other powerful platforms we’ve been given, for better or worse, in the choices we make in every moment with every action at each breath. [Editor’s note: “Voting Day” is the first single from No Story is Over, a full length Son of Laughter album coming out March 2017. The album art is a collaboration between Jamin Still and John Hendrix. Still created the image as an oil painting. Hendrix designed the text. Click here to download the song from Noisetrade.] “Voting Day” Every day is voting day. Cast your whole heart a thousand ways. Cast a net. Cast a stone. Cast your king up on a throne. You get to say what you’ve got to say ‘cause every day is voting day. Every day is voting day. Cast your whole heart a thousand ways. Cast a look. Cast a spell. Cast your brother down a desert well. You get to say what you’ve got to say ‘cause every day is voting day. Heart won’t behave. Digging your grave. Riding the river with a runaway slave. Sometimes you choose to lose all you have. Sometimes the truth is you’re better off bad. Cast a shadow. Cast a doubt. Cast those deadly demons out, and let love reign! That’s a fine campaign! ‘Cause everyday is a voting day. Every day is a voting day. Every day is a voting day. Every day is voting day. Cast your whole heart a thousand ways. Cast your colors. Cast a play. Cast a cup from a hunk of clay. Who’s gonna win it? I’ll have my say. Every little minute is a voting day.

Rabbit Room LIVE is our first official event as a nonprofit ministry. We’ve invited a bunch of friends of the Rabbit Room, people who have in one way or another been a part of this community over the years to celebrate what God has done, and to look ahead to what’s next. For almost a decade the Rabbit Room has flourished and become much more than we could have imagined: Hutchmoot, The Local Show, Rabbit Room Press, speaking events, “Mini-Moots” all over the country, and—most importantly—the many rich relationships that have shaped our lives. We hope you’ll support our mission, which is “to foster Christ-centered community and spiritual formation through story, art, and music.” If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the years, it’s that we can’t do it alone. We hope you’ll join us. GET YOUR TICKETS HERE. https://youtu.be/raVkBkBay4o

Right now I’m sitting in Jamison Theater in Franklin, Tennessee, watching one of the final rehearsals for The Battle of Franklin before it opens on Thursday night. I’ve had a lot of time in the last couple of weeks to reflect on the miracle of watching one’s work come to life. It’s weird. It’s satisfying. It’s scary. In May of this year, Matt Logan, the artistic director at Studio Tenn, asked if I was interested in writing a new stageplay/musical based on the Civil War Battle of Franklin (which took place about a mile from where I’m sitting right now). Was I interested? Let’s see: cannons, muskets, cavalry charges, family tragedy, an epic battle for the soul of a nation—and some of it in song? Count me in, all in. What I didn’t realize when I said yes, was that I’d need to have a story outline and rough draft ready in about 30 days. Gulp. But I dug into books and research and started writing. In the tale of the Carter House I found an intimate real-life angle on the battle, and it was one I was excited to write about. Fast forward a few months, and a couple of dozen drafts and rewrites, and here I am sitting in front of a massive stage built specifically for this play. It’s set with lanterns and flags and 19th century chairs and tables (even a sword or two), and there are real live people marching across it in costume as they put flesh and blood on what was once just a few ragged words on my screen. What’s a writer to make of this strange alchemy? It would take a whole book to pull together all my various feelings, and neither you nor I have time for that, so let me instead offer up a few thoughts: As a writer, I do all I can to make my characters as visceral and real as possible. I’m primarily a novelist or prose writer, and in that medium the audience has only its imagination to inform the story, so I try to write in bold strokes, to define sharply, to paint as best I can the picture I want the reader to see. But in the medium of stage writing, I’ve been surprised by how much sharper and bolder those lines become once they are enfleshed. Often what I think of as powerful on the page becomes almost unbearable once brought to life on the stage. There is a scene in Act 2 