Going public

Back in the day--over 30 years ago now--my friends and I would ask each other, "If you could do any kind of work, what would it be?" My answer every time was, "I'd be a writer." Not just any kind of writer, I always explained, but a writer of essays. A towering literary hero to me then (and now) was C.S. Lewis, and I longed to be like him---profound and poignant and masterful in expressing the struggles and glories of living out his faith in Jesus Christ.

Lewis himself gave me the words, through a character in Till We Have Faces, to express what I longed for as a writer:

...to say the very thing you mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean, that's the whole art and joy of words.

Yes, said my fervent heart, yes, that's it! To say the very thing I mean---that's what God must want me to do for my life's work!! But somehow, my very longing became the obstacle that kept me from writing. If you believe, as I did, that any thought worth sharing with the world has to be a profound one, then "to say the very thing you mean" requires that your writings also be profound. Every writing.

I hardly ever wrote letters to my friends (back then that's what we did to communicate with people far away), because each letter was a laborious exercise in deep thinking and the most careful choosing of words. By the time I was in college I was excruciatingly concerned with saying the very thing I meant, and the worst possible scenario was when I was writing a paper on a topic I related to personally---say, for instance, comparing St. Paul and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in their treatments of the dialectical nature of faith (what can I say? I was a Religious Studies major!). I remember to this day the agonizing hours I spent editing and re-editing each "profound" sentence. It's as if I was bound by chains, forced by my own longing to be the operator of some infernal machine: must say.... the very thing...I mean....must say....the very thing...

I've decided it's time to drop the last of those chains. The God who saved me 30+ years ago from self-worship has also spent those decades healing me from self-importance. It's time to thank him publicly by responding to His eternal "yes"---His unconditional love and kindness---with a "yes" of my own. So I'm going to write about faith and hope and transformation and what it means, in my life, to choose His life and truth and way.

Whether you find me "profound" in my writing is--truly!--of no consequence. I'd prefer that, of course, but my commitment to these pages is about my commitment to Him. If my writing is imperfect then it's simply reflecting who I am. God still says yes to me in my mess, and I will honor Him with my heart and mind and soul and strength--even if I don't manage, ever, to say the very thing I mean...