[Editor’s note: If only this had been written by John Bunyan . . .] In the Foot Care Aisle The foot care aisle at Walgreen’s maketh glad The footsore souls who come to find relief— Support for fallen arches, gel-filled pads To cushion every podiatric grief. My feet are sound and healthy, fungus-free, But in the foot care aisle they ache to ache. They itch to itch and burn so they might be Soothed and eased and salved for comfort’s sake. I contemplate my future and I smile. Corns may mar my toes, a plantar’s wart my sole. What then? I’ll come back to the foot care aisle. I’ll manage with the help of Dr. Scholl. Such pains are vague and far from where I stand, But remedies are real and close at hand.

Following on yesterday’s post, here’s another look at MYTH from NPT’s Arts Break. The world premiere is next Friday night and discounted tickets are available in the Rabbit Room store.

Editor’s note: Blackbird Theater’s musical theater epic, Myth, premieres next Friday night. Anastina McKelvey is working behind the scenes on the production and we asked her to give us a peek behind the curtain. Tickets to the show are available in the Rabbit Room store at discounted prices just for our readers. We hope to see some of you there. Tonight is the first full-cast, full-score rehearsal for Myth, Blackbird Theater’s latest musical. Leaning against the far wall of the mirrored classroom, I silently observe thirty backs seated in thirty mismatched folding chairs. When the music director snaps his fingers to establish a beat, the cast follows. Open scorebooks fill every lap, pens dash off notes as quickly as possible, and a few errant feet help their bodies keep time to the music. As the voice of the twenty-person chorus converges for the first time, the room itself seems to swell and tense, but maybe it’s only me. None of the actors seem to notice. Their individual voices weave seamlessly in and out of the song with such a haunting sense of belonging that I forego my search for soloists in favor of letting the whole sound lace around me. From such musing over the humanness of the ancient gods and the ensuing fragmented relations between heaven and earth, came the idea of a girl whose life is unjustly shattered by Zeus. Myth tells the story of Acacia, Princess of Athens, who in her struggle to understand loyalty and justice, unwittingly undermines Mount Olympus and the Greek pantheon. Though the idea behind Myth began over twenty years ago, the story is only now coming to fruition. Driver and Greene have spent years with the characters and events, shaping the narrative and preparing it for stage. The existence of Blackbird Theater itself is a direct result of Myth; as they could find no theater company willing to assume the financial risk of producing an untested production of this scale, the two friends decided to establish their own non-profit theater company—but Myth was wildly ambitious, something they would have to build up to. After several acclaimed seasons staging productions like G. K. Chesterton’s Magic, George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, John Logan’s Red, and their original plays Twilight of the Gods and Roger’s Version, Driver and Greene are at last prepared to premiere the story that started it all. What Greene first envisioned twenty-five years ago has metamorphosed into a ninety-four person project, with a full crew attending to every aspect of lighting, props, construction, wigs, and make up. The score is a delightful mix of Greek chorus and modern musical. The sets are eloquent in their familiar otherworldliness. The costumes land somewhere between unsettling and beautiful. Not only have Driver and Greene accomplished a number of Herculean tasks to bring this new musical into existence, but they have done so with excellence, passion, and humor. Their dedication to their craft is evident in every aspect of the show. As the cast sings its way through the story, I begin to pick out which actors play which characters—Acacia, Aphrodite, Zeus, Prince Kallisto. Hades is seated directly in front of me, with a voice to put thunder to shame. At his feet lays a terrier with morose eyebrows. There’s an obvious chemistry, an energy that’s building, as the actors begin to play off one another’s characters for the first time. And I’m here, leaned against the far wall, trying to remain unseen as I watch the transformation happen, feeling a little, perhaps, like a mortal in the halls of Olympus. [Click here for tickets.]

There are times in my life when my own mediocrity and lack of holy desire leave me quietly wondering if God has finally given up on me. That, disappointed with my weakness, He has taken my calling and given it instead to someone who has worked harder, prayed longer, and deserves it more. It’s not something I shout about, or even admit readily to myself, but all too often I allow myself to be seduced by the voices that whisper this dark and dangerous logic into my weariness. In those moments it seems inevitable that He has finally noticed the ease with which I have neglected and trampled upon the fervent promises that came so easily in simpler days. In a steady stream of small but piercing moments, God has been reminding me again recently that the voices are wrong. They are wrong because they are based on the presumption that somewhere along the line God looked at me, saw something of value and responded in love. The truth is, that is not what happened. God can’t fall out of love with me because he didn’t fall in love with me. He couldn’t start loving me because He has always loved me. That’s what Paul is telling us in the first chapter of Ephesians. Before the world came into being, God loved us, not because of who we are, but because of who He is. As a friend reminded me last week: Love is not dependant on the person who is loved but on the character of the lover. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “He loved us not because we are loveable, but because He is love.” Gradually, but insistently, the truth of this statement has been driving out the fog that clouds my understanding of who I am before God. If God’s love for me stems entirely from His own character, and He Himself is love, then He cannot stop loving me. It is the very essence of who He is. The inescapable truth is that His love has nothing to do with my promises and everything to do with His. One of my favourite stories is found in 1 Kings 19. Elijah has just been part of a spectacular display of God’s strength, demonstrating astonishing faith and courage as he faces down the prophets of Baal. However, as can so often be the case, in the wake of victory he finds himself in the wilderness, exhausted and alone. God’s response to Elijah’s desolation silences again the lie that God loves us most when we are at our best. There is no rebuke. Instead, He allows Elijah to sleep, waking him only to provide the food needed to strengthen his weary body. The food that has nourished my soul this week is this: He has known about my failed promises and my lukewarm heart from the very beginning. Back when my heart was full and my vision of the future held nothing but passionate, wholehearted devotion, He knew it wouldn’t always be that way. My failures didn’t stop Him from loving me then and they can’t stop Him from loving me now. The absolute certainty of God’s love comes alongside us in our lowest, most undeserving moments, lifting our heads and reminding us to look up. It is the hope of forgiveness when we are struggling to forgive ourselves and it is the promise that nothing, neither mediocrity nor failure, neither brokenness nor unfulfilled promises can separate us from the love of God. Yet, when Love catches up with us, it is so much more than comfort and forgiveness. In its underserved outpouring of grace, Love becomes a catalyst for greater things. Later in the same story, refreshed and reassured, Elijah made the long journey to Horeb where God revealed more of himself and prepared Elijah for the next stage of his journey. Similarly, after the Resurrection, Jesus met the disciples on a beach beside the Sea of Tiberias, providing food for their weary bodies and truth to restore their broken hearts and readying them for all that lay ahead. From one person to another, and through different seasons of life, the tasks we are called to are rich and varied. However, there is one calling that remains constant and unchanging. It is not the call to do or to go but the call to be. To know and be known. To go “further up and further in,” pushing deeper into all that He is and allowing Him to kindle again the passion that sustains us and spurs us on. To cultivate His character so that we can love like He does—unreservedly and without regard to the worthiness of those we have been called to love. When a compassionate God meets us where we are and accepts us in our frailty He gives us the very thing we need most. Hope. Hope that slowly scatters shadows and allows the light to waken and revive our flagging souls. Whispering the truth that there is no failure great enough to drive us from His heart. Reminding us that, while He loves us in our weakness, He isn’t finished with us yet.

I’m frequently asked for advice by illustrator hopefuls, and my constant response is: “Keep drawing. Keep drawing like you draw. Don’t repeatedly reinvent yourself. You will naturally evolve if you just keep drawing in your own style. Then, once you’ve convinced yourself to draw naturally, focus on telling a story through your illustrations.” The main character in a scene doesn’t always need to be visible, or their face shown, or a full frontal shot. Try to avoid drawing the “cover image” with each illustration. Can you imagine the mess that Star Wars would be if every scene was a Drew Struzan movie poster? Holy cow! Tie Fighters in miniature scale, zooming past the giant, disembodied heads of Luke or Han. Awesome movie poster—but that’s no way to tell a story. That’s just intended to draw the audience in. When you are visually telling a story within a particular scene, try telling the scene from the teller’s eye-view, or from different perspectives. The “fly on the wall,” an ant on the floor, what does he see in the scene? Think like a movie director. Our characters are not always walking directly toward a camera. That would make a terrible movie. Look at the scene of Bonifer Squoon as a spider (“Spidifer”) in The Warden and the Wolf King. No faces are visible. The boys are narrowly escaping out a bright door so we see only their silhouettes. Squoon himself is scarier as a mysterious, spidery hulk, without focus. There are implications of his appearance, but no clear view to be seen. Give the reader details they need, and give them room to imagine as well. Thats not always the plan or what is needed, but its a great step in learning how to tell a story through illustrations. Create opportunities for mystery and wonder in the mind of the reader. The great Charles Vess once told me, about my illustration of John Carter and Woola for Under the Moons of Mars, that the strange multiple light sources and shadows made him wonder what was beyond the frame of the illustration. What was causing that outside the hut? Honestly, that wasn’t on purpose, but it made me want to do that on purpose from that moment on. Thats what I believe we need to strive for in visual storytelling. Make them want more, in a good way. Make them think beyond what you share by the clues you provide. You are a storyteller, in pictures.

