Whatever is Lovely

Lately I’ve been reading the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve ever read, even though few people around me would agree.

As soon as I tell someone, “it’s a book about punctuation,” the conversation pretty much ends. It’s like a child who tells you how many peas he can stick up his nose; the average person doesn’t know what to do with that information—or really if he wants to do anything with it at all—so he says, “that’s nice,” and goes on about his business, completely apathetic to the plight of the overworked apostrophe.

Lynne Truss, however, cares about punctuation a great deal: so much so, she felt the need to write a whole book about it. That got me thinking, not just about punctuation—because I am genuinely nerdy about that sort of thing—but also about the motivation of a writer.

See Eats, Shoots & Leaves is not merely a textbook for high school English classes. It’s a passionate celebration of punctuation’s role in creating rhythm and meaning in our language, a sardonic assessment of our culture’s undervaluation of language in general, and an intriguing dive into the history of the marks of punctuation we regularly overlook. Whatever a reader might think about the subject, Truss sees punctuation’s place in grammar and syntax as being so important that she had to write about it. She couldn’t leave the subject alone. It was just too lovely, too valuable to not use all her talent to express that.

This, I’m beginning to think, is the root of great writing: a great subject.

I realize the thought is nothing new—nothing I think ever is. Greek artists used the term muse; modern artists might call it inspiration. In either case, what’s described is the sense of being overcome by something outside yourself that enables creative expression. It’s discovering and longing to convey something lovely, excellent, praiseworthy that makes any artistic medium more than what it seems. Just as a pen in a writer’s hand is only the tool through which talent passes, it seems an artist does his best work when he is merely a tool through which beauty passes.

I think the Apostle Paul was on to something when he told the Philippian church, “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Of course, he wasn’t speaking to a room of writers; he was teaching a small community of people how to live a life pleasing to God, a life focused on everything God is and does: everything that is great and worthy of our attention. Still, I think his recipe for a life of faith and obedience is also capable of whipping up a life of great writing. Stare at the things in life that are worth staring at, and those same things will begin to flow out of you—they must.

So, with Lynne and Paul in mind, the question is posed to me: what great thing am I going to attend to? Maybe self-sacrifice? Love? The magnificent semicolon? I’m not sure what my inspiration is yet (there will probably be many different things over time: some earth-shattering and some just me-shattering), but it’s where I think we have to begin.

Prescriptive vs. Descriptive: The Tightrope of Diction

Having breakfast with my aunt, uncle, and cousins several months ago (it took me a long time to post this one), I learned something terrible. My family informed me, and the dictionary app on my phone confirmed, that the wordirregardless is in the dictionary.

“Irregardless?” I asked. “As in ‘without without regard’?” I looked at the app again, just to be sure I’d read it correctly. Indeed I had—and my heart broke a little.

Though I’d argue that some words shouldn’t be included in any dictionary ever, this got me thinking back to a lesson from my college days about dictionaries and the difference slants they take in choosing words to include. Every dictionary falls into one of two very different categories.

Descriptive Diction

I don’t have too many apps on my iPhone, but one I couldn’t do without is Slango, the Urban Dictionary app. It helps me define important terms like bromance and babymama: words that specific demographics of people use in everyday speech but will most likely never appear on a middle-school vocabulary test. I have this application—and use it now and again—because I want to understand what people around me are saying.

This is the purpose of a descriptive dictionary: to describe and define words real people are using.

Prescriptive Diction

People often pin English majors as grammar Nazis. Some are, but not all. It really doesn’t matter if you answer the question, “How are you doing?” with “Good,” because you’re just talking, not writing a thesis.

However, when you are writing a thesis, the rules are important, and a prescriptive dictionary is one tool that can help.

When I look to the professionals behind the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, I can trust them to teach me the right way use my language. I won’t find a series of all the half-cocked things that have come out of people’s mouths—including mine—and accidentally include that in a cover letter, but rather learn the most accepted and universally clear words I can.

At the heart of a prescriptive dictionary is the desire to teach people how to use our language properly, conveying our thoughts in terms that are standardized, so that everyone understands what’s being said.

Maintaining the Tension

So which is it? Should a dictionary reflect common diction or shape it?

It’s easy to live in one of these extremes, accepting one as right and the other as wrong. People have fallen on either side of the debate for centuries, but I don’t think it’s that simple—and frankly neither to many modern dictionaries. We often gain the most when we take both ends and, like a pair of complementing tools, apply them at the right times.

