*Warning – some child abuse images are described in this post.

The 18-month-old wears a small hospital gown over his puffy diaper. His left eye is a greenish purple and a baseball-sized bump perches on the side of his head, just above a small square patch of white gauze. He sits quietly in the hospital nursery.

The young woman holds her hands out and the little boy reaches for her. She glances at the nurse, who nods in return, so the young woman picks up the little boy gingerly, handles him like an egg shell.

Her husband, who had waited at the door, walks forward quietly and joins the two new friends.

So this is what it means to be a foster parent, he thinks. When he looks at the boy’s head, the unexpected love he already feels mingles with anger and sadness. He puts his hand up on the boy’s hand where it rests on the young woman’s shoulder. The boy looks at him.

And the boy screams in terror. He fights to get away. Two nurses come running and the young woman carries the boy to the other side of the room. Her husband retreats into the hallway, shaken.

* * * * *

They take the boy home and the first time they change him they see the cigarette burns previously hidden by the diaper, a constellation of pain. They see additional bruises and begin to realize that he doesn’t hear so well out of his left ear.

That little boy falls in love with their other children and he cannot get enough attention from the young woman. He eats and he thrives and he grows. He even starts to walk, toddling along the coffee table, the arm chair. But every time the young man comes into the room or looks at him across the table, the boy trembles, cries out and then screams, frantic.

The baby can’t tell the difference between his biological father and this new, loving father. Maybe it’s that their voices sound the same or their faces look similar. Maybe it’s because they both have beards or short hair.

It’s understandable – the wounds were severe. The pain was real. The fear doesn’t evaporate.

So the young man waits. And he waits. And one day he comes into the room and the little boy is standing up, holding on to the side of the sofa. The little boy doesn’t cry, so the young man walks a little closer. He sits down beside the boy, and still there is no screaming, no trembling.

The young man puts his hand down on the sofa beside the toddler.

“Hey, little man,” he says quietly.

The toddler looks up at his face, then reaches over and grabs on to one of his fingers.

* * * * *

Don’t confuse your fathers. God is not the abusive one. He’s not the one telling you you’re not good enough. He’s not the one hurting you just for the fun of it.

He’s the kind voice, waiting.

She turned back when the angels said look ahead and every cell of the body that was woman and wife and mother hardened into crumbling salt. She became a gray and twisted pillar and soon she was wind-bitten and alone, for her husband could no sooner stay on these unpeopled flatlands with his motherless daughters than he could have convinced her not to leave some covetous or curious sliver of her heart behind in her homeland.

Whether you believe a God who hung the heavens can also breathe words unsullied through sinful man, or you believe that what we have now are just the poetic shards of some deeper truth, you might leave her tale inclined to avoid whatever it is that causes a body to be recast as salt, whether literally or metaphorically.

Don’t turn back. You’ve been called out of that wretched place, for the love of God; don’t turn back.

We are supposed to move forward with a good word for the lost and the broken and sometimes even for ourselves, hidden in our hearts as God’s grace-filled words are supposed to be—and well-hidden at that, as often as we choose our own words in their place. We are supposed to move forward and for God’s sake not turn back lest our moving becomes turning, becomes standing, becomes a cautionary tale, a ragged godforsaken pillar where once moved a pilgrim.

To Lot’s wife, salt was death, yet Mark records Christ exhorting his disciples: “Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another.” He refers to Leviticus, where salt indeed represents a kind of looking back, a remembrance of the covenant between God and his wayward people.

We are a backward-looking people, and what we look back to shapes where we are going. I am prone to look back on my best moments, or my sweet and secret sins, or my grievances, which is to say the worst moments of someone else. I am a writer and so I look back; I am a sinner and so I look back, at times with pleasure and others with shame and sometimes with both in equal measure.

