[Editor’s note: This one is a couple of weeks old, but the “everywhere but Nashville” line still holds true.] This week’s snow and ice (everywhere but Nashville) has made me think of a favorite poem by one of my favorite poets–“Boy at the Window,” by Richard Wilbur. “Boy at the Window” Seeing the snowman standing all alone In dusk and cold is more than he can bear. The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare A night of gnashings and enormous moan. His tearful sight can hardly reach to where The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes Returns him such a God-forsaken stare As outcast Adam gave to paradise. The man of snow is, nonetheless, content, Having no wish to go inside and die. Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry. Though frozen water is his element, He melts enough to drop from one soft eye A trickle of the purest rain, a tear For the child at the bright pane surrounded by Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear. Bonus media: My daughter, a devotee of the movie Frozen, introduced me to this different take on what it means to be a snowman:

In his poem, “A Footnote to All Prayers,” C. S. Lewis insisted whenever we speak to God we must acknowledge, He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou, … And all men are idolators, crying unheard To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word. Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great, Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate. Saint Augustine expressed it succinctly in his small book, On Christian Teaching, “God, although nothing worthy of His greatness can be said of Him, has condescended to accept our praise.” This is one of the most remarkable paradoxes of the Christian life. The more one realizes how no expression of praise could possibly be worthy of God, the more one feels compelled to shout Hallelujah! It is nothing short of audacious that for the past two thousand years believers have gathered every day to worship Him whom they know they could never adequately worship. Our inadequacy is hardly reason to abandon theological reflection. Nor is it reason to ignore the fellowship of the saints. Before God and among each other we Christians are not meant to reach perfection, rather we are wounded souls together “limping” to worship. Because we stumble along the way of life, what we know about God and how we react to our knowledge will always involve some discomfort. Picture not the pious woman with calloused knees; instead think of the same pious woman tripped up with skinned and bloody knees, but nonetheless shouting, “Praise God!” It is the kind of picture that might tempt some of us to try to strike out on our own, in a less theological and ecclesiastical but more comfortable direction. For the past two thousand years believers have chosen this individualist path, too. Yet, there is nothing audacious about lonely comfort. Fellowship in worship is the antidote to the discomfort of God’s ineffability. It would be nothing short of terrifying to proclaim with the Psalmist, “You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you! I will proclaim and tell of them, yet they are more than can be told,” if we never heard someone next to us exclaim, “That’s exactly how I feel, too!” #Augustine #CSLewis

As an illustrator, the most common question I’m asked is “what kind of utensil, paper, paint, ink, pen, etc., did you use to do this?” I’m always forthcoming in my response—at times in great detail. I have nothing to hide, there are no tricks up my sleeve when it comes to my art. I am aware that there is no magic pencil to be pulled from a stone, no special paper that arrives like a flying carpet and somehow transforms one into an amazing artist. There is however, a common misconception in the minds of artist-hopefuls that the artists they admire actually do possess those items and are simply hoarding them. “Let us make man in our image.” That’s what the Creator said, right? My humble mind has come to understand that “our image” was possibly referring to two major aspects of likeness: the possession of one’s own will, and the ability to create. Both of which I am grateful for, the latter more so than the first, as creating gets me in much less trouble than my will. Although one’s will, driven by faith, is the beginning of creation . . . but that’s for another day. Needless to say I’m thankful to be a creator, and it is that gift and talent in which I find the ability to produce artworks. So maybe there is some magic in the talent, but it’s up to me to determine the level of success I will find. The preparation, research, practice, planning and execution are based on what I am willing to put into exercising my raw goods. “Ok, so I’ve got some talent, then just how do I decide what medium and materials are right for me?” You try. You try over and over. You experience. You experiment. You fail. Failure is the most important thing you can do while you are finding yourself as an artist. And through this process you eventually shape yourself into . . . well, you. And no matter what that looks like, be proud of it. Whatever you find yourself to be as an artist, as a creator, be the very best at it. Do your art like nobody’s business and when someone comes up to you and asks “What kind of pencil and paper did you use to do this?” you can proudly respond as I do: “It’s a #2 pencil and Xerox paper.”

Summer of 2012 found me flying over to Europe for three weeks of touring with Alison Krauss and Union Station. One of the best parts of playing in a band is that it funds my bent for wandering and taking in beauty. In the past 20 years, Europe, England, Ireland, and Scotland have skinned me of more shoe leather and per diem than I care to count. St. Patrick’s and Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin, the British Museum and Library in London, and Heidecksburg Castle in Rudolstadt, Germany, have all been food for the eyes and soul of this wandering boy. Four days into the 2012 tour we flew to Oslo, Norway. It was a day off, but much of it was burned up traveling, so I walked around the town for a bit, bought some food, and went to my room. I got online to research Oslo, and a thrill ran through my stomach when I saw The Viking Ship Museum—three ships used for burials—was three miles away. Sound check at the venue wasn’t until later in the afternoon the next day. In the morning I armed myself with camera and coin and set out. There is something deliciously lonely about walking solo for miles in a strange country thousands of miles from home. I took time for a perfect cappuccino in a narrow cafe on a quiet street, looking in shop windows, listening to unintelligible conversations, and watching birds. I wandered in town: I wandered in parks: As I came closer to the museum I smelled the salty edges of the sea, wanderers moored until the next wind drove them out again. Three miles from the hotel, I entered the museum slightly footsore (I’d been in Europe four days already, remember). I went in, paid up, and saw how the Vikings crossed the North Sea. Basically, they used large, ornate rowboats. Also, I saw some boots. The boots of a wanderer. And combs to make things beautiful. Museums always get me thinking about bigger things. I remember seeing the Persian Kings exhibit at the British Museum in 2005. There were floor tiles the prophet Daniel may have walked on, utensils, cups, dishes he may have used. My old pastor used to say, “Most people don’t put flesh and blood on the Bible.” I’ve pled guilty to that more than once. But as I looked upon the everyday household goods of Darius and Nebuchadnezzar, I felt a palpable closeness with Daniel, a sense of his utter reality. I stirred myself and moved on to the Viking cart, which was in amazing condition partly due to how well it was built. Practicality and beauty mingle. I especially loved the reddish textures in the wood. After two hours of slack-jawed gawking, I noticed I was really stretching it on time. The band bus would leave from the hotel for sound check at 3pm. I went outside, my mind and heart spinning with all the impressions and thoughts I’d gathered. Art, craft, beauty, courage, sailing by the seat of your pants, life, and death, we-never-really-own-anything-we-just-use-it-for-awhile. I walked to the trolley stop outside the museum. It would ride into Oslo and be at the hotel in fifteen minutes. After all, time was short, I was tired, my feet hurt a little, and I had a show to play that night. Then the thought came, “If the Vikings could sail the North Sea in ships like that, you sure as heck can walk three more miles.” I didn’t have time to walk all the way back. So I ran.

