I’ve started reading through George MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons. It’s a book I’ve read piecemeal for years, skipping around here and there, but for the first time I am reading it straight through as one long progression of thought. The gems of revelation in Unspoken Sermons remind me of Golg in The Silver Chair telling Rilian, “I have heard of those little scratches in the crust that you Top-dwellers call mines. But that’s where you get dead gold, dead silver, dead gems. Down in Bism we have them alive and growing. There I’ll pick you bunches of rubies that you can eat and squeeze you a cup full of diamond-juice. You won’t care much about fingering the cold, dead treasures of your shallow mines after you have tasted the live ones of Bism.” Here are some of MacDonald’s live treasures: From “The Child in the Midst”: “In this, then, is God like the child: that he is simply and altogether our friend, our father—our more than friend, father, and mother—our infinite love-perfect God. Grand and strong beyond all that human imagination can conceive of poet-thinking and kingly action, he is delicate beyond all that human tenderness can conceive of husband or wife, homely beyond all that human heart can conceive of father or mother. He has not two thoughts about us. With him all is simplicity of purpose and meaning and effort and end—namely, that we should be as he is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness. It is so plain that any one may see it, every one ought to see it, every one shall see it. It must be so. He is utterly true and good to us, nor shall anything withstand his will.” From “The Consuming Fire”: “For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected—not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring.” From “The Higher Faith”: “What should I think of my child, if I found that he limited his faith in me and hope from me to the few promises he had heard me utter! The faith that limits itself to the promises of God, seems to me to partake of the paltry character of such a faith in my child—good enough for a Pagan, but for a Christian a miserable and wretched faith. Those who rest in such a faith would feel yet more comfortable if they had God’s bond instead of his word, which they regard not as the outcome of his character, but as a pledge of his honour. They try to believe in the truth of his word, but the truth of his Being, they understand not. In his oath they persuade themselves that they put confidence: in himself they do not believe, for they know him not. Therefore it is little wonder that they distrust those swellings of the heart which are his drawings of the man towards him, as sun and moon heave the ocean mass heavenward. Brother, sister, if such is your faith, you will not, must not stop there. You must come out of this bondage of the law to which you give the name of grace, for there is little that is gracious in it. You will yet know the dignity of your high calling, and the love of God that passeth knowledge. He is not afraid of your presumptuous approach to him. It is you who are afraid to come near him. He is not watching over his dignity. It is you who fear to be sent away as the disciples would have sent away the little children. It is you who think so much about your souls and are so afraid of losing your life, that you dare not draw near to the Life of life, lest it should consume you.”

When it comes to books there are all kinds of people. To identify a few: —Those who have no interest in reading (no one at the RR). —Those who have slowly gained an appreciation for pleasure reading, perhaps scarred by having been required in high school to read and report on Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge in English lit class (may or may not have been me). —Those who would not bother cracking open a book for the obvious reason that it’s easier to watch television. —Those who devour books, not necessarily paying attention to the book’s condition or its edition/printing/binding. Then there are those who, like me, have fallen off the far end of the spectrum when it comes to persnicketiness—admitted book snobs, who for incomprehensible reasons must have in our personal collections the very first printing of the very first edition of the title as it first appeared in the world. The thrill of the hunt for our tiny populace is, in the heat of the moment, not really knowing what we want until we find it staring back at us. Mass paperbacks hold no allure for this stubborn breed. Avid collectors—not to be confused with avid readers—do not pretend that in their lifetime they will have time enough to read the entirety of their libraries, but they bask in the sheer joy of being surrounded (literally and figuratively) by the literati adorning their floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. In such homes, book stacks may as well be furniture. Into this eccentric category I have fallen. I can track my interests in book collecting and selling back to an early 21st-century visit to a small college town in Vermont. My host, knowing my appreciation for author Frederick Buechner, himself a Vermont resident, took me to visit no fewer than three local used bookstores the morning before the show I was to play. It was this virgin foray into secondhand bookshops that sparked my obsession. One of those shops survives to this day and remains high among my all-time favorites. A drab sheet-metal building with high ceilings, narrow aisles, and a less than helpful owner give the place its charm. In shops like this, ladders are required to reach the uppermost shelves where dust settles upon the hard-to-reach top pages’ edges. An uncomfortable crick in my neck—the result of contorting my own spine ninety degrees in order to scan each and every book’s spine—is but a mere job hazard, easily tolerated for the thrill of the hunt. Precarious stalagmitic book piles rise from the floor. I am not above crouching on my hands and knees to gain a clear view of these layered volumes. In brick-and-mortars like these there exists neither the sparkle of bestseller end-caps nor the sheen of life-sized, cardboard author effigies smiling an invitation to purchase. The only shelf space inhabitants are the overlooked, no-longer-wanted, outdated, rare, and antiquarian worlds existing between the rubbed, soiled, faded, gilt-stamped covers. The variously tempered mom & pop owners—some as friendly and outgoing as your mom, others as crusty and cranky as your pop on a bad day—sit behind their counters eating tuna salad out of Tupperware, sipping black coffee, reading their morning papers, chewing the stems of their unlit pipes, or methodically minding stacks of books yet to be catalogued and shelved. Then of course there is the smell—the Smell!—of modern and antiquarian volumes comingling in the confined, papered paradise. Sniffing the open pages of an early 20th-century tome is an addiction I tell you, an addiction akin to any habit-forming drug. I am a habitual sniffer. It is not without humility (and glee) that I admit this neurosis. Toward the end of 2013, an idea began to burrow into my brain: if there were other people in the world like me—fellow book-sniffers and folks seeking specific authors and titles—why not put my travel schedule as a musician, and frequent (habitual?) ventures to far-flung bookstores (something I was already doing) to work by offering my services as personal book shopper? Thus was born The Book Mole (cue superhero music). Later, the idea that I should take it a step further and resell books—a virtual used bookstore—made complete and utter sense to me. Though I don’t yet have a brick-and-mortar shop, I do have the tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, curmudgeonly owner part down pat. A few months ago, I opened the official The Book Mole webstore. Were I a physical storefront, I would gladly welcome you with a smile, a hug, a Dr. Pepper, or maybe coffee, or tea and crumpets— anything to make you feel welcome and safe. For now a digital smiley face emoticon will have to suffice. * As a matter of principle, I refuse to type said colon followed by an end-parenthesis. In addition to books and the book-finder service, there are accoutrements available: gift cards, the option of Brodart mylar dustjacket wraps (to protect your book’s DJ), and custom linocut bookmarks, hand-cut and printed by artist Lee Younger. A small sampling of TBM’s ever-changing current listings: —signed Civil War histories —1st edition of Bertrand Russell’s 3-volume autobiography —early printing of Gibran’s The Prophet —sizable selection of Frederick Buechner titles —G.K. Chesterton volumes —Louisiana history —literature, fiction, theology, art, education, US and world history, presidential biographies, author biographies, pirates, poetry, children’s books, family resources, and ephemera Visit The Book Mole, you might find something you like. Thank you, and happy Moling.

One night a few months ago, Stephen Trafton performed his one-man show, Encountering Colossians, in Nashville. As a bonus, he sang “The Impossible Dream” from the musical The Man from La Mancha. Stephen’s song and his remarks about Don Quixote sent me back to one of my favorite books of all time. This post first appeared on Justin Taylor’s blog on The Gospel Coalition. It’s hard to know how to take Don Quixote. He is as thoroughgoing a fool as any figure in all of Western literature. Addled by many years’ obsessive reading of old stories of knight-errantry, Quixote is unfit for life in the (early) modern world where he finds himself. His foolishness is not entirely harmless, either. When he sallies forth with his sidekick Sancho Panza to enact his chivalric fantasies, they leave behind them a trail of property damage, bodily harm, and high dudgeon. At one point, Quixote frees a chain gang from their captors, releasing hardened criminals into the Spanish countryside to commit who knows what depredations. Cervantes makes it clear that his hero is a menace to civil order, however good his intentions. Yet for all that, we cannot help but love Don Quixote. He is a man of vision; rather than getting comfortable with the world around him, he forever strives for another, better world. Where other people see squalor and ugliness, he sees dignity and beauty and hope. Quixote’s first adventure after leaving his village sets a pattern that will persist throughout his story. When he arrives at a nasty little inn frequented by hog drovers and mule skinners, he believes that he has come to a grand castle. When he encounters a pair of prostitutes, he sees “two beauteous maidens or graceful ladies taking the air at the castle gate.” When he speaks to them with the high-flown courtesy of a knight addressing two ladies, they laugh in his face. Though he is stung by their mockery, he doesn’t insult them back, but calls them to something higher: “Civility befits the fair,” he reminds them. Quixote, it is true, stands too much on his own dignity, but he also insists on the dignity of those around him, even when they don’t see it in themselves. My favorite lines from Don Quixote come not from Don Quixote the book, but from the musical it inspired, The Man of La Mancha. “I hope to add some measure of grace to the world,” Quixote tells Aldonza, the hard-bitten, world-weary tavern prostitute. She snarls back, “The world is a dung heap, and we are maggots that crawl on it.” Quixote will have none of it. “My Lady knows better in her heart,” he insists. I realize that it’s cheating to quote a musical based on the book when I claim to be talking about the book. I realize, too, that Dale Wasserman, who wrote the dialogue for The Man of La Mancha, may be misreading Don Quixote. I’m not entirely convinced that Cervantes saw his fool Quixote as a holy fool or as a true agent of grace. But if any literary character ever invited willful misreading, surely that character is Don Quixote. I don’t recommend drawing too many specific lessons from the life of Quixote. If we try too hard to make him a “fool for Christ,” we will run into trouble, and soon. I do believe, however, that to experience Don Quixote is to feel—indeed, to love—the truth that God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. There are many sane characters in Don Quixote, but none of them know the true, the good, or the beautiful so well as the madman Quixote. The saddest moment in Don Quixote comes not when he breathes his last, but just before. Lying on his deathbed, Don Quixote regains his sanity and repents of all the foolish acts he had committed in his madness. When he dies, it feels like losing a good friend twice. That sadness is a clue—to the meaning of Quixote, and to more than that. The world insists that we take it as seriously as it takes itself. The madman and the believer both know that we don’t have to.