I am inclined to say that looking back on what has brought me shame is unprofitable to my soul, that it ignores the forgiveness poured out atop Golgotha. I feel like I am supposed to say that because I’ve heard it said, but I think it is wrong because shame brings repentance and repentance is in short supply—in my life and in the life of the world.

Had Lot’s wife looked back with shame for how she’d embarrassed her husband with their neighbors, as the Midrash teaches, perhaps she would not have been turned to salt, but instead would have found flightier feet, racing past her man and her girls until she stood in the grassy hills gathered about the mountains into which they fled, laughing and encouraging them forward, unburdened precisely because she had looked back on her past and seen herself for what she had been, and therefore for what she was becoming. If salt is remembrance then we can all use salt, a reflavoring, a return to the vision of what we were fashioned to become.

“Have salt in yourselves, and have peace with one another.” They hold together, don’t they? Every time I have been at war with someone—every single time—I have had my own failings far from mind. It’s so much easier, after all, to be aggrieved by another’s failings when I’ve turned my back to my own.

Have remembrance, Christ says, and have peace. Remember what you have come from, then turn to the race set before you, and fly headlong into what you are becoming, into the life bought for you at great price, into the good works laid down at your feet when God knew you in your mother’s womb.

Remember and have peace. Remember—but don’t turn back.

Photo by kevin dooley, Creative Commons, via Flickr.

seth and titus

I was introduced to Seth Haines a year or two ago when I read a letter he wrote to his wife Amber. The whole escapade’s embarrassing, but a mutual friend invited me to a party at their house. I misunderstood instructions for finding the privy, and I landed in their bedroom. There on the bedside table was a large white envelope with ‘Amber’ scribbled across the front. I mean, if they didn’t want anyone reading their private correspondence, they wouldn’t leave it hanging about during a party, correct?

Alright, don’t look at me that way. I’ve never been invited to a party at their house (slightly bitter), and I did not nose my way into their space. However, the letters Seth wrote and published online had all the grit and honesty of lines he actually penned for the love of his life, not words he simply intended to use as a stringer, a ruse to pimp up traffic for his site. In other words, it struck me that Seth wrote to Amber without constantly looking over his shoulder to make sure we were watching.

I read the letters, and I showed one to Miska. “This is my kind of guy,” I said. And now that I know Seth a bit, my suspicions have been confirmed.

Seth is lover to Amber and (I’m willing to wager a whole lot on this one) hero to Isaac, Jude, Ian and Titus. He hails from Shreveport, Louisiana where his grandfather insisted that a swill of Gordon’s Gin would keep the mosquitoes away. If you’ve spent much time in the bayou, you understand that this is a concern. Seth’s affinity for cajun food stuck, but not the Geauxx Tiger loyalty. Seth went to law school at the University of Arkansas and threw down roots in Fayetteville, so he’s gone local and taken up the Pig Sooie chant. As a native Texan who is still loyal to the old Southwest Conference, I can’t tell you how much this Sooie fact pains me. If I ever see him in one of those Razorback hats with the huge snouts, I will reconsider my affirmation for his character and his writing. However, my wife is from Arkansas, so I’ve already acquired sufficient coping mechanisms.

Most of you will obviously know Seth as a writer. He is the editor of Deeper Church, but he is also a poet who has a steady gig with Tweatspeak Poetry. His prose finds its way here as well as on his own site. What I appreciate most about Seth is that he doesn’t write generally – but particularly. Good sentences alone are not enough to make truly potent and lasting writing. We need sentences that help us see the ground and the sky and the person next to us (not to mention the person inside us) more clearly. Seth does that. Like this:

My grandparents on my mother’s side where Episcopalian. The Mouks, George and Carol, are interred in St. Thomas Episcopal on the bayou. It’s a quiet church, small, community based. On Sunday mornings, sometimes the mallards splash down on the bayou backdrop as the bells usher the congregants in. My Grandfather Mouk wouldn’t have missed a Sunday service for the world, especially in his latter days. He’d sing the hymns, voice quavering, loud. My grandfather Mouk held my grandmother Mouk until the cancer did her in. He had a strong will, too, though maybe it was made of different stuff than steel.