Twelve years ago at a Wesleyan college in Indiana, I played my first show as Andrew Peterson’s full-time right-hand man. Tonight in Greeley, Colorado, I played my last. At least for now. In January of 2002 I was 22 years old and newly married. I had come to Nashville two years prior to pursue my goal of playing sessions. I also hoped to be a sideman to a great songwriter. I just didn’t know who that might be. Rich Mullins had died in 1997, my freshman year of college. I figured eventually somebody had to pick up that torch and run with it. I wanted to run alongside. I met Andrew through my friend Mark, who was AP’s college roommate. Mark told me I was meeting the next Rich Mullins. The magic words! I wrote a string arrangement of Andrew’s song “Faith To Be Strong” for a class project and sent the recording to AP. It worked. He hired me to write strings for Behold The Lamb Of God, which was then in its second year of touring. After the show, AP asked me to come on the road in the spring. Little did I know . . . Now it’s March 2nd, 2014. Beth and I have been married almost thirteen years. We have four kids. Our oldest is 10 and our youngest is 5. The goal of being a session player never quite came to full fruition for the best reason possible: production got in the way. I spend nearly every day in the studio helping one artist or another shape her best songs into a cohesive, inspiring, truthful recording that will help her say what she needs to say and take the next step on the path marked out for her. I always said I’d travel with Andrew until he made me stop. But anyone who’s been around record-making can tell you that production is a more-than-full-time job. Sometimes I work average hours, but when the river’s in flood you can find me in the studio 15 hours a day for days on end. In those seasons I am keenly aware that I am just one man. It took me a while to admit—because I didn’t want it to be true—that I can’t be the husband, dad, and producer I’m called to be AND be the drop-everything, fully-present sideman I want AP to have. Here’s a sidebar about sidemen. The artist’s ministry is to the audience; the sideman’s ministry is to the artist. The artist carries a heavy burden, and when that gets too heavy the sideman carries the artist. It’s Sam Gamgee work. Sometimes I was good at it. Most of the time I flat-out sucked. Sidemen have our own signature blend of psychoses. The sideman feels like he’s always about ten feet away from someone really interesting. I think there’s a movie with a similar title now, and that only corroborates my story. The sideman finishes second every night. As AP has said, if he does his job right, he becomes invisible. People have come up to me five minutes after I played my heart out and said, “Weren’t you the drummer?” Yes. Yes I was. Boo hoo, Ben! Woe is you! That’s not my point. My point is that everything I’ve just said about sideman work turns out to be what’s lovely and sanctifying about it. So John the Baptist has this great ministry going. He’s baptizing in the desert and people are coming out in droves. Then Jesus comes along and takes the limelight. What does John say? “He must increase, I must decrease.” And there was never one greater than John the Baptist! Then Jesus starts his ministry and what does he say? “I do nothing on my own but only what I see my father doing.” I love the way the Message translates Colossians 3:3. “Be content with obscurity, like Christ.” Obscurity is appropriate attire for human beings. It looks really good on us. The sad fact is, I have a fame idol. Not a front-page fame idol. More like an “everybody whose opinion matters knows who Ben is and thinks he’s the best at everything” fame idol. And now that I’ve made my most humbling admission, you have to send me yours. What could kill a fame idol deader than a nightly spoonful of second-place? I used to think it tasted bitter. Now I like to keep it in a hip flask and sip it. Production, for example, tastes so much better spiked with obscurity. My best days in the studio are preceded by the following prayer: “Lord, I am going to the studio today not to be served but to serve and to give my life.” So I recommend sideman work, with all its glorious difficulties. Especially if you can find an Andrew Peterson. Andrew knows his calling and because of this he has incredible spine. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him make a move that wasn’t in keeping with his calling. And it’s a worthy one. It’s all about mining the depths of his own wounded-ness and coming up with the kind of rare jewels in which the poor in spirit see their own reflection. His songs are like Harry Potter’s thestrals; you can only see the winged horses if you’ve experienced death. The people who appreciate Andrew’s music the most are the ones who’ve known real sorrow. AP himself has been Job-tested as of late, kind of punched in the gut over and over by the accuser. I’m proud of him for hanging in there, staying in community, seeking out counsel and encouragement. Go and do likewise. As for our relationship, Andrew and I have spent enough time together to know every last one of each other’s stories and most of each other’s flaws. And yet I’ve never questioned whether our friendship mattered to him. Andrew takes community very seriously. He meets conflict head-on because he sees the kingdom coming and he wants to enter it alongside his brothers. He’s prone to point out the elephant in the room with disarming bluntness. Some of the words I most needed to hear, whether I welcomed them or not, were spoken by AP. Finally, it goes without saying that Andrew possesses a hard-to-match creative intelligence. It manifests itself in story, wit, and insight. He wrote Light For The Lost Boy (the whole record) in about two weeks. He’s always adding irons to the fire, new projects that will keep him fresh and engaged. Or wear him out! When you engage in a critical discussion with Andrew, you know you’ve met your match. To say working with Andrew has sharpened me as a writer doesn’t do the last 12 years justice. I learned the writing life from Andrew. Tonight we closed the show with “Don’t You Want To Thank Someone.” It’s my favorite AP song. Yes, I do want to thank someone. Thank you, Lord, for giving me the gift of these years. As I walked off stage tonight I glanced back at my keyboard world. I thought, “Goodbye, little domain; it’s time for me to go.” Thank you, Lord for the time I spent on that piano bench, ten feet from someone really interesting. Thank you for the whole trip. From the car to the shuttle to the ticket counter, through security, to Starbucks, to the gate, to the jetway, to the plane, to the jetway, to baggage, to the rental car, to Chipotle, to the used book store, to the venue, to soundcheck, to dinner, to the green room, to the stage, to the green room, to the rental car, to the hotel, and eventually to bed. Goodnight AP. I’ll see you one of these mornings and we’ll do it again.

I’m so grateful for the invitation to contribute to this community. When I learned what many of you write and listen to, what some of you sing about, I often think, “Yes! That’s what I paint! We mine the same material, plumb the same waters.” The themes of rebellion and redemption, brokenness and restoration resonate with me as they seem to with many of you. And so it’s a privilege to offer you a glimpse into my world. I’m currently preparing for an art fair in April and so every few weeks I’ll update you on what I’m working on. I look forward to getting to know you all better. #art #illustration #painting

Following is the piece I wrote as an essay for the special edition of my new record, Love Will Have The Final Word. The suffering of others can make us talkative, loosening the tongues of even the most timid among us. We mean well, we want to help, but more often than not we end up being like Job’s comforters: doing more harm than good by offering half-baked answers, which are no comfort at all and leave the hearer feeling even more alone. When we do this we are asking the suffering person to be okay, to cheer up, and in doing so we are rejecting their pain. The loneliness of our own suffering can make us introspective. It can lead us into the shame and regret buried deep in our hearts, warranted or not (a friend of mine who had a miscarriage told me that all she wanted to say over and over again was, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” though she had done nothing for which she needed to apologize). In this we see how pain has the power to unearth our deepest wounds, driving them to the surface where perhaps God can begin to heal them. Several years ago, I experienced one of the most healing moments of my life. It happened in the back lounge of a tour bus. I had just poured out my broken heart to my friend, Andy Gullahorn, when I recognized in the silence that fell between us that I was bracing myself for what he would say next. Would he try to fix me? Correct me? Would he reject my pain by offering answers? After a moment Andy said, “Jason, I want you to stand up with me. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to hug you, and you need to let me hold you for at least two minutes. And I’m going to time it,” he said as he took off his watch, “so you’re not going anywhere.” I’m not afraid of male bonding, but two minutes is a long time to hug anyone, let alone in the back lounge of a tour bus. I laughed nervously at first because I felt awkward. But then I found myself crying, and not long after that I started ugly crying. And then, as the last bit of strength I had been clinging to gave itself up, I felt like I sort of went limp and mostly just hung there, held up in the arms of my friend. He didn’t ask me to be okay. He didn’t offer answers. He just offered himself. Pain is holy, and in the presence of holiness it’s often best to keep quiet. No words passed between us, but what Andy was saying, and what God was saying through him, was clear: “You are loved. You are not alone.”

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be working through two Greek tragedies with my students. The first is Oedipus Rex, a devastating story about a man who unknowingly murders his own father before accidentally marrying his mother. The second tragedy is Antigone, which describes the pathetic death of a daughter conceived in the incestuous marriage of Oedipus. The historical context of these tragedies is interesting to me. In modern times most of us attempt to avoid “spoilers.” We don’t want the outcome of a plot to be known until the story unfolds. However, when these plays were first observed, the audience already knew how the lives of Oedipus and his daughter would end. Imagine experiencing this dynamic as a script writer. From the first words of the prologue, the average audience member knows more about the fate of poor old Oedipus than his character does. The punch line is told before the joke. How would a playwright keep an audience engaged if the end of his plot is already exposed? Instead of running from this challenge, Sophocles maximized it. He incorporated the empathy of his audience as a key function of the narrative, almost like a painted scenic backdrop against which the action takes place. In fact, Oedipus is driven by a dramatic irony that depends upon the audience’s sense of foreboding. Catharsis is achieved because Sophocles evokes fear and pity for a doomed hero. Unpacking this has been relevant to me, because recently I have been thinking about how I carry my own past and how I tell its stories. I’ll be forty-two this year, old enough to have seen certain micro-plots of life worked to micro-conclusions. Yet, passing days tend to move so quickly, and in the rush I have assigned meanings to certain micro-plots haphazardly. When I realized this, I began to work intentionally back through the story of my life, and particularly through my twenty-year marriage, to reexamine acts and scenes that were lived in the raw and rapidly named as comedies or tragedies. The first scene I unpacked was a miscarriage. I was young and horrified when it happened, and the sorrow of losing a child was too much to process. I couldn’t find thoughts or words to capture it all, so I simply let images collect into a deep, vague ache that throbbed for two decades. Going back into this memory last week, I knew how the story ended. Like the audience watching Oedipus, I knew what profound sadness was waiting for me. Yet in retrospect, that certainty allowed me to examine the particulars of the narrative and find valuable messages hidden in a tragic story. One of my favorite lines from The Lord of the Rings Trilogy was spoken by Samwise Gamgee. He looks at Gandalf the wizard and asks, “Is everything sad going to come untrue?” I love that sentence, because it is the silent ache of so many hearts. We long to know that spring will come after a brutal cold. If you are a spiritual person, perhaps your eschatology provides a vision of paradise that will kiss away every tear lost. Skeptics argue that promises of eternal comfort were borne of desperation and fairy dust, but I see that differently. I think it is telling that there is a widespread, inherent ache in the human heart for happily ever after. An infant who has never nursed will still scream out of need for milk. His hunger indicates that something exists to quell the want. Is it not then possible that the human soul hungers for bliss because a heaven exists? That is my ultimate hope. I cling to it. Yet it is also good for me to see that even in this closer, sadder world, there are tragedies that can be re-explored after time and seen with more clarity. They are going to bite and sear to the last line, and yet, by exploration tiny strands of truth (and even beauty) will emerge, hidden among the train wrecks. This is not the ultimate redemption, of course. It is not what I long for most. Still, to see how grace sometimes rises in horror is an unexpected benefit of growing older. Our sad stories are important, too. And knowing how terribly they end can invite us to rewind through them, looking not for the great reveal, but for bits of sea glass hidden on broken shores.