Though we often oppose them, rules are actually good for us. They make sure we’re all on the same page, playing the same game. Without rules in the arena of language, writing and communicating would be very difficult over long distances. Local communities inevitably develop local standards of communication, but without a set and circulated list of “proper” usage rules uniting those communities, the different local patterns invariably move further and further apart, making clear cross-community communication increasingly unlikely, until one day, you actually have different languages. It may sound a bit ridiculous, but prescriptive dictionaries actually help keep a language together.

However, the world will not always abide by an academically approved set of language guidelines, and that’s a good thing too. Though the academics have a huge hand to play in describing and defining the ins and outs of our language, they need the creative types too.

As local usage patterns change the way the language behaves on a small level, we wind up finding new and intriguing ways to say the same old things more vibrantly. Art requires innovation, and language is definitely an art. It’s in the freedom to explore and experiment with the meaning and usage of terms that we find our language becoming ever more alive, agile, and beautiful. If those expansions to the language aren’t documented so that people can understand them, though, we’re left with a lot of people frustratedly scratching their heads to figure out what they’re reading. This is the value of the descriptive dictionary.

When used in conjunction, the two types of dictionaries really reflect the juxtaposed but complementary nature of language as a whole. The strict and stalwart rules of proper usage are like a flagpole, creating a sturdy framework of fundamentals that isn’t susceptible to the short memory and flighty whims of the human mind and tongue. This gives anchorage to the more fluid, colorful side of language, allowing it the freedom to catch the wind and fly, unfurling all its beauty without blowing away into incoherent mess.

Today, many dictionaries try to do both, giving an inclusive look at commonly used terms while making note as to which ones aren’t suitable for certain settings, which is a pretty fair middle ground that I can appreciate—though I still think irregardless is a dumb word.

God Only Knows How Stories Affect the Human Heart

Sometimes I get stuck in a heady rut. Nay, a lot of times I get stuck in a heady rut. And when I do, it’s a hard pit to come out of, particularly because my chosen method is based on my own mental strength—ha, that’s funny—and not the patient, righteous intervention of my Savior.

Here are my thoughts when I’m bogged in my head. I’ll read some kind of Christian self-help-ish book so I can focus on what I’m doing wrong and get 12 handy tips for success. I might “pray” for a while—which really means I just sit and think through the problem on an endless loop. Or there’s always the option of letting my eyes blankly roll over a page of the Bible while my mind keeps spinning. What I often forget to do, though, is to look for God in the ordinary things of life.

How many times must I re-learn what I preach so often? God uses stories to touch the hearts of men.

The other day, I found myself getting stuck in another heady rut. With a bit of spare time to burn toward the end of the day, I really wanted to read more of the novel I’ve been working on, The Art of Racing in the Rain, but thought that doing something “spiritual” (i.e., self-focused and self-righteous) would be better to get me out of my rut.

I struggled with the decision for a bit but finally gave in and picked up the book, believing if only for a moment that, yes, maybe the God of all creation didn’t need me to focus on my torrent of thought any longer. I flipped to the page I’d left off on.

Surprised though I was, the short, 4-page chapter gave me chills.

The canine narrator witnesses his master, shaky-handed, nearly spiral into a drunken self-destruction, at a time when he and his daughter would need  all the steel and perseverance he could muster. The author does a great job of playing off a stereotypical situation and cliche turns of phrase to create a turning point for these characters that is anything but.

Frankly, it was what I needed to see that night: not another cranial attempt to dig myself out of a hole, but an imaginative embodiment of hope, determination, and faithfulness. My imagination had to be turned to something else.

No matter how many times I think it or say it, it always surprises me: God designed us in such a way that stories disarm, surprise, confront, and change us in a way that so many other things can’t.

Form, Meaning, and Ferris Beuller’s Fury

In my last post, I railed against the notion that setting a hard and fast cap on paragraph length in a blog is good. Much of my argument was that it’s more important to use the length that best fits the content. Much to my enjoyment, I saw this principle at work in real life this week.

Curse You, Nuggets, and the Hands That Bore You!

It was about noon when I walked into the kitchen at work to grab yet another cup of coffee.