in which a slave character named Callie confronts her master and exposes to him the flaws of his way of thinking. I invested plenty of anger and emotion into the scene on the page and it’s always a moving scene for me to work on and think through. But when I see the scene drawn into the the real world with the passion of gifted actors in costume and in context, I’ve been amazed at how much more it all means, how much higher the stakes suddenly become, how powerfully I’m affected by what I’m seeing embodied before me. There was a moment during rehearsal when someone cried out, “Pete! What have you done to these poor people!” and I genuinely felt a pang of guilt for the plight of the characters I’d wrought, though I knew I was using their struggle to push them (and the audience) toward a greater revelation. The unlooked for lesson is that words on a page are often one thing, but the word incarnate is another entirely—more present, more human, more complex, more inescapable, more shot through with the nuance and power and frailty of life as we know it. That was a powerful thing to witness. There have been others. It’s a very different thing to write a novel or short story than to write for the stage. This will be obvious to most people, but the particularities of the difference weren’t apparent to me until I’d done it. In a novel, I’m in control of the world and everything the reader knows about it, as well as the characters and all their thoughts and motivations, hopes and fears. But in writing for the stage, I find I’m more in the position of laying groundwork. I can provide stage direction (knowing it may be discarded), and I certainly provide all the dialogue—but once I hand the script off to the director, it’s out of my hands. This tells me two things. First, that I need to be careful with every word (shouldn’t we always?). If I want the audience to experience the story I intend, I need to make sure the story is fully contained within the words as they are spoken. I hope you see the important difference here. In a book, not everything I want to say is said in dialogue; I can take pages and pages, if need be, to address the what’s happening either internally within the characters or externally beyond the scene at hand. But on stage, the dialogue and action at hand (and the subtext) have to bear the full burden of the narrative. I don’t have the luxury of a page of explanation or internal dialogue. It’s all happening right there on the stage in real time, and therefore every word must be fully invested with the meaning and intention of the writer. Secondly, It’s not my job to write actors into a box. Yes, I tell them what to say, but they also need leeway in how to say what I’ve given them, and from that leeway, whole worlds emerge. That which was flat (though imbued with all the dimension available to me as a writer) suddenly takes on depth, becomes whole, real, vital. So it’s my job then to construct a controlled narrative that conducts the characters and audience along a predetermined route, but is yet pregnant with the possibility of discovery and individual agency. It means that my own story is entirely capable of surprising me, not because it deviates from my intent, but because it fulfills it in ways I had not looked for. That’s an amazing thing. It’s as if a painter’s painting suddenly reached out and took the the brush from the artist’s hand and began to paint itself in greater detail than even the painter intended, though never once straying from the painters composition or design. It makes you think doesn’t it? I know that’s what it does to me, and in case you missed it, there’s a lot of theological meat in there to chew on. Maybe that’s why I enjoy theater so much. There is, bound up in the process and execution, a fascinating Christology bubbling just beneath the surface. This is true of most any art form, of course, but in few others do we see so clearly a picture of Incarnation itself. The Battle of Franklin has been an enormous challenge and delight to work on and it’s been an incredible lesson in the craft of writing. If you’re in Nashville during the next two weeks, I’d be honored if you made it out to see the show. And thank you so much to Studio Tenn and the incredible group of actors and musicians who have brought the story to life and to the entire production team who has put it all together so beautifully. I’m humbled to have been a part of such a magical thing. Tickets are available here.