The Samaritans were the descendants of Israel’s northern kingdom who had intermarried with their Assyrian captors after they were carried off into exile in 722 BC. The Jews regarded the Samaritans as traitors who had exchanged the bloodline of Abraham in order to settle in a pagan land. Jesus and his disciples came to the Samaritan village of Sychar at the hottest part of the day and stopped there to rest and eat. The disciples went into the village for food while Jesus stayed by the well outside of town. While he was there, a woman approached. That she came to the well during the hottest part of the day suggested she was a social outsider who had to get water when no one else was around. She was surprised to come upon this man and even more surprised when Jesus asked her for a drink. “But you are a Jewish man and I am a Samaritan woman,” she said. “Why are you even talking to me?” Jesus answered, “If you knew who it is that asks you for a drink, you would be asking me and I would be giving you living water.” (Jn 4:9-10) The woman regarded Jesus for a moment as she processed what he said. Were they even talking about water anymore? She said, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with and this well is deep. How are you going to get that kind of water?” With that, they were now deep in the pools of metaphor. Pointing to the well, Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst again. In fact, what I give will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” She said, “Where can I get that water? My life is hard, and I’d love to be able to leave it behind.” (Jn 4:13-15) Though she was talking about her daily midday trips to the well, her life was full of burdens greater than this. In her wake lay a slew of dead and broken relationships, and with them the pain they heaped upon her fragile frame. She put on a brave face to stand her ground and talk like this with Jesus, but he saw right through her. “Go get your husband, and I’ll tell you all about this water,” Jesus said. She said, “I don’t have one.” She knew he knew better than to imagine she was a married woman. “I know,” Jesus told her. “You’ve had five husbands and the man you live with now is not one of them.” This was such a personal, painful detail to come from the mouth of a stranger. He was correct, but what would he do with this revelation? Would he shame her? Abuse her? Take advantage of her? To deflect the intimate light she’d just come under, she started asking Jesus questions about the differences between Jews and Samaritans—specifically about where God wanted his people to gather for worship. But Jesus didn’t begin this conversation so that they could talk about geography. He disarmed her in order to get to her heart through her wound. He said, “Your people and my people argue about many things. A time is coming and in fact is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. These are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.” (Jn 4:24) The woman said, “My whole life I’ve heard that the Messiah is coming and that when he comes, everything will be made plain.” Jesus said, “Listen. I am he.” (Jn 4:25-26) The woman was shaken. When she first encountered Jesus, she assumed nothing much would come of their meeting. She came from the wrong race, religion, gender, and moral reputation for anyone like Jesus to care. But in this moment, he hadn’t just shown kindness to her. He had exposed her insatiable thirst for comfort and control and revealed her most painful secrets and then told her he could satisfy her deepest thirst forever. Jesus didn’t see her the way she saw him. He saw in her a troubled woman longing to be satisfied on a deep soul level. He saw her attempts to slake her own thirst through pluck and a long line of men. But he also saw a person who was created for worship and someone who would al- ways be thirsty apart from it. He saw a woman made in the image of God who wanted something God had put in her heart to desire—himself. And Jesus was telling her that the way to a satisfied heart came through him. It was as though as they sat beside the well, Jesus and this woman were the only two people in the world. He didn’t regard her by her reputation, but according to what her heart was created to hunger for. She was a symbol of the world Jesus had stepped into—a world of people created to know and love their Maker. But so much in and around them was broken. The brokenness filtered through every single human relationship, from an unnoticed woman alone in the desert to the tetrarch of Galilee who had John the Baptist locked away in his dungeon. But that unsuspecting world was beginning to change as Jesus’s ways and words continued to spread. About the Post: This post is an excerpt of chapter 7 of my 2015 release Behold the King of Glory: A Narrative of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. ___________ Follow Russ on Instagram Follow Russ on Twitter Follow Russ on Facebook

[I came across this fascinating article last week. It’s a conversation between Peter Thiel, the co-co-founder of Paypal, and N. T. Wright, one of my favorite theologians. The topic was the nature of Death and its place in the world and it’s well worth your time to read. Would love to hear your comments. Here’s how it starts. Click through to read the whole thing at Forbes.] It turns out that Peter Thiel quotes Hamlet. For Thiel, a line in the play’s second scene throws open the pessimism that runs throughout the tragedy and, in his opinion, our current cultural moment. “Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,” says Gertrude to her son, Hamlet. Her words are a cold comfort to the young prince, who is grieving the death of his father. All that lives must die. “At some level it’s a statement about reality. At another level,” Thiel postulates, “it’s a statement about accepting the rottenness that is in Denmark.” Death is a fact of life, Gertrude says. There’s nothing to be done. Get over it. But Peter Thiel isn’t getting over it. “Why,” he asks, “must we die?” On a recent Monday evening in San Francisco, 700 members of the Silicon Valley tech scene from the beste krypto börse swarmed the SF JAZZ Center for something of a fireside chat between Peter Thiel and N.T. Wright, hosted by The Veritas Forum. It’s not unusual for the technorati to show up in droves to hear from the billionaire technologist-philosopher Thiel, who co-founded Paypal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and co-founded the behemoth private data analytics firm, Palantir (recently valued at $15 billion). He is one of the most successful tech investors in history, and has been called “America’s leading public intellectual” by Fortune magazine. Thiel’s fans have made his new book on entrepreneurship, Zero to One, an instant bestseller. But this Monday night he drew a crowd for an unusual reason: to talk about death and God with one of the world’s leading Christian theologians. [Read the rest here.]

A jaunt to the mountains is always a good idea. I especially like it when I want to interrogate God about the direction of my life, while also letting him know I’m a little miffed with the current particulars. Several weeks back, I was befuddled in soul so I packed my faithful blue hatchback and headed for the hills. I stayed in a mountain cabin with airy rooms, a steady supply of coffee, and a dimly lighted little porch just shaped for hours of brooding.  My plan was to do quiet, restorative things: read, take very gentle hikes, and generally make enough quiet space in my brain for God to speak some…encouragement? Direction? Anything would do. But the resting was not to be. I don’t know what possessed me, but I spent most of my time acting like a mountain goat. I hiked every trail in reach. My cabin, set right at the feet of great, jutting boulders in the foothill valley that flanks Pikes Peak, was perfect for meditation, prayer, and…climbing. In my heart and feet was an insatiable desire and a restless energy that set me on a series of long scrambles up red, muddy hillsides, out onto craggy, storm-shadowed cliff edges in quest of, well, I wasn’t sure what. A deeper drink of storm sky. A wider view. An end to my fitful thoughts. But my thoughts were tenser than ever by that afternoon when I hiked up the top ledge of a canyon. I had checked my trail guide and thought I would be out for a short, easy climb. I must have missed the turn because an hour in, I was still going up, too far to turn back but flummoxed as to where the downward road might be. I stopped to check my map and noticed abruptly how the air had pooled and stilled and the sky turned an ominous grey. The hot, pin-drop silence of air just before thunder filled the woods and then was shattered by a terrific crack. Great. Every mountain dweller has a cache of people-being-struck-by-lightning stories. I was pretty sure I was about to become the stuff of legend. So I jogged. Up and up and up, gasping for breath at the ten-thousand-foot altitude, sweating first, then soaked and chilled as the rain came pelting down. Finally, drenched to my skin, with the constant threat of electrocution just behind and the trail ever, always, mind-bogglingly up, I got furious. My anger wasn’t so much at the fact of my predicament as it was that I felt this wild, dirty climbing was a metaphor of my life. More than a metaphor, my heart felt that my past year had been a literal lung taxing, foot bruising scramble after God—his presence in my workaday life, his love amidst my fallenness, his will for me in a world of unlimited options and frightening isolation. Finally, I gave up running and plopped myself down under some scrubby pines. This was my day of rest and I was going to take it however I could get it. I ignored the lightning, embraced the fact that I was going to come out of this muddy, and asked God point blank how much longer I was going to have to climb. This was really what I had come to the mountains to figure out. How much longer, I demanded, was God going to tax my mind and soul to the limit with his upward road? The answer, to my shock, was immediate. It was in question form, of course, but clear as dawn: how long was I willing to climb? Sitting there, I realized that my life, my story, was one set in mountains. From a childhood shaped by parents in missions, to my own decision to become a writer, the roads I had walked were lonely, upward roads. Someone should have warned me that trying to be a writer would set me amidst artistic barrens and beauties I could never have dreamed. But then, someone should have told me the same thing about believing in God. The writing life, the faith life, are both an uphill climb, and a climb made most often in loneliness. Every part of my life  seemed tailor made to cast me into a soulish wilderness and I suddenly found this hard to bear. I inwardly railed at God that I was doomed to a mountain life when what I yearned for was ease. I begged for the valley then. I sat there in the rain, pleading for rest, for a break from writing, for release from conviction, for relief from the dramatically beautiful, yet utterly demanding road I walked in loving God. I was tired of struggling for new projects, of wringing my brain out like a rag for every deadline. I was tired of being lonely, of trying too hard to belong, of being misunderstood, of hurting. As the rain poured harder, I told God that loving him seemed always to lead up mountainsides. But the thought stopped me short. Sitting there, soaked and shivering, I had to wonder if any follower of God gets an easy road. What if we are all called to this mad uphill dash when we claim God as our own? What if all makers and artists, all lovers of people and God in every walk of life are called to this mountainside scramble after holiness? The thought was so distressing it got me straight to my feet. But I could not shake it as I slipped my way down the mountain. It grew as I slept that night and met me in the morning when I finally got that coffee and quiet. With that idea—the truth that every lover of God must journey uphill and into the wilds—came a calm I had not expected. I was finally able to face a truth I had never grasped before: the mountain road is never going to end. Real faith means to climb. Creation of any beauty, the giving of any great love, means an uphill road and a stormy sky. With that realization, I was finally able to ask the one, burning question that I needed to. Did I truly want the valley life? I believe we can reject the mountains and run for the grasslands and God will still love us. I believe that there is such a thing as a valley faith. It’s real, it just doesn’t go anywhere. A valley faith is one that chooses not to take on the struggles of radical love and risky vocation. It’s fine. It’s virtuous. But it stays home and locks the gate. And sometimes, honestly, I’ve wanted that, even prayed about it. I’ve wanted to compromise a few convictions, give up the strain of creation, relax the tension of sacrificial love. But in the end, I always have to confront my own heart, the heart that has been stirred by God’s love and kindled by his beauty. And that heart stares me down and asks; do I want to give up the chase after God’s presence? Do I want to abandon the beauty, the knowing of truth that forces me to wrestle down the words that will describe the best and deepest things I have ever known? The answer is no. I realized that morning on my little cabin porch that I had prayed for ease because I was weary. God understands that. He knows the strain of a faithful life. But I knew I had prayed the wrong prayer. What I needed to pray for was vigor. Not release from struggle, but a newborn strength to help me bear the wilds of this wondrous road. Not escape, but a heart sparked by hope, a will empowered by supernatural courage. Who can walk to the high and holy places of God? I opened my Bible to my old familiar haunts, Isaiah, the Psalms, and found my answer in the poetry of their words. Those who rise on the strength of His own wings. Who can traverse impossible ways, as Abraham and David, Joshua and Jesus? Those who pray not for escape, but for zeal, for Spirit’s breath in their lungs, and Spirit fire kindling their hearts to endure. We can run for the valley and God will still love us, but I decided that I didn’t want to. With David, I wanted to believe that: God girds me with strength and makes my way blameless.
 He makes my feet like hinds’ feet, and sets me on my high places.
 He trains my hands for battle so that I can bend a bow of bronze.
 His right hand upholds me. His gentleness makes me great.
 He enlarges my steps under me. My feet have not slipped. (Psalm 18) So mountain life, here I come. I know that exhaustion, petulant storms, and rocky hillsides of writer’s block will dog my steps. But I’m climbing upwards toward this God who beckons me on, whose wildness plays all around me and challenges me to chase him. I’m climbing in search of the love I have not yet given, the stories I have not yet told, the hope that is a light, silvered and pure, at the far edge of the storm. The road goes ever on, as Bilbo says, and I’m determined to follow it to the wild end.