At the most recent Hutchmoot, Andrew Peterson and I gave a talk called “Writing Close to the Earth.” Andrew got on the subject of sehnsucht, that unexplained and unsatisfied longing that was for C.S. Lewis such an important clue to the meaning of the universe. Lewis’s autobiography Surprised by Joy is punctuated by moments in which some earthly experience awakens him to the truth that there is more to the world than mere earthly experience. A little model garden in a biscuit tin, Arthur Rackham’s illustrations of the Ring Cycle, a flowering currant bush—seemingly commonplace things—each gave Lewis “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing” for a world beyond this world. In Andrew’s words, these episodes are “moments that are lodged in our memories as significant, though we don’t always understand why—moments where the veil is lifted for a moment, and we’re left with longing, or with a new revelation of the wild beauty of the world.” Andrew asked the audience to describe such moments in their own lives. There were a lot of mountain vistas, sunsets and sunrises, encounters with music and with art. For me, the question brought back a memory that sheds light on all the fiction I’ve ever written. Once when I was eighteen or nineteen years old, my father and I were puttering up a familiar stretch of Georgia’s Ocmulgee River in a small aluminum boat. As we passed a sandbar that I had seen a hundred times, I was startled to see it move. Only it wasn’t the sandbar that moved; it was a great, thick alligator, ten feet long at least, with a tail as big around as a saw log. Though I had been coming to the Ocmulgee River all my life, I had never seen an alligator in its waters or on its banks. But there he was, as big as life and twice as natural. The alligator was terrible to behold. But he was thrilling to behold too. Awful and awesome, after all, used to be synonyms. If he had wanted to, the alligator could have swept us out of our little boat and eaten us up. I understand that alligators don’t ever behave that way. But it wasn’t the understanding part of my brain that first reacted first to the sight of this monster. Nor do I even think it was my “lizard brain”—the seat of the fight-or-flight reflex—that awoke at the sight of the great lizard. No, I think this alligator awakened the part of my brain (or, more appropriately, my soul) that responds to mythology—to old stories of dragons and monsters that lurk at the edges of the worlds that we humans try to keep civilized and comfortable. I had seen alligators before, at the zoo and in the Okefenokee Swamp. But this one lived only ten miles away from my house. He was in “my” river, where I had been coming all my life. A week earlier, I had swum across its muddy waters, not a mile from the very sandbar where this great reptile lay like Smaug on his pile of treasure. The rivers in the southern half of Georgia once teemed with alligators. I had heard rumors that a few still survived in the Ocmulgee. I dearly hoped it was true, that the world where I lived was still as wild as that. But it didn’t seem likely. I lived in a world where the roads were paved and hot water came out of the faucet. We had a television, a VCR, a microwave oven. There were McDonald’s restaurants in my world and Top-40 radio stations and convenience stores that sold Coca-Cola and potato chips. But also, as it turns out, there were dragons. For me, the alligator on his sandbar was a stab of Lewis’s Joy. I couldn’t get over it. I haven’t gotten over it yet. My friends think it’s funny that every novel and short story I have ever written involves at least one alligator. I suppose it is kind of funny. But it’s more than funny. Alligators for me carry a lot of metaphorical freight. They remind us that just beyond the civilization and comfort that we carve out for ourselves, there is a wild beauty that is neither civilized nor comfortable nor even safe. They remind us that this world, the one where we live and move and have our being, is still a place of myth and marvel. Here be dragons.

“With Every Act of Love” was the last song to be written for my new record. Knowing I didn’t really have a song that felt like the lead single, I turned to N. T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope for inspiration in a writing session with my friend Jason Ingram. I enjoy the idea of taking a compelling theologian’s idea and shaping it into a pop song that might extend the idea’s reach. What follows is the essay I wrote that is included in the Special Edition of my new record. With Every Act Of Love A doorway placed on a set or in a scene is often a sign of new possibilities. A wall divides worlds, and the door is a portal between them, a passageway through which change can enter from one world into another. In his book, Surprised By Hope, N. T. Wright reminds us that though we live in the world of men, the Kingdom of God is always at hand. Statements such as “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through” are meant to affirm a deeper reality beyond reality, but they may tempt us to imagine Christianity as an ideology of evacuation and abandonment. However, the hope of the Gospel is as earthy as it is eternal, marked by a Love that pursues, engages, renews, and is fulfilled in the marriage of Heaven and Earth—when the Kingdom that was launched through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ comes to fruition in the new Jerusalem, “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev 21:2 NIV). The hope laid out for us in Scripture is that this world will not be abandoned! It is being redeemed as part of God’s new creation. The Kingdom of God is not for “someday when” but is an eternal reality that we are invited to participate in here and now. “Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness;” says Wright, “Every act of care and nurture, comfort and support . . . every deed that embraces holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world—all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. . . . What we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted. It will last all the way into God’s new world.” This means that all that we do with love—whether mission work in a foreign land or doing laundry in our own home, feeding the poor or feeding our kids—advances the Kingdom of God and will last forever. Or in the words of one of my favorite songs by David Wilcox, “You will always have what you gave to love.” The outlandish beauty of all this is that God doesn’t need us to build his Kingdom—he is God after all—but for reasons of his own, he’s decided he wants us. And in the wildness of his wisdom, and as unlikely as it seems, he has put us where we are and asked us to be a portal between worlds, a doorway through which he arrives to redeem and renew. “Amen! Come Lord Jesus!” Watch the “With Every Act Of Love” lyric video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4bB7BUxBbY The new album, Love Will Have The Final Word, releases next Tuesday.

A few weeks ago, Jakob Lewis (a friend from church) sent me the first episode of his new podcast, Neighbors, wondering if it might be of interest to the Rabbit Room community. He said it featured a story about Thomas McKenzie, and, knowing that there are no dull stories about Thomas McKenzie, I was intrigued. I listened to the episode and was immediately impressed. Not with Thomas’s story (though I would be), but with the quality of the podcast. I’ve been a Radiolab fan for years and I could tell right off the bat that Jakob was too. I loved the sound, style, and pace of Neighbors, and any favorable comparison to Radiolab is a positive thing. But Jakob’s ear for a good story was just as in tune as his technical ability. He let Thomas’s experience with the death of his father play out just like it should, with grace, insight, and a bit of revelation. When I told Jakob how much I enjoyed the podcast, I learned that he’s just been accepted to a residential radio storytelling program on Cape Cod. The course is led by Radiolab’s Robert Krulwich and This American Life’s Nancy Updike. They only accept nine applicants and Jakob was lucky enough (and talented enough) to be one of them. The two-month course means that Jakob will have to take leave from his job and be away from his wife for two months, though, and he’s currently in the middle of an IndieGoGo campaign to try to raise money to defray his expenses. He’s not asking for much, but if you appreciate the kind of storytelling that Jakob demonstrates in this episode, consider helping him out. I did. When Jakob completes the residential course he and his wife are hoping to drive across the country and collect stories along the way. Based on his work in this first episode, I can’t wait to hear them. You can stream the episode below. Check it out for yourself and visit the Neighbors homepage. Neighbors, Episode 1 “Our Father: Two Fathers Trying to Out-Father One Another” by Jakob Lewishttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/OurFather.mp3 Click here to visit the campaign page.