Andrew Peterson’s newest album is now available! If you pre-ordered, your CDs are in the mail and should arrive soon. If you pre-ordered a download, you can access your files by logging into your account here. If you pre-ordered your CD at Hutchmoot, your CD is on the way and you’ll receive a link to download the record later today. If you haven’t ordered yet, here’s what you’re missing: After All These Years is a collection of 18 songs (20 if you buy the download), including four new songs and eight brand new recordings of old favorites like “After the Last Tear Falls,” “Isn’t It Love,” and “Nothing to Say.” That’s a jam-packed CD full of good music. Here’s the title track (one of the new songs). Grab the whole album in the Rabbit Room store. [audio:Afterall.mp3]

In Nashville, on July 22nd, Andrew and I celebrated the conclusion of our journey creating The Warden and the Wolf King. That same night, another group of young men celebrated the launch of a new journey. Colony House, a rock band made up of brothers Caleb and Will Chapman and friend Scott Mills, threw a party for the release of their first album, When I Was Younger. I could tell it pained Andrew that he wasn’t able to attend their release party. The next morning when Gina and I left the Peterson’s to return to Ohio, Andrew gave me some parting gifts, and among them was Colony House’s new album. It took me only two listens to realize that I had just been handed one of the finest albums I’ve heard in a decade. Fine from start to finish. Each track unique yet cohesive and tied together with common threads of longing, heartache, hope, and the understanding that the only real control we have is in letting go. As I listened, I wondered how well they could perform such heartfelt music in a live setting, and this past Wednesday evening, Gina and I were afforded the opportunity to experience just that. It was the final night of the band’s two-month, nationwide tour with indie-pop rockers, Knox Hamilton. Colony House entered the stage amid an abstract soundtrack in the vein of the album’s title track, and they wasted no time before diving into their indie-rock anthem, “Keep On Keeping On.” I had no idea there would be such raw energy in their live show. They kept the energy high by transitioning seamlessly into “Second Guessing Games.” The audience obviously had some fans among them, and I could hear them singing out the choruses to each song. As they performed my personal favorite, “Caught Me By Surprise,” Caleb Chapman sang with trained control, never losing his attitude of joy and youthfulness. This youthfulness hit its peak during their rootsy, rock beast “220,” with Will Chapman beating the drums with fury and guitarist Scott Mills nailing his Hendrix-like guitar tags amid the pounding low end battery. It all blended in perfectly with the ebb and flow of the set. After their final song ended, and the crowd chanted their plea for “One more song!” they shyly returned, sans their tour bassist, to gift us with an intimate and somewhat tribal rendition of “Moving Forward.” The crowd was moved. Hands were raised in surrender. Voices were lifted in personal triumph. It was glorious. Gina and I had fun speaking with Caleb as the club closed down, all of us enjoying how small the world truly is. Even more thrilling, Colony House is hitting the road again this month, and returning to my city where Gina and I will no doubt be in attendance again. If they are coming to a venue near you, don’t miss it. [Colony House’s Caleb Chapman is in the line-up for tonight’s edition of The Local Show. There are only a few tickets still available. Get yours here.]