As tourists pause to take pictures on the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial, very few notice that the careful spacing of the stairs symbolizes the years of the Civil War. Some steps represent seasons of particular intensity, so they are steep and arduous. Other steps are spaced far apart, signifying seasons when “up” seemed distant and unapproachable. These details that so often go unnoticed are a part of what makes the destination at the top of the stairs, the monument, so memorable. Matt Conner has a theory that goes like this: An artist is never more interesting to his audience, than when he is in the midst of the creative act. We thought it would be fun to provide an inside look at the process of creating Andrew Peterson’s new album, and as I watched Andrew at work in the recording studio recently, I had the privilege of observing some oft-unnoticed details. I parked behind the purple building on Nashville’s storied Music Row, and Andrew’s producer and friend, Gabe Scott, opened the door. Gabe led me through a narrow hallway to a small room attached to an even smaller room. The smaller room was dark, but there stood Andrew with headphones and a microphone. Gabe sat at a desk facing not the window looking into Andrew’s dark cove, but a giant computer screen. He clicked something, pushed a button, and said, “I’ll punch you in.” The room filled with sound, and Andrew sang, “I had a dream that I was waking . . .” The most prominent initial detail was not the darkness of the recording booth, but the tone of encouragement permeating the room. It’s a grueling process, singing the same thing over and over, listening to yourself and your words, and Gabe supplied just the right amount of encouragement. Where Gabe offered praise, Andrew responded with trust. When Gabe said, “That’s the one for me, unless…” it was natural for Andrew to say, “No, I trust you, man” and really mean it. This partnership of trust and encouragement has been built over years of friendship, and the friendship was evident as they worked through the details together. At one moment, they reminisced about the time they visited Gabe’s home and watched a deer-skinning. The conversation flowed from funny anecdotes to pointed questions as Gabe asked, “Do you experience a sense of loss and victory as we comp?” “Comping” is a study in details. Artist and producer listen to every few seconds of vocals, and then string the best takes together into one seamless tapestry. It is repetitive and it takes time. It is a series of difficult decisions about almost imperceptible differences. Each vocal take has a personality. They are characters in a story, each telling the same story in a different way. Some takes are emotional, and others sound more vocally pure. Andrew answered Gabe’s question about loss and victory confidently, “No. I used to. But not anymore.” His answer captured a detail that makes this album different than his others. Besides the different players, different producer, and different feel, Andrew is different. He says that once, he wanted control over every little detail. And while he acknowledges that there is nothing wrong with having an opinion on each piece of the creation, he also wisely points out that when control is surrendered, the finished product is often better. Andrew had not yet surrendered the title of the album when I observed these details. From the hours I spent in the studio, though, I knew what the album was not called. It wasn’t titled, “Conscious of the Nasal I,” or “When the Shimmering Went Away,” or “Mesmerizing Loopiness,” although as each of these phrases came up in conversation, Andrew nearly had me convinced that one of them was indeed the title. Now that the title is revealed, I realize I heard it the first minute I was in the studio and then a hundred times more throughout the afternoon. Two months ago, only one song of the album had been written. The rest was unknown, but Andrew says that watching the mystery unfold is like approaching a mountain and realizing it is far grander than the imagination could have conjured. In comparison to Light for the Lost Boy, Andrew says of this album, “It’s more hopeful. No, not more hopeful, necessarily, more joyful.” After listening to the first complete version of the song they’d spent the day on, Andrew sighed, a good sigh, and said, “There are a lot of words in that song”—a lot of words, a lot of choices, and an abundance of details. During my day in the studio I witnessed just a few small steps that, like the monument in D.C., are part of an ascendance toward a far greater finished product. Some of those vocal takes will probably never be heard again, but they were nonetheless essential elements in the long process of making the album. At one point, after an hour of comping vocals, Gabe zoomed out on the monitor. One detail met the others: bass, drums, guitar, keys. Pastel blues, greens, purples, and pinks decorated the screen like a scattering of Easter eggs. The waveforms looked like heartbeats. Gabe pressed play, and all the heartbeats formed a harmony. The details formed a song, the song was alive, and the songmakers were satisfied—one step nearer the summit. When Gabe punched Andrew in, the room filled with more than simple sound. It filled with details, memories, friendship, and even a title. Andrew sang: “I had a dream that I was waking on the burning edge of dawn . . .”

A new Pixar movie is always cause for celebration. But with such a long string of films that are more like soft, huggable security blankets than mere films, I always go into the theater a bit anxious, worried that I’m going to be let down and disillusioned. Sorry, Brave, but you were an itchy blanket that smelled like cheese and Mom threw you out. Jennifer and I saw Inside Out this weekend and I’m pleased to report that I’ll be hugging it until it’s old, dirty, threadbare, gnawed at the corners, and begging for a biohazard warning. I loved it from the first frame to the last, in fact I didn’t want it to end—and I’m hoping maybe it won’t until we’ve seen a sequel or two because there’s nearly endless potential for further stories. Go see the movie. Especially if you’re a human. I’d love to hear what everyone else thought of it. P.S. (I think it says a lot about me that, so far, my two favorite movies of the year are Inside Out and Mad Max: Fury Road. Both are heavyweights of visual storytelling–lots of “show,” minimal “tell.” And I also recognize that they both feature strong female protagonists, which Fin Button keeps telling me I seem to have a thing for. Who knows, maybe Joss Whedon and I are related somehow.)

This is only a small reflection on a large theme. A few videos and animations have made the rounds in recent years. These show the scale of the universe. I like being able to scroll from the smallest to largest known object in the universe, and it is fun to see the scale of the Minecraft world along the way. The size of the Virgo Supercluster is mind boggling, yet it is a spec. And seeing the scale of earth next to the largest known star, then realizing that the largest known star is just a pin prick of light in any of the billions of galaxies in the universe, well, it is marvelous beyond comprehension. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This is the start of all revelation. It is how the revelation of scripture begins and it is how the revelation of nature begins. Our modern understanding of the scale of the known universe does not disprove a creator God, it merely underscores what ancients understood by the power of intuition; namely, a creator God must be powerful beyond measure. If there is a creator God responsible for all that exists, regardless of how that God went about making it, that God is so powerful and awesome and impressive that if we ever came into that God’s presence then we would feel utterly powerless and insignificant and diminutive. This is a God who ignites supernovas a million times over as part of the creative process. We could expect our lives would be nothing to that God. Should we ever face that God, the only logical expectation would be instantaneous annihilation. But, if for even a moment that God paid attention to us, if even for a split second we were shown mercy, then our response would have to switch from terror to worship. These are the options before the face of the creator God, and the options would present themselves in an instant: Insignificance and the expectation of immediate annihilation or else mercy and the hope of unending love. A moment of mercy before the creator God necessitates our eternal adoration.