I’ll never forget the call. I was being asked to join Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God tour as their special guest. Did they have the right number? I had seen the show for the first time the year before and was so encouraged and inspired by the evening that I told my husband I’d found our family Christmas tradition, so the invitation to actually be a part of the show seemed surreal and too good to be true. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never intentionally read through anything for Advent, but as I listened through the Behold the Lamb of God record to prepare for the tour, I was swept up into the “old, old story.” I have Andrew to thank for introducing me to the joy of remembering well the story of our savior. I was totally that girl on the bus who fell asleep listening to the Behold the Lamb record every night and who was reading Russ Ramsey’s Behold the Lamb book in the mornings. I was captured again by the story of our Rescuer. I also found myself caught up into a beautiful community of story-tellers. These people love well. They seek each other out. They listen. They pray. They laugh—a lot. They play spike ball and catch phrase. They say, “I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?” They gather each night to eat a meal together. They bear with each other. They craft songs that carry the ache and joy and hope and wandering our souls experience, and they welcomed me as one of their own. Night after night, I would cry standing side stage, hands raised in the air, as Andrew sang the truth to every crowd. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away our sin Behold the Lamb of God, the life and light of men Behold the Lamb of God who died and rose again Behold the Lamb of God who comes to take away our sin Oh to get to sing the gladdest of tidings to a different city each night. To get to sing the story of Emmanuel, God With Us, to our own souls. Remember! “The power of death undone.” Remember! “Son of God. Son of Man.” And then we would walk off the stage every night as our own voices mingled with the voices of brothers and sisters who came to the show to remember with us. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” Praise Him indeed. #BeholdTheLambofGod #EllieHolcomb

Saint Augustine wrote a small book in 393 that I like to use as a reminder. The book, Faith and the Creed, was an address he gave to a plenary council of the African Church. In it, he exposits a combination of the Nicene and Romano-Milanese creeds. As you would expect from Augustine, the entire short book is good. Yet, I especially like the introduction, where Augustine explains the use of the creed and the importance of its defense. He begins with its use. But the Catholic Faith is made known to the faithful in the Creed, and is committed to memory, in as short a form as so great a matter permits. In this way for beginners and sucklings, who have been reborn in Christ but have not yet been strengthened by diligent and spiritual study and understanding of the divine Scriptures, there has been drawn up in few words a formula they must accept in faith, setting forth what would have to be expounded in many words to those who are making progress and are raising themselves up to attain the divine doctrine in the assured strength of humility and charity. The Bible is a big book and theology is an expansive discipline; there is much to learn. The creed serves as an orientation to the Christian faith for those who are new to it. But also, the creed is a reminder for those Christians who have dug deeper into the Scriptures and have lived in the faith long enough to have experienced the conundrums of discipleship, which often engender doubts. Be sure, doubts will arise. Not just because faith includes disheartening mysteries, but also because there exist people who do not believe the Christian faith and who are not content that others should. This is why Augustine makes a case for exposition. But the exposition of the Faith serves to fortify the Creed, not that it is given to be committed to memory or repeated instead of the Creed by those who obtain the grace of God. But it guards the things contained in the Creed against the wiles of heretics with full Catholic authority and with a stronger defense. In a word, all Christians need to remember the basics of faith and also we need individuals who will expound the complexities of faith. Few of us would feel comfortable categorizing ourselves alongside the likes of Augustine, one of the great expositors and defenders of Christianity. But, neither with false humility should many of us claim only to be sucklings. The majority of us are in between. It helps for me to remember this: I am not new to Christianity, though others are and they need the example of my continued affirmation of the faith that they are just beginning to learn. Neither am I a great defender of the faith, though others are and they need the example of my continued affirmation of the faith that they labor so hard to defend. Those expositors of the Christian faith have been on my mind and heart recently. They are the Christians who get beat up by antagonists, and even by their own hearts and minds. Too often, they also get thrashed about by in-between Christians like me. They choose to wrestle with mysteries and doubts in an effort to give me comfort and assurance. I would not understand the smallest imprint of the depths they explore. And, if I followed them all the way down to those depths, my faith would be rattled to its core. Why am I so quick to accuse these expositors? They begin to dig in search of diamonds deep, but as soon as they hit clay, I chide, “Ah ha! I knew you were going to smear the faith.” In reality, defending the faith requires getting messy. Often confidence comes only after washing off the caked-on grime accumulated from burrowing for jewels of truth. Are there ways, I wonder, for in-between Christians like me to help expositors clean up after a particularly hard dig? I cannot say I know the best way to help, though I suspect it might involve getting a little dirty, too. #Augustine

First of all, let me apologize to Andy Gullahorn for the awful Beyond the Frame joke you see in the picture above; I stole it from Sally Zaengle so you can blame her. That’s Kathleen Norris being a good sport with the guitar. We left for Texas on Thursday morning with quite a bit of anxiety. The opportunity to hold a “Hutchmoot” event at Laity Lodge was a dream come true, but none of us knew how well it would work. Would people recognize it as a uniquely Rabbit-Room-ish event? Would the community aspect translate in the same way it has at past Hutchmoots? Would the more spacious program still leave people fulfilled? Would Kathleen Norris feel at home and enjoy her time with us? All these and many other questions were on my mind when I got off the plane. And now, after three and a half days in the beauty of the Texas hill country, after lots of Psalms and poetry, after tables spread with great food including some legendary scalloped potatoes, and after lots of great conversation, I’ll say that the answer to all those questions is a resounding “Yes!” Thank you to all who came and participated so richly. Thanks to all the speakers and musicians (Andrew Peterson, Jennifer Trafton, Jill Phillips, Eric Peters, Andy Gullahorn, Paul Soupiset), you guys were fantastic; Saturday night’s concert was one of the highlights of the weekend. And I’d especially like to thank Kathleen Norris, who had no real idea what she was getting into, but who came with curiosity and a beautiful, earthy humility. Her humor and wisdom were an absolute delight and it was a privilege to be able to sit at her feet and learn for a few days. Now that we’re home, I’m anxious again—but not with questions. I went to the desert drained, but now I’ve soaked up the poetry of the weekend and I’m full. I’m anxious to write—and that’s a good thing. I’m also anxious to get to work finalizing plans for Hutchmoot 2014. The dates are October 9-12. We expect registration to begin sometime in mid-March. We’ll see you in October.

[We were so delighted to publish this at Story Warren because it zeros in on so much of what we are aiming for. But this doesn’t only apply to children and families. Thank you so much for this, Alyssa. —Sam] “Can we go to school the long way today?” My daughter’s brown eyes watched my reflection in the mirror as I stood behind her, brushing her hair. “The view is better when we go that way,” she said. “Do you mean when we pass the big field?” I asked, returning her reflected gaze. She nodded. “What do you like to see in the field?” I asked her. “Everything.” This was a first. My six-year-old is much like me: practical-minded, task-driven, and above all, punctual. She is the first of us to be ready each morning. She will stand in the kitchen—backpack on—and watch the clock, announcing each minute that passes until go time. Even when we’re running ahead of schedule, she hurries her little brother along and asks repeatedly, “Are we going to be late?” So I was surprised that today she wanted to go the long way. And that is why, even though her little brother had seen to it that we were running late, the long way is how we went. In truth, plenty of other fields are lovelier than the one on Woehrle Road. Just a few miles north on 62, you pass sights much more pleasing to the eye: sprawling farms, ribbons of water bending between wooded banks, meadows wrapped around maple-crowned hills. By comparison, our little field hardly qualifies as a field at all. It’s really just a wide place between suburban gridlines — a few dozen acres the city hasn’t yet been able to wrest from the (no doubt wonderful) family who owns them. But perhaps it is made lovelier for its incongruity with the edifices of industry and commerce huddled around it. It certainly is a welcome respite for eyes that are accustomed to the visual bam-bam-bam of development. For maybe thirty seconds, the landscape smooths. You can look at it without having to blink away information overload. You want to keep looking. Driving down the arrow-straight lane along the eastern side of our field, I risked letting my wheels wander off into the icy shoulder to look a little harder at the field than usual. I wanted to appreciate it with my daughter, to have it in common with her. I think I know what draws her to that field. It isn’t the modest beauties perceivable to the eye: the subtle rise and fall of the land, like a topography of slow breathing. The ice-glazed skeletons of last autumn’s gleanings. The pond, frozen who-knows-how-solid, issuing a silent dare. The southern sun slipping upward, glancing across the expanse with shy eyes. I think she is drawn not to the things she sees, but to what they awaken: longing. I know because I have felt it and hoped to feel it again. I have gone the long way in order to find it. C.S. Lewis called it the inconsolable secret. It’s the deep desire to be able to slow, to enter, to quench an ineffable thirst. It’s an ache in my chest, a wild need to hold on to the invisible source of the beauty before my eyes. It is my soul trying to swallow. The Germans call it sehnsucht. Maybe they can explain it better. This longing has become familiar to me as I’ve learned to recognize and welcome it. But it is just beginning to awaken in my daughter. She’s never asked to go the long way before. I glanced back at her. She was turned toward the window in her high-back booster seat. I wanted to say something, to mark the moment with a poignant phrase. But her head rested against the seat belt. Her eyes were distant. I knew that my girl had gone where I couldn’t follow. Gazing silently out her window, deaf to her brother’s nonsensical chatter, she was listening to a language only knowable to her. I didn’t ask her what she felt. She couldn’t have explained it any better than I can. It is enough to know that she was willing to risk punctuality for the sake of something lovely. She is learning to differentiate between what is expedient and what is meaningful. I am overjoyed that she is beginning to listen to the call of a place whose rewards are worth the price of practicality. It was a beautiful, sad, holy thing to watch my daughter slip into that place and beyond my reach. But it is a place she must go. I pray she will learn to seek it often, and to take delight there. I pray she will hear in it whispers of a Name. I will gladly go the long way to get her there. —–   —–   —– Featured image by Shauna Raymer