Before my oldest son was born, I had a miscarriage at twelve weeks gestation. It was a messy, terrifying experience; and for years after it was over, I struggled with fear that the loss had been my fault. I was afraid that I had traveled too much in the first trimester, or that I had been too stressed about the ministry we were trying to begin. Maybe the electricity from the waterbed my husband and I were sleeping on had caused the baby to die somehow, or maybe I shouldn’t have lifted the flower pots by the front step. The one thing I knew for sure was that I had been too casual about motherhood. Our pregnancy was unexpected, and my emotions hadn’t had time to catch up. I was supposed to have nine months to adjust to the idea of a baby; I didn’t know life and death could change places overnight. When I woke up from the D&C, I was groggy. I remember asking the nurse two things: first, if they could tell the child’s gender, and second, if I could somehow bury my child. She told me “no” to the first, and to the second, that the hospital had already “taken care of” the baby’s remains. It was a quiet, empty ride home. Community was not much comfort. The same Christians who would have been horrified if I had aborted a child smoothed over the loss with platitudes. They said, “You can have an other one,” or, “God doesn’t make mistakes!” or “Sometimes these things happen.” They were trying to help, but I felt a lot of pressure to be okay, even though I wasn’t. So I didn’t tell anyone when my milk came in. I was so young that year, too young to understand what was happening inside my soul as I sat on our couch with my breasts swollen and aching, with my stomach cramping and contracting. My body felt the loss even before I understood it fully. I had been a mother, but my baby was gone. This left a terrible emptiness, and I wasn’t sure who to blame. The most likely answer was myself. I thought maybe the universe had sensed my reluctance about motherhood . . . maybe if I had been more sober minded, I could have willed that baby to thrive. Perhaps I had failed to extend some invisible, mental umbilical cord (“Live child, live!”); maybe if I had been more ready . . . maybe if I had been more worried . . . All that guilt and fear went inside me, it took hold in my empty womb. I didn’t know how to process this level of sorrow, but I did know one thing—that if God ever let me be a mother again, I would do everything right. I would die before I ever made a mistake so bad that it hurt another child. A year later, I was pregnant with my oldest son. I still remember the prayers I prayed when he was living inside of me. I made radical, passionate cries to God. There was still a dark place inside me that felt like I had failed at motherhood first go around, and I was determined to be a different woman now. I would be as sober and earnest as I had been playful and distracted. When my baby was born, he was beautiful. I had seen pretty babies before, but I had never seen a child so perfectly proportioned and weighted. His little hands and feet were sculptures. What words can a mother use to explain how it feels to hold her firstborn child? It is a severe love, comprehensive and eternal. I didn’t sleep for months because I was so afraid of losing him. I moved his crib beside my bed, and every night I lay with my hand on his chest, measuring his breath. I determined to make every single decision based on what was best for him; it didn’t matter how difficult those choices were. From diet, to sleep schedules, to early education, I committed to hard, good things. I gave up money, relationships, rest hours; I bowed my dreams, my ambitions, my body down to this enormous task of maternity. Sometimes I got so tired I didn’t think I could do any more, but whenever I was tempted to waver, I remembered that miscarriage. I remembered how fast it could all be over, and I recommitted to doing my part, even if it killed me. Besides, my son was a wonder. He was bright, funny, strong, deep, wise beyond his years. He shone like the sun. What could I want more than his good? And then my daughter was born. From the beginning she was a compassionate child. If my son was a war horse, she was a mountain stream. She moved with delicate strength. She was artistic, committed to beauty. Learning came easy for her. It was all too much. I had been given the two most glorious children in all the world! How could I manage it? I homeschooled after saying I would never homeschool. Then I started a University Model school when I didn’t have the mental energy or time to devote to such a massive endeavor. A few years later, I pinched pennies to make private school work, then I got a job when saving money wasn’t sufficient. When my husband was a pastor, I tried not to put too much pressure on the kids, because I didn’t want them to resent the church. I tried to provide the right toys, right sports, right books. (I labeled all of our children’s books by date, because I wanted my children to understand where they stood in time.) I researched vaccinations, foreign languages, imported apple juice, and the impact of music on brain waves. I bought craft supplies, circuit kits, and microscopes. I made sure my children were never, ever around creepy men. I carried wipes and sanitizer. I wouldn’t let my kids play in the ball pit at Chick-Fil-A because I was afraid someone might have peed in it. I crawled through the playgrounds at McDonalds with them so a pervert wouldn’t catch them in a corner I couldn’t see. Every decision about play groups, difficult teachers, radio stations, videos, and slumber parties, I measured against possible benefits and drawbacks. I didn’t let them ride with other people, even when that would have been easier. I found a way to be there, no matter what. I found a way to keep them safe. I would kneel beside their beds at night after they slept, listening to the sweet, steady sound of their breathing and remind myself that not a single day was guaranteed. And then my two older children became teenagers. They became beautiful teenagers. If you knew them, I believe you would like them. The oldest is brilliant, edgy, musical, risk-taking, penetrating, and painfully funny. The other is brilliant too, though she is more forgiving, tender, insightful, and artistic. Both are innovative. Both are determined. Both want to know who you really are. I have come to enjoy their company as much as that of my closest friends. But I am also afraid for them. I am afraid, because that miscarriage still haunts me. Losing that baby got into my bones, and I have lived believing that if I did well enough as a parent, God would bless my children and give them abundant, happy lives. I loved them too much to look at that fear rationally; the risks were just too high. I would simply do the hardest thing, and pray that everything would turn out OK as a result. When I see that concept written out, I can see that it is too extreme. I see how it was proud, and constricting, and not born of faith. I see how it is rooted in law instead of in grace. However, it’s also a promise that is implied in many popular parenting books. If you raise children according to standard X, then Y will happen. And perhaps some of that is true; perhaps even most of the time X leads to Y. Yet, I am also learning that there is a huge difference between parenting your children with Christian principles and trusting Christ with your children. The teenage years are showing me how wide that disparity really is. The dangers my children face have so quickly grown from catching cold to my son driving in the rain in the dark. (The latter turns me into a wild bear, all teeth and ferocity. My poor husband.) And now we are looking at colleges, and I am remembering the mistakes I made at nineteen, remembering the questions I had about God and how I was so defiant against heaven at times. I am hoping he will know better than I did. And even though I was committed to do everything right, I didn’t. I failed. I failed. I lost my temper sometimes. I doubted God. I slandered, I resented, and I wasted hours I could have invested. I was materialistic. I was jealous. I was coarse. I was defiant. I failed in ten thousand ways, and so did my husband. So did the Christians who were in our community. My children saw hard things. They saw religious hypocrisy, and they heard thin answers to deep questions. They saw friends betray one another, and they watched anger take root. They saw believers fail to take responsibility for ugly mistakes. They saw me limp, and grow numb, and withdraw sometimes. As hard as I tried, I didn’t give them the perfect world I wanted to provide. None of us walked with God like I wish we had. I find myself standing in the wake of all this exhausted, frightened, and overwhelmed. For almost twenty years, I did everything I could do to make life just right, and it wasn’t. Now my efforts to repair the past and insulate the future can do almost nothing. The world is way too big. Suddenly, I am helpless. I am helpless to do the job I wanted most to do well, the one job I was willing to die for. “Lord God, what now?” I wish there were an easy answer to that. At twelve years old, Jesus left his mother and father, and he wandered into the temple so that his individuality could intersect with a world that was bigger than his little family. This is a complex story, because Jesus was a Divine child; I’m certainly not drawing “how to” principles from it. What I do know is that if I had been Mary, I probably would have been there standing in the doorway of the temple with hand sanitizer. That would not have been a good thing. Mary lost the Son of God in a crowd, and apparently she was terrified about her mistake. She caught Jesus breathless and gave him the same speech I give my son when he forgets to text: “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress.” What fear is there in all the world like that of a mother who believes she has lost her son? There are no words fit to describe it. Meanwhile, Jesus was busy chasing something more important than making his mother comfortable. He was asking questions. He was probably even asking the sort of questions bright boys ask, hard ones, questions they don’t often ask their mothers over lunch. And the living God apparently met him in those questions, because when Jesus explained the whole thing to his earthly parents, He said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Sometimes our children need something we can’t provide. Sometimes they need to go into the swarm and figure things out. What a story to read in this season of life when I feel almost paralyzed, because letting go is so much harder than I thought it would be. It’s not that my older children aren’t beautiful, bright, and good hearted. They are smarter than I am in many ways, and they have repeatedly demonstrated self-control, wisdom, tenacity, and kindness. It’s not that I don’t trust them; it’s just I am afraid that if I relax, I will miscarry again. Even though they have grown competent, I want to be able to give something costly and painful from myself that is sure to keep them OK. I want to die for them again, but I cannot, because we have reached some sort of threshold where I must stop. In my imagination, there is a room in some transcendent realm where mothers of teenagers pray. The walls are open through arches, and there are thin white curtains hanging down, and the breeze snaps them. A collection of tired mothers kneels together in this room, scared, tired, palms up, asking for what we finally realize that we don’t have. And the prayer we pray is also a sort of repentance, which is odd, after all we have worked to do that felt like goodness but was never quite. That prayer goes something like this: “Oh, Lord. I see now. I see that all my work was small. I see now that I was proud to think my strength was enough on its own. My striving and my sustenance weren’t what kept these children alive; you were here all along. You were chasing them. You were loving them even more than I did. My everything was too much like Eve’s everything, I tried to do Your job. At times, I think I even tried to fight You for them. Forgive me. Forgive me for talking about faith while living in fear. Please heal any wounds I have created. Please show me how to take a few steps now in faith. Oh, Lord! There my children go, carrying their questions into the clash and clatter of the cities. It is so hard to see them disappear into the crowd. Father, please do what I could not do for all that I tried.”

The light looks different this time of year. Shafts of gold pierce trees transient, darkening. The earth goes to bed a little earlier each night because she knows she’s getting older, fighting gravity, remembering carefree green and dancing in the rain, remembering emotional thunder and flashing lightning. But now, she’s only wiser and knows sleep makes all things rested, beautiful. And tomorrow she’ll wake early, dress in fire-red and bands of gold because she can with no one left to impress and never more alive.

OK, eleventy would be too many, so let me just admit up front that the headline was designed to suck you in. Welcome to Downworthy dot com. I’m going with a gimmick that involves what Math “People” call “Numerical Collisioning.” You’ll see at the end. Like charismatic church services, these follow no particular order. [Winking emoticon goes here.] Spurgeon’s General Warning: Thinly-disguised bragging follows and bragging cometh of pride, which is deadly. Why should you back The Green Ember on Kickstarter? 1. We made a cool video. It’s a little long, yes, attention spans on-line being what they are (or aren’t). But it’s a good video, I think, and I’m pleased with it. It has a cool part you’ll want to stay tuned for. I won’t ruin it, but two hints: 1) #RabbitsWithSwords 2) Dubstep My dear friend Brian Patton made it and he’s the man. I love his vision. The video is below! 2. It’s a story that grew out of our family life together. I began the stories that eventually became The Green Ember on our porch, telling our then-toddler tales of the rabbits that dashed around our yard. I didn’t write a rabbit story because of The Rabbit Room, or Story Warren, this story goes back long before either existed. So, it’s a tale that grew in the years of telling it to my kids. That may not mean much, but I hope that means it’s a story shaped by real interaction with real children I love. And if that carries over a little bit outside our family, I’ll be delighted. 3. The reception so far has been amazing. OK, not very many people have read the book. But we’ve had great feedback from our early readers and everyone who has read it has loved it. (Including this amazing kid in Tennessee whose dad sent me a video of his excitement after he finished the book. Made my decade!) Kickstarter has been bullish on our presentation since day one. That’s thanks to many people. Without a celebrity name to trade on (no one’s paying to have coffee with, or get a phone call from me) and without celebrity cheerleaders (unless you count early enthusiasts Randall Goodgame and Jonathan Rogers…and I should) or much organization (outside of a few in the Story Warren team), we’ve managed to make a little dent. We had so many friends from all over eager to support the project, including some fine Rabbit Roomers. We saw a lot of enthusiasm as we met our initial goal in 19 hours! It’s been a hoot. 4. Zach. Franzen. He’s an incredible illustrator and kind of a genius. Some of you met him and heard him talk at Hutchmoot. The man is a wonder and it was wonderful to partner with him on this project. I love his illustrations and the cover art he made. I think you will too. 5. It’s a family affair. Randall Goodgame sings with his wife and kids, Andrew Peterson has his family band, and I’ve always had a soft spot for family endeavors like that. This has been a family project. The kids have been involved from day one as audience, editors, and biggest supporters, urging me on. My 9 year old son illustrated a companion book available in some of the packages. (The version with his illustrations will only be available during this Kickstarter.) My daughter also did something cool that backers will receive, though it’s not listed in the rewards. It’s a surprise. My wife wrote about our journey here. 6. It’s Story Warren’s first book. We hope and plan to do more. Andrew Mackay, my amazing partner at Story Warren and a veteran of publishing, has been working a long time on his own publishing company. This is the first fruit of that labor. We want to do more. We had a conference last year, Inkwell, and thanks to a great team it was an incredible success! We are firmly hooked on incarnational endeavors. We love the web stuff, but we want to do things you can feel and touch in the real world, like books. We want to do things in the flesh, like conferences serving a few hundred kids in person. This project pushes us further into that kind of work. 7. Sarah Clarkson said this about The Green Ember. Sarah Clarkson knows books. (Do you have Read for the Heart? You should.) She knows children’s books and books for families. I was delighted when she said this: “A captivating story with sword-bearing rabbits, daring quests, and moments of poignant beauty, The Green Ember is a tale that will delight and inspire young readers to courage and creativity and would make a perfect book for a family to read aloud.” Super nice, right? Thanks, Sarah! 8. The Green Ember makes a great Christmas present. If you order through the Kickstarter, you can go ahead and take care of Christmas presents because it will all be at your house in time! If you want to give a bunch as gifts, there’s a higher tier where you can get ten extra copies along with most of the other stuff from the high tiers. Those obviously help us out a bunch and are too pricy for many. But even just getting the $15 paperback copy is great! Christmas presents? Check. 9.  This is selfish. But . . . You’ll be helping me launch my career as an author. Many of you know that (almost) anyone who does this for the money is insane. I would have to sell more books than I’m going to sell in order to make anything close minimum wage, but that’s not what it’s about. When you back the book, it makes everything easier and removes obstacles to us doing this the way we believe it should be done (illustrations, hard cover, etc). You’re making this a joyful experience. Thank you! 10. The Green Ember is for every age group, except babies (I know this, man . . . tried and failed to impress mine). The Green Ember is a story aimed not just at a certain age group (though it is a long middle grade novel), but one we believe your entire family will enjoy. I know its a cliche. I know it. But it’s really meant to be for the old and young. “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the least.” —C.S. Lewis. I aimed for this. I hope I succeeded. 11-111: I think can sum up these last 100 reasons with just one reason that is worth a hundred reasons. (Hey, it’s less than ten-thousand reasons, thank goodness.) Rabbits. With. Swords. That’s right. Rabbits. With. Swords. I don’t think you need any more reasons. That is the best. That’s better than 100 reasons, better than 10,000 reasons, even if I sung them over and over and over and over and over again to you, so that you had zero chance of ever getting it out of your head no matter what. #RabbitsWithSwords Thanks for indulging me! I hope you’ll consider supporting our Kickstarter. We only have a few days to go. I hope the fact that we have met our “goal” (which was awesome, but was just an arbitrary number we picked) won’t stop you from getting your own copy of the book and sharing the project. Cheers!