[Editor’s note: For more of Jonny’s work, be sure to check out his graphic novel, Martin & Marco, in the store, and visit his website to see what else he’s been up to when he’s not napping for inspiration.] (Click the image to view full size.)

“When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” – African Proverb Twenty years ago when I married my wife, I did not know her. And she did not know me. We were two. We were kids just out of college. I was twenty-two and she was twenty-one. Neither of us knew much about life outside of the nest. But we knew we wanted to figure it out together—the two of us. I didn’t know it then, but when it came to our marriage I wasn’t just learning how to be a husband, nor she just a wife. I was learning how to be her husband, and she was learning how to be my wife. Though this would certainly lead us to ways of relating common to any marriage, it would also forge a relationship as unique to this world as a fingerprint. Our marriage created an empty library, and we were two containers of books out at the curb, waiting to be brought in, cataloged, and shelved. In would come the stories we had been told, the books we had read, and the faith we had been given. In would come her history and in would come mine, along with her comedy and my drama and all of the mysteries that lie between a man and a woman. When we had brought in all we had, only a fraction of the shelves were filled. Those empty shelves were waiting for what was yet to be written. Slowly but surely, volumes of lamentation, praise, art, humor, geography, vocation, finance, education, home improvement, medicine, Biblical studies, theology, grief, parenting, gardening, and inspiration would find their place among the stacks. Characters would be introduced and characters would also leave. This, of course, is nothing new. Most of the roads good friends walk in life eventually diverge. There is nothing for it. We can have the closest of friendships for a season, but when a semester ends, or someone moves away, or circumstances change, we find that sense of intimacy tapers off. There is only one human relationship we come know in this life that is meant by God to be intimate in affection, proximity, and purpose until death itself separates us—the marriage relationship. In marriage God gives a gift of incalculable worth—a sworn partner for life. We are like two tectonic plates who, by God’s grace, grind away at each other’s rough edges until we fuse together into a brand new nation. My nearsightedness and pride collide with her courage and wisdom. Her woundedness and fear run aground on the shores of my boyish optimism and confidence. And these collisions shape us both. But when we stood hand in hand at the altar, promising to stay in this covenant for better or worse, in sickness and in health, until one of us died, we knew little of each other’s worlds. Now, twenty years in however, we know much more. With God as my witness we do. I know how to make her laugh and I know how to make her cry. I know how to feed her fear and I know how to awaken her hope. I know what keeps her up and what gives her rest. I have the power to hurt her more deeply than anyone else on this planet, as she has with me. We have learned to speak in each other’s native tongue and to see through one another’s atmospheres down to the terra firma. Yes, we see through a glass darkly and we have much to learn. But we see so much more now than we could have ever imagined was there when we took our vows. I have fears that are known only to her and my Maker—not because I hide them from the rest of the world, but because they are so nuanced and deep it would take someone who has been at my side for half of my life to know their triggers and to read them. There are qualities of beauty and fragility deep inside of her that no one else will ever know in the ways I do, though some I am seeing sprout up in the four children our God has given us. When I see my children carry my wife’s beauty in them, I understand eternity in ways that never before occurred to me. Parts of us will continue on after we’re gone. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. But the truth is that there are also parts of us and our stories we will take to our graves—riches, wonders, inside jokes, sorrows, and prayers no one but she and I will ever know. I imagine every life-long marriage is this way. This thought—that my wife and I will enjoy a sort of life known only to one another—adds to the sanctity and beauty of our union. Not even our own children will fully grasp who this woman and I have become and are becoming to one another and to everyone else we know because of our relationship. Lord willing, each of my children will also take on this sort of union one day. And when they do, there will be many facets of their lives I will simply not have access to, nor should I. But this woman—my wife—is a marvel. And it is a holy honor to have to say that, in many ways, you’ll just have to take my word for it because you will never know what I know. Though much of what she and I are will continue on in the lives of our children and friends, some of it will burn to the ground when one of us dies. This tells me that the place where I stand with her is holy ground. I stand in that place where two have become one, and that by the grace of God. ___________ Follow Russ on Instagram Follow Russ on Twitter Follow Russ on Facebook

Eric slept soundly that night in Hay-on-Wye, little Z’s floating up from his beard and hovering near the ceiling for a few moments before gliding down to rest on the many old books piled around him. I slipped out of my bed, army crawled across the floor and, with a little fan of my fingers, tried to snatch his copy of The Great Divorce, Indiana Jones-style. Alas, Eric had gone to sleep with the book tucked under his arm, and every time I gave it a little tug he snorted and a fresh batch of Z’s poofed out of his mumbling mouth. None of the above is true, but you get the picture. We woke up the next morning and agreed to eat lunch on our own and meet back at the B&B at 1:30, which would give us plenty of time to get to the next show in Birmingham. Eric took a careful count of his books, gave me a sideways glance, at which I shrugged innocently, then we headed out. Right away we realized that we were both hungry for breakfast, so we stuck together through the cobbled streets of Hay, streets we had memorized thanks to the previous day’s frantic book hunt. We walked toward the clock tower, a sort of five-points intersection at the lower end of town, passing bookstore after bookstore: Murder & Mayhem (a mystery bookshop), Addyman Books, the Poetry Bookshop (they carried a first edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems, which could be yours for a cool $7,000), Rose’s Bookshop (specializing in children’s literature), each of us amazed that God had allowed us this gift of a trip, on one of the few sunny February days in the history of Britain. We had espresso and breakfast at the Granary Café, at the table right next to the quietly crackling fire. This was our second meal at a restaurant which featured fireplaces that were more than decorative. We checked our email, sipped our coffee (which was quite good), and said little. Eric and I both require silence in the morning, which makes nine days of jetlagged travel not just bearable, but pleasant. Then came the hunt. Remember those Looney Tunes episodes where Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog clock in each morning with a friendly greeting, fight like bitter enemies all day, then when the whistle blows, signaling the end of the shift, they abruptly stop their shenanigans and bid farewell like old friends? I’ll let you decide who was the sheepdog and who was the book-stealing wolf. We thanked the good folks at the Granary, stepped out into the street, and before I could say a word, Eric disappeared in a poof of smoke. I revisited all the same shops but the butterflies in my stomach had flown. Not only was my brain tired from scanning the spines of thousands and thousands of books, I knew with a grumble of certainty that every shelf had been scoured by the Book Mole himself. There was little chance that I would find any more treasures today. I turned out to be entirely mistaken. There’s nothing like the delightful loneliness of wandering an unfamiliar town. For an introvert like me, there are few things quite so refreshing, and I take full advantage of every opportunity to do so when I’m on the road. I can’t think of a single time when I’ve meandered through whatever town or city I happened to be in and not discovered something interesting and almost mythic: a footpath shooting off into the brush (once I walked about six feet off the main road through some privet and happened upon a 200 foot drop into an abandoned quarry), or a narrow and foreboding alley that looks like something out of Sherlock Holmes, or a creek tucked deep in a gully between the parking lots of the Walmart and the Discount Tire, and when you climb down to it you find a green world snaked with giant tree roots and piled with pillow-sized rocks, a world that seems entirely content to go about its happy business while the people up top push shopping carts full of junk to their cars. And that’s just in America. Now imagine going for a wander in a 1,000-year-old town. I lit my pipe and followed a muddy path along the River Wye for a few miles, finding it wonderfully easy to imagine what this place might have been like when there were serfs and farmers and lords and ladies living out their lives along this same river. At a bend in the river I turned around and saw with a catch of my breath that the ruins of Hay Castle were visible in the distance over the tops of the bare trees. This was more or less what a boatman would have seen all those years ago as he floated  the Wye with a load of cabbages to sell at the market. All of a sudden I felt ten years old and was perfectly content to let Pappy nose through as many C. S. Lewis first editions as he wanted. I spent a few hours out there alone, sketching and puffing and reading and praying before I realized I was hungry. Thirty minutes later I was back in town heading straight for the Blue Boar, a pub that came highly recommended by the woman who ran the B&B. I sat down near the fireplace, which once again burned actual wood, opened my journal, and wrote for a while as I waited for what turned out to be some of the best cod and chips that I’d had on this trip. I’m a sucker for fish and chips, and find it almost impossible not to order it when I’m in a pub. The sun angling through the window was warm, the atmosphere was perfect, my belly was happy, and I was more than a little disappointed when I realized it was 1:30 and I had to rendezvous with Pappy at the car. He had acquired a few more books, but nothing to make me jealous. Thank goodness. The drive to Birmingham was as uneventful as it was enjoyable. We listened to the Bon Iver album for most of the trip, since Pappy had never heard the whole thing, and its landscape of sounds was the perfect complement to the soft hills around us. I’m sure Birmingham (pronounced “BUR-ming-um”) has its share of history and beauty, but we didn’t see much of it. We were pushing our schedule hard to get there in time for soundcheck, and it was dark by the time we arrived. We were greeted in the parking lot by one of the most English people in England, our host Toby Minton. I didn’t remember until I saw him, but I had actually met Toby and his family two years ago when I played in Llantwit Major, in Wales. It’s hard to say why, exactly, but Toby looks unmistakably English. If you put Toby in a lineup of 100 Americans I’d peg him without hesitation as the lone Brit. I don’t know, maybe it was the tan sweater, or the neatly parted reddish hair, or the way he carried himself with a sort of nervous politeness. He was a pleasure to talk to. Eric and I were treated with such kindness there, and they fed us well, too. By the time the show started there were a few hundred people in the room, and it’s safe to say that Toby might have been the only one who knew what he was in for. See, there just isn’t much Christian music in the United Kingdom—much less is there non-worshipy, acoustic singer/songwriter Christian music. One of the fun things about playing over there is that there simply isn’t any context for the sort of music we do. I can imagine the conversations: “Gareth, darling, do you know about this program they’re putting on at the church tonight?” “I believe I read something about it, Susan—some American with a guitar. He’ll be wearing a cowboy hat, no doubt.” “Don’t be silly. It says here that he’s a Christian songwriter. Not a cowboy.” “Well, the last thing I need is more stodgy hymns. I say, we get enough of those on Sunday.” “Not hymns, either, dear. Story songs.” “What the devil is that supposed to mean?” “I don’t have the faintest idea. But if we don’t go, Toby will never let us hear the end of it, you know.” “I suppose you’re right. Nothing good on the telly that night anyway.” Eric and I did our best to connect with these good people, banking on the Buechner Principle that our stories all intersect somewhere if we look closely enough. And here’s the delightful thing: the people were so warmly receptive, so effusive in their applause, that Eric and I hardly knew what to do with it. Honestly, there were times when I watched with glee as Eric had to interrupt the clapping so he could introduce his next song. By the end of the night we were both glowing. Thanks, Birmingham. Our cowboy hats are off to you. Pappy and I followed Toby a few miles to his house. Pauline, his wife, made us toast and tea and we visited with them and their two teenage sons until I could hide my weariness no longer and they showed us to our rooms. The next morning, Toby had a treat for us. He had sent this note to my manager before the trip: We wonder if they would they be interested to hear that our house, where they will be staying, is actually right next to what is now called “The Shire,” only half a mile from Tolkien’s childhood home, and the adjacent Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog where he explored and played as a young lad? Yes, Toby. We would be very interested, indeed. [Day One] [Day Two] [Day Three] [Day Four] [Day Five: Part One] [Day Five: Part Two]