Two of my coworkers were there chatting while coffee brewed for one and a bag of frozen veggies thawed in the microwave for the other. Between them sat a dwindling plate of “chocolate nuggets” that we’d been munching on for the last day and a half. Though the name can hardly be considered appetizing, the combination of crunchy sponge-candy and milk-chocolate coating absolutely was, especially alongside a hot cup o’ joe.

“They’re almost gone,” Karen said, standing over the counter in her fluffy pink hoodie, looking at the plate of nuggets.

“Oh, so it was you that brought those?” I asked, stirring my coffee. “It’s taken all my strength to not eat them—all.”

“I’ve been eating them all day,” Graham bemoaned, shaking his head.

“If you liked those, you’ll love these,” she said, raising an eyebrow and pulling another bag of nuggety, crack-laced sweets from behind her back. She dangled it in the air like a dog treat.

“You’ve got more?” I asked, already envisioning my utter loss of self control.

“Those things are dangerous,” Graham said, turning toward us from the espresso machine.

“I know,” she said, opening the package with a snicker. As she poured the fresh load of nuggets onto the waning plate, she smiled to herself and added, “I give them to you guys so I don’t eat them all.”

Graham paused, placing his mug gently on the counter beside her. Suddenly, he threw his arms to the ceiling; arched his back; and with an incendiary look, he boomed “You heartless wench!”

His voice bounced off the cabinets as she stood there, hunched over the plate, frozen. Personally, I didn’t know whether to soil myself or fall over laughing. Karen just stared at him, speechless.

“It’s a Ferris Beuller quote,” he said as I gave him an excited high-five.

“Neither of you knew that?”

“No.”

“No.”

Karen’s eyes snapped to me. “You didn’t know that? And you gave him a high-five for calling me a wench?”

“It—” I stammered not from fear, but from the adrenaline surge that comes when you experience artistic glory.

Graham interrupted, laughing at me, “Your face was priceless.”

“It—” I tried to continue, “it was awesome!” I beamed, interlacing my fingers to demonstrate my meaning to them both: “It was the perfect melding of form and function!”

I wasn’t afraid of Karen’s feminine wrath; the experience had simply been too good for that to even matter. The words
themselves were intense, with a hint of sarcasm arising from the archaic nature of wench. The timing, the voice, the posture, the expression—it all synced up with that strong yet facetious remark better than I could have anticipated, being simultaneously scornful and hilarious. I knew Graham was kidding, but did I really know it? I don’t know, and that’s what made it wonderful.

It’s Not Just What You Say, but How You Say It

When we write, the message isn’t all we have to worry about; of equal importance is the form its delivered in. Word choice, grammatical construction, sentence variance, paragraph length, rhythm—you name it—each has its own subtle voice, and those voices can be used either for or against the intended meaning of the piece. Graham complemented his intended message with each element of his indignant yet facetious theatrics. A good writer does the same thing, ensuring that every technical aspect of the piece is expressing at least an element of the intended meaning. When this happens it’s an amazing experience that a reader is far more likely to remember.

Granted, this doesn’t happen every time you write—if it does, please tell me your secret—but it’s something to strive for every time. There’s no reason to shortchange your message or your reader by ignoring the importance of form.

(Having said all that, I now sincerely hope I didn’t miss a typo.)

Blogging: Art or Brevity?

The other day, I received an email with a link to copyblogger.com from one of my friends at work. He’d sent it to those of us in the customer-facing side of the business, and the title of the email got me really excited: “We’re All Writers.”

The link I was directed to was a good resource. Titled 7 Ways to Improve Your Writing… Right Now, this particular post had a number of really helpful hints for drawing more readers and making your blog copy generally more accessible for the average reader. Among the things listed were the need for concise, clear writing; staying on topic; and watching your use of tone, all of which are great reminders for a writer in any written genre—I recommend checking it out.

I Don’t Know About That…

Here’s the part I had a hard time with: the writer recommends breaking up your paragraphs into chunks as small as possible, never to exceed three short sentences. Three sentences—that’s it? I was surprised to read it. Yes, sometimes that’s a great length for a paragraph—heck, sometimes one sentence is a good length for a paragraph—but it seems inhibiting to draw that kind of limitation.

“Make it easy for people to read your work,” the blogger writes to express the heart behind his position. “The easier it is, the more they’ll get your point and enjoy reading — and that’s what you want.”

