I believe in dirt and diamonds, hope and heartache, grammar and grace. I believe in a world that is colorful, complex, and dangerous. I believe in eternity, friendship, photosynthesis, and other mysteries. I believe there is deep meaning at the bottom of things, and I believe in a God who holds it all together.
I also believe that there is wonder in words and beauty in language, and that what is wonderful and beautiful deserves to be shared and celebrated. This blog is intended to be a daily ration of these random little bits of wisdom and wonder that I’ve found tucked away in the corners of books, album liner notes, and other unlikely places. These are the sentences that get underlined, fragmented thoughts with a mysterious power, lyrics that stick in your heart and glow with a curious warmth.
I would echo the words of a fellow blogger:
I wish some of these [things] could appear in a blog. Not in their entirety even, but as fragments, the best of them somehow picked out by someone wise, like the stammerings of all of us who cannot quite speak it whole and right. It is thus too with theatre reviews: most of the time I will never get to the production and all I read is a cursory summary of the critic’s judgment rushed out to meet a deadline. What I really need to read about are those one or two little moments, even in an average performance, when something magical happened. I want those small transient fragments of life captured, the lines quoted, the action that made them live described.
So here is my proposal: blogs to serve as the back-up of mankind, our rough drafts never completed, the store of what’s saved. That’s what we should use them for: the little bits and pieces that won’t find a place for themselves in the world; tiny specifics more than over-large and self-conscious opinions; messages in bottles.
There you have it. A morning message in a bottle – a grain of wheat in a world of chaff – “something for the road.” May these words speak to your spirit as they have spoken to mine, and thanks for sharing the wonder.
“We both feel lost / but I remember what Susan said / how love is found in the things we’ve given up / more than in the things that we’ve kept / and ain’t it funny what people say / and ain’t it funny what people write / and ain’t it funny how it hits you so hard / in the middle of the night / and if your home is just another place where you’re a stranger / and far away is just somewhere you’ve never been / I hope that you’ll remember / I was your friend”
-Rich Mullins, The World As Best As I Remember It, Vol. 2, “What Susan Said”