See what I mean?

I mentioned law school earlier. Seth’s day job doesn’t center on any of these fine talents. Rather, Seth pays the bills in the legal profession. He passes out cards where a J.D. hangs at the end of his name. Isn’t that cool? Since I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, I know something about lawyers who crank out the stories. Our local boy John Grisham seems to have made it go. Haines and Grisham, kind of sounds like a country duo doesn’t it?

Speaking of music, could you believe that Seth’s first artistic love may actually be music? Like, real music. I’ve heard his stuff. The man can play. He can even beatbox. A few weeks ago, he offered me a riff over the phone, and I was transported back to the 80′s. Seth’s eclectic musical tastes range from Simon and Garfunkel to Rich Mullins to Blue Oyster Cult. The fellow will simply not stay in one place for too long.

I don’t know what to do with a gent who’s got all this talent bottled up in one body. It makes me want to throw up my hands and just give up. I do know, however, what Seth’s doing with all this creative verve – he’s giving it away. And he’s giving it away beautifully. We’re all better for the gift.

This word ‘gift’ reminds me of one last thing I must say. What strikes me most about Seth is his generosity. In a narcissistic media world (and writing world), Seth truly intends to help others expand their voice. When everyone seems to be fighting tooth-n-nail to hold their space, Seth keeps giving space away. That all by itself would be reason enough to sit up straight and pay attention when Seth has something to say.

“’I will not take you out of the world.’ There are enormous implications here that I can so easily neglect. Christ was a carpenter for most of his life, and those years were not wasted ones…. Christianity does not isolate the sacred from the secular. Not only are material things good in themselves, they are also signs of God’s loving attention, and they can, if we let them, open up a way to him.”

 -Esther de Waal, Living with Contradiction

My son stands outside his Sunday School class, a gym sectioned off into age groups by carpeted dividers. He’s in a line with all the four-year-olds. He’s got his classic moves going on so as to impress the “ladies” in line beside him. These moves include hitting himself in the head and making an “Oomph!” noise, then waving his arms in a circle, going “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Then he smiles as if to say, I’m that awesome, girls. It comes naturally.

His teacher asks him to be calm as he comes to the front of the line. “August,” she says, “Are you ready to worship God?”

He shakes his head yes. “Okay, you can go sit in the circle.”

And he walks to the circle where three boys are whispering various forms of “poop” to each other and cackling and two girls are digging in the carpet strands for treasures.

The teacher rolls out the sand table and tells a story about deserts and God’s people and how God loved them and made a way. At the end, the children are invited to wonder out loud about the story. They say, “I like to play with sand at the park” or sometimes they say nothing.

This is how four-year-olds worship. Yes, I said worship.

*

I pray big things for my sons. I pray for gentle spirits and for courage. I pray they will be men of conviction and mercy, justice and forgiveness. I pray they will grow to love the things that God loves.

And sometimes we have tender discussions about faith. We talk about God giving us new, soft hearts, especially on days when our hard hearts seem to be running the show. We talk about taking care of people who need care the most.

But most of my living with my boys is not “spiritual,” it’s physical. I am wiping snot. I am wiping rear ends. I am chopping vegetables; I am singing the praises of vegetables to the child who refuses to try new things. I am holding tools in my hands. I am tending ouchies. I am packing bags and packing snacks and packing my pockets with tissues because someone always has a cold. I am tying shoes and buckling seat belts.

And it is holy work. Yes, I said holy.

*

This Sunday begins the season of Pentecost in the Church calendar. Pentecost has been on my mind lately. On Sunday we celebrate Christ’s promise being a true one. He said he would send a Helper and he did. He said God’s Spirit would fall on us, and it did.