I agree with his intent but disagree with his methodology. Making your writing accessible, clear, and enjoyable should be the name of the game for any writer—why else would you be writing? However, ease of read, clarity, and entertainment level are not inversely proportional to the number of sentences you use or the length of those sentences.

Quite to the contrary, I’d have to side with another writer I highly respect, who taught me to employ a wide variety of sentence and paragraph lengths. In his mind, we approach them as an artist does her brushes: each a different tool for a different job. Some express a sturdy meaning in a single stroke. Others tiptoe you from one thought to the next, coyly drawing you on until you’re following a choreography of wordplay that’s no longer a series of words at all, but a pirouetting string of images you freely and fancifully keep in step with. Each is designed to speak to the reader in a way specific to the needs of the content, synchronizing form and meaning. Used appropriately, varying lengths create an ebb and flow that does the subject matter justice while maintaining reader interest. This is the great joy and challenge of writing.

Now, this lesson was given in the context of a creative-writing course, where writing is treated as art, but I dare say the value of this advice is not limited to a novel or essay. If a long paragraph with complex sentences is what it takes to best communicate a point, a blogger should be as free as a novelist to write one, two, three—as many as it takes to convey the point well.

Nor is the value of variety limited to writers of a novel. I’d like to think that even casual blog-readers benefit from a writer able and willing to use a wide spectrum of written tools. Perhaps some readers really do just want strict information in a terse format—I must admit, bullet points are nice—but how many people accept short, lifeless writing just because they know nothing more? Bloggers, because their work is so universally available, have a unique opportunity to offer something deeper to a broad scope of readers.

The long and short of my argument is this: in any medium, quality should be the point for both writer and reader, not always brevity.

NOTE: Despite my disagreement on this point, I have a great deal of respect for the writer of copyblogger.com, his professional work, and his advice. Carry on bravely, copyblogger. Thanks for all your service to people like me!

Last Days with My Grandfather

This last Monday, just after 7pm, I got a phone call from my mom. It would have been my dad on the other end of the line, but he couldn’t stop crying long enough to convey the message. “Tutu,” she said, “went to be with Jesus.”

Father and Son

It took almost a year since my grandfather (who I’ve always called Tutu) had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but over the last month or two, his bout really took a downward turn, and particularly in the last two weeks, his energy levels took a sharp nosedive. For months, he’d been losing strength, but it was nothing his wife, my step-grandmother, couldn’t support him through. In recent weeks, however, his health took such a turn that he suddenly required the aid of an in-house hospice worker, who, knowing the signs well, informed my folks just this last Saturday that that would probably be his last week. And so it was.

 

It’s not like any of this came as a surprise. He was given three months to a year to live at the turn of 2010, but being the cantankerous, able-bodied man he was—the guy could still ride a bike backwards at the age of 90—his system fought on into the farthest reaches of that prognosis, maybe farther than he would have liked. You could tell he didn’t really want to go on living as a sickly old man. He’d scarcely had a cold over his 92 years on earth, so it was very hard for him to do no more than travel from bed to bath to recliner every day. Every time I saw him, the pain seemed more to perplex him than it did hurt him; the concept of weakness and suffering simply didn’t compute.

And that’s really how I saw him take all of life: as a computation. “Mechanical genius” seems hardly enough of a phrase to tell the tale of a man who launched America’s first satellites into orbit and figured out how to make them take and transmit snapshots from outer space. He loved machines, understood them, studied them, cherished them. It was the emotional and social things that escaped him—a two-way conversation with another human being was all but a foreign concept. He’d gladly speak for hours about World War II, the space program, and the way the world used to be, but it took thirty years of my dad’s career for my grandfather to finally ask what “working in a restaurant” really means. Don’t get me wrong, he loved his son, but he wasn’t—let’s say—socially adept.

Aside from my father, there was one other person I got to see him have an emotional response to: his Lord. And that’s one thing I will never forget. I missed years of opportunity to pursue a relationship with my grandfather, but in the last year, I had the privilege of getting to know a man who, for all his faults and failures, always teared up and recited a verse at merely the mention of Jesus. Jesus had an effect on him that no one else did; his Lord was all he loved and all he wanted—and I can’t even imagine how happy he is to finally see him face to face.

The Saturday before he died, I prayed for one gift: that I would get to hear my grandpa talk about Jesus one more time before he passed, that the praise of Jesus would be the last thing I’d get to hear him speak. Graciously, God obliged.