An Explanation for the Uninitiated: Subjects With Objects is an ongoing, collaborative art project forever ordered according to the following rules: A shadowy public spaces painter sets up in pubs and executes spontaneous portraits at the rate of one painting per pint. He then hands off those enigmatic little ocular disturbances to a semi-anonymous poet & novelist who lives with them long enough to solicit their otherworldly mumblings and ephemeral whispers, distilling each of their essences into a line or two of poetic prose. The painter is Jonathan Richter. The poet is UNKNOWN & UNKNOWABLE, so it is best NOT TO EVEN ASK! However, for the sake of convenience we may refer to him as DKM. Subjects With Objects Unplugged Untitled 17 (2008) The One That Almost Got Away… Okay, so this little pink fellow gave me fits. First off, unless he’s been picking his nose (and be warned, dear reader, that I did explore that possibility), there’s no readily apparent “object” in the painting. So what is his object? Is it the tank-turreted Rorschach of his shirt? Is it the golden chaos of his unkempt, Nordic hair-sweep? His nose reddened from gobleted grog or Northern cold? Or is it . . . Ah, yes . . . Is it perhaps an object in that other sense of the word: An intent, a desired end or outcome? An objective, as it were. As in: His one object was to negotiate world peace. He was the ever the most disappointed of men. As I considered it, I saw that the ruddy fellow’s posture could clearly suggest that other sort of object. I noted the rigid but slightly leaned angle of his torso, as if he’s been waiting for someone else to finish speaking before he interjects his own words. The hand raised, finger up, to suggest that he’s a student or a new intern, waiting to be called on before he speaks. He’s almost certainly not the authority in whatever situation he finds himself in. In fact, he’s probably the sort of fellow who’s mostly at the mercy of others, if only because he cannot see past the rules to ascertain the spirit of any law and make his own broader judgments. And then there’s his expression. Not hopeful. A tiny insinuation of panic behind his small eyes. A sense that perhaps he has already, like Elvis, left the building and has entrenched himself in what he perceives to be the most defensible depths of the soul, walls erected and steeled against some great disappointment. The doorman left standing guard behind his eyes is now but a coin-operated automaton. Those were some of my early thoughts anyway, but back to the question of “rules.” That’s the territory I lit out for as I first began to formulate the earlier possible lines of text. This little gentleman seemed to have retained his Germanic forebears’ love of order, though any martial aspect of the Teutonic warriors had long since seeped from his family line. So he sits there now as one who finds order in life by following the rules—if only he could understand what’s expected. And right now, he’s having a bit of trouble understanding. Untitled 17 was originally created as part of a gallery show titled “First Day In Purgatory.” The overarching (though unspoken) context for that show was that each of its subjects were experiencing their first day of the afterlife. Some were reflecting on the temporal existence that had so recently drawn to a close. Others were seeking to get a handle on their new surroundings. It wasn’t too rigid a pretext and some of the pieces in that collection surely outside of it, but that was at least the loose context I had in mind as I approached this one. The rules have changed, I thought. This poor fellow is sitting in a desk, in a room with a bunch of other newbies, and he’s trying to find order, to make sense of this new plane of existence. He wants to get it right. He wants to play by the rules. He’s like a first grader on the first day of school. And he wants so badly for the others to play by the rules as well. So what are the rules? Would someone please tell me the rules here? Or would they at least rigidly enforce what I assume the basic rules to be? Excuse me, sir, I’d like to make just one point. People keep getting the paper towel stacks in the bathroom wet. Excuse me, sir, I’d like to make just one point. People don’t seem to be wiping up their messes in the break room. If he calls on me, I’m going to ask why the girls got a longer bathroom break. If he calls on me, I’m going to ask to be assigned a new partner. If he calls on me, I’m going to ask what they’ve done with my knees. Is there anything I can wipe this on? And the other thing is, my room is right beside the door and people keep coming in late and slamming it. And the other thing is, my room is right beside the door and people were coming in late last night and slamming it. If I could just interject one point. My room is right beside the door, so when people keep coming in late and slam it, it wakes me up. Whaddayou mean ‘dispose of it myself’? It’s a booger! Does someone have a tissue? It’s a booger. Why? It’s a booger! What do we do with boogers here? What are we supposed to do here with the boogers? Is there someone here to dispose of this for me? And one last question. What do we do with our boogers? And one last question. Where do we put boogers? I don’t know where to put this… booger. I might not have been blessed with their talent or money, but at least I knew my place. And then, BAM!, just like that, I was able to retrieve it from my nose. If this isn’t hell, why am I so uncomfortable? If this isn’t hell, why is it so uncomfortable? I would just like to point out several safety violations I’ve noticed. I’m just wondering if there will still be a daily quota. Will we be graded on spelling? Will we be graded on spelling? Because I’m actually pretty good at spelling. When Untitled 17 hung in the “1st Day in Purgatory” gallery show, Richter and I opted for the slightly surreal text choice: If he calls on me, I’m going to ask what they’ve done with my knees. I honestly don’t know why. If he calls on me, I’m going to ask what they’ve done with my knees. I think the idea probably just amused us enough that, in a moment of sophomoric giddiness, we actually did choose it. Part of the humor is that the statement presupposes that the ambiguous “they” did indeed do something with his knees, and what that could be, and why, is as absurdly perplexing to us as it is to him, but by golly, he’s gonna get to the bottom of it, if only they’ll call on him. Who knows what goes on in a place like purgatory, anyway? We even printed 20 paperback copies of a book version of that art show to sell in the gallery, so this version was forever memorialized, though in a limited fashion. Still, this one nagged at me, and I found that even a couple years later I was still uneasy with the choice. It made me chuckle, but it just wasn’t the correct text. It wasn’t until we had secured funding and were preparing for the printing of the hardback run of Subjects With Objects, Volume I last year, that I sat down to wrestle with this one again, throwing out all the previous brainstorming choices. And finally, at last, the answer lit like a butterfly on the tip of my nose and I said Oh, yes. All along, I had been trying to force this guy into the wrong venue and the wrong posture. He wasn’t the student trying to figure out the rules. No, he was the defendant whose flimsy defense had already crumbled, and who was now making his last ditch appeal, grasping at the only straw left him: That’s true, your honor, but if you find me “Not Guilty” I will afterwards remember you with a greater fondness. Now the piece was both comic and tragic (as many of the SubWOb pieces aspire to be), as it became a reflection of our ill-conceived human attempts to somehow find enough personal leverage to justify ourselves, or failing that, to “bribe the judge” as it were. Postscript: I’d like to think that after this fellow made his statement, there were several seconds of complete silence in the courtroom, and then the sound of the judge’s booming, bellowing, mirth-filled laughter, rising up in waves and bursting forth like a flood that overtook all within it’s hearing, sweeping them up in a rising tide that was at once, joyful and terrible. And if our friend in Untitled 17 was at last able in that moment to suddenly see himself for who he was, and rather than becoming angrier and more defensive, was able to embrace his own absurdity and unselfconsciously join in the laughter, then I think it all might have turned out right for him in the end. _________________________ Untitled 17, 2008 is currently on display and offered for sale in the Subjects With Objects gallery show Pretty Girls Like It When You Take Their Things at O’ More College in downtown Franklin, TN. The show is open to the public and will run through March 3rd, 2014.

When my aunt passed away, I inherited a little black journal of my grandfather’s that she had kept. It’s just big enough to hold in one hand, the paper so soft and thin, and his light, somewhat cramped penciled handwriting is fading with the years. He died just months before I was born, and all my life I’d been told how much alike we were, so this little piece of him, traveling to me from across the decades, was a treasure indeed. One day, I started to read it. Though I hoped for insight, outpourings of the depths of his soul, I got entries like this. Fri February 7, 1947 Worked 8 hrs today, which went by very well. Pay day. Fair all day. These were the makings of life. There was the birth of dad’s eldest sister, years before he was a thought. There were fair and warm days working in a shipyard. There were days work went well and days it went slow. There were days of cultivating gardens and visiting family and, occasionally, missing the bus. My grandfather was a simple man. He went to a Bible college in New York, wanted to be a preacher, somehow made his way from New England to Florida, and supported his growing family by working on ships and in orange groves. He never drove. His kids played marbles in the dirt road. And my parents have made a similar way, though perhaps with a little less education and little more money in the end. My dad joined the Navy, spent a few years in Puerto Rico, married my mom, worked a couple jobs before persistence landed him at a local phone company. Forty years, five company name changes, and a slew of new technologies later, he still loves it. My mom worked in retail and grocery stores until I was born. She stayed home to raise my sister and I. She homeschooled us and drove us around and made sure her little family ate three meals a day. Sometimes she talks about things she wanted to be when she grew up, but she sees the blessing and the hard work of being a mom. It seems they didn’t make as much of calling as my generation does. We’ve been told we could be anything we want to be if we get a degree and dream big, live life like an adventure, center ourselves in an epic story. They told us we deserved more than a mundane 9-to-5, that we could do more, dream more, that it’s somehow noble to quit your day job to travel and write and play songs and dig wells. That your story could be more. More epic. More lasting. Like your own personal Odyssey. Like immortality can be earned. Well. Let me tell you. We are none of us entitled to our own epic story. We are in one, but we are not one. We are the walk-on extras in the grand tale of the universe. We are living in our microcosms, but floating in and out of the scene. Of course, we do live them. Some of us do enjoy the call to go do grand things. But some of us write our smaller, no less important stories in eight hours of work a day.