There is much drama in the Pentecost story. Tongues loosened, gospel preached with reckless courage and received the same way. Wild comings to Jesus and all those souls folded in to something so profound it was incomprehensible. It still is.

Sometimes I long for that sort of wild Holy Spirit wind to blow firey into my small life: to light the ordinary and bring fearsome healing to the world around me.

Sometimes I lament the whole thing: My lack of spiritual drama. My small faithful moments and my small weak-willed faith.

And then I remember that there is no distinction in this sacred, this secular. Not really. There is a Holy Spirit renewing all of it, restoring the very foundations of the physical world. The Spirit has come and it has made all the beautiful things true. It is making all the true things beautiful. The Spirit has come to the physical world and the work of God is bright around us.

So the matted man who paces daily beside his packed red shopping cart next to the Walgreens, talking to the air but always looking right in my eyes, that man stands on holy ground at the corner of 9^th and Clement. Will I bow before the Lord who made him? Will I recognize the face of Christ?

And the little boy crying for me to wipe the snot that has coated his lips, the boy wrecked without my hand to bring him life and hope and a clean face, his are the lips of Jesus.

And these groceries in my hands. These strawberries are signs of a good God, a God at work in the land and in the Church: planting, tending, creating, harvesting.

It is all Spirit work.

We in the Church are all worshippers, distracted by one another, distracted by ourselves. Digging in the carpet for treasures, guffawing at our own dorky slapstick. And yet, God says, “Church, are you ready to worship?”

And here we are in physical chairs holding physical books, chatting over physical donuts after the service. And that is when the Spirit breaks through. At our most ordinary, most human, most simplistic, there is power.

Yes, I said power.

Image Credit: Sivesh Kumar, Flickr

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.² He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes^[a] so that it will be even more fruitful.”     John 15:1-2

I shifted with discomfort beneath his gaze. I wanted to avert my eyes but they kept drawing me in. His words burned, seared the gardens I had slowly built with flowering pleasantries. I wanted friends and family to be comfortable strolling down soft lit paths of grace and acceptance. “Come, sit next to me. I’d love to hear your story,” I’d say to my visitors. Sometimes it would be just that, I’d listen, making myself available. Other times I’d hear a missed beat in their flowing verse that would cause me to pause, but I’d just pat their hand and tell them to go on. My garden stayed manicured trim and flowered with abundant varieties of fragrant herbs like basil, lemon thyme and rosemary shrubs. The paths were bordered by gentle waving lavender and heather. It was pretty, peaceful. I was being a friend, tending this garden so my guests would be comfortable, not feel judged, safe to come as they are.

The thing is, most times, they left just as they had come.

This revelation blew into my home this week, landed on my front door through the life of someone very close to me. Often I have found myself saying, “I’d rather err on the side of grace in all things.” I feel the concrete swaying like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

It’s easier to sit on the side lines of life.

Witnessing.

There are plenty of soap boxes I’m familiar with, some that have my footprint worn into their splintered tops.

These boxes I know.

I teach.

I live by their tenets; their structure has built my foundation.

Others I’ve tiptoed around watching as others bang their gavels upon them, dig them deep into the earth and make them the high place on which to view their world.

I avoid them.

I don’t want the association. I don’t want my God to be associated. Maybe I don’t want to see Him as a judge.

I like the Jesus that went to the cross and in His mercy took the sin and suffering with him. His gentle eyes that cried when He witnessed pain, that sparkled when the lame walked. The God that holds my hand to cross a busy, bustling, road of life and who will carry me if I have nothing left to give. His grace is a flood that has washed over me time and time again, healing, erasing, nurturing, planting, sewing that garden.

His gaze turns to my prize rose bush. With pruners in hand, He begins to make deep, harsh cuts into the green, thick stems. With precision, He removes a strong limb, with a half a dozen blooms, that started to grow slightly to the center of the plant. “This one is headed in the wrong direction.” Another has just a spot of black, working His way back inches from the spot, He makes another permanent snip. I’d spent so much time tending this beauty and I thought the aromatic, spicy scent of the deep crimson blooms stood as a testament to my craft. My craft.

