What are you looking for?

The setting for the story of our life is changing. We’re moving. It’s not the biggest, most daring move. We’re not traveling 8,000 miles to live in Africa (as my parents did with us when I was a kid). We’re moving about 100 feet. We are buying and moving into our neighbor’s house. (Insert coveting jokes here.) Boring? I hope not. The small story of our family moving is about more than more space, more than moving up the hill into a little bigger house. It’s about a dream, a vision, a story our lives are telling. Overstating it? We’re moving because we believe the setting of the new house will allow us to thrive in our passions. We believe it will help us be and do who we are and what we are called to. Space, the final frontier. We did not need more space. We have said, “we need more space,” and have heard others say it many times. It’s sort of true, but not really. We have more space than most people in the world and in history have had. (A good measure, I think. Especially to gauge thankfulness.) We could have made it work. We want more space. Why? We want to have people over. Hospitality has been on our hearts for a long time and we want to have a space that makes that possible/easier. The place we’re moving to is not huge, by any means. But the way it’s laid out allows for a lot more room to have people in our home. The fact that there’s more opportunity for easier hospitality figures into our plans for our children. We plan to have a lot of “home games” with their friends. We want our kid’s friends of all ages to want to come to our place and to have room to operate and have a good great time. This house gives us more of that. The place has a small hut that I plan to use for writing. A Writer’s Hut, which Chris Yokel –outstripping all competitors– has perfectly named “The Forge.” It’s kind of a dream-come-true. (Of course, it needs some work. Much like the novel I can’t wait to return to writing when things settle a bit.) I could go on, but you get it. We think this place will serve to aid us in our various vocations. And that’s the point of writing a little about this. The setting changes, the story proceeds. I could go on about our situation in particular, but I mainly just want to connect the move (an ordinary thing) with our calling and our story. So, here’s to the wild, wonderful adventure of moving next door! What’s happening in your life? What is God doing to advance the plot of your story?

Before U2 returned to Nashville last week—thirty years having passed since the last time they performed here—Matthew Perryman Jones decided to get some friends together to play some of their favorite songs from the U2 catalogue, a testimony, of sorts, to the witness of four Irish guys, and a way of saying thanks to the biggest band in the world. Nashville author David Dark got things started by telling the crowd, “I don’t know how to explain myself to myself apart from U2.” That sentiment was shared by most of the performers—a lineup that also included Sarah Masen (w/ Bulb), Derek Webb, Sandra McCracken, Thad Cockrell, Mike Farris, Stephen Mason, Kate York, and Griffin House. Each artist told us how they had discovered U2’s music in middle or high school, how their songs assured them that they weren’t alone in the world, and how their horizons had been expanded by the encounter. Matthew Perryman Jones told us about the first time he saw them live, on the Joshua Tree tour, and how he walked out of the arena listening to the people around him in the parking lot still singing the last song, and he thought: “So that’s what music has the power to do.” One by one, before singing a favorite song, each artist bore witness to the work of U2’s music in their lives. As is to be expected whenever a group of people are deeply moved by a work of art—be it a poem, song, movie, painting, or anything else—there will be others who don’t understand and respond with rolled eyes or mocking comments. When one artist made the claim that he feels like U2 saves his life about every five years, I saw some in the crowd suppressing laughter and looking annoyed by what they considered hyperbole. I felt differently. As a teenager, I heard people talk about this band called U2. I even heard people say that some of the members were Christians, and that there was something of depth and value in their music. But raised as I was to disdain rock-‘n-roll, it was all laughable because, come on, they used drums and electric guitars, an obvious sign of rebellion against God. I didn’t come to appreciate the witness of U2 until years later in my early twenties. I met a childhood friend for drinks one afternoon and we spent five hours catching up, trying to explain to each other, and to ourselves, where our journeys had led us and how we were attempting to make sense of life and adulthood. We traded books and CDs over the next couple of years and at some point he gave me a mix CD of his favorite U2 songs. The first song on it was “Walk On,” and he introduced it by telling me about an experience during college, an unspeakably hard time for him. Among other things, his parents were going through a difficult divorce, and he couldn’t always see a reason to keep on going. At the end of each day, he would take a walk around the campus, ending up at the bluff overlooking the city, listening to U2 on his headphones. More than once, he told me, the only reason he didn’t take one more step, the only reason he didn’t give up hope and go over the edge of the cliff, was Bono singing these lyrics: I know it aches, And your heart it breaks, And you can only take so much. Walk on, walk on. …Stay safe tonight. [audio:WalkOn.mp3] Today, my friend is a good father to two beautiful girls and a loving husband to his wife, at least in part because of the witness of U2. Even if I had not had similar experiences with their music myself, I would still be grateful to them for my friend’s sake. After the U2 tribute show, I was at home, finishing up work for the evening, and I pulled up U2 in my iTunes and played some of my favorite songs. I listened to “Walk On,” and when it ended I hit play again. Twice. And then I put away my work, turned up the stereo and played it again. Crawling into bed that night, I picked up the book on my bedside table, Ian Cron’s Chasing Francis, a biography of sorts in which a man documents his spiritual journey through journal entries addressed to St. Francis. I opened the book to the page where I had stopped reading two nights earlier and picked up where I left off. Here’s the first thing I read: Dear Francis, A few years ago I went to a U2 concert at Madison Square Garden in New York City, just three months after 9/11. Most of us in the arena that night probably knew someone who’d died in the Twin Towers; we’d lost three people in our church alone. I’ll never forget the end of the concert. As the band played the song “Walk On,” the names of all those who had died were projected onto the arena walls and slowly scrolled up over us, and then up toward the ceiling. At that moment the presence of God descended on that room in a way I will never forget. There we were, twenty-five thousand people standing, weeping, and singing with the band. It suddenly became a worship service; we were pushing against the darkness together. I walked out dazed, asking myself, “What on earth just happened?” Of course, it was the music. For a brief moment, the veil between this world and the world to come had been made thin by melody and lyric. If only for a brief few minutes, we were all believers. And of course there’s the moment everyone is talking about; after the band took their final bow and was about to walk off stage, Bono noticed a guy holding a sign that read “Blind Guitar Player.” Bono told him to come up on stage, called for his guitar, and hung it around the man’s neck. The blind man wanted to play a song for his wife and started strumming the opening chords to “All I Want Is You” as Bono took the lead vocal. “You say you’ll give me eyes in a moment of blindness,” the lyric goes. At the end of the song, as the guy started to take off the guitar, Bono stopped him and told him to keep it, concluding an unforgettable evening for that man and for the rest of us gathered that night. I walked out of the stadium with my friends, sore and sweaty and tired, but most of all, grateful for the witness of U2.