“I was terribly shy as a boy,” the man said. “Excruciatingly shy. But in third grade there was a girl I liked, and somehow I mustered up the courage to tell her so on the school bus. And she said she liked me too.” He smiled a wistful little smile as he told it. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She liked me too. So I thought I’d strike while the iron was hot. I asked her if she’d like to be my girlfriend. She said ‘Sure.’ It was like I had been transformed in a moment, from a loser to somebody’s boyfriend. Even my big brother noticed something different about me when I got off the bus.” He paused as if to savor that memory before going on. “The next day,” he said, “I picked some flowers and gave them to the little girl on the playground. Everybody stared at me, but I didn’t care at all. Except that the little girl stared too, just like the others. ‘What are these for?’ she said. ‘They’re for you,’ I said. ‘Because you’re my girlfriend.’ The girl’s mouth dropped open in horror and she shrugged her shoulders and gave the other kids one of those looks that said, ‘This boy’s crazy.’ “‘What are you talking about?’ she said. ‘On the bus,’ I said, ‘I said I liked you and you said you liked me too.’ She came at me so fast I didn’t know what was happening. She gave me a shove that landed me flat on my back. When I raised up on my elbows, the girl made it clear that she would hit me again if I tried to get up. The other kids were laughing and pointing, and lying there on the playground I promised myself that I would never again get close enough to a girl to get hurt by her. “I kept that promise,” he said. “That was thirty years ago. That little girl was my last girlfriend. I’ve never been hurt by anyone since.” I ran into that fellow the other day. He’s still as guarded as ever. And as lonesome. C. S. Lewis wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, unredeemable.” That little girl shouldn’t have betrayed that little boy’s confidence or pushed him down or humiliated him in public. But the things she did to him weren’t nearly so harmful as the thing he did to himself when he promised never to be hurt again. Valentine’s Day is a day for sentimentalizing the most pleasant aspects of romantic love. I’m fine with that. But it’s also worth noting that love, when it comes to it, involves a willingness to risk being hurt. To love a person is to be willing to struggle—to struggle for her, and often to struggle with her. My wife’s love is a harbor from life’s storms, and I’m thankful for that. But sometimes it’s the storm. I’m thankful for that too.

When the purport of the images—what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections — seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. —C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer 52 (1963) A man wakes up on a misty morning. He looks out his window and likes what he sees. So he dresses and walks out his door to enjoy what has been given him. The mist doesn’t last long.  But while it lasts it softens the edges of the world, brings out its colors, and dances with the shafts of light from the rising sun. And then it vanishes. The man emits a satisfied sigh. God makes everything beautiful in its time.(1) I can imagine another man—say, a photographer—waking up the same morning, somewhere in the same vale, seeing the same mist, the same light, the same landscape. Recognizing the aesthetic value of what he sees, he runs to find his camera. He rushes out his door, and looks for just the right place to best capture the dance of mist and light and landscape, the viewpoint from which mist and light and landscape appear to greatest advantage. He experiments with a few different lenses, and snaps a few pictures to preserve the morning’s beauty for posterity—to preserve the past for the future. It isn’t preserved, though. A window on it is preserved. If the photographer has done his work well, it may be a clear window. But still it is a window only; the misty morning itself isn’t preserved. And the sigh the photographer emits when the greedy fingers of the rising sun have stolen the last mists likely will be of a much different kind than our first man’s sigh of satisfaction. God has set eternity in the man’s heart, but in such a way that he cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end.(2) We cannot capture vapor. We can enjoy its flirting and flitting through our fingers, but fixity is not one of its virtues. Likewise we cannot shepherd the wind. For starters, we do not know where it comes from or where it goes. Even if we did, we still couldn’t pick up stray wind, lay it across our shoulders, and carry it back to the fold. Welcome to life under the sun. For many years I could not begin to understand what Koholeth, the author of Ecclesiastes, was teaching. His book seemed to oscillate between pounding home the vanity of life, and then exhorting us to enjoy life—food, drink, company, and toil. Enjoy your vain life. I can take instruction from paradox, but not schizophrenia. But Koholeth was not schizophrenic. Many of his translators unjustly make him seem so. They make him seem so by doing precisely the opposite of what C. S. Lewis told Malcolm to do: they trusted abstractions like “vanity” and “meaningless,” rather than trusting images, like “vapor.” The translators doubtless could heap up lots of scholarly reasons for translating hebel as “vanity” rather than “vapor.” I’d say it’s a literary misjudgment, though. Hebel loses much of its affective power when rendered as a negative abstraction, rather than as a positive picture-word—the kind of word that lodges in our imagination and works its way through our will out into our hands and feet. The vaporousness of life under the sun may very often vex us. It may turn much of our toil to vanity—especially if we labor under the delusion that our lives are going to turn a profit under the sun. Yet if God gives us the ability to do so (3), we will recognize life under the sun, in all its vaporousness, for what it is—and we will enjoy it. (1) Ecclesiastes 3:11. (2) Ecclesiastes 3:12. (3) Ecclesiastes 2:24-25. #CSLewis #Koholeth #LetterstoMalcolm #Ecclesiastes #vapor #images

When I was a graduate student at Vanderbilt, I went back to my hometown in Georgia to work on a remodeling crew. One of my crewmates was a boy named Jake. He was seventeen and skinny but tough as beef jerky. He was so country that the dash and bustle of Warner Robins, Georgia made him gape the way you might gape at Times Square, and any time we went to a restaurant for lunch, he had the unsettling habit of telling the town girls how pretty they were. Most mornings Jake came to work bleary-eyed, as if he had stayed up all night. I asked him what that was about, certain there was a good story behind those red-rimmed eyes. “I hunt wild hogs,” he said. “Me and my buddies spend most nights in the swamps, either at the Ocmulgee or the Flint.” “Boar hunting!” I said. This was interesting. I didn’t figure it would be hard to get him going on that subject. A question or two, and he would be off. “So, what kind of gun do you use?” I asked. “Gun?” he scoffed. “We don’t take no guns!” “Then what do you take?” “Dogs. Rope. A flashlight.” “Wait a minute,” I said, not sure we were talking about the same thing. “What did you say?” “We got these dogs,” Jake said. “Mostly bulldog. We slog through the swamp until they bay up a hog. Then a catch dog grabs holt of his ear.” He paused, basking in my fascinated attention. “And then I whirl in with the rope to tie him up.” “Tie him up?” I asked. “Tie who up?” “The hog! Who else?” “You mean like calf-roping at a rodeo?” “About like that. Except that a calf aint slinging five-inch tusks around and kicking like a roto-tiller and squealing to deafen a feller. It’s some excitement, I don’t mind telling you.” I gaped. “So you tie him up,” I said. “What do you do then?” “We carry him out on a pole, kicking and squirming.” I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but the next day he brought me pictures of the dogs, the hogs, and the hunters, both in the swamp and in the pen where they fattened up their captured hogs. Jake came to work one morning more red-eyed than usual. Obviously he had been crying. I put a hand on his ropy shoulder. “What’s wrong, Jake?” I asked. He gave me a doleful look, then busted out crying again. “We were hunting last night,” he sobbed. “And an alligator ate my dog.” I thought, What a world is this? I was living this suburban, academic life, and yet there was this alternate world swirling just around the corner where men wrestled wild boars in the swamp and alligators ate their dogs. I decided that if I ever wrote a book, Jake would have to be in it. And he is. He is the original feechie.