This essay is adapted from my plenary session, “Notebooks and Number 2 Pencils,” at the From Death Unto Life conference in Franklin, Tennessee earlier this year. I know what it means to soar. When I was twelve years old, I got called out by my algebra teacher for writing stories in class. It was humiliating to have every eye in the room pinned in my direction—and it wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last. I couldn’t help it, though: that back corner desk by the window was too near the real world of birdsong and daydreams, and that story was too intoxicating. My bonneted heroine had just toppled over in a buggy, for heaven’s sake, driven, if memory serves me, by her deceptively demure rival. It was no time to be thinking of integers and variables (as if there ever was a time I willingly submitted my mind to such imponderables!). I still remember that notebook, purchased by my mother for the ostensible purpose of mathematical equations. But the thick, college-ruled paper was just too much for me: I almost saw the words on the page before my #2 pencil formed them. My heart jolted along in the wake of that tale, giddy as my girl in her careening buggy. Writing wasn’t work—how could it be? It was flying. By the time I was seventeen, writing had become a much more serious business. The #2 pencils and college-ruled paper were now requisite, along with the addition of my dad’s law school-era thesaurus, held together by a rubber band and smelling, enchantingly, of must and sweet wordsmithery. (To this day I can’t open that battered Roget’s without a rush of association so tender it hurts.) But there was something more, something at once mystical and exquisitely practical: as a dreamy-eyed, home-educated high-schooler, I had accidentally discovered fertile valley of solitude. Suddenly rather thin in the friend department, but always one to occupy my own imagination with the utmost contentment, I found in the freedom of my new life ample space for the tending of a rich inner landscape. I walked around in a world of daydreams, stumbling from time to time against prosaic things, like math homework and Friday chores (indeed, “prosaic” was my term of utmost disdain in those days), but at night, I came into my own. This is what writing looked like when I was seventeen: I would wait until the house fell silent, until the last light in the kitchen had gone out and I heard the scuff of my mother’s slippers retreating to the opposite end of our long, low ranch. Only then would I slip from my bed and steal across the room to the front window, where, beneath tall casements set with fake, 1950s lattice (which I happened to think the most beautiful, bowerly windows imaginable), reposed a particle board footlocker (which I found equally alluring, owing to the treasures housed within its humble frame). To throw back that lid was to let my stories out, friends with whom I shared some of the happiest—albeit most secretive—moments of my life. I had a reproduction copper chamberstick that my dad had given me, and lighting its taper and flinging wide the magic casement to the night air, my ritual was complete. I would kneel there for hours at my footlocker desk, scribbling and dreaming, unburdening my overfull heart of the lovely visions that had been accumulating throughout the day. I like to say that I got addicted to #2 pencils during that time (Empire Integrity, to be precise), but what I was really addicted to, of course, was the thrill of what happened when that pencil made contact with paper. The stories spun themselves, of moonlight and gossamer, laced with the spice of a spring evening or the heart-charging tempest of a blustery October night, and it was magic. The wings of my fledgling soul were tireless, immortal, unencumbered by the weight of self-consciousness which was to tangle later attempts. I mounted and swirled and dove amid the romance of words and ideas; swift as a skylark, exuberant as a mockingbird singing at sunset, I wrote like it was the one thing in the world I was made to do. No one knew about my stories but my sister and, later, my best friend. Those two took my dreams at face value, a fact for which I owe them an eternal debt. I didn’t want to be a writer in their eyes—I was a writer, by the fairy birthright of ambition. I wrote by night, but I shared my tales with them by day, under the flowering fruit trees of April, or on a carpet of moss beside a merry brown creek. And they did me the honor of crying in the right places and refraining from negative comments which might have snatched me too early from the skies. (Only once did my sister take issue with one of my rather florid descriptions. “I don’t know that ‘flowers straining their silken ears for a familiar footfall’ is quite the best image here,” she said gently. Thank goodness I listened to her.) Apart from my sister and my friend, however, my stories were a closely guarded secret. I had some nebulous notion of sending them out into the world one day, so long as the world proved kind enough. But there was plenty of time for that—in the stories I read and the stories I wrote, things just had a way of working out for the dreamers of dreams. The words of Longfellow were my rallying cry: “How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams With its illusions, aspirations, dreams! Book of Beginnings, Story without End, Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!” Then I grew up, and learned how cold the world could be. I’m 40 years old now, and I’m still reeling from the shock that life is hard, and that there’s a cruel, sad spirit abroad which scorns our most sacred ideals. What’s more, I’m staggering around most days under the blow that art is hard. I’m haunted by that 17-year-old girl, with her flying pencil and her heart full of arrow-sweet visions. But here’s something I know to the core of my being: what that idealistic girl believed about God and the world and herself and art and story is the truest thing about me. To hang on to what I knew instinctively then, in the midst of what I know experientially now, is the battleground of my art and my faith. To whisper to a grieving world, even out of great pain, that God is not just as good as we hope He is, He’s better—that the innocence and beauty and goodness we’re all mourning the loss of is actually our rightful inheritance—well, that’s the worthiest reason I can think of to make this great, messy, arduous effort of stringing sentences together, one awkward word after another. But it’s hard. And right now it’s really hard. Between a burden of circumstances and an accumulated inner crust of self-doubt, the words just aren’t there. I’m not flying—I’m not even gliding short distances: I’m frozen. I feel like a stunned bird that’s smacked into a window, too dazed to try my wings once more. I seriously doubt I would try them, but for a force that’s breathing the beauty of spring into my winter world: friendship. I’m humbled to say that God has sent one of His very sweetest singers to my side in this dark place, a kindred-compatriot who is not only one of the most brilliant souls I’ve ever encountered, she’s one of the truest. Scarcely aware of her own influence (as God’s most shining ones always are), she breeds beauty with a seemingly effortless touch—seemingly, for I’m aware of what it costs her. If I didn’t know her heart, I’d be tempted to envy her gift. But, as it is, she’s generous enough to take me into the counsel of her struggles, her feelings of paralysis, her fear. It was her idea, in fact, that we establish a weekly commitment to help pull one another out of a wordless slough. The routine is simple enough: every Friday, we send each other what we’ve written that week—unpolished, unfinished, and imperfect. We set small, creature-comfort penalties for missed exchanges, but they’re really unnecessary: a debt of honor trumps denial in my book every time. And so, I’ve been sending her pitiful fragments, bits that never amount to anything, embarrassingly clunky snatches of prose. The intent of our arrangement is safe-keeping, not critique; much as I value feedback, what I need right now is someone I can trust with my messes. This all flies in the face of my sense of privacy and perfectionism, of course—which is exactly what it needs to do. I’ll never be unselfconscious about my writing at large if I can’t be unselfconscious with a beloved friend. Nevertheless, I don’t think I realized how stuck I really was until I started trying to produce something for her eyes. Things got so bad back in February that I cast aside the essay I was grinding over and started something new: a Petrarchan sonnet on writer’s block. (I know—I mean, what did I have to lose?) I sent it to her in pieces as I wrestled out each hard-won word. It’s not a good sonnet, but it helped me articulate the mess I was in: Word-clipped, I flounder under frowning sky, Stone-sealed in sullen cloud, from which no ray Of pallid light escapes to ransom day. Such useless wings! What passage can they buy Upon this bone-chill of a breeze? I lie, Breast-heaving, frantic eyes a-dart, and pray The ragged crows that circle in the grey, Or gather on bare branches with a call So coarse it curdles hope itself, will fail To spy my helpless state, too stunned to seek Concealment. Come, heart! Come winter’s prey, small Songless quarry of the cold: Up-stir! Avail Yourself of flight! Alas, I am too weak. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but the effort of writing this poem was so great it felt like an ending, a swansong—until, suddenly, it wasn’t. For right into the midst of this chaos of scribblings and scratched out words and hair-pulling shone one of those ordinary miracles that hint at something terribly important. Midway through the painful birth of this sonnet, I stepped outside one morning into a world as raw and frozen as my own heart—but, overnight, the world had changed. Impossibly, implausibly, the air was full of music. The branches overhead were host to a crowd of lithe forms, darting, upstarting, and settling again, and they were singing the song of my summer heart. I could hardly believe it, though it happens every year: the red-winged blackbirds always pass through our place on their migratory path, and I’m always surprised. Just when I think I can’t take one more minute of winter, I’ll open my kitchen door one day to a raucous anthem of warmth and youth and spring. It’s no coincidence that I fell in love with these birds at seventeen, on my first visit to an island that has come to be both haven of dreams and healing place—their music is an unfailing connection to a inner spring of essential “me-ness,” and a time and location that marked me for life. But that February morning, they sang a wider song, of a strife and a mirth and a joy and a pain of which my solitary struggle was only a part. I thought of my Rabbit Room colleagues and community as I stood there in the cold, warmed by the great, glad, goodness of the various songs they were singing into the world. I thought of the authors who shaped my ideals; the musicians whose songs saved my faith again and again; the poets who emptied their dearly won jewels into my hands. There, in a delightful jumble, I thanked God for Lucy Maud Montgomery and The Innocence Mission and G. M. Hopkins and Andrew Peterson and Elizabeth Goudge and George MacDonald and Michael Card and Sheldon Vanauken. I thanked God for Pete Peterson, who believes in me enough to mark up my stories and point out my writer’s tics, and for dear old “Jack” Lewis, who told us all we’re not alone. In a flash of transcendence, that chorus of blackbirds imaged for me “a great cloud of witness”—a host of faithful ones singing a song so beautiful I longed to lift my voice among them, even if I’m more of a house wren among such larks and nightingales. Weeks later, I sent my friend a companion to that bleak sonnet, an answering refrain springing from the courage her kinship had leant me. I know that sorrow, struggle, grief, and pain all serve the truest art, but what I’m seeing in this songless place is that we’re not meant to create in isolation. While the ritual of my dear old #2 pencils connects me by some deep instinct to the sweet, secret dreams of my youth, the desperation of experience connects me more than ever to the people in my life. It takes guts and grit and determination to be an artist—we all know that—and lots and lots of solitude. But it takes something more, something mystical as a moonrise and practical as a firm handclasp in the dark: it takes each-otherness. And in that fellowship, we know that the soaring’s not the thing—the Song is. What is this whispered force abroad, this rush And whir of feathered life? The air is stung With song: a lightning-liquid sweetness wrung From scores of tiny throats. The dark wings brush Athwart my gloom, each pinion marked with flush Of flame, each note a summer hour among A host of wintry days. Such music, young From ancient time, and bearing yet the blush Of spring’s primeval dawn, is goad so glad It cracks the frozen air with joy and wakes A sleeping secret in the earth. I rise, Lift voice, lift bruiséd hope, enough to add One note to that bright hymn their rapture makes— And, having done, mount with them to the skies.