The most beautiful and lovely things always have been, and always will be, slow. Almost anything moving fast is naturally appealing. Where I live there is a kind of zoo called the San Diego Safari Park. Essentially the Safari Park is 1,800 acres of Africa relocated to north San Diego county. (By comparison, the more famous San Diego Zoo is 100 acres.) At the Safari Park there is a lot of land for animals to cover if they get motivated to take off running. Sometimes there is motivation. It is just awesome to watch a gazelle trucking across the savannah. Or there is this bighorn sheep exhibit that is basically a hundred-foot sheer rocky cliff. Occasionally you get lucky and see one of these beasts leaping up (or down!) the cliff like a bullet. Fast is beautiful. When my daughters were younger I often traveled for business. Returning home from a trip, Leanne would bring the family to pick me up from the airport. I would get through security and make eye contact with my daughters. The older ones smiled but played it cool and waited for me. The younger one took off running. Trying to look like an adorable dad getting home from a long trip, I stopped walking, swatted down, and spread out my arms for a big hug. And waited. My kneecaps began to swell. Lactic acid stabbed like switchblades into my butt cheeks. All smiles and big eyes, she had wobbled half the distance and I was growing faint. Slow is more beautiful. Of course, by comparison, my toddler was moving at breakneck speed. When I think about how long it will take her to reach her sweet sixteen (she’s nine-years-old now), her airport sprint happened as quickly as a text message. Her older sister is about to turn sixteen. Perhaps it is just me, but as cute as it was to see my toddler race across the airport, it is far more lovely to see a sixteen-year-old who has grown up well. And I suspect when our next daughter reaches sixteen, it will be more lovely to have seen two children make it that far. And when that little wobbler finally makes it to sixteen, it will be more lovely still. Because the most beautiful and lovely things happen slowly. For a while I have been thinking about this. Here is a sampling of what takes place slowly and will never speed up. The list is relative, some things take longer than others. The point is all of these things happen at a pace slower than our culture’s obsession with speed, and all of these things will never happen faster than they do now. And all of these things are beautiful and lovely because they happen slowly: The time it takes to grow food naturally. How long it takes to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. How long it takes to make coffee in a French press. Roasting a marshmallow properly, that is, light brown with a hint of crispy shell. The time it takes to own a dog until it gets old and you have to put it down. How long it takes the red-tailed hawks behind our house to glide from one end of the sky to the other. How long it takes gray whales to migrate from Alaska past San Diego to Baja California where they have their babies. How long it takes for a kitten to stop being cute and turn into an annoying cat. A fifteen-minute nap. A good night’s sleep. A big yawn and long stretch. A one-mile stroll. A two-hour hike. Reading a book. Writing a story. The time it takes to gestate a human baby. The number of days until a child’s first birthday. How long it takes to be married for twenty years. The time it takes to live until you have lived to a ripe old age. Our speed-obsessed culture glories in innovation and the new. What is the next new thing and did we get it faster than we got the last next new thing? But the most beautiful and lovely things are not new and do not come at us faster than before. Maybe we need less innovation and instead could use a dose of remembrance. Then we could recall how good it is to wait on what is best. #Remembering #Slow