Hutchmoot 2015 did not pass for me without effect. More than a year later those changes are still evident. It was during those four days that my vision for artmaking came into sharper focus and I began to own in a more experiential way the truth that whatever I steward in this life was placed in my care unto the end that it might be nurtured and exercised in community—and then offered back to community. Part of what was broken in the fall of humanity, after all, was a true understanding of ourselves and of our unique and specific gifts as gifts apportioned to us that we might offer them for the service and delight and benefit of others. In this context, each of us, in the totality of our existence, was intended as a gift to others, were we not? Imagine what all relational transactions will one day be like when the last vestiges of fear, shame, self-consciousness, greed and pride and manipulation have been forever removed from the equation, when motives are no longer mixed and questionable, when nothing is left but mutual joy and appreciation and delight in the glories of God uniquely manifest in each person. To know another person in that context will be the same thing as to experience a greater revelation of the nature and beauty and wonders of God. The problem now is that we so often (and always to some degree) bend our gifts to ends other than those for which they were given. But I digress. This book is an idea sprung from the soil of community, and You are that community. Douglas McKelvey The thing is this: at Hutchmoot 2015 I experienced my own connection to a specific community in a deep and tangible way, both as a community in which I felt nourished and affirmed, and also as a community in which I saw that I might have something to offer that could be of genuine benefit to others. But I also awoke to a greater sense of how the one required and flowed from the other and of how both parts worked together: as a community we nourish and encourage the specific individuals in it, unto the end that each individual might be liberated to exercise their gifts in a way that then nourishes and encourages the community as a whole. It’s kind of a beautiful thing. Roots to fruit. So it was the stirring of all these ideas and emotions and multiple moments of teary-eyed thankfulness (coupled with a number of people’s responses to a liturgical adaptation of one of my unpublished manuscripts with which we closed the gathering that year [editor’s note: “The Liturgy of Lost Rhyme”]), that suddenly coalesced in those days of Hutchmoot withdrawal and afterglow, into a new book concept. Within a couple of weeks of Hutchmoot 2015 I was sitting over coffee with Pete P., pitching the idea for Every Moment Holy: New Liturgies for the Everyday as a Rabbit Room Press book. I swear the concept had arrived already fully fleshed out, which is another way of saying that it was less like staring at an empty page and wrestling ideas (as my experience of creating things often is), and more like plucking a fully formed and low hanging fruit that I had just bumped with my head. Every Moment Holy would be, I explained to Pete, a collection of everyday liturgies that families, couples, individuals, and small groups could incorporate into the rhythm of their lives, written with a sense of lyricism on the one hand, but also penned as practical tools for training ourselves to more constantly “practice the presence of God” in all moments and facets of our lives. The book would exude an artful aesthetic, brimming with old-school-style woodcut illustrations (even if some of their subjects were more specifically modern). There would be 100 liturgies in the collection: A Liturgy for the First Hearthfire of the Season, A Liturgy for When the Electricity Goes Off, A Liturgy for a Child’s First Day of School, A Liturgy for the Watching of Storms, A Liturgy for Home Repair, A Liturgy for the Morning of a Yard Sale, A Liturgy for a Broken Bone, A Liturgy for Feasting with Friends, etc. I had already written A Liturgy for Fiction Writers and A Liturgy for the Keeping of Bees, and was working on A Liturgy for Sunsets and A Liturgy for Laundering (clothes, not money!). Pete listened for a few minutes and then responded with an enthusiastic “Yes! Absolutely! Let’s do this!” And thus began our year-long journey to get to the point of now finally launching the effort to pursue the project (but that delay is another story involving countless forms and government agencies). What I want Rabbit Roomers (and especially Hutchmooters) to understand is that Every Moment Holy is a book concept that emerged organically from my interactions with this community, from the active role that you have played in my life. This book is an idea sprung from the soil of community, and You are that community. And for that I am grateful. Because of that it’s also very much a project that I hope will be a gift to community; first to the Rabbit Room circle, but then, more broadly, as a part of the Rabbit Room community’s ongoing gift of creative output to the church and the culture. Now that we’re finally able to move forward with raising funds to create Every Moment Holy, I suggested to Pete that we share one of the liturgies here, so that anyone curious about the project would have a clearer idea of what the tone and approach of the book will be. Click here to read “A Liturgy for a Husband & Wife at the Close of Day.” Some of the liturgies in the book will be for circumstances that only come about once a year or so. But others, like this one, I hope can be useful and meaningful to people on something more like a daily basis. Feel free to print out and use and even copy and pass around this liturgy if you wish. All we ask is that you please leave the copyright info at the bottom so that if it does “have legs” we won’t lose it to public domain before the book is even published.