Like beauty, books are meant to be shared. The library at North Wind Manor has been created as a place for books to be shared. With sections such as “Ghost Stories” and “Literary studies,” “Rabbit Room Authors” and “Children’s Books,” “Philosophy” and “Theology,” and entire shelves devoted to Lewis and Tolkien, this is no ordinary library. We thought it would be fun to feature some of the books housed at the library, while also welcoming those in the area to stop by and borrow a book. To kick off this series of posts, today we’re featuring More Than Words: Contemporary Writers on the Works That Shaped Them, a series of essays compiled by Philip Yancey that examines the bookshelves of twenty-one authors. In one chapter of the book, Walter Wangerin Jr. exactly captures the power of a story, and in doing so encapsulates the purpose of the entire book: This is how the tales of Hans Christian Andersen so mightily influenced me. They were my world for a while. They named and shaped the universe in which I dwelt, and something of that shape has remained forever: not the fantasy but the faith that created the fantasy continues even now to explain existence. By his fairy tales Hans Andersen welcomed me to his bosom, and I delivered myself for safekeeping unto him. Those things which were horrible and senseless in my external world were, in Andersen’s world, horrible still; but his stories gave them a sense (often a spiritual sense) which I could grasp, by which the horror might be mastered, if not by me then by someone, by goodness, by God.” –Walter Wangerin, Jr., “Shaping the Child’s Universe,” More Than Words, pg 133 In More Than Words, contemporary authors such as Eugene H. Peterson and Robert Siegel discuss the writers who have shaped their stories. From Luci Shaw to Shakespeare, tributes are raised in such a way that will leave the reader with a long list of books to read, of worlds to explore, and of libraries to make home. If you find yourself at North Wind Manor, you are invited to check out More than Words or any other book on the shelves, enter a world, let goodness and God master the horrors, and be shaped.

A few years back I was the copywriter on a team that was working on an ad campaign for a huge national organization. We were in a meeting one day with one of the higher-ups in the organization—the Director of Marketing, I think it was. In any case, he was high enough up to fire us if he wanted to, and he was talking like he wanted to. He was chewing us up one side and down the other. He took a quick bathroom break, leaving us at the table to give each other significant, raised-eyebrow looks. When he came back to the table, the tirade picked up where it had left off. But from where I was sitting, I could see the man’s shoes. Black wingtips, glistening with drops of overspray from his peeing. I felt ever so much better. Nothing he could say could hurt me. I wasn’t the one who had peed on my shoes.

At the start of each day for the past week, I’ve been doing an ink warm-up drawing to keep my ink skills flowing. A lot of my final illustrations are done using traditional dip pens and nibs. I find that I get a little stiff and rusty if I’m not using them frequently, and with the span of time between final art on projects, I tend to have months in some cases where I’m not inking at all. Nibs have a specific direction and movement that they allow for and you have to get into a natural flow or your lines look really stiff. One morning I sat down and thought, I’ll draw a frog man. No other thought. The result was a little, squat toad with some wanderer’s accessories. Cute enough. I posted it to Instagram, as I usually do, in hopes of inspiring someone out there watching me. My wife, Gina, who was sitting out on the brick patio pulling weeds and tending to the moss growth, happened to be that person on that day. No more than ten minutes passed before I received a text from her. While out on the patio, she had checked her Instagram and saw my drawing. She paused her weed pulling to write a little poem about a toad friend named Old Roger Ribbit. (You can read it in its entirety here.) I smiled from ear to ear reading it, impressed that a little practice drawing could inspire her writing to bubble up so quickly. She considered each detail of the drawing. One of my favorite lines was, He uses his thistle thorn just like a hoe To create little rows where the new seeds should go. I loved it so much that I felt it deserved more art. So I drew more. Then I sent it right off to Sam Smith, who loved it as well and saw the value of sharing this through Story Warren. A day or so later I drew a little girl searching under rocks for bugs and snakes, and wouldn’t you know, Gina sent me another text a bit later with another wonderful poem about a little girl catching critters and spending the day with them. I’m sure this will be shared on Story Warren as well. This in turn inspired me to explore this little girl some more. The next day found me drawing her fishing and singing with the birds, which was inspired by the critter choir in Gina’s critter poem the day before. We are careful not to turn this newfound joy into a daily expectation, or it may feel like work. But its been great fun to be inspired by each other’s creativity and to cultivate that creative landscape in our home.

Ron Block served as the featured performer at Hutchmoot 2o13 with the official release show for Walking Song, his latest album co-written with RR contributor Rebecca Reynolds. The album features a guest list of Nashville’s finest players, and the songs feel like classic bluegrass offerings even upon first listen. Check out the title track, “Walking Song”, which features Kate Rusby, to hear an accomplished musician in his finest hour.

It’s likely you’ve never heard the name Katsushika Hokusai, but his work informs our thinking when it comes to what we perceive as Japanese art. For example, you’ve probably seen some form of his most famous painting (above), known simply as “The Great Wave,” which is part of a larger series called 36 Views of Mount Fuji. Hokusai lived from 1760-1849, and started training as an artist around the age of 12, but only produced his most important work, including “The Great Wave,” after 60. I had a chance to view a special exhibition of his work this past week at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Amidst the many prints was a quote from the artist himself, which caught my attention: “From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about 50, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of 70, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice. At 73 years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects, and fish. Thus when I reach 80 years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at 90 to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at 100 years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at 110, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive.” Hokusai’s thoughts present a startling contrast to our culture obsessed with youth and quick success, and they hint at the long, disciplined process of mastery. What do you think of Hokusai’s words as they apply to the life of the artist, or to life in general?