“The present state of the world, the whole of life, is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I would reply, “Create silence! Bring men to silence. The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. Create silence.” —Soren Kierkegaard My husband and my Lord, in company with the kindest of house-sitters, have conspired to give me an inestimable gift: a month on my beloved jewel of an island. A whole month to write and read and work and dream; to recover a bit from an intense season and recalibrate my inner compass. A month of quiet. We’re ensconced in our Silver Girl under a canopy of moss-clad trees, a brisk little bike ride from our favorite beach on earth. The bookshelf is crammed with carefully selected titles (both new friends and old loves), the galley is stuffed with comestibles, and my dear Brown Betty teapot is on constant duty. We both have clearly marked goals for this time, Philip and I, ambitions towards which want to point this arrow of golden hours. And when the day’s work is done (or when one needs an occasional day-dreamy pause), there are inexhaustible beauties upon which to feast the eyes and the soul: vistas of endless marshland, ever a-teem with the changing life of the tides; sunsets that spill over this green land like an upturned cup of golden wine; long, grey colonnades of live oaks, whose ancient boughs bear the graveclothes of Spanish moss and the mystic, living parable of resurrection fern. And, of course, and always—the sea. Bonnie Blue, for one, has definitively made up her mind to be a sea dog. We taught her to swim in the ocean back in May, and at first sight of it last week she took off at a gallop, leaping and yipping for joy. Her exuberance is contagious, rekindling a childlike sense of play that reminds me who I am in a most elemental sense: a child of God. “The sea is a fountain of youth,” said Peter Kreeft with characteristic incision. “Only the child within us can hear the music of the sea.” I heard it the other night as I’ve not heard it in ages, having been lured by Bonnie into a moonlit swim. Picture this: a radiant moonrise in a sapphire sky, scattering the sea with diamonds and turning the sand to silver. Not a sound in the world but the wind and the waves and the music of our own laughter, while beyond that enchanted space of shining water, a darkness and silence so deep it seemed to hold us suspended in time. And in the midst of all that magic, Bonnie Blue bounding and swimming between us like a deliriously happy otter. I’m telling you, there’s little generosity in the world equal to that of a dog sharing it’s own joy. Our Bonnie’s been extravagant with hers, and we’re utterly delighted. And so very grateful. So, my goal this month is to finish the first draft of my novel, a project I mention to just about everyone I meet as a means of slaying self-consciousness and creating an ever-widening circle of accountability (into which I welcome each one of you). I confess, It’s been a difficult shock the past couple of years to realize that this writing life doesn’t get easier, but harder. I feel like everything I’ve written of late has been wrung out of a great travail—and that it shows. My words feel clunky, ill-fitting. It’s been months since I’ve penned anything I was remotely pleased with, much less anything that’s come without strain; so thickly has the fog settled into the creative spaces of my heart that I’m sorely tempted to doubt those spaces exist at all. I’ve wondered in my darker moments if I’ve said everything I had to say. I’ve wrestled off the bête noire hissing between my ears that I’ve never had anything to say in the first place. I’ve sought my Hidden Spring—and found it dry. Before we came down here, I spent some time reflecting in my journal about what I was seeking in this time by the sea, what I was hoping not only to accomplish, but to recover. I was reminded of Thomas Kelly’s “recreating silences,” those deep places of transfigured life from which all true creativity emerges. I remembered the solemn charge of Kierkegaard to create silence: prize it, fight for it, win it at any cost to reputation or image or so-called productivity. He doesn’t say to seek it—he says to make it, as solemnly and faithfully as one might make any work of true art. I decided then and there that I was going to make silence a part of my life here this month in way that I’ve never done before. And unprecedented experiment in quiet. Accordingly, I seized the first opportunity after we arrived to take an early bike ride to the shore. The sky was a mounting castle-scape of clouds, pillared and turreted, dark and light broken by serene patches of blue, and when the newly risen sun broke between them, it turned the sea below to a sheet of molten gold. It was all so arrestingly, awesomely beautiful, I couldn’t help but think it was the kind of morning on which Christ might return. I propped my bike against a washed up piling, spread my blanket on the hard-packed sand, and commenced to “sit and stare:” to my left, the sea and all that glory of light and shadow; to my right, a startlingly green stand of pines; and before me, the full vista of the beach, a primal forest of twisted tree forms the sea has claimed, the wind has writhed into fantastical shapes, and the sun has whitened to a bleached silvery grey. I was determined to sit for one hour remembering what silence sounded like, keen to the life around me without contributing any of my own noise—even mental noise, which can be of the very worst sort. Ten minutes in, however, it started to drizzle. I smiled, feeling very philosophical over my imperviousness to a little shower. Then it started to rain, and I tucked my Bible and my phone up under my legs as a precaution. Then it started to pour, and I was tempted to flee, but for the fact of the aforementioned Bible and phone. So, I sat still, gently opening all my senses to what it meant to be caught in a rainstorm on the beach. I savored the icy little drops, stinging my soul and body awake. I noticed the clean-washed scent of rain, mingled with the salt of the sea that summoned a nostalgia I could hardly name. I paid close heed to the way the rain turned the sea and the sky to a misty, uniform grey, and how a sudden rift in the roiling clouds would ignite the bare trees down the beach like the gilding of a fairy’s wand. I shared the beach with one solitary gull who stood at the water’s edge looking out to sea as if seeing something my eyes weren’t trained for, and a scuttling ghost crab who seemed utterly unmindful of the weather. And as I cycled back down the beach after both the storm and my hour had passed, I was accompanied by four magnificent ospreys, lighting on and wheeling from the heights of dead trees, just exactly as if we were all part of some solemn, silent procession. I remembered, then, in that wordless place, what the child inside of me has always known: namely, that it’s not so much an excess of care that contributes to a meager inner life, as an absence of prayer and deep, silent communion with God. Inquiring quietly of my own heart, I realized that not only has it been months since I’ve had any real joy in writing, it’s been months since I’ve had any real delight in God’s presence. My prayers have less been conversations and more emergency requests. But one cannot dwell in emergency; resources are exhausted and reserves run dry. And, of course, in that light, I could see the obvious: the Hidden Spring wasn’t dry—it was choked. Those same unavoidable realities of human life that threatened the good seed in the parable of the sower can clog up the deep source from which our Living Water is drawn. To be soothed down into stillness once more has become the theme of this month for me. To think of one thing at a time, and not twenty-five (how muddled I’ve become with too many words and too many cares!), to let silence and beauty and the Word of God have their ancient work on me—these are the great ambitions of my heart. I still have every intention of finishing my novel. But nothing is more important than recovering that innocence of intimacy with God that’s been buried under a mound of pragmatic, dutiful doing. I will hear what The Lord God is saying: for He will speak peace to His people, and to His saints: only let them not return to folly. It’s nothing short of folly to pound away after a vocation without drawing from the wells of salvation. How sweetly He reminds us, though, wooing our souls by every means—from the effortless flight of a bird, to the love song of the sea, to the stormy hunger in our own hearts. The sea heals us by helping us learn to listen . . . silence is requisite. ~Peter Kreeft

I’ve always been a storyteller, because I’ve always needed stories. Facts, arguments, charts, and diagrams—they’re all a bit lost on me. But wrap your discussion in a story and I’ll dive into its narrative without a second thought. Living inside the story makes things specific and personal, and suddenly everything clicks—the abstract thought that once made me shrug becomes real when encountered through the experience of a story. As far back as I can remember, I made up elaborate stories to explain anything I didn’t understand—which was plenty! One of those stories was The Hidden Lantern, which I set to paper in May of 2004. Here’s an excerpt: The great and proud country of Arsendol to the west of Linoriath was far from the terror of Tor Danosh and therefore did not fear what they had not seen. But the great kingdom of Ramish west of the desert was near to the southernmost mountains of the country where the enemy lay, and their northern borders had already been assailed, so they soon offered to help the Nandor. Yikes. Can you tell I was reading The Silmarillion? I’ve kept The Hidden Lantern hidden for years—for obvious reasons. When Tolkien writes like that, it’s brilliant. When I do, it’s pretentious at best. But while I kept the story hidden, it stayed alive—and over time it began to change. Tolkien’s horse lords and Witch-Kings—drawn from his background in classic English literature—were replaced by swashbucklers and bandits drawn from my background in classic adventure films. The overwrought Middle English dialect was gradually replaced by snappy banter and silly puns. I began speaking a language that I knew. As a child, I spent most of my time in worlds drawn by Peanuts creator Charles Schultz, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, and Uncle Scrooge creator Carl Barks. My taste in comics has expanded and diversified over the years, but those three men still define my style, because absorbing their work taught me the language of comics. It was thrilling—and eye-opening—to read newer comic works like Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet, Jeff Smith’s Bone, and Ben Hatke’s Zita the Space Girl and see the whimsy, humor, and carefree adventure of my favorite childhood comics being put to work in service of epic, ambitious, and often thought-provoking fantasy stories. That’s when I pulled out The Hidden Lantern and changed the name to Martin and Marco. Suddenly, the characters began observing pratfalls instead of delivering soliloquies. The cursed object that Marco acquires was no longer a wooden box but a child’s backpack with a goofy grin stitched onto it. The story thrived when I brought it into my own unique imagination and began to create out of what I knew rather than what I thought I should be. Authenticity paid off! And once Martin and Marco got started, there was no stopping them. Three years of planning the story, scripting, thumbnailing, designing characters, reconceiving scenes and sometimes entire storylines—it’s all lead to a five-volume series of graphic novels called The Dragon Lord Saga. And at long last, the first volume, Martin and Marco, is ready for print and up on Kickstarter! Happily, the bones of the story held up as I changed the skin. At its heart, this is a story about adventurers—characters on an unpredictable and dangerous journey. Dragons loom on the horizon, hoarding gold and power. But dragons also loom within, hoarding secrets and desires. This is a story I’m living. To those who believe in this project, who have backed the Kickstarter, who have spread the word—it means the world to me that you’re sharing this vision. If you haven’t met Martin and Marco yet—I’d love to introduce you. Visit them on Kickstarter (the campaign ends soon!) and at my website. I hope you’ll be a part of the story and join the adventure! (Click the image below to view full size.)

We’re super excited about tonight’s Local Show for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the first Local Show to feature a theme—something we hope to see more of as the show evolves. And second, it’s going to be an entire night of Rich Mullins songs as a slew of artists pay homage to the man who inspired so many of us. We hope you’ll join us tonight for this special show. It’s going to be a ton of fun. To give you just a taste of what might happen, here’s a video of Jill Phillips, Andy Gullahorn, Jeremy Casella, and Andy Osenga covering “Calling Out Your Name” at a show a last month. Get your tickets here. The Local Show – “Calling Out Your Name” from The Rabbit Room on Vimeo.