He stepped back after finishing and turned to me.

His eyes told me all I needed to know.

Granted, was it said in an awkward, half-joking way, but it was the half that wasn’t a joke that hit home.

That sort of thing has a way of sticking with you.

It was years and years ago. I had just started Bible college and was going through the early stages of making my faith my own. The end times had recently become an important issue for me.

At this point you are probably picturing me drawing elaborate charts and connecting everything I watched on the news to Biblical prophecy.

But, actually, the end times had become important to me because they were the crack in the foundation. The more I studied, the less plausible the things I had been taught about Christ’s return, and the rapture, and the tribulation began to appear. This mattered because, for me, it set a question mark against everything else.

Not that the church I was attending was outwardly obsessed with the second coming. It was brought up in the pulpit from time to time, but I do not remember it being the main theme of many sermons. However, it permeated our songs, and prayers, and casual off hand comments.

We knew what the end held, and least in broad strokes, and found little reason to debate it. We could rest safe in the knowledge that the Bible was quite clear about these things, as long as you just read it “literally” and did not let a tradition get in the way.

Then I read it literally, without a tradition (or, rather, with a tradition that does not think of itself as one), and my certainty disappeared. As it turns out, even playing by the rules of that game, what I had believed about the end seemed full of holes.

I felt mislead, and confused, and unsure of how many other parts of my faith were about to crumble. [Plenty, but that wouldn’t be the end of that story]

In retrospect my reaction left something to be desired. I brought my questions to my pastor, felt highly dissatisfied with the answers he offered, and came back with a twenty page research paper attempting to disprove a pre-tribulational rapture.  

That could have gone better.

_________

If you had asked me back then why the end times mattered so much to me that I would write a twenty page paper on it, I would probably have said something about getting my theology right and taking the Bible seriously.

But looking back I think there was a deeper reason my questions about the rapture turned into a full blown crisis of faith.

When I started asking those questions it was as if someone had taken away the end of the Story.

In the process, I was forced to confront all the ways my view of the end fit terribly as the climax to the long narrative of God’s saving work in the world.

I was learning about a God who made this world and called it good, and then, when things went wrong, set in motion a plan to set all things to rights. 

I was reading about Jesus’ command to turn the other cheek, about the Messiah who refused to use violence to defeat Israel’s oppressors, about the Lamb that was slain and somehow gained victory through death and resurrection.

And, as an ending to that story, this other story about escape from this world, and Jesus coming back to claim his victory through violence, it fell short in so many ways.

Could I have articulated it that way at first? I doubt it, but I needed to go through the long and messy process of tearing down and building back up. I needed to question, and doubt, and struggle. I needed to come to a place where I could ask what a fitting end to this beautiful story might look like, before I could start to hear other voices who would eventually inform the way I think of the second Advent.

_________

Today I cannot imagine writing a twenty page paper about the rapture, but I still think that what we believe about the end of the Story is incredibly important. I just don’t think that playing the my passage vs. your passage game is a productive way to sort it out.

Instead, I simply want to leave you with a question. When you contemplate the beautiful, grace-filled, startling narrative of God’s work in the world, what sort of ending would be fitting as the climax to such a story?

_________

If you are interested in reading further, here are some books that I found to be helpful in my journey.

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Michael Gorman, Reading Revelation Responsibly

Andrew Perriman, The Coming of the Son of Man

J. Nelson Kraybill, Apocalypse and Allegiance

David Neville, A Peaceable Hope

I live in the suburbs now, though, and shrubbery is the tree, flower, and vegetable of choice in a dry climate with water shortages.

