I'm in the process of packing up and moving across town. This means dragging out every article of everything that I own and deciding whether to take it or leave it. Among the rubble behind my bed was a packet of letters and scribbles, some of them pages taken from journals that I have since (apparently) discarded. I don't know why I kept them, but among these I found stories and notes from events long since forgotten:


Calvin comes limping into the garage door, crying pitifully, face streaked with a mixture of dirt, tears, and blood. (Churchill would be proud.) To any general assessment, he has just gotten into a big fight... one wonders what the other guy looked like. 

His story? 

"I sawed Greg flipping on the swing, an' I tried it, an' I did it, but oncet I falled!" 

(And Ben choruses from the background: "He can do really good flips!") 

I washed off his face - the bloody nose, bloody lip, bumped noggin slightly abrased - not to mention all the dirt in his mouth, nose, lips, and hair! Ah. And then he had to change his shirt, which was FILTHY disgusting... 

John Flavel says:

For the true apprehension of beauty, like faith itself, is an exercise in laying claim to what is already ours. There is a low door in the garden wall, and it opens on an inheritance: this is my Father’s world, and He has given it to me... In short, if we find ourselves wandering through this beautiful world of ours with ink-stained fingers and dreamy eyes and a slightly lopsided ivy crown, gazing about like we own the place, it’s because we do.

-Lanier Iverson, "On Possessing Beauty"

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of seeing one of my favorite musicians perform live. It was beautiful; the music was sufficiently loud, the artistry sublime, and the companionship (my sisters and some of my dearest friends) warm. Halfway through the concert, however, I was struck by a fierce desire: not for the experience to go on forever and ever, as I have sometimes felt before when I was younger and in the throes of some extraordinary experience of art or literature, but simply to be home again.

The experience itself was not tiresome, but I realized it could not be an end in and of itself. Such extraordinary beauty is no good if it only makes us dissatisfied with the beauty of the ordinary. The highest peak of a crescendo must in the end return to the sustained quiet of the melody, or it is simply another over-drawn high note.

Because the best sorts of beauty are the ones I distinctly do not plan. The best sorts of beauty are the ones I do not expect. I expected to go to that concert and see and hear beautiful things - and I did. But it was a glimpse of the beauty of this world as God has made it, and the full enjoyment of all the good gifts he has given to man - the rain he sends on the just and the unjust. There is a beauty better still. It is the beauty of the commonplace, the beauty of the million little ways that he shows his particular love for his children as they stumble about their everyday paths. They are the tremendous little things, the pinpoints of light that provide windows into a world that is still to come, a world that has been wholly renewed, if we will see them for what they are.

I am glad to be home. 

     "I am going to Battersea," I repeated, "to Battersea via Paris, Belfort, Heidelberg, and Frankfort. My remark contained no wit. It contained simply the truth. I am going to wander over the whole world until once more I find Battersea. Somewhere in the seas of sunset or of sunrise, somewhere in the ultimate archipelago fo the earth, there is one little island which I wish to find: an island with low green hills and great white cliffs. Travellers tell me that it is called England (Scotch travellers tell me that it is called Britain), and there is a rumour that somewhere in the heart of it there is a beautiful place called Battersea." 
      "I suppose it is unnecessary to tell you," said my friend, with an air of intellectual comparison, "that this is Battersea?" 
      "It is quite unnecessary," I said, "and it is spiritually untrue. I cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or any England. I cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. I am seeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land. Now I warn you that this Gladstone bag is compact and heavy, and that if you utter that word 'paradox' I shall hurl it at your head. I did not make the world, and I did not make it paradoxical. It is not my fault, it is the truth, that the only way to go to England is to go away from it." 

I do not remember when I first began searching for the sunset. I was on the road before I realized it had begun. My sister painted it into a picture for me once, and I believe that was when I first began to realize. The painting itself was nothing grand: a simple daub of watercolours depicting the silhouette of a girl on a hill against a flaming sky. It was a spin-off of one of the hills in my parent's neighborhood. I had watched many a sunset just so, many times.

But I stopped to look at the painting on its place by my door one day on my way to work, and that was when I realized how distant the sunset was. Fifty-some miles would take me to that same hill; it would not take me to the sunset. The impression of a day gone by - or a day foretold - in an artist's mind; it was not mine to grab. It was too bold and surreal - or perhaps it was too real, the grass on those shadowed hills surely too sharp for my soft and shadowy feet.

I seemed to shake, for just a moment, with a curious longing to expel myself through the veil of the picture frame and stand beside that girl and stare into the face of glory. The voice of Chesterton seemed to ring in my ears: whether it was hell or the furious love of God, I did not know...! But it was early in the morning, and the dim lamp in my room seemed to turn things black and white by turns. Only the picture burned with a maddening brightness, as far removed from my little room and the day ahead of me as eternity is from finite things.

Hey, you.