Eleven years ago I knew exactly what kind of parent I was going to be. I had decided what books my daughters would read, what songs they would love to sing and how I would handle difficult situations. It turns out that life cares little for my theories. The challenges facing our children seem to grow on a daily basis and the truth is that some days I go to bed feeling like every choice I made turned out to be the wrong one. It feels like the future is approaching at an ever-increasing pace, relentlessly mocking my naïve arrogance and tempting me to give in to the fear that I have not adequately prepared my daughters for what lies ahead. For me, one of the most sobering moments in the entire Old Testament narrative is when the children of Israel discover that the land they are ready to conquer is inhabited by giants. Crippled by fear for the future of their children, the Israelites turn back and head for the wilderness. Every time I read it I wonder whether I would have acted any differently in their shoes. Honestly, I doubt it. Sometimes, when I look at the world around me, the temptation to retreat can be almost overwhelming. It strikes me that the thing which swayed the Israelites more than any other was the voice they chose to listen to. All twelve of the spies saw the same thing when they looked at Canaan. Giants. Strongholds. Danger. The facts were inescapable. Despite this, two very different stories were told that day. Two of the men painted a picture of a land that was fertile and ripe for harvest. So rich was the soil that it took two men to carry a single cluster of grapes. Yes, the men who lived there were big and yes, the battle would require courage, but the God of Israel was bigger and he had promised to fight for them. The problem was that the voices telling the second story were louder. They told a tale of fortified cities and soldiers so big they made the Israelite army look like grasshoppers. As the story spread and their words took root, the images conjured in their minds struck fear into their hearts and turned their legs to jelly. I don’t know what the future holds but I know there will be days when my children will stand in the long shadows of unwelcome giants. On those days, the story they listen to will make all the difference. I have a God-given responsibility to guide and nurture them and to lead them constantly to Him, however, I am beginning to realize that when I try to do it in isolation—determined to provide everything they need—I elevate myself beyond the truth of what I am. For a long time I have been utterly convinced by the importance of community. I know that we were not designed to make this journey on our own. When it comes to parenting, to my shame, I often forget this. I am so thankful for the people in our lives who are prepared to stand with my husband and I and add their voices to the story we are trying to tell—friends who, over the course of years, have taken the time to intentionally know and love our girls, enriching their lives in ways we never imagined and filling in the gaps when we fall short; grandparents who are faithful in prayer, surrounding them, protecting them and providing examples of faith that has endured through difficulty, struggle and the passage of time; teachers who give them good books to read, quietly stretching their minds and fanning their imaginations in the best ways; writers who write great stories which inspire courage and songs that stir up faith. The truth is that my husband and I can never fully equip our daughters for the battles they will face; only God can do that. Our job is to keep telling the story. Over the past few weeks, this truth has been gaining momentum in my heart, bringing in its wake a welcome freedom. With the freedom comes a fresh determination not only to fill the lives of my children with voices that are telling the true story and telling it well, but to intentionally stand with my friends as they fight to raise their families in an increasingly hostile world.

The fifth annual Hutchmoot has come to an end. It’s hard to compare one Hutchmoot to another because each one has had such a different flavor, but this year was one of my favorite of the bunch. From Luci Shaw’s keynote (not to mention her presence with us all weekend) to Jill Phillips’s concert to the Local Show to session after session that I wish I had been able to attend, we were overwhelmed by good stories, good music, good food, and time to think deeply about beauty, calling, obedience, and the Kingdom. Now comes the tricky part. Now comes the daily grind, the reintegration into our vocations, our churches, our families, the long work of building the Kingdom brick by brick, book by book, meal by meal, day by day. I want to offer a resounding THANK YOU to all the volunteers, session leaders, kitchen masters, trash haulers, painters, organizers, and encouragers who gave so much of themselves this weekend, and to give each of you a chance to sound off on the impact of the weekend. What were your favorite parts? What did God teach you? In the words of Stephen Trafton at the end of Encountering Colossians, “You know you have been changed. How?”

It happens all the time. I get an email from an angry reader who says, “Why are you wasting time talking about the technical aspects of a movie? What really matters is the message!” From now on, when that happens I’ll probably encourage the disgruntled reader to read an article called “Lazy Cultural Engagement,” which was published today at Christianity Today. One of my favorite writers on the subject of art, faith, and culture — Alissa Wilkinson — has seen Gone Girl, the new film by David Fincher. I know a lot of Christians who will ask, “Why did she give any attention to Gone Girl? It’s dark. It’s violent. It’s R-rated. And there’s nothing Christian about that movie!” I know others who are likely to hear from their pastor, or read on a “progressive” Christian website, that Fincher’s film is about “the wages of sin,” or it’s about “Christian themes,” or it’s about “what happens to marriages when husbands and wives don’t know Jesus” … and they’ll decide it’s worth a look. For what it’s worth, I’ve been both of those people at different points in my journey of faith. And in both cases, I was looking at art through glasses that distorted my vision and prevented me from having a rich, meaningful experience. That’s because there is a distressing delusion at the heart of so much Christian engagement with art: It’s the delusion that says “The style and the substance are two different things. We should care much, much more about substance than we do about style.” Here’s the thing:  Style is substance. Look out the nearest window at a tree, or at the clouds, or at anything God has made. By focusing on how God made that thing — by discussing the “stuff” of it, the particularity of the details, the beauty, the shapes and colors and chemistry — you can come up with all kinds of provocative, revelatory observations. If you change the style of something, you change what it can mean. And what’s more, God’s creation speaks to us in new ways all the time. When Jesus shared parables, he didn’t “deliver messages.” Not even close. He gave us mysterious narratives that we continue to ponder, discuss, and interpret, with new rewards and understanding, many centuries later. When we call something “a work of art,” we are praising it as something that is suggestive, not declarative. We’re claiming that it speaks mysteriously, not directly but at a “slant” (to borrow a word from Emily Dickinson). What’s more, we’re claiming that it will go speaking in ways that cannot be reduced to paraphrase. And it will very likely speak differently to different viewers based on their experience, their attention, their questions. When Jesus wanted us to remember him, he didn’t give us a piece of bread and a glass of wine and say, “Let me explain to you what these represent. Let me tell you the message of what I’m doing.” No. He just said, “Take. Eat. Drink. This is my body. This is my blood.” And we are still pondering what he meant. We are still discussing it. In some cases, we are still arguing about it so vehemently that we’re building walls to separate ourselves from people with other interpretations. Thus, a work of art is something with which you can have a relationship; it is not a puzzle that is solved by the discovery of what it means. How ironic, then, that much of what passes for “Christian art” in recent decades is, in fact, simplistic, didactic, a message wrapped in mediocrity. Clunky narratives. Obvious poems. Cliche-heavy lyrics sung to derivative music. A fuller understanding of art can bring us to two complementary perspectives: —The first recognizes that all meaningful art is “Christian” in the sense that art, by virtue of inviting us into beauty and meaning, is reflecting something of God’s glory and something of human limitations. —The second way of understanding the same thing would be to say that “There is no such thing as Christian art.” That’s because Christians do not have a monopoly on what is true: Non-Christians can see and reflect aspects of the truth in their art as readily as any Christian, and art made by Christians is sure to be fractured by blindness and corruption because Christians are human beings too. If art reflects the truth, then it reflects Christ. Because Christ is the truth. Sometimes, people get to know him before they discover who he is. I think he likes it that way. When artists create meaningful art, we’ll know it, because it will be more than just “true.” It will be beautiful. It will be mysterious. It will go on revealing new nuances, new provocations, new revelations on the third, the seventh, and the seventeenth encounter. Whenever you encounter that confluence of truth, beauty, and mystery, you are encountering Christ at work. He often moves unrecognized. He often pockets his name tag. (Remember that road to Emmaus?) What were we talking about? Oh, yeah… Gone Girl. Let’s get back to Alissa Wilkinson. Alissa went and saw Gone Girl. She took notes so that she could write a review for Christianity Today. Some readers will be eager to know what she thinks about the film’s “message.” And they will be disappointed if she spends time talking about the film’s style.  They’ll think that she’s wasting her time on frivolous matters. But that is not the case. As she says: Christians, of all people — people who still believe they’re embedded in a cosmic story, one with both form and content — ought to be the ones who get why we focus on how a comedy works, or what’s going on in the background of a shot, or why a filmmaker might be drawing on the past, or whatever. If we think art is designed to work both on the level of form and content, then we can’t possibly be satisfied to get the “message,” evaluate it, accept or reject it, and move on. We should be hungry for more. Can I get an “Amen!”? [This post originally appeared at Patheos.com. Read more: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/october-web-only/gone-girl.html]

[Editor’s note: Brian Rowley handcrafted a set of Rabbit Room pipes for last year’s Hutchmoot, and we’re honored that he’s back again this year with more. What follows is a short message from Brian about this year’s set. They’ll be available at Hutchmoot for $295 each.] It’s that time of year again. The shape has finally been decided upon and blocks have been selected for the 2nd annual Rabbit Room Pipe of the Year! Seven pipes have been crafted to be the same in size and shape, but completely unique in finish. Each has it’s own look and feel and character, so you can chose the one that speaks to you. And each is stamped with the Rabbit Room stamp solidifying their belonging to the set. Without further ado, I present: The Gruffman So, you’re not the conversational type. Don’t let them hold it against you. There’s plenty of talk to go around, and even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent. This is the pipe for you, the quiet one, the one who watches the others from the edge of the room. It doesn’t mind if you’re mulling over the latest commentary on Plutarch or simply enjoying the evening air. Quiet is quiet. This is a pipe that recognizes that one of the marks of good friendship is the capacity to sit together and say nothing at all. —Panegyrics by Adam Whipple The Gruffman is my version of a classic Danish Rhodesian, which is a member of the Bulldog family. A Bulldog is known for it’s diamond shank and canted bowl, with rings separating the top and lower half. While the Bulldog typically has stark straight lines, the Rhodesian is a sleek curvy cousin, trading it’s straight diamond shank for smooth sloping curves. The wood used to create these particular pipes is Erica Arborea, which we know to be called Briar. The briar I use comes direct from Italy, from the best supplier in the world. The stems are each individually hand carved from German Ebonite and German Acrylic. I am honored and excited once again be able to present the Rabbit Room community with these pipes. —Brian