This morning I stand in front of our dining room window and see the bush outside has grown more than halfway up the window. A smart, albeit aesthetically challenged, architect designed our home—all but two of our windows face north, so sunshine is a commodity and shrubbery is buying us out. Armed with a cup of coffee in one hand and a handheld trimmer meant to cut the stems of flower bunches, I go straight Edward Scissorhands on that bush.

I don’t know anything about trimming shrubs, but I know how to cut a branch and make a straight line, so I do my best.

In Texas some plants stay green all year long and the only way to know new life has come is the differentiation of greens. This bush was dark green all over with fresh cowlicks of bright yellow gold-green: the new growth. These must go.

Yesterday I cut something beautiful off of my life. I stood there and decided that sunshine was more important than the wildness of growth that I love. I abhor weeds, but I love green, and I confess, I leave what is green and good growing far longer than it should. I leave it because how can what seems so good be so bad?

I have been sitting deep in the book of Hebrews for a few months now, thinking about men and women who never saw what was promised—even though they spilled and wasted their lives full out, full on for the hope of glory. I have been thinking about setting aside sins and weights, shrubs that shield from sunlight and thorns that tear us from truth. I have been thinking about what it means to set my eyes on Jesus, who authored and finishes this whole story in which I live—and how sometimes the story He tells and the story I want Him to tell are so very different.

This morning I trim our shrub and I think about what it means to cut off what seems good for the hope of something better.

As each fresh, green-yellow shoot falls to the ground I feel my heart constrict and my eyes fill with tears. They will die there, apart from the whole, apart from the root. I remind myself in their death they make room for a fuller shrub, a kaleidoscope of greens.

I stand back to admire my work, but the truth is without a hedge-trimmer my lines are crooked, there are no flat lines, no tea-parties to be had on the table-top of this shrub.

Inside, though, a full line of sunlight falls across the back of a chair at the table. I sit and finished my coffee.

~ Jim Harrison

A friend asked how I was doing after returning home from Brennan Manning’s funeral. I said Triste. Sad.

I know St. Paul proclaimed O death, where is thy sting? but there are many days when I feel uncle Pauley was a complete nutter. Just admit it, apostle formerly known as Saul – death stings, hurts, reaches up under your breastbone and yanks your heart chain a good one. Such a confession doesn’t mean you’ve gone soft on Easter or gotten muddled in your head concerning those who’ve fallen asleep. As best I can tell it means you’re still here but someone you love is gone, not gone like they went to Aspen for the weekend, but gone as in they’re walking the ghost road gone. Dead’n’gone.

Now you may have buttered Mufasa’s circle of life and swallowed it whole, but from the porch I’m sitting on death is against the grain. I don’t like it. Clods are washed away from the main and we’re left here diminished. Triste. Sad. It is now acceptable in the Church to say I’m a believer but I doubt. I’m thankful for this, although it does reveal a bit of historical amnesia. But I’m still grateful for the reality. Maybe one of these days in the Church it’ll be acceptable to say I’m a believer but I’m sad. I’m not talking Eeyore-sad, where I’m nothing but a barely moving mass of mope, but more Don Quixote-sad, still itchin’ to fight windmills but faced with a woeful countenance. I find this to be dangerously close to Jesus-sad, snorting like a horse (wept) at the absence of his friend Lazarus. There, that’s what I’m talking about: Man of Sorrows-sad. 

I wish I could don black, draw the curtains, and grieve for a season, but that was for another era and even then I’m not sure how many people really did that. No, I’ve jumped back in the land of the living, the undulating terrain of teenage kids and manuscripts desperate for editing and watching this season of Mad Men with my wife. But I’m aware that an ache that was barely an ember in my 20s is now a 40something flame as high school classmates and grandparents and friends have died. Death. The thief.

And now Brennan. Am I glad he’s not suffering any longer? You bet your sweet ragamuffin I am. Do I feel shaky though, knowing he’s not in his little room up there on the Jersey coast trying every day to let God love him? Yes I do.