The day before he died, I got to talk to him. He kept fading in and out of wakefulness, and his mind was fuzzy at best, but I told him how proud I was to have a grandfather who loved Jesus so emphatically and passed that faith down to his family as best as he could. My dad passed on the message because my grandfather couldn’t hear me over the phone, and immediately, my grandfather recited the verse my parents had helped him recall not hours before.

“Jesus,” he said slowly, “is the way. The truth. And— the life.” Then he fell asleep, re-awoke, made a snappy remark about being old and sleeping a lot, and fell asleep again.

In our final conversation, I walked away with exactly what I’d requested and all that I wanted, to hear my grandfather’s love of our Lord just once more.

Someday I’ll see him there at the foot God’s throne, or maybe in God’s workshop, most likely building something impossible with Jesus and repeatedly calling Him “King of kings and Lord of lords”—he loved that phrase. All will be new, and I can’t even imagine who he’ll be. I look forward to that day, hoping the first words I hear from him are just like the last.

Cowbell Maybe, But I Don’t Need More Gong

One of my favorite writing professors in college insisted that we always ask a question of any assignment we were writing or editing, creative or otherwise. His perennial inquiry was so what? Why would anyone read this? What’s the point? As my months and years in the writing business pass, I continue to learn the importance of what he taught us: words were meant to carry meaning.

The Gong

Everyone knows the phrase “talking to hear yourself speak,” and we all know that it’s not a flattering remark when someone says it of you. I find—by my own glorious example—that the same can be done in writing; we (and by we I mean I) can easily fall into the trap of writing to read ourselves write. I can’t speak for anyone else but I, for one, have a tiny promoter inside my head who talks to me a lot. You think clever things and write with humorous wit, he tells me, pressing down his slicked back hair and admiring his dollar-store cuff links. Why should you withhold from the world the gift of your many words and sickeningly exciting life? Don’t you know who you are? You’re Josh Wall, dammit.

I listen to him more often than I should, despite how annoying and vain he is. My mind flashes to 1 Corinthians 13, where the Apostle Paul comments that someone with gifts of communication (in context, it’s angelic tongues) who doesn’t use those gifts out of love is nothing more than an obnoxious cacophony of gongs and cymbals clanging about. I imagine kindergartners with mallets on a stage full of cymbals of various sizes, and my toes curl at just the thought. But that’s how God describes it when I take his gifts and dilute them down into a little cup of Josh-is-so-clever, instead of using them to speak truth and benefit people. That probably means I have to change something.

The Question in Context

And so I find myself with Dr. Amarose’s question again: so what; why does this blog matter? If I’m honest with myself, it was first made to sport my greatness for potential employers, but I’m increasingly inclined to think that that is a sub-par reason for writing. There has to be a purpose, a meaning, something that someone needs to hear. And that is what I’m after. As I figure this out, anyone’s ideas are appreciated, but ultimately, it has to come from God’s work in me, from a deep-seated truth dropped square into my own heart: one that I need to tell. Otherwise it will never be sustainable.

The long and short of this message? I’m after my thesis, so expect changes ahead.

Padawan Theology

Jedi in the Real World?

The other day, I got an unexpected direct message on Twitter from the Church of Jediism. Yes, I said Jediism. And yes, that’s derived from the word Jedi, those lightsaber-toting defenders of justice from the Star Wars universe. (Oddly, the church is based out of North Wales, UK, not the planet of Coruscant—guess the reign of the Empire had more of an effect on them than even George Lucas knew.)

Whoever was behind the Twitter account replied to a tweet I’d made about the unofficial-ness of Star Wars Day. We had a nice little back-and-forth in which I received some information about their church. Apparently, there are 3000 followers of this budding ideology world-wide, and they seem to like calling it a religion, even though something in me finds it hard to classify them in the same ballpark as major world faiths. I suppose it’s beside the point, though; the fact is that there are people in Wales, Texas, and who knows how many other places who hold to the principles of the Jedi order. They believe in a single, unifying force that binds all things in the universe together, much like Obi-Wan Kenobi first told Luke Skywalker in the very first Star Wars flick.

Coming from a Christian worldview, though, I can’t help but disagree with a lot of the fundamental philosophy of Jediism. For instance, the Creator and Binder isn’t just a force; He’s a person (Colossians 1:15-17), and you can’t manipulate Him into lifting heavy objects for you—that last part’s from the movies, not the church, but I couldn’t help myself.