A while back I introduced the Civil Language Project to the Rabbit Room. Then a couple of weeks ago when I walked through the doors of Church of the Redeemer to participate in the seventh year of Hutchmoot, Pete Peterson greeted me and asked what had become of it? Truth be told, I have been worn down and discouraged. The outcome of this presidential campaign seems hopeless. What’s more, worries about post-November 8 reactions feel oppressive. I was uncomfortable posting about the Civil Language Project with such a negative attitude. So, I didn’t. But then Hutchmoot happened. Who could go to Hutchmoot and not have his spirits lifted? Who could close out the weekend singing the Doxology with fellow rabbits and not be hopeful? I can’t. And so I am taking up again this topic of civil language. The filth emanating from Trump’s mouth is against us. The rot seeping from Clinton’s emails is against us. Our own addictions to the headlines and tweetstorms and memes is against us. That’s probably why I’ve gone crazy and come up with this: Father Christmas’s sledge is about to burst forth from Helm’s Deep. “Now, Shadowfax! Now, Nahar! Now, Fatty Lumpkin and Lightfoot! On, Hasufel! On, Bill! On, Windfola and Firefoot!” Mrs. Beaver calls after her husband, “You’ve forgotten your supper, dear!” He doesn’t hear her. He’s climbing onto Treebeard’s shoulder next to Merry and Pippin. Even the mighty ent sways, as Father Christmas floors it. He’s trying to keep up with Landroval, who has spotted Donald Trump’s Boeing 757 and is in hot pursuit. Orc arrows—which look strikingly similar to Hillary Clinton’s logo—clink off the bottom of the sledge. A shadow crosses over the pursuers and the heart-stopping cry of a Nazgul rends the air. Father Christmas groans. The hobbits and the beaver cover their ears. Rush Limbaugh vomits on his golden microphone. Al Franken’s glasses shatter. But Susan reaches for her horn, raises it to her mouth, and exhales big. And I mean, biiiiggg! Instantly, a flying coffin rockets past the sledge, directly towards the wraith. Nearer. Nearer. It’s about to ram the winged beast when the top of the coffin flies off and a stark-naked philologist leaps onto the black rider and rips him limb to limb using only his teeth and bare hands. Now, back to the chase, Father Christmas’s sledge is so close they can see through the windows of the plane. There’s Trump! They can see the whites of his eyes. They can read his lips. He’s talking—as always. “Oh, would you look at this,” he says. “This is too precious. Here comes the media bus. A bunch of lying, cheating, sons . . .” His pilot takes evasive measures and the lurch of the plane throws an orange tuft of hair across Trump’s mouth. “I hope you were going to say, ‘sons and daughters of Aslan,’ you gambling, philandering, demagogue!” “Lucy!” says Peter, scolding. A burst of speed only Shadowfax could muster sends the sledge alongside the plane. Treebeard reaches out a limb and palms the fuselage like he’s squeezing the last uncracked stone in Isengard. “Who’s on the move now?” chortles Mr. Beaver. Pippin turns to Merry. “I have not labored this hard or for this long on such an empty stomach since Grishnákh dragged us away from Parth Galen.” The two hobbits empathetically look into each other’s eyes. Without another word they simultaneously reach for their pipes and leaf. Father Christmas turns to his co-pilot, “Where to? Mordor?” “Old friend, for this errand we need neither smoke nor flame,” says Gandalf. “Only a deeper magic, all but lost in these our darkened days, can kindle hope now. Take our cargo to Rivendell. There we must place our trust in the ministrations of hospitality.” Boromir sulks. In my next post, I will discuss hospitality and the Civil Language Project. [Editor’s note: I intend to hold him to that promise.]