[In the early summer of 2013, I contracted a blood-born bacteria which required open-heart surgery. Since then, I have been writing about that season, using my personal experience as a setting to discuss the relationship between affliction and faith. The following is a potential chapter from these writings, if they should one day be put together into a book. This piece explores the subject of depression from a person who was writing about it in real time. Um, enjoy?] I am depressed. My doctors told me this might happen—a detail my wife recently reminded me of when she saw the dark clouds rolling in. She has seen this in me before; we both have. Still, even though being depressed is nothing new, this particular depression—because it is mine now—feels new. It always does. My prior experience with this dark night of the soul tells me that, when unchecked, it has a tendency to become something untamable. And no matter how many times I’ve walked down this road, I still struggle to see it for what it is. When a child hears a tapping on his bedroom window at night, until he turns on the light to see that it is only a branch blowing in the wind, it might was well be the knuckles a dragon come to carry him off to its lair where his bones will be licked clean. I know from experience that when I leave the voices in the dark unnamed, they become monsters. Tap. Tap. Tap. They try to persuade me to climb into their bubbling cauldron on my own volition. So in an effort to overcome the darkness, I am going to turn on the light the only way I know how: I am going to describe what I see and hear and feel, and then I am going to look into what winds are blowing that cause the tapping that has me so troubled. This is what my depression feels like. This is my monster. My depression feels like anxiety. Worry and fear are never far from me. When I am alone, my thoughts gravitate toward my burdens. When I lay down to sleep, my mind drifts to unresolved fears I cannot seem to shake. I worry—not about my present health, but about my future. Am I supposed to return to the life I knew before this affliction hit? Can I? The world I know—my friends, my work, and my family—moves on while I sit in my recliner watching TV. The thought of climbing back into life feels overwhelming. My depression also feels like grief over these seemingly wasted days. I lament that I spent my fortieth birthday and eighteenth anniversary in a hospital bed. It is the sort of sorrow I experience when I feel forgotten, which is a very unique sort of pain. My depression feels like apathy. I do not care about things that once stirred me deeply. My desire to pastor people is all but gone. I don’t want to listen to peoples’ struggles—not because I don’t think theirs compare to mine, but because right now I honestly just don’t care. This disinterest scares me. Will my passion or empathy ever return? There are times when I cannot imagine they will, and that is a terrifying thought, which leads to another voice in the dark—futility. Finally, my depression feels like futility. I cannot work. I cannot lift heavy objects. I cannot do anything that requires endurance or focus. I feel like I’m wasting precious days—and, as Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I cannot concentrate. I can’t hold a thought. I feel cooped up, deprived of sun and motion and warmth. I’m told exercise is great for keeping the depression at bay, but my best attempts at doing anything active reveal just how weakened I have become. This makes me irritable. My emotions are all over the map. Some days I cry easily. Other days I feel little if anything at all. This inability to reign myself in leads me to hopeless thinking. So there they are—anxiety, grief, apathy, and futility. Anxiety raises questions about my future, grief casts a shadow over my past, and apathy and futility drape a fog over me in the present. These are my voices in the dark. These are the four-headed monster tapping on the window during the black night of my soul. He whispers his accusations into my ear, beckoning me to surrender hope. “You’re letting people down. You’re selfish. You’ve lost your spark.” No wonder I feel so lost. There is no reasoning with the monster. Like the devil, he laces his lies with gilded threads of truth. The truth is I am not yet recovered. I do depend on others to care for me. I wrestle with apathy, and sometimes it pins me to the mat. I have lost my spark. In my weakened state, this is where I am right now. This is all true. In seasons like this, the straight truth is my best help. One truth my doctor told me early on was that this depression would probably find me after I had been home for a few weeks. And here it is, like a train pulling into the station right on time. Now that I have named what I feel, I will describe what is actually happening to cause this tapping in the night. Why has this monster come to me now? Depression is a common after-effect of heart surgery. One common trigger is the anesthesia, which alters a patient’s brain chemistry just enough to mix things up. Depression is also often triggered by post-surgery PTSD, or soreness and pain, or the extended neglect of care for one’s well-being (such as hygiene habits, exercise, or diet). It can also come as a side-effect of antibiotics and other medications that have been introduced into the blood stream. I have experienced all of these triggers to one degree or another. More medications course through my veins now than at any other time in my life. My nightstand is covered in pill bottles. Some of the pills help my body heal, but they also make me nauseous. For that, I take an anti-nausea medication which amps up my blood-pressure. For that I take a blood-pressure medication which causes dizziness. Lucky for me I’m taking that anti-nausea medication. Along with those, I take one pill to fight constipation and another to help me retain fluids when the anti-constipation medicine does its work. And the painkillers. Oh, the blessed painkillers. I take a lot of oxycodone, as prescribed. Still, I get a few raised eyebrows when I tell people how much oxycodone I’m taking. I suspect I’m becoming chemically dependent on them because when the pill bottle gets low I feel anxious. What wonders those little pills are—reliable servants constantly eyeing the role of master. At some point soon I will step down from the narcotics, but for now my doctor tells me I must keep taking them because I cannot afford to devote any of my physical resources to dealing with pain. All my energy needs to go toward healing. Together, all these medicines combine like a cocktail numbing my system. As for my soreness and pain, they are less intense than they were. But it still hurts when I try to perform some of the most basic activities, like lying down or sitting up again. Being unable to roll over without losing my breath is disheartening. Then there’s the lingering effects of the anesthesia. One doctor told me it can take roughly one month per hour of being under sedation to finally come out of the haze. I am foggy headed all the time. Writing is one activity I can do to keep my mind sharp, but it is hard work—a frustrating exercise in false starts, heavy revision, losing my way, editing, and taking my time. Between the cabin fever, the effects of my daily meds, the pain, the loneliness, and the narcotics, I have begun to lose my grip on certain things I know, on an intellectual and theological level, are true. When I pay attention to how I am feeling, I can almost see it happening. This slide into sorrow has a name—depression. If I am to see this depression for what it is, I need to remember what I have been through. My feelings come from somewhere. The scar down my breastbone and the puncture wound in my abdomen through which they fed the electrodes into my heart in case it should need to be shocked back into rhythm remind me that I have been through an ordeal. The reality is that I have been taken apart and reassembled. I am like a vase that has fallen and been glued back together; close inspection will reveal that I am not what I once was. I bear certain scars—inside and out. My chest was opened up like a cabinet door and parts of me that were never meant to see the light of day were held in a surgeon’s hand. My heart was stopped for several hours as my blood passed through a machine. I experienced a stroke-like neurological event that left me temporarily paralyzed and confused. The physical trauma I have experienced is both unfamiliar and significant. Beyond the physical trauma, there’s also the emotional weight. I have carried the burden of facing my mortality for the first time and preparing for my own death. I have considered the possibility of unimaginable loss for my wife and children. I have prayed in advance for the grief they and my parents and friends might have known. All these factors together make up the soil from which the seed of my depression has sprung. So what am I to do? Keep going, though, to be honest, some of the time I don’t want to. One of the greatest lies the monster in the dark tells me is that I should neglect doing the things that I know on an objective level can only help—get good sleep, eat well, exercise, shower regularly, and nurture spiritual disciplines. I must avail myself of the means of grace that have been afforded to me—friendship, prayer, rehabilitation, Scripture, and time. When I look objectively at the common symptoms people with depression tend to experience—change in appetite and sleep, irritability, hopeless thoughts, difficulty making decisions, and a general sense of apathy—I recognize that I own them all. The trick is to not let them own me. This depression snuck up on me. It could easily have gone undetected because in almost every other health-related area, I am progressing nicely. My scars are healing and my pain is decreasing. My heart sounds strong through the stethoscope. My murmur is gone. But my mind and emotions are not recovering at the same pace as my body. That simple fact is very difficult to observe. And since post-op depression doesn’t usually show itself until after the patient has returned home from the hospital, it can be difficult for family and friends, as well as the patients themselves, to understand what is happening. Depression, when veiled by the good news of physical progress, hides beneath the skin out of earshot of the stethoscope, tapping on the window of my mind where only I can hear. It doesn’t take much for me to feel alone and afraid in the dark. But when I turn on the light, here is what I see. On one hand, my depression is common enough that my doctor told me to watch for it. There are a number of factors that contribute to it—some are named, others are more mysterious. My body has been medicated, taken apart, reassembled, broken, and put back together. But on the other hand, depression is not new to me. It resides like a pox in my heart—dormant throughout much of my life, but able to be awakened nonetheless. And this reality is one I know I will live with long after my prescriptions run out and my body returns to normal and I go back to the routines of daily life. Knowing my own tendency toward melancholy makes me regard this particular season of depression as a sort of a gift. This time around I feel like the monster is in a cage, like an old silverback gorilla at the zoo. I can observe him without too much fear. This is a gift because I need to know this beast. I need to study his movements, watch what he responds to, and learn what calms him down because I know that unless the Lord chooses to remove this thorn from my side, I will continue to battle with seasons of depression. The time is coming when the monster and I will live together in the wild. He will lurk in the shadows and I will train my senses to anticipate his ambush before he pounces. But there will come nights, no doubt, when I will hear the tapping and my soul will be gripped with fear. By the grace of God, I will use what I learn from this season of depression to feel my way around the room to the light, find the courage to flip the switch, and expose my depression under the light of truth. Sometimes that light will be enough to deliver me from fear. But sometimes it won’t. Such is the nature of the beast. God help me. ___________ Follow Russ on Instagram Follow Russ on Twitter Follow Russ on Facebook