We were honored to host Chris Slaten, a.k.a. Son of Laughter, for the inaugural house show at North Wind Manor earlier this summer. Chris is currently working with producer Ben Shive on a new album, and the new songs peppered throughout the show gave beautiful glimpses of the full-length record to come. The night was also highlighted by familiar songs we’ve grown to love, and our song of the week is the title track from Chris’s debut EP, The Mantis & The Moon. Few songwriters can craft such meaningful stories, let alone keep things as beautiful and lively as Son of Laughter. “The Mantis & The Moon” is a great example of why we all fell in love with this EP in the first place. “The Mantis & The Moon” by Son of Laughter from the album The Mantis & The Moon He was dreaming of their praise when he saw the silver moon, the grand celestial stage. He tried to trap it in a tree. He used a noose of grass and waited patiently. He tried it all to sit astride and rule above the world that once had passed him by. But I don’t want to be the mantis who tried to ride the moon. I don’t want to be the sister who cut her sole to try to fit the shoe. I don’t want to be someone who does not want to be who they are. Still I find, half the time, I’m staring at the stars. She was dreaming of escape when she saw the golden shoe, the hopeless narrow shape. She knew she could not fit the form of the missing queen he’d been searching for. So through the truth she carved her way to leave the life she knew to find a better place. But I don’t want to be the mantis who tried to ride the moon. I don’t want to be the sister who cut her sole to try to fit the shoe. I don’t want to be someone who does not want to be who they are. Still I find, half the time, I’m staring at the stars. He followed his heart into the night with a new guitar, the endless road in sight. Tired of waiting all his life, he struck out on his own and kissed his cares goodbye. The golden moon shone endlessly… but the light awoke his wife and sleeping family. I don’t want to be so far from you. I don’t want to be so far from the truth. I don’t want to be someone, someone lost in desire – a lonely little spark, drifting through the dark, headed for the stars, far, far, far from the fire

[The following is an excerpt from my essay by the same title in the forthcoming Molehill, Vol. III.] Rembrandt is in the wind. The sea surges and swells. The little fishing boat has no hope of holding on to the churning foam below. The bow rides up the back of one white breaker while the stern dips in the valley beneath it and the next.  Waves break over the sides. The half dozen men to Rembrandt’s right shout and strain at the sails, struggling to keep the ship from capsizing. The five men to his left plead with Jesus of Nazareth to save them. Rembrandt stands in the middle of the boat, his right hand tightly clutching a rope, and his left pinning his hat to his head. His name is scrawled across the useless rudder, as though this is his boat on his sea and they are all caught in his storm. He and everyone else in the ship are soon to be lost unless their leader intervenes. The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt’s only known seascape, is one of his most dramatic paintings, capturing that moment just after the disciples knew they would die if Jesus didn’t save them and just before he did. The five foot by four foot canvas hung in the Dutch Room on the second floor of the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum for close to one hundred years. Everyone who looked at it saw the same thing; Rembrandt looking out through the frame to us—looking us dead in the eye. The terror on his face asked us what the disciples were asking Jesus: “Don’t you care that we’re perishing here?” Rembrandt, who was known even to his own contemporaries as “The Master,” was as much a storyteller as he was a painter. He cared about the narratives behind his paintings, and he painted them to tell as much of the story as he could in a single frame. One way he did this was by painting himself into several ubiquitous Biblical scenes. He did this not for vanity but for the sake of the story. He wanted to draw us in, capture our imaginations, instruct us on how we should relate to what was happening on the canvas, and bear witness to what he believed to be true about the world he painted and his place in it. By painting himself into the boat in The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Rembrandt wants us to know that he believes his life will either be lost in a sea of chaos or preserved by the Son of God. Those are his only two options. And by peering through the storm and out of the frame to us, he asks if we are not in the same boat. Do we know that we are perishing? Do we care? ______________ Follow Russ on Instagram Follow Russ on Twitter Follow Russ on Facebook

This past February, the Wolf King team hit crunch time. I was in full swing, inking one illustration per evening after work and two per day on the weekends. I was also in the throes of finalizing art for an early readers picture book. I was on the home stretch and had reached a scene with the brothers and good old Bonifer Squoon, which I was anticipating with excitement. I began cranking away at inking the “Spidifer” scene and was about 75% finished when it happened. After one of my frequent dips into the inkwell I realized there was a small cat hair resting on my nib. Without a second thought, I blew a quick puff at the hair to toss it off. And then my eyes focused on the illustration below and the spray of black acrylic ink that freckled its once-pristine surface. My heart cramped. My instinct was to somehow brush this dust off of my drawing. But it wasn’t dust, and I knew it. It was there to stay. I could barely believe it had happened. I pride myself on not making errors when I ink, and even if I do, I work it into the art. Some illustrators splatter ink all over their art because it suits their style, but I was going for a classic ink style that needed to look sharp and clean. I realized that I didn’t have time at this point to worry about fixing it with white paint and re-inking, so I trudged on. Making matters worse, when I showed my wife the final illustration she pointed at Kal’s silhouette and asked, “Why did you give him black eyes?” I hadn’t, but ironically the spray had fallen into the spots where his eye sockets would have been. I had to laugh at that point. Thankfully, Photoshop is awesome. I scanned the image in, optimized it, and then precision-erased spots and clone-stamped lines until only I knew it had ever happened. But now, I really enjoy sharing the original piece, with its flaws, and telling the untold tale of Bonifer Squoon and the Cat Hair of Doom!

Imagination is a serious business. It gives substance to our yearnings for something beyond ourselves. Imagination is what convinces us that there is more to the world than meets the eye. And isn’t that the first principle of faith? The Chronicles of Narnia awaken the reader to the imaginative possibilities of the gospel that have been there all along. The Chronicles serve as a reminder that if the gospel doesn’t fill you with overwhelming awe and joy and fear and hope, you may not have really understood what the gospel says.” —from the Introduction Rabbit Room Press is proud to announce that Jonathan Rogers’ long out-of-print The World According to Narnia is back on the shelves. It’s available through the Rabbit Room store and wherever great books are sold. Special thanks to Chris Stewart for the great work on cover design. Writing Classes with Dr. Rogers Also note that Jonathan has opened up a new section of his online creative writing course, “Writing Close to the Earth, Part 1,” which is now open for registration. And on Thursday, October 9th, he’ll be holding a one-day in-person writing seminar here in Nashville. It’s called “From Memory to Story: Writing the Short Memoir”—and if you’re coming to Hutchmoot, don’t worry, class will adjourn in plenty of time to make registration and dinner. For more information about Jonathan’s classes, visit his website. And click here to pick up your copy of The World According to Narnia.

