Welcome To My Blog

I believe people change, and I believe life can get better. I have changed, slowly and with time, the way a tree grows by a river. I have a very intelligent and conservative friend who teaches at a local Bible college, and he believes the only thing that truly changes a person is God’s truth, that is, His Word and His working in our lives through the Holy Spirit. This makes a lot of sense to me, because the times in my life when I have been most happy haven’t been the times when I’ve had the most money or the most freedom or the most anything, but rather when I’ve been in love or in community or right with people. My friend at the Bible college believes the qualities that improve a person’s life are relational, relational to God and to the folks around us. This made a lot of sense, too, because when Jesus was walking around on earth He taught His disciples truths through experience, first telling them stories, then walking with them, then causing stuff to happen like a storm on the sea, then reiterating the idea He had taught them the day before. Even then [...]

Here is something I found to be true: you don’t start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath: I’ll tell you how the sun rose A ribbon at a time . . . It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and [...]