On Magnets

Hey, check out these cool magnets my girlfriend got for me:

I'm going to make so many poems, and I'll totally let anyone read them. In fact, I'll probably start another creative writing tumblr devoted to pictures like the one above, though with the words slightly more carefully arranged.

On Ending

Today was the first rehearsal for The Importance of Being Ernest in which I have been cast. It will be my final production in college. This department has been one of the chief joys of my undergraduate experience, and already I feel myself slowly detaching from it. I feel an incredible momentum pressing behind me, and there is no telling what effect it will have as it carries me along through the next month.

Should be exciting.

On Stories

I have long held the assurance from God that he was going to use my writing in some manner, though he has left it foggy exactly how. I have done my best to trust him in that, and done fairly well on the whole. However, I have left everything up to him to accomplish it. Lately, God has been revealing to me more and more how he wants to work with those who follow him. I have come to the realization that it is not enough to trust that God will use my writing. I need to work at including him in my writing process, seeking his words.

For a class I am taking called Evangelism and Discipleship, one of our assignments was to come up with a rule of life: a series of disciplines for our own lives as an act of seeking God. In consequence of what I had been learning from God, I decided to augment my daily scripture reading by freewriting afterwords. This has been incredibly rewarding. It gives me a large part of what I used to get from writing a poem every day without the detriment to my craft: catharsis, a burst of creativity, a place to spill some thoughts and reflections. I have been pleased with some of the ideas that are coming from my freewrites and have developed some stories out of them.

A good friend of mine suggested that I post one of these stories on my blog, and I decided to take her advice, so here is one of my recent stories inspired by my reading"

I looked out the window and saw the sun low in the sky. Still, I probably had a whole hour of daylight left before it got dark and lamps were lit. I had a whole hour left to work. I felt a hand on my shoulder. Rebekah.

"What are you writing now?" she asked.

"Still working on my history."

"Still?"

I nodded.

"How long are you planning to work on this?"

It was a tricky question. Between work and sunset every day time was short, and I could not rush. I could not hurry. This was careful work--precise work. It would likely take several more weeks before I found time enough to finish entirely, perhaps as long as a year. "As long as it takes" I answered.

She was silent for a moment stroking my back gently as my pen gently stroked the parchment. "I remember when you were writing about Ahab and Jehoshaphat," she said. "You spent a couple months on them. You have not been writing less and less about each king since then."

She was right. I had found fewer things to say about the subsequent kings. I didn't know if their reigns were really less eventful or if I was beginning to lose interest in my project as it dragged on. I hoped it was the former.

"Why are you doing this?" Rebekah asked.

I stopped. It was a simple question, yet monumental in what it asked. I had asked my self the same thing countless times, and I had come up with only one real answer. "Because," I said, "people need to know these stories. They need to be written down."

"They are already written down," she retorted.

"Yes," I admitted. "They are written in the annals. But no one reads those."

"You do."

"No one except me then," I said, shrugging. "The annals are tedious and dull court records, and if you get caught up on all the meaningless details, you miss the real story."

"Which is?"

I thought for a moment. I could spend hours answering her question, but I didn't have that kind of time--not if I wanted to finish writing about the reign of Pekah of Israel before darkness fell. I looked for words to sum up what had driven me all these months and I could find only one answer. "The grace of God," I said.

"What?" she asked, somewhat shocked. "Israel has been destroyed and Judah reduced to a tributary of Babylon. Where is the grace of God in that?"

Her words were harsh and bordered on blasphemy, but I understood the pain behind them. Everyone in Judah did. The whole nation was asking God--the God we had long ignored--to rescue us, to redeem his chosen people, but he was silent. Or perhaps we had forgotten how to hear him.

"God was so merciful for so long," I told her. The law warned what the result of disobedience would be, and yet he delayed punishment for hundreds of years. he was giving us a chance, hundreds of chances. Don't you see? In spite of all our unfaithfulness, he had not abandoned us, and through all his prophets he was still reaching out to us, hoping we would turn to him. That is the story that must be told."

She was silent for a long time, taking in what I had said. She was my wife, but even she had never heard the full reasoning behind why I was writing my history. "What about now?" she asked.

"What?"

"What about now? Has God finally given up on us?"

"I don't think so," I said. "After all, he's finally got our attention."

On Art

All great art is a reaching out after the eternally divine.