This is a version of an article I wrote for LifeWay’s ParentLife magazine. It appeared in the July, 2010 issue. At writing seminars everywhere, writing teachers are giving stuck story-writers the same advice: “Ask yourself, ‘What is it that my character wants?’” Why? Because once you know what a character wants, you know what choices he or she is likely to make. Once your character starts making choices, consequences follow. And then a story begins to take shape. Desire. Choice. Consequence. That’s what a story is made of. When we speak of the other kind of character—an individual’s character or integrity—we’re usually talking about the choices that person makes. A person of character chooses the good over the bad, the better over the good, the best over the better, whatever the circumstances. And why does a person make such choices? Because he or she wants what is good or better or best. Each of us is a welter of warring desires. You want to lose weight, but you also want that other piece of cake. You want to make good grades, but there are a million things you want to do instead of studying. You want to please God, but you also want to please yourself. So how do you choose? You choose according to what you want at the moment of choosing. And your choices have consequences, which shape the next part of your story. Desire. Choice. Consequence. It’s what character is made of too. It is that parallel between story development and character development that makes story such a valuable tool in shaping your child’s character. In the midst of life’s battles, it can be hard for a child—for any of us—to step back far enough to see the connection between desire, choice, and consequence. In a well-told story, on the other hand, it is easier to see the big picture, even as we inhabit it in a small way. If you are going to use stories as a means of shaping your child’s character, it is important, of course, to find stories that teach the right things. But that is not the only important thing; it is at least as important that you get in the habit of talking to your child about the stories he or she experiences. Help your child see the connection between desire, choice, and consequence by asking questions like these about the stories you read together: -Why do you think the character made that choice? What was he trying to get? -Did that choice get him what he wanted? -What else did it get him? -What was the cost of that choice? -Do you think the choice was worth the cost? And here’s the thing: these are the kind of questions that can help redeem even a questionable story. You might slip up with a book choice or a movie choice; it happens. But if you’re talking with your child, helping him or her make explicit the connection between desire, choice, and consequence, even a story that isn’t altogether appropriate can be a great learning opportunity. As character-building goes, a questionable story with great follow-up questions might be more valuable than a perfectly appropriate story with no discussion. I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that any old story will do for your child or that all stories are of equal value when it comes to character-building. Some are indeed better than others. In the examples below, I offer three foundational character truths, each with three books that portray it. Character Truth #1: This world does not define you. Children’s fiction is full of stories in which the main character suspects he isn’t who he appears to be. Why does that idea ring so true? Because it is true. We weren’t made for this world, and in the end it’s not the world that names us or gives us our identities. To live a life of Christian character is first to come to terms with this truth. Consider the mouse Despereaux in Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux (Candlewick Press): he is rejected by his fellow mice because he cannot bring himself to cringe or scurry. He is brave, adventurous; and as he follows his heart he finds out who he really is. Another of my favorites in this vein is Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga (On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness and North! Or Be Eaten, Waterbrook Press). In these fabulously engaging books, two brothers and a sister find out that they aren’t who they thought they were. The Story of Ruby Bridges (Scholastic) is a non-fiction picture book that tells the beautiful story of a six-year-old black girl who faced incredible hatred from whites in her hometown of New Orleans when she became the first black child to attend Frantz Elementary School in 1960. Her determination not to be defined by the hatred of the whites who verbally abused her every day—and her willingness to forgive—is inspiring. Character Truth #2: You find your life by losing it. This paradoxical truth is at the heart of the Christian faith. As with any paradox, we come closer to understanding it in story form than in its stated form. Generations of children have been introduced to the sacrificial nature of friendship through the spider Charlotte, who devotes the last of her life’s energies to rescuing the pig Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web (HarperCollins). And The Velveteen Rabbit only becomes “real” after his beauty has been loved to shredded ugliness. Kate DiCamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (Candlewick Press), also about a toy rabbit, plumbs a similar theme. Character Truth #3: Grace is primary. True character is not a question of will power. Character that lasts must grow out of God’s grace—and the realization that we don’t have it in us to live a life that is up to God’s standards. That’s a hard thing to teach; grace is another of those paradoxes that can be better grasped as story rather than as precept. And yet it is hard to find children’s books that truly make grace come alive for the reader. I have fallen in love with a picture book called Sidney and Norman: A Tale of Two Pigs, by Phil Vischer (Nelson Publishers). Sidney the Pig is a mess, even by pig standards. His neighbor Norman has it all together. Both pigs are astonished to learn that God loves them without regard to their ability (or lack of ability) to keep things together. Eleanor Estes’s The Hundred Dresses (Sandpiper) is an achingly beautiful depiction of a poor girl’s willingness to show grace and forgiveness to classmates who torment her—and her willingness, in the end, to bless them with beauty. And I couldn’t offer a list of character-building children’s books without mentioning Sally Lloyd-Jones’s Jesus Storybook Bible. It is a reminder that the Bible is a series of stories that add up to one big story—the story of Jesus. “The Bible isn’t a book of rules, or a book of heroes,” Lloyd-Jones writes. It’s an adventure story about a young Hero who comes from a far country to win back his lost treasure. It’s a love story about a brave Prince who leaves his palace, his throne—everything—to rescue the one he loves. It’s like the most wonderful of fairy tales that has come true in real life! That, in the end, is why story is so valuable to the parent who wishes to shape a child’s character. All the best stories are but faint echoes of the truest Story. And as that Story finds its way deeper into our hearts, we cannot help but be changed. [Editor’s note: Jonathan’s blog is full of all sorts of great stuff. Be sure to check it out at Jonathan-Rogers.com]

I lie in bed these sweet few days When the windows yet are open And the weather yet is fine, And love to hear the dead of night Announce its living presence With hoot and croak and creeping vine. I love the knowledge that for years As I have waited on the bench Beneath the juniper tree, And paid such close attention, There is an owl I’ve never seen An owl, I know, who watches me. I love the sound of secret things, I love to hear their nearness, And to feel their wildness, too. (Three days ago we sowed the seeds And every hour I check the dirt For seedlings pushing through.) I lie in bed awake, alert, Aware of the God of the Garden. I sense in the seed a promise, An unfolding resurrection In the furrowed row, in soil And root, in husk and humus. I sense an ancient heart alive Who haunts these moonlit acres, Blessing, bringing life from death, Dawn from darkness, song from sorrow. The night owl swoops, the zephyr sighs; I hear within the tomb: a breath.

While living in Umeå, Sweden I worked occasionally (when I was bored with window shopping, reading and writing) at a cool place called Kafe Station (pronounced stah-SHOON, not STA-shen). Moving right along. A local church turned an old fire station into this cafe and it stands as a major component of their ministry, staffed and managed by the church and used as a really neat gathering space for concerts, meetings, minglings and such. When I had just barely acclimated to the new pace/language/wonder, Maria and I went shopping one morning for organic lavender for our morning baking. Curious, I thought, as we shuffled through the snow to the shops down the street. We found a medicine and herb shop where we purchased a little plastic pocket filled with teeny purple buds. This was going to be both fun and educational. Once back in the little green-tiled kitchen and with the local radio playing songs in a language I could only scarcely grasp, we tied on our aprons and started mixing a dough for the day’s skorpor (Sweden’s answer to biscotti). My job was chopping chocolate chunks off a good size block and running a knife through some toasted hazelnuts, both of which would eventually be folded into the soft mound of sweet dough, along with the aromatic lavender. Just enough to perfume the biscuits, though, not enough to render them soap-like. They baked, nestled in their long, perforated baguette forms, while we cleaned our workspace. When they came out, fragrant and golden, we quickly sliced them into inch-thick pieces, laid them out on sheet trays and slid them back into the oven for their second and final baking. We retired to a cafe table for fika and enjoyed the tiniest cups of the darkest coffee with the cutest spoons. Soon the sweet, floral, nutty scent settled into air of the warm, sunlit room, quiet save for the clinking of said cute spoons, the hushed murmur of the lilting, sing-songy language, and the occasional squeal of a beautiful, rosy-cheeked Swedish baby in her stroller. Skorpor were taste-tested, naturally (my tongue can still remember the foreign but marvelous combination), slid onto trays and then into the lighted case, ready for the day’s dunking.

Jellybean Highfive’s unofficial detective business was booming -if booms are what explosions make. Oh, the devastation, he thought. It had blown up in his face, his third case –The Case of the Bulimic Fatty. He had found the truth at the bottom of the case, but had uncovered it in such a way as to cause it to be forever hidden, like King Tut’s coffin. Will they ever find it, he thought. “I wonder,” he said. Probably not, he mused. He wondered this while walking down a street connected to many other roads. He wondered how anyone could call a street “secluded.” All streets met up with other streets, didn’t they? He tried to imagine a street all alone, on an island perhaps, sad and secluded, with only its top five books to read. “All roads lead to Rome, Jellybean,” he said to himself, “and Roman roamers roam them. That’s where I come in.” He smoked on a cigarette, imagining himself to be in a movie called “Jellybean Highfive.” He often did this, even while brushing his teeth. He would look himself in the eyes, half-closing them in a dramatic slit, and imagine a gravelly voice-over voice gravely laying out the impossible odds. “But one man stands in the way…Jellybean Highfive.” His reverie exploded when he realized he was standing in the way –of a pretty blonde who needed to get past him in order to board a bus headed who knows where. “Pardon the interruption,” Jellybean said, not able to move due to the magnetic magnetism of her face. Like a tractor beaming its headlights at a deer, he was lit up by a terrifying attraction. “What are you staring at?” she said prettily. “My destiny,” he whispered, slitting his eyes and cocking his head just so. “Oh,” the woman said, embarrassed. “You should never be embarrassed,” Jellybean said, finally moving to the side and making way for her. He extended a hand to help her up on to the bus, then took off an invisible–nonexistent, really–fedora and made a slight bow. To him, she was the queen of the city just then. It seemed as though the entire street inclined her way. Birds seem to sing, people seemed to hum, and the sun broke through the charcoal crush of clouds to illuminate her lovely face. Then she vomited. She looked around for a moment, then escaped into the bus as the doors closed. The bus lurched forward and disappeared into the maze of interconnected avenues in the auburn autumn afternoon. Jellybean stood there, spellbound. All he had was the memory of her. Then his mind started working, dots began connecting in his mind. He walked quickly somewhere, using his mind to think thoughts. He got out a notepad and made massive checkmarks in it. He stopped and shouted, “I have it!” in triumph. But his triumph turned quickly and his face fell. He stood, looking absently around, like a child from a broken home standing in an outfield, realizing that the one he was scanning the bleachers for hadn’t come like he’d promised. “It’s not the streets who’re secluded,” he said in a hoarse whisper. He noted absently the rushing crush of people everywhere. “It’s the people in the streets. For more Jellybean Highfive click here and say “there’s no place like home” with your heels.