My name is John. I’m a believer. And I am sad, taking shaky steps to this downward dance.

Some have said Oh just think, Brennan Manning is now skipping around heaven, hand in hand with his Abba, laughing like a little kid. I don’t know about that. Maybe. I rather think he’s walking around speechless, with tears running down his cheeks, thinking to himself Its so beautiful. And the good God who knows our every thought smiles and says to him Yes, Brennan, everything you preached is true.

Therefore, comfort one another with these words.

Revival was the thing whispered when I sat in pews as little girl. When we prayed for God to return to the land, to our schools, to the US of A {as if he’d abandoned us already} we asked for revival.

Revival was the thing whispered in prayers as we spoke in tongues. In the middle years we went to charismatic church and revival was on everyone’s lips. Oh Lord, bring revival! We prayed over and over again.

Revival.

Revival.

It was as far in the future as the second coming of Christ.

In my mind I thought revival would mean scores of people either flooding the churches every Sunday or later I wondered if revival meant millions speaking in tongues and falling on the floor with holy laughter. In my head I had created the idea of “revival” to mean “repentance.”

All the drunks would stop drinking.

All the promiscuous people would stop having sex.

All the fathers would return to their families.

All the kids would begin to obey their parents.

But what the word revival really means is living. It’s awakening. It’s a restoration to life of something that was once dead.

And as I get older and I see the Church grow into a depth of beauty I see a moving away from isolation and a movement toward community. I see people meeting in homes and opening not just their tables but their hearts to others.

They are opening their hands and their pocketbooks to the needy and their empty bedrooms to children who need homes.

And then I whisper to myself: Is this the revival we prayed for?

Our hearts have been awoken to the needs of the world and it goes beyond simple awareness — it has turned into action. Is this wide call to the gospel (to care for the widows and orphans) the revival we whispered about in the charismatic pews?

Here is the beauty of it: When the church comes comes out of her front door and into the world, when she opens her doors to invite the rest of humanity in, when she opens her heart to true community, that is revival.

When the church finally feels comfortable in her skin that she can love Jesus and love others at the same time, this is revival.

When we see the orphan care crisis in it’s death throes and the world slavery at its end, this is revival.

When we see Christ-followers opening their homes regularly and coming outside the walls of their church, this is revival.

Have you felt an “awakening” lately? Do you have hope for the church?

We’re continuing our series of spotlights on Deeper Church contributors. Today it’s my privilege to “introduce” you all to Timothy Willard (though I expect many of you know him already).

For the time being, Tim lives in Atlanta with his wife and three young daughters, though he and his family will be skipping over the pond come fall, so he can pursue a Ph.D. in Theology at King’s College, London. (Am I the only one feeling positively green?)

Tim is a freelance writer and editor and the author most recently of Veneer: Living Deeply in a Surface Society. He also serves as the chaplain for Praxis, an organization that supports and mentors entrepreneurs who are compelled by their faith to advance the common good. It’s also common knowledge that he absolutely, totally, unequivocally hates –ly words.

I caught up with him over Facebook and asked him a few questions about his work and his studies.

What do you do as the chaplain for Praxis?

I am one of the core mentors of the program, except I don’t give advice on business or strategy matters. Rather, I lead morning devotionals. I focus these on elements of biblical leadership, issues pertaining to work/life balance, and what it looks like to pursue an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.

I also meet with the fellows one-on-one. These rich times allow us to build relational trust and share our lives in real ways—outside of the entrepreneurial world. We may talk about family, vision and what it might look like to incorporate certain spiritual disciplines.

I also offer a writing element via sporadic emails of challenge and encouragement. And, to round out my responsibilities, I am also the van driver to our dinner outings. [smirk]

You also help other authors write books. What does that mean, exactly?

I have helped authors edit their manuscripts. I also do a lot of book proposals—helping authors narrow and sharpen their ideas into book proposals for publishers. Most of the projects I write on are collaborative efforts where I do some co-writing, coaching, rewriting and concepting.