Still, I have to admit that no matter what people have derived from it, l remain a little-g Star-Wars geek (“little-g” meaning I’ve never been to a convention or dressed up like a Wookie, Calamari, or Gungan—even though I know what all those are). And every so often, I go on a mini-binge of LucasArts entertainment, which I did again this last weekend as I sat around my apartment resting off the remainder of a cold.

A Slightly More Accurate Reflection

Interestingly enough, it was in this most recent Star Wars viewing spree that I found something more reflective of God than I did in the wisdom of the real-life Jedi.

[Warning: mildly confusing geek-talk ahead.]
In an episode of the most recent rendition of Clone Wars (an animated series that follows Obi-Wan and Anakin between movies 2 and 3), Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan learner, Ahsoka Tano, commandeers an enemy tank and uses it to destroy an enemy weapons facility, with the help of another Padawan. In doing so, the two learners save their friends, but knowingly bury themselves alive beneath the rubble of the collapsing building. Facing asphyxiation, the two try to send an emergency message to their masters above, to whom it seems they’re as good as dead. Things don’t look good.

In all truth, the storytelling isn’t great, but Ahsoka’s words are at least something to think about. Trying to send one last SOS, she says—almost as if she’s reminding herself of the truth before passing out—”Master, I know you’re up there, and I know you’re looking for me.”

This line could probably have gone totally unnoticed, but something there was at least worth thinking about: she had faith in the persistent, seeking love of her master, who’d already saved her time and again, regardless of the circumstances. She’d come to firmly believe that, even when all indicators would point her master to the assumption that she was dead—a lost cause—he would still search for her until he found her.

As she said it, and the scene cut back up to Anakin standing beside the rubble assigning clone troopers to start digging, the words—particularly master—rang in my ears. It struck me that this reflects the essence of Christian faith; it’s all about a Master so loving that He would come after His servants even when anyone else would consider us a lost cause. And the more we experience and understand that in heart, the more faith we’ll demonstrate when we’re buried under the rubble of life.

Of course, that means I have to look at my life and ask myself how well I really know my Master? Tough question.

Thanks for the thought, little animated Jedi.

Poultry—er, Paltry—Thanks

Today has been a very quiet and very nice Saturday—none of you asked, but that’s beside the point. I watched cartoons, played WoW, watched The Fantastic Mr. Fox (good movie, if you’re curious), spent some time in prayer, read a book, and talked with my folks on the phone—all in the name of resting to kick the snotty remains of last weekend’s cold.

It was good, but all day I’ve been thinking that it’s time to write a blog again. I had a few ideas in mind as to what I could write, but one stood out as the one I really wanted to write right now. What I’d like to say is this: thank you Jennie-O employees!

The Train of Thought

Sometimes my mind takes me to some funny places, and one of those places that seems to be growing into a more common destination is the idea that a lot of what white-collar America does is not necessary. Cars are helpful, pretty clothes are nice, movies are entertaining, and skyscrapers are quite impressive, but I’d argue that none of them are necessary. After all, the essentials of human life can pretty much be boiled down to (1) food, (2) water, (3) clothing, (4) love, and possibly (5) shelter. I mostly think about this when I see images and stories of 3rd-world nations, which I’ve been reading about this week.

Tonight it all reoccurred to me while I was slicing a Jennie-O turkey breast for this week’s sandwich lunches. Munching on a big chunk of bird, I thought about how I didn’t have to hunt it, I didn’t have to kill it, I didn’t have to skin and gut it, and I didn’t have to cook it, and yet, there it was in my hand—and my mouth. With the amount of time it would take to eat each day if I had to do all that for myself, I’d never have time to do the wonderful modern things I do—like working my job, for instance.

I then had to ask myself afresh how I had that gob of turkey (which was now a bite or two smaller) in my hand. And the answer is pretty simple: ordinary folks who work their day-to-day jobs at a Jennie-O farm, a Jennie-O plant, and a Jennie-O shipping warehouse. They do what they do because they have to do something to provide for their families. They don’t get award shows on TV, they don’t get stories written about them in the news, and they aren’t the heroes in our movies. And yet, they (and others at similar companies) feed us every day: something that is essential to our existence. If I’m honest, my work (valuable though it is) is not essential, but theirs is.

Thank You!