The good S.D. Smith quoted C.S. Lewis at his blog a while back: …only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current. Here we have the key to what Lewis (and the other Inklings, and all the Romantics, dating back to S.T. Coleridge) believed about literature. All created things are icons, in some form or another, of spiritual reality. This is what I mean when I talk about “logos epistemology.” It’s the belief that the creative logos, the Word, is within and behind all creation, and all creation points to that Christ/logos. What we can know is all built on the foundation of the logos, to which physical reality points. But this nominalistic thinking – that the physical reality only has surface meaning and nothing beyond it – is severely limiting and dehumanizing, because we are so much more than bare physical fact. This is why embedded in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia septology is planetary symbolism; we experience the deeper levels of reality while interacting with these symbols, even if we don’t understand them. This is why his Ransom trilogy is built on the scaffolding of literary alchemy. We pass through the stages of black (grief/loss), white (purification) and red (eternal life) with Ransom, whether we understand alchemy or not. This is the exact opposite of gnosticism. It’s not “secret knowledge,” which is more important than the physical symbols, but the belief that the physical symbols do indeed picture reality. In gnosticism, the physical imprisons reality. In logos epistemology, the physical is part of reality and points to the Creator.

In early March I joined forces with Jason Ingram and Rusty Varencamp, th team that produced Everything Sad Is Coming Untrue, to break ground on my next full-length record. Originally we had planned to record last summer, but with the still growing success of “More Like Falling In Love” it seemed good to let Everything Sad Is Coming Untrue have a little more time to find it’s audience. We were then blessed again to have a good reception at radio for “I Am New” – after 11 years of doing this full-time, I am overjoyed to finally have connected with radio and have been grateful to find a whole new audience for my work. 2011 was a busy touring season for us, too, which left me little time to write new songs for the next record. But any moment I could break away was spent working on songs that I hoped would give shape to a new record and the next season of my ministry. I came into the first day of recording with about half the songs still needing the lyrics finished. Every spare moment was spent trying to find out exactly what these songs wanted to say. In the past, this kind of situation has caused me a lot of stress. But I was surprised at how much peace I had going into this. My mantra (I use that term in the colloquial sense, not as an expression of Hindu practice :- ) went something like this: “God has called me to this work, he’s made me to be a song writer, I’ve been entrusted with the gift of songwriting. God has intended for me to make this record. I trust his plan, I trust the gift and calling he’s given, which means that I trust that as a writer of songs, these songs will be written when they need to be.” Deep breath. Followed by waiting. And eventually they were all written!Sometimes I was working on the lyric up until the very last moment – and in one instance even going back after the fact and re-singing a new lyric – but they were all written, and I’m trusting that they are all what they were intended to be.It was the closest I’ve come to striking that balance of believing that it wasn’t all up to me, and yet working diligently as though it were. That sounds very Calvinist of me, doesn’t it? Well, I don’t mean it to be necessarily; it somehow feels to me both more and less than that. But that’s another blog… I’d like to think that this is my best record yet. Time will tell whether that’s just the newness of it all or a legitimate assessment, but I know one thing: I’ve never been more grateful for a batch of songs. I feel like as a whole they touch deeper places of truth, fear, and hope than any other collection of songs I’ve brought to a record. I was blessed to have the players comment repeatedly about how this project felt different and one night I even got a text from Jason Ingram saying he thought this was going to be a special record and that he was grateful to be working on it with me. Maybe that’s up to you, the listener, to decide, but these kindnesses and encouragements add up and help assure me that we’re on the right track. My modest success with radio this past year has made everybody I work with hopeful and expectant, but we still had to work with a realistic budget, which means that every moment had to count – no room for mistakes or for songs getting away from us. As we wondered early on about what the sonic signature should be for this record, we decided it would be cool to build it around the drums. So we brought in Paul Mabury – my favorite drummer in the business – a day early to be really intentional about beats and the overall drum vibe. He spent the day dreaming up live loops that he would create with stomping and all kinds of other cool sounds and we laid all of that down before the band came in. With the foundation of the live drum loops and textures in place, the rest of the band already had a bit of a road map for what kind of vibe to go after on each of the songs and we set to chasing after it. Guitarist Mike Payne joined us again and we also had Tony Lucido, one of Nashville’s most sought after bass players. With every song, we asked, “what’s your first instinct for how you would play this song? Okay, now let’s not do that and wonder what else the song could be.” They worked hard on every single track to reach for something that felt original and unexpected, and yet not showy in a way that would be distracting. John Mays, the head of A&R at Centricity, made me aware that nearly every song spoke of fear. I hadn’t realized that before, but as I look through the lyrics fear has emerged as a theme, as well as the antidotes to fear, which mostly have to do with trust and allowing ourselves to be loved. More on all of that later… I tried to make a one take video each day to let people hear little pieces of the songs as they were being “born” and I’ve included them here. They’ll probably make more sense when you hear the finished project, but hopefully they give you a little taste of what we’re cooking up for you. The release date is September 13th and the tentative title is “A Way To See In The Dark”. Thanks for listening and caring about my music, Here are the videos: Day 2: The Sound Of Our Breathing Day 3: Remind Me Who I Am Day 4: Good To Be Alive Day 5: No Thief Like Fear Day 6: Nothing Is Wasted

One Saturday morning in February, I was reading through several old essays and detected a couple of threads where certain themes held together. I began printing and grouping and by the time I finished I’d come up with an outline for what might be a book of essays. There was one piece in particular, an unfinished one from over a year ago, that I began to see in a new light, a possible vision for the whole thing. It was an exciting couple of hours, until I realized that only a third of the actual writing was complete. Since then I’ve stumbled quite a bit on the path toward a finished product, yet the further I go, the more clearly I see the obstacles. The most obvious one is that I have never written a book before, and while this is a valid concern, my guess is that, for most writers, each new book feels like the first. Having one book tucked under your belt does not necessarily mean you feel equal to the task of writing another. It’s no accident that I used the word “task” just now, because that’s what writing a book is. No matter the romantic notions I have regarding my name on a spine, writing is work, and this work requires discipline. Like running a marathon, or building a house, writing a book takes a certain amount of work, each and every day. Now, I can’t tell you the last time I lived through a week where I could actually take two hours, at my leisure, every day to sit and write; it has been quite a while since I’ve have that kind of freedom. I’m married, and we have three children, and my husband is currently enrolled in seminary. His income provides what we need, but it doesn’t allow me to hire a short-order cook, personal shopper, or housekeeper. So around here, my days fill up pretty fast. I’m not complaining, it’s the season of life I’m in. At the end of the day it’s far more important that my family is loved and cared for than that I transfer a thousand words from my brain to a computer screen. However, I could find the time to write every day if I planned a little more carefully. If I made myself go to bed on time, set my alarm to get up before everyone else, and immediately opened documents rather than checking Facebook, I could easily get an hour’s worth of writing in before my children needed my complete attention. In the evenings after dinner, or perhaps right around nine o’clock, I could sit down and crank out a few hundred words. I could also turn on the TV less, and read my Bible more. I could choose exercise over dessert and creative thinking over status updates. All it would require is a little bit of discipline, organization—and a complete personality transplant! I’ve never been much of a planner, ask any of my planning friends and family. I drive them all crazy. I prefer to live more like Julia Roberts’s character in Pretty Woman: “I’m more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kinda gal, moment to moment—that’s me.” I hate wearing watches and setting alarm clocks. I secretly think “list” is a bad word. I don’t think ahead, and I am usually unprepared. It’s called being a free spirit, right? And isn’t that what makes me a creative person to begin with? Strike that. I know these silly things are not all true, and I recognize the need for structure. I just don’t know exactly how to do it, and what’s more—I don’t really like working on things that I’m not yet good at. And that’s why I must cultivate discipline. It’s not something that happens over night. I was hoping it was something I could make happen in forty days when I made my Lenten promises, but alas, it was a rather unsuccessful attempt. Would that I could change the internal hard drive setting of my spirit from apathetic to driven and watch as the file folders multiplied, but I’m finding that personal habits will only be altered by means of those human parameters known as time and commitment. The one encouraging discovery I have made is this: the more I write, the easier it is to write more. Yes, that may seem a rather obvious finding, but let me tell you that I don’t care. It’s exciting to see that I’m writing faster and my flow of thought is smoother and easier to translate these days. It’s exciting enough that I can smile at the fact it’s taken me so long to catch on. Who would have thought? Training leads to triathlon. In her book Acedia & Me, Kathleen Norris says of her work: “The world does not care if I write another word, and if I am to care, I have to summon all my interior motivation and strength.” That’s the kind of sentence that should line the walls and ceiling of my bedroom so it can be the first thing I see every morning when I rise and shine. Maybe a mantra like that could drive me to the desk of discipline and transform me into a well-written woman, but real results are far more likely to be the result of daily decision. Just like walking down the stairs and turning on my yoga DVD after breakfast, the choice is mine to make, each and every day.