Tell me more about your work in your favorite genres. What creative nonfiction projects do you have up your sleeve? What about the fantasy fiction?

I’m working on what some would deem a creative non-fiction book right now on the subject of belief. It makes me tired just talking about this project, but it also excites me when I think about weaving strands of narrative into an epiphanic moment.

The fiction book is in the young adult category, so my target audience is 12-18 year-olds. But we all know that age range is bologny. We’re all still reading Narnia books, and when do we ever really finish reading Tolkien? The book is titled The Fire Blossom: Rise of Avian. It’s a coming of age epic fantasy where an orphaned prince finds himself on a journey to retrieve the magic of the Fire Blossom. His adventure forces him to pick between avenging his family and giving the ultimate sacrifice in order to repeal a great evil invading the land.

Why do you hate “-ly” words? I think they’re lovely.

“-ly” words are gross. They’re extraneous encumbrances. Of course I’m being a bit extreme because it’s fun. I can’t tell you how many people email or text me and say they’re forever ruined with “-ly” words. Now that it’s mentioned, you will always be aware of those hideous creatures littering your prose.

Years ago, after reading On Writing Well by William Zinsser, I gave up “-ly” words because he made such a strong case for how they weaken your writing. If you evaluate each “-ly” word, you can almost always conclude that it doesn’t need to be there. Not all, mind you, but most.

Stephen King, in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, holds to a similar view, but King was influence by Strunk. “-ly” words are like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Sure, you can put it on, but you must know how much the neighbors murmur and whisper and make fun of you for using it.

You mentioned awhile back on an ADC thread that you’ll soon be moving to London to study with Alister McGrath. What prompted this decision?

Last summer I was accepted into the DMin program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary to study spiritual formation. At the last minute, however, I pulled out of the cohort because it was just bad timing. We were about to welcome our third little pixie (girl) into the world and the thought of more school made my wife weary. Who can blame her? I was tired, too.

The day after I made my exit official, I happened to be researching for my next book with Jason Locy, The Brilliance: Finding Beauty in the Shadows of Life (Thomas Nelson). My search in the natural theology field landed me upon Alister McGrath’s home page. He was accepting PhD proposals specifically on the worlds of C.S. Lewis.

Jason and I had been studying beauty and I loved the books we were finding and discussing. My heart leapt into my throat, which I always interpret as the Holy Spirit, unless I’ve just eaten tacos, and so I emailed Professor McGrath with a general inquiry. Long story, short: after two months of emails and formulating a viable dissertation proposal, he accepted it. I then had to apply to the school, King’s College, London. I was accepted last September.

Throughout the process my wife and I kept asking, “If I get accepted, how will we do this?” Well, even as I write this it’s looking like our house is going to be sold by July and we’ll make the move to London in September—though we’ll be living in the Oxford area.

Professor McGrath moved from Oxford to King’s in 2008, though he still holds a research position at Oxford and is involved in the well-known apologetics track there. I will be studying for the PhD in Theology. My working topic is: C.S. Lewis’s contribution to natural theology via his literary use of imagination and beauty as apologetic.

What I love about this topic and why I think it’s so relevant in today’s popular culture is because it offers Christians a way to offer a supposal. We experience a kind of longing when we observe or experience something beautiful. Lewis says that longing is for the thing behind the thing—and that thing is God. Suppose there is a God, wouldn’t it make sense that he is what our hearts long for when we hear a symphony play or view the sunset? Everyone experiences beauty, but how cool would it be to work on a theology of beauty that welcomed those on the fringe of belief into a dialogue about its origin?

If you don’t yet subscribe to Tim’s blog series (there’s one on prayer, which I subscribed to because this is my year of prayer, and one on pipes, which I subscribed to because British academics are way cool), I’d encourage you to do so. At the very least, come fall, you’ll get to live vicariously in Oxford.