I know you're tired. In fact, I know you're exhausted. And I know that life just feels like a battering of assignments and tests and hours put in here for school and hours put in there to pay for the hours you put in for school, and meeting this person and talking to that person and worrying about this other person... yeah, I'd say I know Anna's life pretty well.

And I know that sky looks threatening, and the boat is the last place you want to be. I also know why.

Yes, I know the secrets of the minefield, of the storm, and I know the secret of your heart: you're not terrified of craziness and explosions and being exhausted from an excess of work. The reason the minefields terrify you, the reason you and so many others stay away, is because you're afraid you won't feel anything, and you hate being bored.

Wake up. The peril is not in the obvious hazards, the literal bullets, the schedule that wings by in a blur. The danger is in the landscape that never changes, the ground that never seems to ascend or descend, the monotonous plodding that grows more maddening with every step.

Peril is everywhere, but especially in the mundane. The thing that makes the minefields dangerous isn't the mines; it's the fact that you can walk them and never know the mines are going off all around you. That you would dive headfirst into the teeth of death and experience salvation and still - still! - shut your eyes to the beauty of the reality of what God is doing because it is too small for your backwards, twisted mirror-vision to detect, too boring to tickle those itching ears, too even-keel and ordinary to rock the emotion-springs of your heart.

This generation is obsessed with feeling things, and you are no different. So easily entertained by news stories and television shows and musical numbers by popular bands that bellow angst and candied-happiness and troubledness, the never-ending lie that life is what you feel, and you have to feel something to know your life. Meanwhile, we scorn things like marriage or simply being a full-time daughter or being a blue-collar laborer for the next twenty-plus years because... well, to dress it up and put it in as close-to-the-truth and disgustingly false way as possible, a Christian is all about risk, and I don't feel like I'm risking anything in any of those boring commitments.

That's why you won't get into the boat when the storm looms overhead. It's not because you're afraid of sinking. It's because you don't want to risk finding out that the storm isn't be all that it's cracked up to be - or, rather, that you're not all you've convinced yourself you are. Dan Haseltine hit the nail on the head when he sang: I have no fear of drowning; it's the breathing that's taking all this work. The terror is in not in going down with a blaze of glory; the terror is in finding your first squall to be a few mere ripples, and that even those are enough to keep you hanging over the rail puking your guts out for a lifetime. The terror is in realizing that it doesn't take an epic gale to reduce you to the dust that you are.

Yes, there are minefields, but they aren't guts-and-glory. They're the stupid little things we have to do every day to be the people God has called us to be and love the people he has called us to love. They're the myriad of insignificant little conflicts where our life is on the line, and we have to surrender it. And that's the danger: the searing heat of the blast doesn't get any closer to us than when we are totally unaware of its presence. There is peril in the mundane, and it is that we do not know the fires are singing the hairs on our necks because we cannot feel them. We cannot feel because we are bored; we are bored because we would rather be secure than have our ordinary things threatened. Take my life, Lord; create a World War - just don't take my routine, don't take my schedule, don't take my secure little corner of the world, my idols of the thousands of insignificant places where I can feel self-sufficient... give me something grand to feel, something I don't care about so all these little things can still be mine to me, and never yours, never surrendered... 

Are you disgusted enough already? Then forsake this gluttony of experience. Feelings are all very well and good in their place, but it's faith that's meant to be your eyes now. To say that life is boring because you don't feel the battle is to fall asleep in the face of an epic gale, even as we shake in our rubbers at the tiny ripples. Yes, that's you. It's good to feel foolish and know ourselves to be dust. Throw yourself on the grace of God. That grace is the only reason you may have faith to see the goodness in being small, in being foolish, in being secure in the greatness and wisdom of Almighty. Are you going to puff up yourself in the face of such great grace and wisdom and strength, protesting that your eyes can do better without the faith he gives so freely?

Come on, soul; you know you were bought with a price, and there's nowhere for you to go but the path grace forges. Let's clamber aboard this vessel and leave the oars behind. We can weigh the anchors of pride and self-sufficiency and unfurl the sails. Let's leave the wheel unmanned; the rudder's broken anyway, and my compass always forgets which way to point. We don't need to use the stars to divine where sovereignty drives us: you know it means us to go further up and further in, and "sovereignty" isn't just a nice word. It works. No, it doesn't feel like a thundering charge up the waterfall into glory yet - this is a Far Country, and we are still plodding, but the beauty of the mundane is that there are always glimpses, and the tragedy is to miss them.

So come on, you. That sky looks doubtful enough for sailing; what are you waiting for?

The stranger approached me as I stood contemplating the barbed-wire fence. It was an old, sagging affair, flapping in the greying dusklight like the tattered shreds of a war-banner. Its gangly belly brushed the short brown grass in several places. I had been trekking through these hillsides for some hours (or perhaps years; I had long since forgotten) until the fence brought me up short. It seemed too disheveled and humble for all the legends. I halted and stared more from surprise than reverence.