It is always a bit of a mental jolt to discover that one of your best-loved authors greatly dislikes another of your very favorite authors. I felt this way recently as I read an essay by Wendell Berry in which he took great umbrage with the wanderlust of Tennyson’s title character in the poem, Ulysses. I have always loved Ulysses, both the poem, and the man presented in it. I even memorized snatches of Tennyson’s sea haunted poem. When I read those great lines of Ulysses’ longing to “follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought,” I knew his hunger. And when I read that face-down-the-night declaration of his purpose to “drink life to the lees,” and “sail beyond the baths of all the western stars until I die,” well, I wanted to take off for the far ends of the earth right then. Something new was waiting to be found. So, you can imagine my dismay when I discovered that Berry found Ulysses’ adventurous fervor to be just the sort of misplaced hunger that sets people off on adventures when they ought to be keeping the faith at home. I’m a bit of a Wendell Berry fanatic. He answers so many of the questions I ask about how to create fellowship and life in a fast, isolated modern world. He’s all for steady cultivation and faithfulness over long years. How can any community or heritage be built, he wondered in his essay, if kings were always wandering off and leaving their people to the wind when the want for adventure struck? I saw his point. I understood. But I also knew that Ulysses’ hunger was more than a selfish whim to travel. It was soul deep, a hunger for something eternal. Somehow, both views had to be true. At that moment, with two great authors juxtaposed over their view of one king’s adventurous heart, I understood that different souls see different sides of life. Different artists find different beauties. Different writers tell different stories. Some find glory in the adventure of life, the great journey required of every soul born. Some find glory in the quiet, daily growth of home life, the small, rich details that come from life carefully tended and lived. Both speak truth, both offer us beauty. Both offer a glimpse into the richness of God’s mind. I sat with my book in hand and thought back over some of my favorite writers and heroes, fascinated to find them each what I will call either a dreamer, or a keeper. Take St. Brendan, for instance. He was a seafarer. Why? Cloistered, devout, he was just a young monk alive in a world still haunted by the furies of old pagan gods, hemmed in by the pathless sea. Danger abounded in brigands and storms and petulant kings. Yet an old monk mumbled a half-baked dream, murmured of paradise gained, and off sailed Brendan over the wild waters, in resolute search of Eden. Jane Austen was an observer. Why? With a knife-keen wit and a mind to unsettle the wisest, she could have striven to philosophical heights. Instead, she spied on her neighbors, and wove the quips and foibles of dining room drama into immortal tales. Brilliant woman, parson’s child, country-bound spinster aunt, she questioned not her lot, but found it to be a merry drama and was glad. Galileo was a doubter. Why? Taught to believe that the earth was settled perfectly in space, the glorious center of everything, he balked. Believe without question? Not him. He studied and stargazed and flung planets from their thrones with never a second thought. One peek through a telescope, one hunch in a prickle up his spine, and off he ran to prove what had never been seen. I think the people of earth are divided by lines of desire. Dreamers stand on one hand, and keepers sit on the other. Restive and restless-eyed souls are the dreamers. They are the hungry-hearted, with wanderlust thrumming in their blood and eager brains, ever in search of what lies a fingertip just out of reach. Truth or beauty, treasure or friend, they would risk their life to find the unseen ideal. In the annals of time, the dreamers play out like high, bright notes in a symphony. St. Brendan had to find heaven if it could be found on earth. The call of it just beyond him was a song he could not resist. Galileo felt that all was not as he had been told. Ulysses wanted to sail beyond one more star. So it is with all dreamers. They are the explorers, the artists, the sailors, and searchers who ever beat down the walls of the known, intent upon finding what has never been found. The keepers wait to welcome them home. They are the glad-eyed and frank-faced souls, who settle and stay with a faithful joy. The song of the unseen troubles them not; they feel instead the dance of the seasons, the cadence of days as time sings in the here and now. The present reaches a powerful hand from the deep earth and roots them, happy, to their one place in the wide world. They craft and build, they keep what is civil and lovely alive, they master the art of life lived richly. In the symphony of time, they are the rich-throated hum of low violins, the myriad voices who weave the steady, marching song of the earth. Keepers are the good kings who set their hearts to cultivation instead of conquest, the Jane Austens who revel in the merriment of every day. They are the rulers and builders, the farmers and reapers of harvests, the faithful who keep all that is good in place throughout the ages. We are born, every one I think, with some leaning toward dreamer or keeper. In most of us, I’m sure there is a bit of both. But no matter which, we must push the song of our soul to its full beauty. The world needs the good that both bring. Evil is defeated by the dreamers whose souls rise to cry against all that is wrong, and the keepers already deep in the daily, gritty work of pushing back the dark. Beauty is cultivated by the keepers who shore up the world with civility, even as dreamers sail back and forth in search of newer, unknown good. Together, they weave the music of their souls, their work, and their wonder into a joyous symphony of fellowship. And this is the song the whole world was made to sing. So, I’ll keep Ulysses and my beloved Mr. Berry. Together, they paint a brilliant picture of the world I am longing to find and create in my own work. Dreamers and keepers; together they paint the wealth of God’s heart. So, the question is, which are you?