We’re proud to announce the first of our special guests for Rabbit Room LIVE. Sally Lloyd-Jones, author of the international best-seller The Jesus Storybook Bible (not to mention a ton of other great books) was the keynote speaker at Hutchmoot 2011 and has been a great friend ever since. She also shows up at the Ryman Auditorium each year to read from the Jesus Storybook Bible and set the stage for the Behold the Lamb of God show. We’re delighted that she’ll be joining us on November 15th as we celebrate art, music, story, and community at the Rabbit Room’s inaugural fundraiser. Tickets to this one-night-only show are available now. Rabbit Room LIVE 2016 @ the Franklin Theater — A Fundraiser & Celebration featuring: -Andrew Peterson -Andy Gullahorn -Randall Goodgame -Eric Peters -Ben Shive -Andrew Osenga -Russ Ramsey -Jonathan Rogers -Sally Lloyd-Jones …and look for more special guest announcements in the coming days. Your ticket price (minus the first $20) is fully tax-deductible. *If you purchase 5 or more tickets, you’ll receive a show poster signed by the whole Rabbit Room team. *If you purchase 10 or more tickets (or a table), you’ll also receive 2 complimentary tickets for Behold the Lamb @ the Ryman Auditorium in December. If you’d like information about becoming a corporate or individual sponsor for this event, email us at info@rabbitroom.com. If you cannot attend, please consider making a one-time or recurring tax-deductible donation to the Rabbit Room by visiting donate.RabbitRoom.com.

At Hutchmoot we announced our plans to publish a book of liturgies for everyday life. The book is called Every Moment Holy and we want to share a little more of what the book is like. Here’s a look at the kind of liturgy the book will contain. This one is called “A Liturgy for a Husband & Wife at Close of Day.” If you’d like to support the Every Moment Holy project, click here to make a donation and see how you can help. A Liturgy for Husband & Wife at Close of Day Husband: At death we will part. Wife: Therefore let us not take the blessing of our life together for granted. Silence is kept as both spouses consider for a moment the gravity of this truth. Husband: May our hearts be ever drawn towards You, O Lord In whose three-personed perfection of love Burns the fire that would kindle also our two-personed imperfection Into a oneness that is warmed and forged of your holy flames, Wife: A thing that is both an echo and seed and a play upon a stage Portraying the promise of union with Christ that is to come. Together: We are unworthy players, O Lord, unworthy to portray your glory. We are weak. We are jealous. We are easily wounded. We are petty. We are embittered. We store up remembrances of wounds. We are insecure. We hurt one another. We do not deal with our conflicts well. We fail to love as you have loved. Forgive us even the failures of this day. Silence is kept. If either husband or wife has need to make amends, they may do so now. Husband: I am not strong enough in my own strength to be husband to you. Wife: And I am not strong enough in my own strength to be wife to you. Together: Let us turn to God together then, asking the strength that we need. Husband and wife take hands. Together: Give us therefore the strength that comes from the grace that flows from your heart alone, O God, that we might live and move and breathe in air of that grace, receiving it in ourselves, and then offering it daily to one another. Without grace, our marriage will wither as a vine unrooted. But sustained by your grace, it will ever flourish and bloom and flower and fruit. Husband: Forgive us our failures and our sins against one another and against our marriage, O God, And restore now our hearts to you and to one another. Wife: Repair the damages of our selfishness, our thoughtlessness, our inconsistencies. Draw us again together at the close of this day, in love, and forgiveness, and fellowship and peace. Together: May we sleep this night side by side in unity of heart and mind and purpose. May we wake in the morning in solidarity and delight, Thankful for the sharing of this life, for the companion who journeys beside us, For hands to hold and arms to embrace, and lips to kiss at the close of day. Husband: May we love one another more at the end of this day Than we did at its beginning. Wife: May we treasure one another more at the end of this week Than we did at its start. Husband: May we hold one another as more precious, more respected, more dear At the shuttering of this month, than we did at its opening. Wife: May we delight in our companionship and take heart in the sharing of our burdens more at the close of this year, than we did as it opened Husband: May we reflect your glory far more fully in the beauty of our shared relationship At the hour we are parted by death than we did even in the hour of our wedding. Together: Bless our marriage. Kindle our desire. Teach us to be friends and lovers and companions. And may this our marriage exist not only for our benefit, But may the bond between us grow to be a shelter and a blessing for others as well. Husband: We ask these things in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Wife: Amen. Together: And now, with joined hearts, together we bring to you these burdens of our day. Husband and wife may now freely petition their heavenly Father with all worries, burdens and concerns. Copyright 2016 by Douglas Kaine McKelvey. All Rights Reserved.