Originality may be the most overrated of the writerly virtues. Much more important is the skill of seeing what’s in front of you and rendering it faithfully. The world is a varied place; every person in it is a miracle; every setting is unusual; every event, every encounter is a thing that has never happened in the long history of the world. On top of all that variety is the fact that every observer’s vision is unique. If you will allow yourself to see what you see, and then write what you have seen, you can be sure that originality will take care of itself. That’s not an easy thing to do. Few people write what they have seen. More often, they write what they think they ought to have seen, or they shoehorn experiences and people into familiar categories. It’s a hard habit to break; categorizing and sorting the firehose-blast of experiences and ideas that come our way is a necessary survival skill. But writing is different. Writing is a chance to release experience from man-made categories and say, “Look at this—this thing that exists in the real world.” Writing comes alive when you do that. Oddly enough, faithful imitation is the front door to originality. I gave a version of this speech to a creative writing class last week. Before I was even finished, one of my students raised her hand. “That’s fine,” she said, “but I went to a high school where everybody actually did fit the stereotypes. There were the jocks, the nerdy kids, the farm boys, the Goth kids . . .” I told her I found it hard to believe that her schoolmates, taken one at a time, fit those stereotypes any better than she did herself. But she was insistent. “The whole town,” she said, “it was like any other stereotypical farm town in Montana.” I challenged her on that one too. “Tell us about your town,” I said. “Help us understand what’s so stereotypical about it.” “Think about any farm town,” she said. “Everybody drives around in muddy farm trucks.” We nodded. That did sound maybe a little bit stereotypical. “And at Christmas, everybody goes to the grocery store to drink apple cider and sing Christmas carols.” “You do what at Christmas?” somebody asked. “We go to the grocery store to drink apple cider and sing Christmas carols. Like any other small town.” She was astonished to learn that nobody in the room (except for a classmate who happened to be from a town fifteen miles away from her) had ever heard of such a thing. It soon came out that those stereotypical classmates of hers often rode horses to school, and that her stereotypical principal took care of the horses during the school day. All that to say, there is no such thing as a stereotypical high school or small town or farmer or principal. No stereotype or category can stand against the concrete reality of specific details. This young woman thought she lived in a stereotypical town when in fact she lived in a town where the locals gather at the grocery store to sing Christmas carols, where the high school principal doubles as an hostler. Writing what you see means, among other things, paying attention to the detail that you couldn’t have known about if you hadn’t been there. I’ve got some ideas about what life in small-town Montana is like, but I wouldn’t have guessed the grocery store hymn sing or the high school horse corrals. In one of my online writing classes, a Floridian wrote about the morning she woke up to see snow in her yard—the only time she had seen snow in her life. It wasn’t a bad piece of writing. All the sentences were good, each paragraph hung together, there were some good similes and metaphors to liven things up. But something was missing, and it took me a minute to put my finger on it. The problem was this: her story read exactly like it would have read if you or I had written a story about a little girl in Florida who sees snow for the first time. Everything you would expect was there, from her looking out the window and not believing her eyes, to the annoying little brother hitting her in the back of the head with a snowball, then smirking and ducking behind a tree. But I find it impossible to believe that nothing happened on that day that I couldn’t have predicted. I can’t even predict what’s going to happen in Florida on a regular day—but a snow day? A week or two later, the same writer wrote a piece about watching a lizard shed its skin. She simply told what she saw, and the result was mesmerizing: “Twisting his head as far right as it would go, he grabbed a piece of his skin and pulled it away. It tore with a sound like tissue paper. His jaw moved up and down as he chewed and swallowed. Then he turned his head left, pulled off another section of skin, and swallowed it.” A couple of paragraphs later, the lizard startles and dashes away: “He leaped off the ledge of the porch and into the garden below. A few pieces of skin flew off as he did, but the rest of it stayed on his back as he disappeared into the grass.” That writing is fresh, vivid, sensory. It invites me to experience something I’ve never experienced before. It had never occurred to me that a lizard pulling off his old skin would make a sound like tissue paper. The flakes of skin flying off as the lizard jumps from the porch—who would have guessed that? And yet it makes perfect sense: of course that’s what would happen. But you would only know it if you had been there. That description of the lizard strikes me as highly original. But that originality doesn’t derive from a flight of fancy, or an exercise of imagination. It came from a writer paying attention to the world around her and telling us what she saw.

What did you love in your high school years? A band? A movie? A book that kept you up all night? It’s amazing how, in that fragile time between becoming an adult and still hanging on to childhood, those attachments you can’t explain can shape your passions for the rest of your life. If I think about it long enough, go back far enough, I’d say I write poems today because of Emily Dickinson. She’s a staple of the earliest literature classes, like Shakespearean tragedies and Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” the old stuff you have to read. Demure in photographs, with wide collared dresses and hair pulled back tight. But for me, and I suspect many other slightly awkward and shy teen girls, her poems burrowed deep into something I didn’t have a name for yet. My text books taught the “cleaned up” versions that toned down her eccentric obsession with dashes, but being drilled into memorizing “To make a prairie” and “I never saw a moor” stirred a sense of vast possibility. To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,— One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do If bees are few. I remember memorizing a lot of poems in 10th grade, perhaps the best thing I could have done in learning to love poetry (a story for another time, I think), but somehow in the middle of words upon words, hers always broke through. When I read the lines “I’m nobody — Who are you? / Are you — nobody — too?” it felt like I’d been given a new name. So I’m not the only one who doesn’t find making friends to come naturally. So I’m not the only one that would rather hang out at home with my family than go do . . . whatever teenage girls in little towns do for fun. So maybe, when people expressed dismay that as a homeschool kid I wasn’t going to prom and playing sports, it was okay that I honestly didn’t care. Emily felt like a friend. A weird, reclusive friend who saw the world with a clarity I couldn’t match yet but desperately wanted, who fretted about death and recognized magic riding on the backs of bees. Tenth grade was when I wrote my first poem. I had to. It was an English assignment. It was a quatrain and it rhymed, kind of like hers, though the imagery was way too obvious, but fifteen years later, I can kind of see her influence. It was something about hope being a candle in the night, a faithful guiding light. In retrospect, it wasn’t very good, but it unleashed a good thing, pages and pages of words, and realizing that hey, maybe I could be a writer. What is it about those years in between childhood and adulthood that sets the tone of our stories and follows us forever? Is it because we still hold on to our instinctive desire to keep playing, even though we’re getting acquainted with the sweat of the brow and the harshness of life? Maybe, as we’re starting to feel dampened by the world, a spark of recognition that “there’s a pair of us” is enough to light us up. Sometimes a poet, or even a single poem, can save your life. It can take you the way you are, in a place of darkness, loss or lostness, and, without changing anything, transmute everything, make everything available to you new, having ‘suffered a sea-change/ into something rich and strange. Malcolm Guite

The antidote to an unsustainable life is to stick around a place. I have been thinking about this a bit. At the university where I work, this semester I am teaching as an adjunct, handling the course “Sustainability In Action” for a colleague on sabbatical. Texts on sustainability tend to focus on the very real challenges of climate change and emerging economies and dematerialization. It is good to think about these issues when we think about sustainability, and to try to work on solutions to them. But preceding the sustainability problems that make news headlines comes a decision that regularly goes unnoticed. It is a decision by some person or persons to leave. Here is the versified form of what I am attempting to say. People these days pack up to get to the next place. No one seems to stick around anymore. Who can say they’ve heard laughter after the decades; the same laughter that they’ve heard, over and over before, or the same tears splashing down on the same old floor? People these days hurry off to the next place. Everyone seems headed through a door. They say a story has a start, a middle, and an end. Well then, no great story can only begin over again. Will you stick around here with me my friend? ‘Cause, it takes time to grow. It takes time to know who we are. There’s no easy way to love from afar. People these days hurry off to the next place. Everyone seems headed through a door, but alone. Of course, someone can stick around a place and live unsustainably. It is called avarice—of the deadly sins, it is the one that extracts more from a place than a place has to offer. Ultimately it destroys the place and any creatures who do not escape from the destruction. Avarice demands all, eventually even all life. Usually the avaricious person moves on. Search Google for images of shale mines. Thousands of feet below the wounded landscape you will see nothing but contaminated water pooled. What you will never see deep down the hole is a resort-sized house owned by an executive officer of a mining company. The anecdote to an unsustainable life is to stick around a place. When we stick around a place, we have to make use of it. And if we keep sticking around a place, quickly enough, we recognize we have to use it in such a way as to not use it up. As Wendell Berry says, “We cannot exempt use from care.” This is our call, to use the earth and care for it. It was not a vocation for Adam and Eve that we get to ignore after Genesis 3. Use with care is our livelihood. Depending on how one envisions the new heavens and new earth, use with care is our eternal vocation. I tend to think that is where we are headed: a place where we properly tend the places where we live. Not a place we sustain, but a place where we flourish and have no desire to leave. What we get now are glimpses of this future, vignettes of people in community caring for the places they stick around. [Editor’s note: If you missed it last week, also check out Sandra McCracken’s “From Smallest Seed: Music Inspired by Community and Conservation” which deals with similar issues.]

Last night’s Local Show was pretty incredible. Thanks to Andy Gullahorn for leading the team and to Jill Phillips, Jeremy Casella, and Andrew Osenga for such a great evening of music. Jill played some new songs, Andy played some funny (and some heartbreaking) songs, Osenga played an old favorite (“The Ball Game”) and some new favorites too, and Jeremy reminded everyone why Death in Reverse is such an awesome album. Special thanks to Arthur Alligood who was a good sport and played a new song when we asked him, and to Randall Goodgame for the Dylan tune. The evening wrapped up with the group covering Rich Mullins (the second Mullins cover of the night), and we even got it on video for you (sorry about the audio quality). Thanks to all who came out to last night’s show. We hope you enjoyed the evening as much as we did. The next show is on September 30th and features Andrew Peterson, Ben Shive, Lori Chaffer, and Buddy Greene—but there’s no telling who else may show up. Tickets are available here.

I’ll go ahead and assume everyone’s already heard that U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence, is available for free from iTunes. That’s a great deal right there. I’m a giant U2 fan and I’m still waiting for a chance to listen to the record. My fingers are crossed. The release reminded me of this, though, which I meant to share several weeks ago. It’s a cover of U2’s “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” by Jenny & Tyler, with special guests Sara Groves and a virtual choir of internet folks (anyone here in that choir?). It’s pretty awesome. Check it out.