I am delighted to present to you this short interview with the very talented and funny Jennifer Trafton. Jennifer is the author of The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic, a novel for young readers and old readers (see Question 1). Idea: Why not spend some of that Christmas cash you got on a fine, beautifully illustrated story? Or you can spend it on illegal drugs? I think the choice is clear. Jennifer is personally autographing every edition purchased from The Rabbit Room bookstore. I assume that other people are autographing the copies sold in other locations. (Bad form. Not very British of them.) My 7 year old daughter has The Rise and Fall of Mount Majestic sitting beneath our tree, awaiting her discovery on one of these 12 days of Christmas. We’re all very excited to get our hands on it after she reads it in one day. Some dude named Andrew Petersomething reviewed this book here at the RR. He said, like, it was good. And stuff. 1. What are your thoughts on what makes a story “for children” and, conversely, “for adults?” Any thoughts on what makes “children’s lit” unique/worthwhile? I’ve never been very concerned about putting things into categories. Good stories are good stories. In my view “children’s literature” is any literature children like to read – which can, of course, differ from child to child. When I think of the stories that have tickled my funny bone the most, that have stretched my imagination in myriad directions, that have dealt with profound issues of life and death in ways that are searing in their simplicity, I usually end up in the “children’s section” of the bookstore. If such stories are not “for adults” as well, I pity the adults. There is nothing wrong, of course, with a book having a specific intended audience. A story has two participants, the writer and the reader, and they make a kind of magic together. Whether or not that relational magic works has less to do with formulas than with empathy. When I picture the readers with whom I want to be in that relationship as a storyteller, I picture kids (often particular kids I know) because I love their imaginative scope, their freedom from many “adult” concerns and hang-ups, their lack of cynicism, their embrace of silliness as well as mystery. So I write “for children” because I feel like, at the level of the imagination, and in the stories I love to read and love to write, I’m one of them. 2. What is your favorite color and what do you want to be when you grow up? My favorite color is joyful and I want to be red when I grow up. Wait. Stop. Reverse that. Okay, continue. 3. Is there a deeper reason why you believe you are called to write novels other than for the billions of dollars you make? No, the billions are enough. Occasionally I wake up in the morning and say to myself, “Jennifer, you have all those imaginary dollars lying in your imaginary bank account, doing nothing but gathering imaginary dust. Isn’t there more to life than this? Making art is a treacherous and beautiful adventure. It requires great courage and creative playfulness and a healthy sense of self-mockery. A story can change someone’s life; it can wiggle its way into a child’s heart and plant a seed there that will grow and blossom as the years go by, until one day that grown-up child (who has never fully grown up, thankfully) will look back and say, ‘That story was one of the things that shaped who I am as a person.’ What a terrifying privilege for a storyteller! What a responsibility! What a calling!” This line of reasoning convinces me until my rent is due. Then I pray everyone rushes to the store and buys my book. 4. On a scale of 1-3, how irritating do you find scales? Seven, at least. Seriously, they are the bane of my existence these days. I’ve tried everything—soap, rubbing alcohol, scouring pads, pliers . . . They will not come off. And believe me, they itch. I think my next book should be about a dragon. 5. What’s next for Jennifer Trafton, author? A new novel? A line of knitted green berets for the “army stuff” section at Wal-Mart? A run for Governor of Puerto Rico? Spill the beans! In 2011 I’ll be diving back into a third novel I’m in the middle of writing, which I am very excited about, because I will get to think about giraffes and ridiculous inventions and call it “work.” (How many of you can say that about your jobs? Other than the zookeepers and mad inventors reading this, of course.) I will also be rearranging my closet, editing things that need to be edited, washing dishes occasionally, warning people about giants, and eating way too much ice cream. Beyond that, I’ve given up on “planning ahead” in life. The best (and worst) things come unexpectedly. I hope there will be many new friends to meet, great books to read, travels to new places, much to laugh about, a lot of Oreos, and very few beans, spilled or unspilled. Like the heroine of MOUNT MAJESTIC, Persimmony Smudge, I am craving a new adventure right now. But as Bilbo Baggins once wisely said, sometimes all you have to do to start having an adventure is to go out your own door: “You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you might be swept off to.” Thanks, Jennifer. Find Jennifer at her website. (You can read the first chapter of her book here.) Jennifer on Twitter. Jennifer at The Rabbit Room Store. (Autographed copies.) Note: Originally posted at my website. In Klingon. Not really. -Sam

A few years ago there appeared a post here about The Jesus Storybook Bible. That post was my introduction to the writings of Sally Lloyd-Jones. I don’t know what Sally’s writing process is like—if she tucks away in the corner of a coffee shop or spreads out at her own kitchen table, and I don’t know if she types her words into a computer or writes them by hand on a yellow legal pad. What I do know—and what is obvious to anyone familiar with her work—is that she is a disciplined, careful, whimsical and dead-serious writer of children’s literature. Not too long ago, she posted the following quote on Twitter: “Albert Einstein quote for today: ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.’” Einstein’s proposition here reveals one of the most confounding objectives for any artist: how to communicate to an audience truths that are, by nature, grandiose and unwieldy enough to inspire that artist to go to their medium to create. Sally Lloyd-Jones operates in a strange industry—Christian literature. This post is by no means offered as a critique of that industry, but I am going to mention one point of criticism I notice because it frames the context for what I’m hoping to express about her. Here it is: often it seems the goal of Christian writing is to take the mysterious and unfathomable in Scripture and distill them down into the plain and comprehensible—as if it is possible to do this and still remain faithful to the Biblical narrative. There are lots of books promising five easy steps to mastering life and faith, as if the mastery of these things comes through the simple process of accumulating more information. As for Sally, she displays a consistent habit in everything I’ve read of hers and that habit is this: she allows for the mystery and beauty of the Gospel story to remain mysterious and beautiful, even as she works to tell us what’s there. That said, I am certainly not taking anything away from her careful fidelity to what the Bible actually says. Sally is an excellent teacher, and she gives her little readers more detail, explanation, and context than she is obligated to provide. And she treats the continuity of the Biblical narrative with such respect and intentionality that one can’t help but understand the content of Scripture better, having read her books. The evidence for this, of course, is seen in how many grown-ups read The Jesus Storybook Bible as devotional literature—and how they often get teary when they try to read it aloud. (Cough, Andrew Peterson, cough.) But today, what I am writing to call broader attention to in her work is how she never seems to be simply about reshaping the extraordinary so that it might come down to her readers as ordinary. Or as Einstein said it, she works to make things as simple as possible, but not any simpler. I am thankful, thankful for the way Sally Lloyd-Jones takes the story of God’s “Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love” and makes it simple, but not too simple. And I am thankful for the way she illustrates the processes of learning, grief, struggle, doubt, and growth by only ever offering us one Hero in the story of Redemption. And I am thankful for the way she tells these stories from Scripture as though they are her own story.

“Harry Potter is a Hobbit.” That was the title of a 2004 article by Dr. Amy H. Sturgis, friend and scholar. It was the thesis that captured my imagination about Harry more than any other. Rowling’s relationship to Tolkien is fascinating: Harry Potter is quite distinct from Tolkien, and also quite similar. It is distinct, in that you don’t see Tolkien’s direct influence all over the Hogwarts saga. In other words, apart from some superficial similarities, no one is going to read Harry and say, “Oh this is just a Tolkien knock-off.” It’s not. But she is writing in the same tradition of Faerie stories. That is Amy’s thesis, and it’s the heart of what I tried to do with Harry Potter and Imagination. It’s a tradition that can be traced back through great writers like L’Engle, Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, and MacDonald, and that great stream finds its source in the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I’m not going all the way back to Coleridge in this post (though I hope to give him some serious attention here in the future). I’m going to summarize, as briefly as I can, this fantasy tradition, with reference to the five authors noted above. At the heart of it all is this: the imagination is a way of knowing. George MacDonald wrote that fairy tales are “new embodiments of old truth.” This comes straight out of Coleridge, who defines true poetry as that which “rescues admitted truth from neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.” We nod and accept certain things to be true, but we tend to neglect the weight of that truth until it is set before our eyes in something new and beautiful: a magical castle, the enacting of deeper magic, a humble hobbit, a Horcrux destroyed, a romp with a lion. Fairy tales tell the truth and open our eyes to its stunning reality – and to how much we’ve neglected it. We find this new embodiment of old truth in Albus Dumbledore’s lesson that love is the strongest form of magic. And we see how love transcends all magic played out before our eyes in Harry’s story. G.K. Chesteron believed that “the world is wild,” and that the philosophy of the fairy tale was far closer to truth than “realism.” We enter our mundane Muggle worlds each day with all the predictable things that bore us. We walk through our routines in a stupor, accepting the world as it is and failing to see it as the untamed playground God made it. When we walk into Hogwarts and find the paintings talking to us, the staircases moving, and ghosts popping up through the dinner tables, we’ve entered a wild world. And if we let Harry’s world affect us, we remember to look for the wildness that exists in our own. J.R.R. Tolkien called fantasy fiction the highest form of art, because it involves subcreation – the weaving of brand new worlds that have to be as consistent and believable as our own. Tolkien wrote, in “On Fairy Stories,” one of the most sophisticated defenses of the idea that we create because we are made in the image of a creator, and that our creative work is a fundamental part of who we are. Tolkien argued that in “escaping” to the world of Faerie, we often encounter truth in a more potent way than in non-fiction or in works of “realistic” fiction. As an example from Potter, perhaps it’s been hard for you to authentically address, in your own life, issues of racism and relating to the downtrodden in our world. You enter Harry’s world. You’ve never met a house-elf. You don’t know any in “real life.” But before you know it, you’re swept into the debate over house-elves, find yourself loving them and sympathizing with their plight, and you join Harry and Ron as they begin to understand the reasons for their oppression. Now, come back to your primary world; there are house-elves here, too. C.S. Lewis believed that in fairy tales, our imaginations allow us to grasp important truth about spiritual reality that our intellect alone, through reason and propositions, cannot fathom. Consider the long-standing, complicated issue of fate and free will, which has been endlessly debated in systematics and caused harsh and violent lines to be drawn between Christian groups. Now, watch the way events unfold in Oedipus Rex, or in MacBeth, or in Harry Potter, where free will and prophecy fulfillment interact and intersect and weave in and out of each other. The issue, in story form, produces mystery and wonder, whereas in our theological propositions, it tends to produce argument and frustration. Fairy tales give us imaginative access to truth in places our religion textbooks cannot go. Madeleine L’Engle is another writer whose literary “magic” got her in trouble in some circles. She criticized the idea that the “real world” was only found in “instructive books,” and wrote that “The world of fairy tale, fantasy, myth…is interested not in limited laboratory proofs but in truth.” She drives this point home when the divine teacher in A Wind in the Door challenges Meg’s idea that something is “just a dream” (and therefore not real) with the simple, repeated question: “What is real?” Proginoskes, the cherubim, follows up the Teacher’s question: “I’m real, and most earthlings can bear very little reality.” Rowling asks the same question and challenges the same laboratory-proof view of reality when Harry asks Dumbledore, “Is this real, or is it happening in my head?” And Dumbledore replies: “Of course it’s happening in your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it isn’t real?” I hope you’re beginning to see where I’m going with this. Reality is bigger and deeper and wider than what we can perceive with the senses, prove with testing and logic, and document with footnotes. Christians who write fairy tales have, for years, been protesting a wonder-less, nominalistic view of truth by writing fairy tales. L’Engle dismissed the idea that stories were just distraction, and argued that story was part of survival in this world. J.K. Rowling stands in this Coleridgean tradition that flows down through these five authors. She’s a unique and quirky addition, to be sure. But I’m glad she’s there. She re-ignited in me a love for these five, and I have a seven-volume stack of Coleridge on the shelf that I intend to learn well. All because of a boy wizard and some chocolate frogs.