https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/05-Come-Away-With-Me.mp3 “Come Away With Me” began with Rebecca Reynolds’s beautiful lyrics inspired by the Song of Solomon, and I added the chords and melody. Like the Song of Solomon, “Come Away With Me” is a depiction of God’s love for us, calling us out of our fears into close relationship with him; we’re to “go boldly before the throne of grace…” as Esther was bold. Although men often tend to relate to God a little differently, in our relationship with God every human being is female – the bride of Christ. But I will let Rebecca’s lyrics do the talking here. I played my 1930s Martin guitars and a banjo on the track and Jeff played piano; we recruited Barry Bales on bass, Tim Crouch on strings, Sierra Hull on mandolin, and John Mock on bodhran. Lisa Forbes did a great job singing the vocal lines at the end. “Come Away With Me” Music: Ron Block/Moonlight Canyon Publishing/BMI Lyrics: Rebecca Reynolds/Wynken Owl/BMI Rise up, my love and come away with me Come away Come away For the winter cold is past And the rain is finally gone While the sleeping world awakens Come away with me Come away You’ve stolen to the shadows You’ve hidden on the stair, And so I’ve come to you. I’ve come to you. Let me see you in the light, and hear the music of your voice. Come away with me, Come away CHORUS I’ve noticed how you tremble At the thought of me. I’ve seen the turn of fear in your eyes. But my love is full and gentle, As the fragrant summer wind Come away with me Come away Rise up, my love and come away with me Come away Come away For the days have turned to song And doves have come to sigh While the bloom is on the vine, Come away with me CHORUS I’ve noticed how you tremble At the thought of me. I’ve seen the turn of fear in your eyes. But my love is full and gentle, As the fragrant summer wind Come away with me Come away Come away with me

Rabbit Room LIVE is coming up in just a couple of weeks! Lots of you have been asking about the line–up and today we’re ready to start revealing what we’ve got planned. This is the Rabbit Room’s first-ever fundraiser and it’s only fitting that we start out with some familiar faces to help us paint the picture of how things began. We’re proud to welcome Randall Goodgame, Eric Peters, and Andy Gullahorn who will be joined by a house band including great players like our friends Andrew Osenga and Ben Shive. In addition to the musicians, we’ll have folks like Jonathan Rogers and Russ Ramsey joining in with their particular gifts (we might make Jonathan wrestle an alligator). Stay tuned! In the coming days we’ll announce more players and special guests. It’s going to be a great show with something for everyone. Tickets are available here, and remember that your ticket price (beyond the first $20) is a tax deductible donation. If you’re interested in bringing a group, contact us at info@rabbitroom.com to inquire about a bulk discount. If you can’t attend, consider making a donation to the Rabbit Room by clicking the “Donate” button at the top of your screen.

From my portion of the Hutchmoot 2016 session “In Search of Home.” You can read Part 1 here. Professor and writer Scott Russell Sanders has this to say in his book Staying Put: “In our national mythology, the worst fate is to be trapped on a farm, in a village, in the sticks, in some dead-end job or unglamourous marriage or played-out game. Stand still, we are warned, and you die.” When you look at it that way, the act of staying put feels deeply counter-cultural. In 1956, President Eisenhower authorized the funding and construction of the Interstate Highway system, connecting all corners of the United States and revolutionizing American life. In the 1990s, the Internet came into its own, enabling worldwide communication in the minutes it takes to write and send an email. And it was less than a decade ago that the iPhone’s arrival turned smartphones — mini-pocket computers — into first a hip luxury, and now, a near necessity. Technology continues to close our distances and expand our horizons, and I’ll be the first to say this is not an evil thing. Technologyis the reason we can even have this conversation space! But this freedom comes with a price. In Florida, I lived in my hometown, but drove an hour each way to find full time work in the career I wanted. Now I live in one city, work from home for companies in other parts of Massachusetts, and joined a church across my state line. Sometimes having little roots in so many places feels downright disorienting. In her book on stillness and creativity, World Enough and Time, Christian McEwan quotes the poet Robert Hass: “‘Longing,’ we say, ‘because desire is full of endless distances,’” Then she makes the observation that “the distances are being erased now, and the longing too, as all seasons merge into one long triumph of consumption.” Does anyone really, truly live in one place? Is it even possible anymore? I’m