It seems unlikely that an Irish stranger would be invited to pull her chair out of the shadows and join the conversation, yet here I am, and for that I am grateful. As I began to write this post I found myself searching for beautiful words that would somehow be worthy of the rich surroundings. If I’m honest, in my head the accent that is part of who I am began to take on a hint of Tennessee. What I ended up with was a post that may have been beautiful (at least that is what I tell myself) but it wasn’t true. And what is beauty if it isn’t true. For the past few months, truth in my life has been less about beauty and more about brokenness. Last July I watched helplessly as my ten-year-old daughter faced for the first time the moment when childish innocence is invaded by something dark and cruel, an intruder whose presence is a constant and unwelcome reminder that bad things happen. Unexpectedly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, she discovered first hand that this story we live in has evil villains and dark forests with monsters who sneak up on us when we least expect it. For every needle that pricked her skin and broke my heart a little more, another question came. It just felt wrong. For me, the deepest pain is in the knowledge that something has happened to my child which I can’t fix. No matter how much I want to, I can’t make it go away. I can’t make it hurt less. For Ellie, whose willingness to allow me share this is testament to her courageous honesty, the struggle goes deeper still. Oddly, the least difficult thing for her is not the condition itself. Medical advances and a tenacious determination mean that physically she is doing really well. The hardest thing has been the internal struggle that follows in its wake. The sudden intrusion of deep questions that many people don’t have to face until well into their adult lives. Why did God allow this to happen to me even though I have chosen to follow Him? Why does He not heal me when all it would take is a word? Does He care that I am hurting? Is He even there at all? One of the reasons the Bible remains deeply and authentically real, regardless of your vantage point, is that it does not hide from these questions. Actually, it embraces them. Within the Psalms in particular there is a depth of intimacy with God and freedom before Him that has pursued me again and again, breaking me apart and breathing strength into my legs in equal measure. It has struck me that whatever situation the psalmists find themselves in, whether unfettered joy or pain and betrayal, through it all they cling doggedly to two truths which are stronger than their enemies and deeper than their pain. The first is that they continue to intentionally anchor their lives in God’s word. The second is that they choose to believe that God is ultimately in control. This voluntary framework for hope is so important that it is laid down right at the beginning of the Psalms. Psalm 1 paints a beautiful picture of the child of God who, regardless of circumstance, chooses to place his delight in His word. Rather than being led and shaped by surrounding culture, such a child makes the word of God his home. Reading it, studying it, meditating on it and allowing it to speak truth into his moments and his days. The image the Psalmist uses is of a firmly planted tree, with deep roots that are nourished by life giving water whose leaves do not wither despite the buffeting of storms and the passage of time. Instead it produces fruit and, according to the final verse of the Psalm, the fruit is the intimacy of knowing and being known by God. There is a beautiful passage in George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind that brings home to me again one of the reasons why we must immerse ourselves in God’s word and in pursuing His heart and His character within it. In the story a young boy, Diamond develops a relationship with the North Wind, who appears to him in many different forms. There comes a moment when Diamond is faced for the first time with a side of the wind that scares him, sitting at odds with the goodness he has known until that point. The conversation goes as follows: “Well, but listen to me Diamond. You know the one me, you say, and that is good.” “Yes.” “Do you know the other me as well?” “No. I can’t. I shouldn’t like to.” “There it is. You don’t know the other me. You are sure of one of them?” “Yes.” “And you are sure there can’t be two mes?” “Yes.” “Then the me you don’t know must be the same as the me you do know—else there would be two mes?” “Yes.” “Then the other me you don’t know must be as kind as the me you do know?” “Yes.” “Besides, I tell you that it is so, only it doesn’t look like it. That I confess freely.” If I’m honest, there are times when aspects of God’s character leave me shrinking back in uncertainty, wondering whether my limited understanding of His heart was ever true at all. Then I remember the story that is at the heart of Psalm 2, of a king whose name is love and a kingdom that is coming. The great story that reminds me of all that I know Him to be and gives me the courage to believe that the part of Him I know is consistent with the part I cannot fathom. That, whatever the circumstances suggest, His heart and His love are constant. Those are the times when I climb like Lucy onto Aslan’s back, burying my face in His mane and holding on even as all of Narnia shakes with the thunder in His roar. By the very act of deliberately and intentionally placing our delight in the word of God and obedience to Him we are taking our place within the kingdom where He is already king. If this is true then choosing to live within the borders of this kingdom is not a restricting of our freedom, but a stepping into something which is infinitely greater and more real than what we see around us. These boundaries of commitment and belief are the ancient writing engraved around the entrance to the place where “why?” is not a hopeless question thrown into the void, but the cry of a heart prepared to accept that God can be trusted even when the answer does not come. It seems almost unnecessary in the Rabbit Room to state that the brokenness we live with is passing; the truth of it whispers in every song and story, but for a ten-year-old whose little ship is being tossed on the waves for the first time, the wonder of it is a longed-for harbour. I am often asked if Ellie will grow out of her need for insulin and the question is usually followed with the whispered ending “Will she have to do this forever?” I don’t know what medical advancements the future holds but I can answer with absolute certainty that it is not forever. If only the true survives, then all that is not true will one day be consumed by the fire that makes things beautiful, and the only thing remaining of the struggle will be the beauty that was formed within it. The reality is that, as people who were created for eternity, we are defined not by the things that will soon be cast away like an old winter coat with the coming of summer, but by the things that will endure because they are made in the image of God. I think there are two reasons why I can’t shake the feeling that God is doing something here which goes beyond what we can see. The first is that the God whose heart is evident throughout Scripture is always for His people. He is always about the business of restoring and redeeming, even if it seems at times to us that he has taken the long way round. The second reason is that often, despite the darkness, glimpses of beauty shine through, as though this temporary veil of shadows is being pierced by the light of all that is to come. And so my prayer for my family, born out of this season in our lives, is that we will allow God to fashion in us the treasure that will last, whatever form that takes. That we will choose to anchor our lives in Him and in His word and, believing that He is ultimately in control, we will have the courage to step through the sacred door into a kingdom where broken wings are no barrier to flight and joy is all the deeper for having been born out of tears.

A few years ago I read N. T. Wright’s wonderful book Surprised By Hope and had my mind blown by all of the beautiful implications of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Being an artist and songwriter, I naturally started to wonder how I might explore ways to connect with the resurrection musically. I found myself day dreaming about writing an album full of songs that sounded like they were coming from the other side of renewal, but with lyrics tethered to the present. I wanted to explore the “already/not yet” tension of living with expectant hope in the midst of suffering. In addition to this, I wanted it all to sound like joy. Joy is an elusive thing for an artist to capture. It is not something you can fake or conjure up at will. It is the presence of the Holy Spirit and, at least in my experience, seems to blow in and out like the wind. It is wonderful when it is present, but it’s absence can be frustrating, especially when you are trying to coax it onto the canvas of your work like a child fumbling with crayons. Time passed and I kept reaching out for joy. I kept writing, struggling, and dreaming. I would fail and scrap everything then start over. Rinse and repeat. I had this joke of a phrase I would rhetorically ask myself: “I just want all my songs to sound like glory and feel like resurrection. Is that too much to ask?” It may sound funny, but months turned into years and before I knew it I found myself at the cross section of suffering and hope, standing there with a big, bright cloud of joy swirling overhead. My vision for this collection of music took all sorts of odd twists and turns—deep into the mystery of where all of the goodness in this life comes from—and I discovered that it’s true what my friend Billy Cerveny says, “My cup of joy is only as deep as my sorrow.”* It took me a long time to find a lyrical voice for these songs but in the end I drew heavily from the scriptures, from the stories of my friends and family, and from my own life—wearily looking into my heart, searching for signs of resurrection in everything and everywhere. What resulted is an album called Death In Reverse, and I couldn’t be more excited or confused after such a long process of writing, reaching, dreaming, and hoping for something powerful to happen in these songs I’ve been wrestling with over the last few years. Don’t get me wrong. I am super excited about the album. But the process itself—the songwriting and recording process, the painting across the canvas and the subsequent discipline of facing yourself in your work—can be a painful experience, because in order for it to be good, it has to be true. And in order for it to be true you have to face yourself, which can be the scariest thing of all because that means you have to trust. Last summer, Andrew Peterson came over to my house and we visited for a couple hours on my front porch. We were trading stories and at one point he told me that pain is a sort of anointing. I think he’s right about that. C. S. Lewis says that pain is God’s megaphone to a deaf world. As far as this record goes, you might say that God has my full attention. In the span of creating these 11 songs, I have seen the hand of God working in my life and in the lives of my friends and family. I’ve been taken to places I never thought I’d have to go—distant, dark and lonely places—only to find the presence of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost closer than I ever dared to dream or imagine. The Lord carries us through this life. We are not alone. And now, I can sing you some songs about it. [To support Death in Reverse, check out Jeremy’s Kickstarter campaign.] *Billy Cerveny, “Donnelly’s Lament” #DeathinReverse #JeremyCasella