Florida State University film student, Patrick Gines, approached me early in 2010 about writing a commissioned song for his film thesis project, When The Waters Rise. Randomly, I was scheduled to play a concert at his home church in Tallahassee just a few days after his initial email. (“Random” never seems quite an accurate enough word for these sorts of occurrences.) Patrick (director) and I met at the show where he handed me an early draft of his script. With another couple of Florida concerts that weekend, I read the script and, in a Sarasota hotel room, wrote “Don’t Hold Your Breath.” Returning to Florida a few months later, with only a brief window of time to shoot, Patrick and I (mostly Patrick) made a music video – my first ever – in which a homeless man named “David” unequivocally steals the show. DHYB will be on my new album, hopefully releasing in 2011. Until then, I hope you enjoy. [Song recorded & produced by Andrew Osenga] Don’t Hold Your Breath by Eric Peters from Patrick Gines on Vimeo.

Superman has the Fortress of Solitude. Batman has the Batcave. The Justice League has the Watchtower. Sherlock Holmes had 221b Baker Street. Bilbo had Bag End. Michael Card has Mole End. It’s my pleasure to announce to you, ladies and germs, the Rabbit Room finally has official headquarters. Quarters for our head. A hutch. A lair. (Can good guys have lairs?) Monday morning I stood in the new office with Pete Peterson, Thomas McKenzie, Jason Gray, Russ Ramsey and our friend Josh Petersen (who was taking the picture) and gave thanks to God for the place. What happens in a base of operations, you ask? Other than plotting to take over the world, it’s where we package and ship all the books, CDs, mugs, and Father Thomas bobblehead dolls. For years now, the base of operations has been in my manager’s basement. It’s been a good basement, as basements go, but even the best basement setup can’t compete with an actual above-ground office. Whoever filled orders had to step over boxes and hunch, not to mention the lack of sunlight makes one cranky (and pasty). If we needed to do any webwork or planning or brainstorming or writing it tended to be in whatever coffee shop we could find. As many of you know, we tried for several months a while back to open a bookstore/coffeehouse, but realized that it’s impossible right now. In the meantime we’ve been looking for a happy medium, a place between the basement and a bricks-and-mortar Rabbit Room store. Enter Ben Shive (a.k.a., one of my best compadres). Ben needed a bigger studio for all his production work. The Rabbit Room needed a lair. Yesterday I signed the lease on an office space that will house both. The Beehive (where Ben does his mad science) and the Rabbit Room will share a space right in the heart of Berry Hill, behind Baja Burrito and next to Sam & Zoe’s coffeehouse. It’s the neighborhood where our uber-talented friends Andrew Osenga, Mitch Dane, Shane Wilson, and a bunch of other great producers and musicians also work and play and eat burritos. It also happens to be about a five-minute drive from the Gullahorns, the Goodgames, the McKenzies, the Ramseys, and–well, you get the idea. It’s in a great spot. Ben will be making fine records in his part of the space and Pete will be in the other, working on things like Rabbit Room Store orders, the website, planning Hutchmoot 2011, and building Rabbit Room Press. (He’ll also probably write his next novel there.) People have asked me what this will allow the Rabbit Room to do that it wasn’t already doing. It’s a good question, and I don’t really know the answer. It’ll be a much better place to fill orders. It’ll be a good place to meet and discuss the overtaking of the world with Rabbity goodness. This phase of the Rabbit Room’s growth won’t include retail sales, so you won’t be able to swing by just yet (though we encourage you to dine at Baja Burrito as often as you pass through town, since food will taste better in the vicinity of our lair). The biggest thing for me is something I learned at Hutchmoot last year: there’s a big difference between existing online and existing in the real world. I don’t mean to overstate, but I think of it as a kind of incarnation. The thing takes on a new life. Years after this whole idea struck, I’m grateful to see it moving forward, building community, and shedding light. Thank you, dear readers, listeners, and encouragers, for being a part of this story. Sincerely, The Proprietor P.S. Shameless plea: If anyone lives in Nashville and has any cool furniture, we’re looking for some. You can see from the pictures that we don’t have much yet, besides the crate Pete’s sitting on. We humbly reserve the right to be picky, but if you have anything you’d like to donate (i.e., bookshelves, floor lamps, club chairs, love seat, coffee table, lava lamp, wooden desk, etc.), we’d be happy to take it off your hands. Shoot an email (and a picture of what you’ve got) to info@rabbitroom.com and we’ll let you know if it meets our impeccable standards.

Smack on the corner of the busiest street in Asheville, North Carolina, scrunched between a rickety old neighborhood and the black snake of the freeway is a health food store. I know this because Asheville is one of my favorite towns in the world and when, in my travels, I can snatch a day or two in its tree-guarded streets, I do. There is a gracefully decrepit old bed and breakfast that makes a cozy base for my many rambles up ivy-tangled streets. By dawn and dusk light, I prowl old roads and woodsy dead ends, steeping myself in the cool, mountain quiet that comes so rarely in my busy days. Several visits back, I got hungry one night after a long evening walk and forayed out in search of a homemade treat. The locals pointed me to a natural foods store for the best desserts around. I found the shop just before it closed, whizzed my car into a spot and was in a mighty hurry to snatch my snack. I walked through those doors, took one look, and stopped still. Weathered wood floors and bins piled with homegrown vegetables met my eyes. Bread in wicker baskets, and that fresh, growing smell of countless green things tumbled together greeted my nose. I walked slowly in, amidst flatbeds of seedlings and bins of grain hunkered next to stands of fresh, local fruit. I wanted to stop, right there in the entrance, to take all the toppling beauty in, for that store jolted my soul. Some sleeping part of my heart that once lived, and loved, much closer to earth and plant and sky came suddenly awake. Though I am thoroughly ensconced in the suburbs at present, I did spend quite a few of my young years as a country kid. My grandmother had two-hundred acres of scrubby, cedar pocked land which I spent countless hours exploring. There was a stubborn orchard that bore bright, stunted apples, and a beleaguered garden in which we daily battled ferocious bugs to cull a few, ruby-sheened tomatoes. But all of it was my delight, all of it a new world for my taking and my just-wakened little soul was keenly aware of every whisper and scent of the earth as it sidled up to greet me. The musty damp of a barn corner, the heady green scent of fresh-mown grass, the scratch of cedar, the fragile perch of a butterfly in my hand. I couldn’t have said it out right, but some hushed corner of my heart knew that my outdoor world was rife with wonder, with growth that never ceased, colors that waxed and waned, scents that came to me as if from another world. I hunger for that in my modern, streamlined life. Sometimes, amidst a day of car and concrete and computer, I yearn for earthiness with something akin to homesickness. One step though, in that Asheville store, and I was back in the tumbled, gorgeous world of my childhood, where every corner of creation whispered a secret I yearned to know. That night, I shook myself back to reality and unearthed a chocolate cake to rival few I’ve yet tasted, but I walked out slowly, sad to leave this small world of a place in which the wonder of my childhood greeted me at the door. The next day, on the way to the airport, I hurried in to grab a snack for the airplane ride home. I was looking for some vitamin or other when I suddenly turned round and saw… well. I saw something that grew a poem in my head right there. The sight I saw compounded all the old mystery I felt, all the remembered savor of earthy things into a few words of wonder. This is what came: Grocery store corners and neat row Lines and price-point signs For cabbage, cakes, and bursting Grapes in hurried hands of people In a speed of modern harvest for Their nightly feast, the slap-bang Grab of sustenance before they Sleep, I pitter past, list half done, Check one item more, I bend down, snatch my prize Stand up and Stop. One jar of red like cardinal’s wings One sapphire stack of cornflower Sheaves, and one jar labeled Horehound leaves. Caldendula, mint, cranberries; Holy basil, lemon thyme, All glassed and jarred in grinning Lines, three sudden shelves of rainbow Jars, I’m Eve, flashed back into a Garden world where leaves were healers, Roots were keepers of the dim, Sweet secret forces formed To spark our blood Alive.