honestly not convinced it is. How can you, without cutting off all contact from anyone outside your physical place? Family and friends scatter, jobs or love make us move… not to mention that, as Christians, we follow an itinerant preacher whose final command was to take his message “to the ends of the earth.” But for all our sometimes necessary wandering, maybe what we need is some spiritual grounding… Tucked into a chapter of the book Slow Church by Chris Smith and John Pattison is an interesting bit about Stability as a spiritual practice, a literal vow taken by Benedictine monks, a vow to stay in one place for a lifetime, sink roots deep, and forsake the possibility of all the other places in the world. What can a sixth century monk have to do with 21st century America? Plenty, it seems. St. Benedict was a young, educated Christian from Rome, who, disgusted with the decadence of the failing empire, left to live as a hermit and pray. But over time, he found he wasn’t alone. Gathering like-minded men, he formed monasteries and wrote a famous rule that would guide many monastic orders through much of the Middle Ages. This rule wasn’t just a nice ideal for a bunch of people to hide from the world. Eventually, these monasteries, despite apparent isolation, became outposts of beauty, culture, and evangelizing to a darkening world. So here are these premodern hermits that turn staying put into a hard discipline of the soul, a means to grow closer to God and, rather than isolate, actually promote human flourishing. I am thankful for technology that lets me leap the distance from Boston to Nashville in hours, and for the possibilities the Internet has given me to do work I believe in. But still, how easily this can distract me from everything right outside my door. Let’s face it: Though physically staying where you are is easy, spiritually it’s hard to be fully rooted and present. In her book Acedia & Me, Kathleen Norris, writing about the even earlier monastic orders of desert fathers, reflects on the struggle for monks to keep this vow: “…acedia [the old name for sloth and boredom] mocked their good intentions by reminding them of the comforts they had forsaken and urging them to abandon their hard way of life. One abba said, ‘If some temptation arises in the place where you dwell in the desert, do not leave that place… for if you leave it then, no matter where you go you will find the same temptation waiting for you.’” But how do we practice stability in a shifting, interconnected world? What do we do when we hear a clear call to move on for the betterment of the world? How can I practice presence where I am, without neglecting my roots, without forgetting where I came from? How can you, when you’re a college student in an unfamiliar city, a military family waiting for the next orders, an apartment-dweller weighing your options when the lease runs out? There’s a physicality to stability, to cultivating home and hospitality. But perhaps too, it’s a mindset. It’s a determination to say, this is not my home, but it can be a home. Finding those places that are only yours, where you know what time to look for that perfect slant of light, that corner where you can pray and read, that cafe where you don’t even have to read the menu. Seeking community in an imperfectly beautiful church, even if it doesn’t meet every ideal. Seeking opportunities for hospitality and welcoming strangers, because you know that you’re just a stranger here too. And I think too that loving a place, calling it home, is an ongoing process of rediscovery. Richard Rohr in Falling Upward observes the disillusionment of our age: “For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the ‘enchanting’ ourselves.” And enchantment is easy when you’re new to a place. The first time I saw snow, it was pure magic. And then… I lived through my first winter. Four blizzards. A broken arm. Days where I just sat at home looking outside and it was gray… and gloomy… and oh my gosh, I missed the color green. I missed green! For 30 years, I saw green every day! Sometimes, I realize I don’t see beauty anymore. This is deadly to the soul. This is the heart of acedia, of restlessness, of the boredom that St. Benedict had to caution his community against. This is the reason we need stability more than ever. There was a time I felt like I lived “in the sticks,” embarrassed by my small town. And then, on the cusp of moving, I would pull into my yard after the long day of work and driving, and look through the Spanish moss, trying to memorize the way moonlight shone on the front yard of my youth. Next month, my husband and I are moving out of our first apartment. And once again, I’m trying to memorize the angles of light, trying to re-enchant this familiar place so I’ll never forget it. This is stability. Honoring what is, learning to see what could be, envisioning a flourishing patch of land, then digging into the dirt and loving it back to life.