Some time ago I began chattering about a photo-essay book idea rattling around in my brain. A hobbyist photographer since I was a teenager, I’ve typically trained my lens on objects and scenes; on the commonplace. There is a gravity in the commonplace, a certain courage born of endurance and experience. Rummaging through a pile of my old black & white prints recently, staring at an innocuous, out-of-focus photo of a botanical garden archway, Adam and Eve came to mind. I imagined them, long banished from the original Garden, years later on the outside looking in, training their eyes back to a place to which they could not return, reminiscing, grieving, and remembering the Old Man and his many charms, the flora, aromas, and vigor of the old world. I wrote this photo caption: Every so often I walk past the place, my old stomping ground. I peek through the gate, and the sweet aroma of rhododendron and jasmine meets me over the tidy hedge. In there, the days were good. To think, I traded it all for an apple of power and my own confederacy. I can no longer recall the finer details. Either that, or I’ve chosen to forget them entirely. Out here, nothing works, and nothing lasts. The edges blur and vignette, everything goes wrong and, if it hasn’t already, dies. Nothing is permanent. I want the recollection of that idyllic place stricken from my memory, and yet—I hope I never forget it. That spontaneous writing exercise resonated with me—this giving voice to overlooked objects, scenes, and dismissed persons—and from there I began “remembering” stories that, though never wholly mine, were, in fact, entirely my own. I penned more first-person vignettes with an eye toward one day publishing them in book form. More or less a coffee-table art book, each page comprising a photo and its accompanying prose. I titled the project Far Side Of The Sea (from Psalm 139), hoping to convey, albeit abstractly, the concept of separation and falling away from a God who, in what must have been an outbreak of delirious compassion or compassionate delirium, chose to cross the wide gulf to search for and deliver us safely to farthest shores, a paradise-of-a-place we could never reach on our own. Three years having passed since my last record, I needed to make a new album. So I also set about the intimidating task of writing songs based on excerpts from the book — imagine Eric in Wonderland following the rabbit trail ever deeper and you get the idea. If the overlooked things of earth have stories to tell, surely someone should offer to help them. Having written songs about an abandoned bicycle, the tear-inducing career of an onion, unwanted pennies on the ground, and scared rabbits (among others), I have tended, over the years, to find commonality with the tired, sad, rusted, deflated, defeated things of earth. Surely, like any one of us, they have their own clumsy stories to tell. Far Side Of The Sea is a collection of first-person narratives, photographic memories if you will. Where I fail the songs and their subjects, I trust in their grace (and yours) to forgive any impertinence or melodrama on my part, and to allow, as with a double-exposed photograph, a bit of your image to haunt theirs, and theirs yours. In a few weeks’ time, I will launch the crowd-funding campaign for Far Side Of The Sea, and I hope you will consider helping me bring this book-concept-album to the light of day.

One fine Easter weekend, having come home from graduate school, I stood in a field where waist-high egg hunters swirled like waterbugs. Their fathers and grandfathers stood in a knot and told each other stories, mostly about tractors they had known. I stood a few steps outside the circle of men, my arms folded, and I thought to myself, “Ah, yes…here is how men construct community: by rendering experience into shared narrative.” It makes me blush to admit that I ever entertained such a thought. Not because it’s untrue—for all I know, men do construct community by rendering experience into shared narrative. The embarrassing thing is that I stood outside that circle of men—at a critical distance—and thought I understood more about what they were doing than they understood themselves. At least I had an excuse: I was only twenty-two years old, and I was in graduate school. In graduate school, what passes for insight is the ability to take concrete, real-life experiences and melt them into abstractions. Within a couple of months, I had experienced a writerly conversion of sorts. I came home for the summer and got a job on a remodeling crew. One of my co-workers was a seventeen-year-old boy named Jake, who unwittingly launched my fiction-writing career. I have told his story before on the Rabbit Room. Most nights Jake spent in nearby swamps hunting wild boar, without a gun. After his hunting dogs bayed up a hog and caught it by the ears, Jake and his buddies would tie it up and carry it out of the swamp alive. Tough as Jake was, I saw him cry once—after an alligator ate one of his dogs. I say Jake launched my career as a fiction writer because he presented me with stories that were too good to turn into abstractions. In Jake’s hunting stories I recognized the distillation of experience that is the stuff of great fiction. That summer I decided that if I ever wrote books, they would have more in common with Jake’s stories than with the academic fare I was reading and writing in my graduate studies. The academic impulse is Platonic. For Plato, ultimate reality is abstract and cannot be detected with the senses. The world around us is a dim reflection of that abstract reality. Art, which imitates nature, is a dim reflection of a dim reflection; it is at a distant remove from the true and the real. Poets are liars, said Plato. He banned them from his ideal Republic. But the storytelling impulse is Aristotelian. According to Aristotle, stories don’t dilute the truth that is to be found in our everyday experience—they distill it. Stories, when they are told the right way, give us something that is truer than everyday life. Chesterton, that great Aristotelian, said we’re all like castaways who have survived a shipwreck and wake up on the beach. We don’t remember much about where we came from, but we’re surrounded by the broken pieces of our beautiful ship and its broken contents, and we set about the work of trying to put it back together. That’s what storytelling is like. It’s also what the teaching of storytelling is like. All these broken pieces of truth and beauty are lying about: how do you begin to put them together into something that is a little truer, a little more beautiful than what we see every day? I am convinced that we’re born Aristotelian/Chestertonians. We look and touch and listen and smell and lick so that the world will give up its secrets. Our hearts leap up at the old stories of long journeys and lost loves and old boys slogging through a swamp in pursuit of wild hogs. The Platonist’s skills of abstraction are important skills, but they can get in the way of good writing. It’s worth noting that those skills are acquired rather than innate. I find that teaching creative writing to adults is largely a matter of peeling away the habits of abstraction and helping writers recover the skills of storytelling and description and characterization that have been there all along. “Writing close to the earth,” as I call it, is about learning to speak again in our native tongue.

When Pete and Andrew approached me about the cover art for Everlasting is the Past, I was excited. When they told me they wanted a cover with a woodcut look in black and white, I was a little nervous. I hadn’t created a woodcut look before, though I had done quite a bit of pen and ink work, so I figured I’d give it a shot. [Click to view full size.] First, I wanted to come up with an idea that reflected Walt Wangerin, Jr.’s main theme. So I read the manuscript, and Pete, Andrew, and I kicked around some ideas. I sent them some sketches. This one is from an early scene in the book, where the author is driving into a storm. They liked it, so I kept working on it. Mr. Wangerin is driving into a storm, but the storm is more than a physical blizzard. It’s symbolic of a spiritual storm, which was the reason I made the car about to drive into a tunnel. I was trying to communicate the unknown that was ahead. But the tunnel didn’t quite fit, it wasn’t quite enough, so I changed the tunnel to a tear in the sky. I wanted to get across the bigness of this crisis, something existential, and nothing quite does that like ripping a hole in space. [Click to view full size.] Pete and Andrew liked it, so I began. I started by looking at a lot of woodcuts so see what I needed to do to create “the look.” Then I redrew the image and began to ink it in. I decided to draw the car separate and quite a bit larger (because of all the details), so that’s why there’s just a car ghost here. After the initial inking, I decided everything needed to be more substantial, so I went back and thickened up all the lines, and in some places added more. I did this several times until I finally got to where I was satisfied with the line work. [Click to view full size.] [Click to view full size.] Next, I worked on the car. Once it was finished, I scanned both images and combined them in Photoshop. Along the way I had also decided I didn’t like the lines on the ground to the left, or along the horizon, so I got rid of them as well. Lastly, I used the eraser tool in Photoshop to create the snow from the storm. [Click to view full size.] And that was the process. By the way, it’s a great book. Pre-order it in the store today!

[This piece first appeared at Jonathan-Rogers.com.] Until recently, my in-laws had a farm in South Georgia. When they bought the place, its charms weren’t altogether obvious to the casual observer. It was scrubby where it wasn’t planted in pines and swampy where it wasn’t scrubby. But my father-in-law made it the work of twenty years to beautify the place. When he planted pines, he planted longleaf, the tree that once shaded all of South Georgia–indeed, the tree that towered over nearly every mile of Hernando Desoto’s path from Florida through the Deep South to the Mississippi River. By the time my father-in-law was born, the longleaf had been logged to near-extinction; when the trees were replaced at all, they were replaced by faster-growing slash and loblolly pines, which produce income twice as fast as longleaf, but always fall well short of the longleaf’s native majesty. Much of South Georgia’s wealth and beauty had once been attached to the longleaf pines, before they were felled and floated down the Ocmulgee and Altamaha to the ocean, then shipped away to be the ribs of great buildings far away from Georgia.  My father-in-law loves his native country; no wonder he planted longleaf. If they take forty years to grow to maturity—well, then, they take forty years. He is a man of imagination and hope. A bare, sandy road ran between two fields on my in-laws’ property. My father-in-law always envisioned it as a grand avenue lined by spreading live oaks festooned with Spanish moss and resurrection ferns. So he went to the tree nursery to buy a few dozen baby live oaks. The nursery man squinted at my father-in-law, who was well into his sixties at the time. “You realize,” he said, “that it takes a live oak a hundred years to grow up?” “A hundred years?!” my father-in-law answered. “Then we don’t have a day to waste!” That’s vision. Those longleaf pines on my in-laws’ farm will one day tower straight and high like the pillars of God’s own house. But the man who planted them will never see it. That avenue of oaks will be a sprawling marvel one day—but not during my father-in-law’s life or his children’s lives, and maybe not in his grandchildren’s lives. Still and all, it is a good work to plant a tree. We don’t have a day to waste. “Planting Trees” by Andrew Peterson from Counting Starshttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/PlantingTrees.mp3