One of the most meaningful moments at Hutchmoot 2010 happened before the event officially began. There we were, huddled in small, safe groups, smelling freshly delivered pizza, holding tightly to the backs of cushy chairs in order to avoid tripping over ourselves. The tension was palpable, at least it was for me. Many of us were meeting for the first time. Some of us had been driving in anticipation for most of the morning. Still others of us were wondering if anyone would notice our absence should we choose to go and hide in the bathroom. “Us” is the group of people, writers, speakers, cooks, organizers, and performers, who worked that weekend to make everything happen. I was scared and nervous. I wanted people to like me. I worried over what to wear, and what I would talk about, and if anyone would even talk to me. We had all looked forward to the day for so long, and it had finally come. Would everything work out like we had planned? Would our participants have a great time? Would it all turn out to be a colossal mistake? But most of all, this group of people who normally took its time when communicating, was now forced into impromptu, off the cuff, conversation. No deleting lines and backspacing over misspellings now. If you couldn’t think of the right words to say, you might have to sit silently, awkwardly. And your awkwardness might cause you to miss out on communicating face to face with the very people you’ve dreamed of speaking with for months. Thankfully, there was the aforementioned pizza to help break the ice. So we all loaded our plates and filled our cups with carbonated, caffeinated beverages–ice cold, liquid courage for this Christian conservative introvert. Finally, Andrew Peterson asked everyone to sit in a circle. He got out his guitar and we all held hands as he sang kumbayah and everything was magically different. We were all greatly at ease and ready for anything. No, that’s not what happened at all, though we did gather semi-circle-like on the comfy furniture. There was a lot of “no, you sit there” met with “please, I insist,” and then we took turns introducing ourselves to the group. I hated this part immensely, and felt like I could not have made a worse impression had I turned up in a three-piece power suit and six inch heels. But it’s all because I’d only been thinking about me, me, me. What will I say? How will I act? How will I be seen? And then, prompted by AP, Russ Ramsey put on his pastor hat and we donned our church faces as he told us a little story about how he had lost a dear friend earlier that week, about how he couldn’t stop thinking of his friend’s first moments in heaven. About how the black and white must have suddenly become color, how the spiritual, heavenly realm had turned into the real world and the two-dimensional stick man was transformed into undeniable 3-D. I’ll admit I got a little teary-eyed as the metaphor took on new meaning for this group of formerly square profile pictures lately changed into fleshy human shapes and steadily beating hearts. But what happened during the next twenty minutes is what truly changed my heart and my outlook for the weekend. We bowed our heads for prayer. Not everyone spoke aloud, but those who did openly shared their hearts with the group and with God. And the desires they expressed were not about how they wanted to say memorable things and teach great lessons on art. They simply prayed for the people who were on their way to this crazy event. They asked for humility and the ability to serve. They prayed for those who were coming to be blessed and comforted by the weekend, by their stay, and by God’s presence. They prayed that everyone would feel at home, that no one would be left out or feel small, and for the love of Jesus himself to be on display, predominant above everything else about to take place. Let Christ’s love be felt and shared in everything we do and say. In Jesus name we prayed, Amen. And in that holy time I saw inside the hearts of the men and women surrounding me, and I remembered the original reason I wanted to be a part of this community. It’s the reason I’ll keep writing as long as they’ll let me and the reason I’ll keep reading posts and buying products and attending events created by its many various members. That reason is love. Love of art, love of man, but most of all, love of Love himself. When the prayer was over, I got to go and sit behind the registration desk for a few hours as attendees trickled in and fragrances from the kitchen wafted up the stairs. Getting to talk one on one with Sarah Clarskon and Jennifer Trafton really helped me settle in behind the scenes of Hutchmoot, and though I continued to have awkward moments and intimidated feelings during the weekend, none of them were caused by anything outside my own noisy head. Everyone I encountered was gracious and understanding. It’s true, there are those of us wallflowers who will always hold some measure of reserve and unevenness, and it’s all too easy to let those internal storms ruin the sunshine of a beautiful afternoon. I can’t speak for the extroverts out there as to what steals the warmth of a room from them, but I believe the cure is the same for both groups: loving the person beside you. Long live the Rabbit Room, and may we all have many happy returns to Hutchmoot!

It’s a dangerous thing to be alive, where temptations to think we’re better than others are everywhere. Temptations to believe we deserve more, ubiquitous. Sinful pride is part of our awful inheritance, even when we’re depressed. Sometimes I think it’s all about me, that even my failures are more important than they really are, or ever could be. It’s the smoking gun of pretended sovereignty, of usurpation. I sigh, denied. And my sighs are the song of selfishness thwarted. Sighs pour forth from the fancy mouths of make believe monarchs, kings detecting treason in every ordinary frustration. Everyone is out to get the selfish man, because everything is about him. I sigh because I’m a thirty-four year old man and crying in public is bad P.R. If I sigh, a defeated, surrendering soul, I am blessed. If I sigh, a frustrated king, an idolater whose god just did nothing again, I am a moaning idiot. I am slapping back at the gift-hand of my Father. Who am I? Good question. It’s the only question and only the right answer will serve. Because from that answer I know my story and the danger then is in forgetting. We are skydivers all, but there is such a thing as a parachute. Remember? Sighs are so often the evidence of my forgetting. They are the heaving woes of wounded idols. They are the crying out for water now, bread now, a return to the slavery of Egypt now. But, though I am often a forgetter, I am never forgotten. That makes me happy. Don’t forget to remember who you are and remember not to forget it. And never never ever ever be redundant. Speaking of redundancy: When my brothers and I were kids, my Dad had one instruction when he dropped us off anywhere. He would always say “Don’t forget whose boys you are.” A good word. Whose child are you? The answer to that question, for those in Christ by grace, is a sigh of relief. Be relieved. Be happy. Sigh not so. Images from Alan Jacobs, The Gospel of Trees

The first music video from Jason Gray’s upcoming A Way to See In the Dark album just hit the web. Enjoy.