And so, if you work a thankless job in an industry that keeps people like me alive so that we can do something else, I want say a serious thank you to you. You’ll probably never read this, and you probably don’t know who I am, but for what it’s worth I for one greatly appreciate what you do.

The Art of Just Getting Up

Hello world. Yes, despite all appearances, I’m still here. After a very long stint away from the blog—what’s it been, 8 months?—I’m  working to get myself back in blogo-action, so here I am.

Explaining (Not Excusing) Myself

I know that my readers (all 1.7 of you), have been wondering what happened to me and why I just up and stopped writing, so it’s only fair that I should at least begin to provide an answer. In all honesty, there are probably at least a handful of interwoven reasons for my disappearance, but I think that there were two things that played the largest role in my vanishing act.

1. Perfectionism
2. Laziness

(How those two things can exist together in a single human being is still a paradoxical mystery to me, but the very fact that I’ve lived with them both for my entire life is evidence that it is in fact possible.).

The first of these, perfectionism, is really to be held most at fault, as it generally causes the biggest lag time between posts, leading the way for its shiesty comrade. When, in the midst of life’s unending busyness, I either had half a mind to make a post or one of my faithful followers told me it was about time to post something new, the first thing that went through my head was the complete lack of seemingly valuable things going through my head. When that voice in the back of your head tells you that everything you write has to meet a high aesthetic standard and an even higher standard of philosophical and emotional depth without ever crossing the line into the arrogant or trite, it becomes to produce anything because—lets just face it—forced depth always turns out arrogant and trite. So, in my perfectionism, I could never bring myself to write anything. (Logical, I know.)

That led to the second thing that stood in the way of my writing blogs: laziness—which is often seen parading around in close company with procrastination. It’s a reasonable tag-along to accompany perfectionism, when you think about it. If I can’t bring myself to publish anything less than great writing, and I don’t want to take the tons of time it takes to produce great writing, then I’ve only really got one choice: putting off writing until lightning strikes my brain—to quote the ineffable Hook. And as we can all now see, waiting for that doesn’t quite pan out.

So, all that is to say that I blew it; I fell off the blog-wagon and, for the sake of pride, refused to get back up again. Fail.

Getting Up

Fair warning, my mission with this post is not to write any of that deep, meaningful stuff I was waiting for earlier, but just to get up, after a long time lying on the metaphoric floor of the blogosphere, and get moving again. (If you’re looking for something poignant or moving, you may want to head over to another blog at this point; Cinemagogue might be a good choice.) This is actually just another exercise in a bigger life lesson God’s had me under lately: the lesson of just getting up.

It may sound silly, but that evil little perfectionist in the rear of my head has long convinced me that a failure is utter failure and the only acceptable track record is a perfect track record. If that perfection is lost, well, there’s not much more that can be done. It’s a pattern of thought that, upon finding you sprawled out in the mire, wipes the mud from its boot across your teeth and then plants its foot squarely in your back to press you in deeper.

It’s really not that helpful, and it’s really not that true—at all.

My roommates have been challenging me with the truth in recent months: the truth that in Christ is forgiveness for sin, redemption from folly, and the gift of just being able to get up and fight again, regardless of the opposition. God knows that I fail, He knows that part of me is at war with Him, and He knows that I am all too easily demoralized by all that. So His solution is this: Jesus. When I screw up unintentionally, in a non-sin matter, I have hope in one who already knows I’m imperfect but cares for me still and wants to build a stronger character in me, so I can get up again. When I actively choose my own way over God’s, I can quickly turn and trust in one who freely took my stripes and gave me his freedom in unyielding love, so I can get up again.

I think—at least in my circumstance—its theological name is repentance, because my natural inclination is to stay down, but I’ve recently come to affectionately call it just getting up. No matter how poorly I do, I just take faith in a big, gracious God and get up to go again.

Because I’m not too good at it yet, I practice it just about everywhere: at work, when a project doesn’t go together as I would have liked; in game-play, when I get my digital arse handed to me; in community with people, when I do the innumerable things that let them down; and even in my walk with God, when I find my heart everywhere but on Him. Jesus gives me the ability to get up and go again, even when doing so risks the exact same fall I’ve already taken.

For that reason, I’m blogging again. I might blog tomorrow or blow it all over again and not blog for another 8 months—I don’t know—but whatever may come in the long term, right now I’m getting up again.