**you'll wake to find you're a little unbroken***

i don't know about all the church-y christianity, but i think i'm pretty sure i do know about God. and that i want to be with someone who knows him in the personal, non-churchy way that i am beginning to. i know that he is more gentle and tender and weeping with me than i formerly realized. that he doesn't come at me with guilt and theology and holiness. he welcomes and accepts and weeps. he is swift with acceptance, forgiveness, love, and calm. peace. patience. kindness. goodness. gentleness. i've fled him and felt abandoned by him. i've feared him and resented him. and yet i've longed for him. i know that i do. and i want to believe. God help my unbelief and save me from the powers of darkness that have confused and consumed and confounded me. that have tripped and obscured and beaten me down. please rescue me now out of the darkness. i don't know why you have allowed it to enter in the first place, but i beg you to free and rescue me now.

"She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while."

From Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

The same elements that make a movie meaningful are the ones that make a life meaningful. I know a character had to face his greatest fears... And once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don't have a choice.

We were designed to live through something rather than to attain something, and the thing we were meant to live through was designed to change us

The only way to know the truth is to witness him make choices under pressure..

Characters don't want to change. they must be forced to change.

But fear isn't only a guide to keep us safe; it's also a manipulative emotion..


The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be... there is a force in the world that doesn't want us to live good stories. It doesn't' want us to face our issues, to face our fear and bring something beautiful into the world.. I don't know why God allows dark forces to enter our stories, but he does.. She wondered why it mattered if Jesus hung on a cross and died. Since the world went crazy anyway. She hung out in the fringes of God for a while, and about a year ago she was ready to let go of God completely.. You're supposed to be good. What good are you for?.. The Tutsis believed they would be spared if they took refuge in the church, but they weren't...she could no longer believe in God in a world with such pain, with so much devastation..but instead of the old anger, she felt overwhelming tenderness and sorrow....Suddenly the resistance had a darker feel, a thieving feel, as if something tangible and powerful were taking our beautiful stories away... there is a force resisting the beautiful things in the world, and too many of us are giving in. The world needs for us to have courage...


a crossing

The shore you left is just as distant, and there is no going back

they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger.

Joy is what you feel when the conflict is over. But it's conflict that changes a person.

"You put your characters through hell. You put them through hell. That's the only way we change."

It's like this with every crossing and with nearly every story too. You paddle until you no longer believe you can go any farther. And then suddenly, well after you thought it would happen...


my soul was collecting fluid
both of us hoping the other might suddenly resurrect from the dead
my life got dark
wondering how the lines around my eyes had suddenly grown so deep

rolled onto the floor and cried out to God a sorrow that, for the immensity of it, I could only attribute to him in the first place. I didn't want tot learn whatever it was he wanted to teach me. I cried out to him an angry petition for rescue. I doubted him and needed him at the same time. God seemed to me, in that moment, a cruel father burning a scar into my skin with his cigarette. And yet i knew he was the only one with the power to make the pain go away.

"before we get started, there's this one thing I have to tell you. Things are going to get bad."

Job calls out to God, asking why God would let this happen. God does not answer Job's question.

and when I was done, the pain came back, and I stood and talked to people and watched their outs move, but I didn't know what they were saying.

There's just something in the DNA of a human that responds to the idea of an event, a moment in which the upheaval we've all been working around is finally laid to rest [though it doesn't occur finally in real life].

I don't believe God will intervene.. we will go on longing for a resolution what will not come, not within life as we know it anyway.

Growing up in church, we were taught that Jesus was the answer to all our problems.. but the hole never really want away.. the idea that Jesus will make everything better is a lie. It's basically biblical theology translated into the language of infomercials...

And when you stop expecting God to end all your troubles, you'd be surprised how much you like spending time with God.

"these things will never happen again. Today I am very sad. Very, very sad. Still it is consistent to say, may the peace of Christ bless you and keep you."

[he] was my North, my South, my East and West

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong

-W.H. Auden

I like that part of Scripture that talks about God speaking something into nothingness, into the dark void.