The Dream of the Rood (the Cross) is, according to The Norton Anthology of English Literature, “the finest of a rather large number of religious poems in Old English.” It is one of the oldest works of Old English surviving today. It was preserved in the “Vercelli Book” found in northern Italy in the 10th century, but may be much older. Its author is unknown, although scholars have often suggested either of two Anglo Saxon Christian poets: Cynewulf or Cædmon. The entire poem is about 1200 words, and was written in the alliterative style of Old English. The poem begins and ends with the story told by the dreamer; the central section is from the point-of-view of the Cross itself. The Dream of the Rood portrays powerful paradox. The Cross is a symbol both of shame and of glory. It is a place of defeat and victory. The Cross submits to God’s will — not bending or breaking, although it could have fallen and crushed the crucifiers — and is thus used to crucify Christ. The Rood suffers along with Jesus, feeling the nails pierce its cross-beam, being stained with blood, even feeling the mocking that was flung at Christ. The connections between the dreamer, the Cross, Christ himself, and ourselves are strongly felt in this poem. from The Dream of the Rood The choicest of visions I wish to tell, which came as a dream in middle-night, after voice-bearers lay at rest. It seemed that I saw a most wondrous tree born aloft, wound round by light, brightest of beams. All was that beacon sprinkled with gold. Gems stood fair at earth’s corners; there likewise five shone on the shoulder-span. All there beheld the Angel of God, fair through predestiny. Indeed, that was no wicked one’s gallows, but holy souls beheld it there, men over earth, and all this great creation. Wondrous that victory-beam—and I stained with sins, with wounds of disgrace. I saw glory’s tree honoured with trappings, shining with joys, decked with gold; gems had wrapped that forest tree worthily round. Yet through that gold I clearly perceived old strife of wretches, when first it began to bleed on its right side. With sorrows most troubled, I feared that fair sight. I saw that doom-beacon turn trappings and hews: sometimes with water wet, drenched with blood’s going; sometimes with jewels decked. But lying there long while, I, troubled, beheld the Healer’s tree, until I heard its fair voice. Then best wood spoke these words… The above translation is by Jonathan A. Glenn and may be viewed in its entirety here. Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Note: I read this last night at a February performance of Behold the Lamb of God at a conference for creative-types here in Nashville called Re:Create. It’s from the conclusion of a four-part series I wrote last year called “Money, Part 4: Little Things Matter“. Art, if it can be ascribed value, is most valuable when its beauty (and the beauty of the truth it tells) bewilders, confounds, defies evil itself; it does so by making what has been unmade; it subverts the spirit of the age; it mends the heart by whispering mysteries the mind alone can’t fathom; it fulfills its highest calling when into all the clamor of Hell it tells the unbearable, beautiful, truth that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. None of these songs and stories matter if the beauty they’re adding to isn’t the kind of beauty that redeems and reclaims. That doesn’t mean every song and every story has to be a sermon. Not at all! But the very existence of great stories and stirring music and good art is a sermon itself. That anyone at all in the world would set their sad heart and tired hands to working beauty out of chaos is a monument to Grace. It reminds us of light and high beauty, and it laments the world’s great sorrow. It gives the heart language to rejoice and language to mourn. Creation groans like a woman in labor? Even so. And we know every birth is a tight-wound cord of fear and joy, pain and pleasure, striving and surcease. Let those who can, tell that story. Let those in Christ whose hands paint worlds, whose tongues limn loveliness, whose ears hear astral strains–let them make, and make, and make. And let the made things adorn the dark and proclaim the coming Kingdom till the King himself is come.

Some months ago I had a friend redoing my basement after it flooded last May. During his time at my house he mentioned he had been designing the set for a movie being shot at Grace Chapel’s big old barn out back. He told me some of the plot line, which I found intriguing, being the me that I am, and I mentioned, off the cuff, that if they needed any music for it to let me know. It wasn’t long before my friend told me to come over and meet the folks shooting the movie. So I became involved. Never having done anything remotely like this, I had no boundaries or “ought-tos” in my head. I also had no idea of what to do except proceed. One of the things that helped me greatly was the time crunch. The film The Nothing was accepted for the Nashville Film Festival, which put my deadline at the morning of April 6th. We pulled an all-nighter and pushed through. From a human perspective, offering to do the music was a completely stupid thing to do on my part. With no training, no experience, I opened my big mouth and made my committal. I had my studio, and my instruments, but that was all; I was to make sounds that brought tension, fear, relief, hope, anger, sadness, redemption, and I had little idea how I was going to do it. The end result was that I learned something experientially; that in composition, as in any other area of music, art, or life, the best stuff happens when caution is thrown to the wind, rules are bent, and we refuse to listen to the voices in our heads saying, “It’ll never work!” or “What will so-and-so say?” We step off a cliff edge in faith knowing God will cause us to fly.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/TheNothing.mp3 From a spirit-view, this was the best thing I could have done for myself. It is easy to spin our wheels holding to old paradigms, other people’s perceptions of us, and especially our perceptions of other people’s perceptions of us. These manifestations of the false self tie us down, shut our mouths, and put the light of Christ in us under a bushel. In some areas of my life I’ve allowed this to happen, especially in the past few years. But none of that matters. In fact, nothing matters but faith expressing itself through love, utter reliance expressing itself as a wholehearted committal of one’s entire being to a particular project, a particular person, a particular God. We are to create as children create, taken up in the thing itself, not bothering about whether so-and-so will think it is good, burning with the fire of creation, the passion of purpose, the thrill of bringing an idea into manifested, tangible reality. I don’t mean simply creation of art. I mean any kind of creation – the creation of a marriage, of a family, of a job, of a friendship where only enemies had existed before. In the end doing this project was an eye-opener. I had real joy in the process, a spontaneous faithing that was nearly continuous, and some ridiculous ideas that actually worked. The Nothing premiered at the Nashville Film Festival April 14-15. It was a good test run. There’s still work to go on finishing details.

Mid-February morning, silent house, a steaming cup of fresh brewed coffee, and a rare quiet moment to myself in the stillness of the early hours. I need this moment. Peering through the blurry condensation on the kitchen window overlooking my lumpy and weed-riddled Nashville backyard, it is evident that my labor yesterday pruning low-hanging walnut, hackberry, and poplar branches successfully opened the understory, offering a newer, wider and brighter perspective on the whole. It is my hope that in doing so, adequate sunlight will at long last bathe the threadbare ground, offering what little grass is there the fighting chance to thicken, spread, even thrive. As a result of the low trimming, we were obliged to relocate bird feeders along with a tin-roof birdhouse of kitschy Elvis motif to alternate locales. Wanting to keep them as close in view as would be comfortable for the birds, if only for the gift of being able to casually witness their avian pecking, flitting, chirping, and occasional disagreements. These tiny, alert, and nimble reminders of living abound amid shared black-oil sunflower seed and suet offerings. Repositioning one feeder near its original hackberry perch just outside the back room window, we hung the tin-roof dwelling and a moldy suet feeder along the northwestern corner of our home within the forked boughs of a leafless crepe myrtle towering above a sleeping bed of perennials. The final feeder we hung in a young redbud on a branch admittedly far too flimsy, too near the ground, and much too easily accessible to pillaging squirrels and preying cats. A herd of Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, white-throats, cardinals, and the occasional lollygagging mockingbird, each in their naturally miraculous custom, have quickly ascertained this new location and source of food. This particular feeder has not been in use since we first moved into the house four years ago. It, like so much of natural creation, has been reclusive in hibernation, avoidance, and generalized hunkering down. How wildlife adjusts with such brisk seamlessness to the blunt, enigmatic realities of winter, to unrequested change, to honing in on new and plentiful sources of sustenance with such talent and determination remains a source of great wonder to me. My observation point this morning, a child’s wooden chair — short but sturdy, a veritable Lilliputian throne – accompanies the matching two-foot-tall multi-purpose table where my children eat, drink, spill, play Star Wars, color, sort beans, and carve Play-Doh. A giant in this seat, my knees uncomfortable at near chin level, I hunker down and peck away at vowels and consonants in an attempt to summon words out of the world. Parula blue skies overhead – a psychological balm during winter’s morose lordship – the sun’s dawning light bounds and multiplies off the neighbor’s already golden yellow exterior paint causing me to wince at unexpected brightness. Squinting my eyes, the crow’s feet gather at my temples. Winter’s slow but resistant recession has begun, and every part of me approves of the transformation. Robins know, too. They sing differently in this air. With more intent, their warbles cascade with less timidity, more gallantly, with greater vigor, more musically sweeping. They know. I listen. I myself become blurred, an unreasonable facsimile of myself beneath winter’s monochromatic gravity: graying eyes, dimming mind, exiled frustration, pent-up cabin fever, hands aching to labor, to feel soil within the creases of my palms, on fingertips and beneath nails once again; all tell-tale signs of my desire to undertake the creative act, to relocate wish and aspiration from the boughs of mere hope to that of deliverance. This longing to act, to construct, to build, to be in motion — even to fail miserably in the attempt — wells up in me, and the innate desire to work, to create, to bow before natural miracle, somehow resurrected and rekindled in a new locale among newfound sustenance, is a bounding source of bright illumination. I welcome the opportunity to wince at its presence, to relocate entombed ambitions and goals, to awaken from the slow pulse of hibernation, to exhume myself from the isolation of hunkering down, and at long last to listen, and to summon the world out of words.