A few weeks ago I woke up to a powdered-sugar dusting of snow on the ground, rolled out of bed, and opened up my computer to Facebook. The headline, “Why I Bought A House In Detroit for $500” caught my eye, and soon I was engrossed in the story of Drew Philp, who at 23 decided to purchase an abandoned house in Detroit in an area that many people are deserting as the city slowly crumbles into chaos. He and his neighbors rebuild their homes, grow vegetables, raise chickens, start schools, build ice rinks in abandoned back yards in the winter, and generally create community in a place that most of the nation has consigned to hell. They are doing something amazing in the face of despair. As he says at one point in his adventure, “It was the first time I really felt I was bringing something back to life, like performing CPR on a corpse that just took its first greedy gasp of air.” There’s something strangely and fascinatingly pioneer about his story, like a 21st century explorer plunging into untamed wilderness, except this “wilderness” is one of America’s best known cities. Drew and his friend share a Promethean moment of glee when he turns on the electricity in his house for the first time. It feels like something out of a history book, and yet when have I ever been so simply happy over something like that? Nevertheless, Drew doesn’t really look at himself as anything special: “I’m not certain I’ve accomplished anything other than taking one abandoned home off the street, teaching a few kids how to read, or bearing witness to a something larger than myself. I’m not certain I’ve become an example to anyone or necessarily changed a whole lot for the better. But I’m still here. I go to bed and I wake up every day in Detroit, in a house I built with my own hands. Sometimes success means just holding on.” Creating light in the darkness. Cobbling together a sense of order in the midst of chaos. Growing gardens in the urban wilderness. It sounds to me like redemption, like resurrection, like new creation in slow and steady ways. His words reminded me of a song by Sara Groves: We come with beautiful secrets We come with purposes written on our hearts, written on our souls We come to every new morning With possibilities only we can hold, that only we can hold Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces Calling out the best of who we are And I want to add to the beauty To tell a better story I want to shine with the light That’s burning up inside —“Add To The Beauty” The beauty of what’s expressed here, and in Drew’s story, is that sometimes the most striking things are the most simple, the most unheroic. We’re not all called to paint the Sistine Chapel, but we can all add to the beauty of the world. Or we could forfeit this calling and do what Switchfoot calls “adding to the noise”. It’s very easy to do this in our age of social media, frittering time away over sharing amusing YouTube videos, cat memes, and inane details about our lives and the lives of others. None of these things are really wrong in and of themselves, but I’ve found they can provide an easy and lazy trap from spending time on things of substance. They can become the trap of nothingness that C. S. Lewis describes in The Screwtape Letters: “Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.” Sound a bit like our culture of endless entertainment? Reading Drew Philp’s story on a snowy morning while still in my pajamas sparked a little something in me. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to go do something big and bold like he did, and it doesn’t mean you or I have to. But it should cause us to ponder, what are we bringing to the world with our time, our talents, our resources? Are we adding to the beauty, telling a better story, or are we just adding to the noise?

Untitled 13, the painting featured in this post, is now available as a new limited-edition, signed and numbered art print. These prints (and other SubwOb art prints) are available in runs of only 100 per piece. You can find them in the Rabbit Room store.] An Explanation for the Uninitiated: Subjects With Objects is an ongoing, collaborative art project forever ordered according to the following rules: A shadowy public spaces painter sets up in pubs and bars and executes spontaneous portraits at the rate of one painting per pint. He then hands off those enigmatic little ocular disturbances to a semi-anonymous poet & novelist who lives with them long enough to solicit their otherworldly mumblings and ephemeral whispers, distilling each of their essences into a line or two of poetic prose. The painter is Jonathan Richter. The poet is UNKNOWN & UNKNOWABLE, so it is best NOT TO EVEN ASK! However, for the sake of convenience we may refer to him as DKM. Subjects With Objects Unplugged Untitled 3 (2013) Be Careful What You Wish For… I can’t claim a consistent creative process. When Richter presents me with a painting, sometimes I do my thinking on paper, capturing every thought that lights long enough to be considered as a possibility. Every half hour I’ll go back and read through the lines I’ve already scrawled, and when one jumps out at me as having a kernel of something essential, I’ll begin to riff a little more on that one. But there are other times when I just sit and stare at one of Richter’s dreamlike paintings, trying to absorb it without too much filter, waiting for the meaning to suddenly emerge. If you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, you’ll understand what I’m waiting for in such moments. I’m trusting that my brain is working behind the scenes to do what brains naturally do: cipher meaning, make connections, establish context. This can lead to one of those epiphany sort of moments when the answer suddenly comes clear, seeming to arrive fully formed. It’s very much like what happens when my mind is muddled by some script or story problem, and I lay down at 3:30 in the afternoon for a short power nap. My mind begins to drift, I slip away into a half-sleep state, and then BANG! In an instant I’m suddenly wide awake twenty minutes later with the obvious answer to my creative problem. The older I get, the more I’ve learned to trust this process of some part of my brain working in the background on a level that isn’t always entirely conscious. For last week’s SubWOb Unplugged column I chose a piece that was worked out in lengthy detail on the pages of a legal pad. This week I’ve chosen to highlight a piece that shows the other method. Around a year ago, Richter and I were working in his Nashville studio on a couple of different projects. There was one evening when I found myself alone in the old factory, overlooking the ghostly cut of the train tracks. I might have been waiting for some effects-laden piece of video to render. I walked over to the stack of SubWOb paintings that still needed text (alas, I had fallen far behind, DEAR READERS) and began to sift through them. I passed this one over and then stopped and went back to it. There was something haunting in it. There was the fact that the woman was seriously overdressed for a beach excursion, yes. But there was also her face. Her face half in shadow, half in light, looking back at something her whole body was turned away from. Her head and figure a little unnaturally long as if compressed between that same light and shadow. Her expression reflecting no joy in the sort of occasion her dress would suggest she’s a participant in. And then there’s the red buoy floating in the sea behind her, telling us what? That one thought, one realization has risen to the surface of her own consciousness and cannot ever be submerged again? I carried the painting to a desk and sat in the near darkness, staring at it for some time. I don’t know how long. Trains blew past in the night. And then, in the empty stillness, I saw it. The meaning arrived whole, in a sort of quiet devastation. I say devastation, because just as you can’t write compelling fictional characters if you don’t care about them and the choices they make (even the villains!), I don’t think I can really articulate what’s going on with the subjects of Richter’s paintings till I’ve been able to posit myself inside the emotional space they’re inhabiting. At the end of the day, I wished better for this woman. I did not want her, by her own past choices, to have trapped herself in such vacancy. Hers is a sad wisdom to apprehend by experience. Be careful what you wish for. I trusted him more when I was the other woman. Funny how much more I trusted him when I was the “other woman.” When I was his mistress, I felt like I could trust him more. I trusted him more as his mistress than I do now as his wife. And why should I trust him? It was easier to trust him as his mistress than as his wife. I trust him less now, because there’s more to lose. I trusted him more as his mistress. The first phrase I wrote was also the obvious choice—no reason to complicate it further. No reason to hit the reader over the head with a more detailed explanation either. Better to let the meaning unfold in the reader/viewer’s mind based on this brief phrase. Everything we need to know is already contained in it. The meaning ripples outward. Of course, that didn’t stop me from trying to tinker with it, but in the end, it was the first phrase I wrote that easily won out.

I can’t remember how it happened, but a decade ago I ended up with a song called “I Am the Sword” on my iPod (one of the big chunky ones that made clicking noises). I recall being baffled by the song and going back to it again and again to try to puzzle out its meaning, which wasn’t readily apparent to me until I read the lyrics years later. I also hadn’t realized until recently that the song is an early instance of a theme running through much of Eric’s music (and writing), a theme of plumbing the thoughts and cares of inanimate objects (like bikes and onions). Eric is one of my finest friends now, but the beginning of my friendship with his music goes all the way back to that one song, which is one of the gems on this new EP, Counting My Rings. Last week, Eric wrote up a history of each of the tracks on Counting (click here to read that post), and the (digital only) album is now available in the Rabbit Room store. Here’s the song that made me an Eric Peters fan. I hope it does the same for a few of you. “I Am the Sword” by Eric Peters from Counting My Rings: B-sideshttps://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/IamtheSword.mp3 Cold, hard steel on a weary battlefield Makes for stuff of legend and of myth Forged from the ore which never should have bore The brunt of such a war to begin with Bedded down for the eve, I easily drift off to sleep without a care, without a second thought I am the brazen bearer of a great and holy terror a venom and deliverer of sorts I am the union, I am secesh I am the musket in the field at wilderness I am the foe, I am the friend I am the bloodied saber at the battle’s end I am the rifle, and I am the sword I helped to turn the tide while still on the rebel’s side the master in the slave’s lowly hand once you realize that all the promises were lies you never want to be used again once you realize that all your truths were only lies you never want to be held again I am the union, I am secesh I am the musket in the field at wilderness I am the foe, I am the friend I am the bloodied saber at the battle’s end I am the murderer of brothers from both near and far I am Grant, I am Lee I am the wedge dividing men and their beloved country