I’ve been wanting to create a table of contents of sorts for all my poems. So here’s that page in progress if you’re in the mood to read some poetry today.

Lately, I’ve been writing hard, more professionally than years past, which means also a bit more mechanically. Some words are needed, so I crank them out.

GoodWordEditing.com (which I have tabbed as GWE in my browser) is one of my few places where I can still play. Play is so important. Like I’ve said before, this is not a subscribe to me kind of blog. I’ve thought of posts this week, I might write–about the twenty-two-thirty rule of engaging readers that I learned on Tuesday, about the scene and plot things I’m learning in my own writing, about how to carve out writing time when you have a family and a career and a church and dogs that need someone to throw the frisbee, about how to use tools like Plaxo to follow other bloggers, about how to use Twitter as a method of social note taking, even a spiritual analysis of Battlestar Galactica Resistance clips showing where that series does a good job of opening the door to think about faith and religion as something to be taken seriously.

Except for Battlestar Galactica, those things don’t feel much like play to me. Even Battlestar doesn’t feel as playful when I’m analyzing it for scene structure, character motivation, and theme.

But poetry is so useless, it’s only good for play. The movement of a poem isn’t going to take me anywhere in particular. I’m just here swinging with the words. Up and back. Up and back. Or maybe kayaking around Serenity Island at one of our city parks. (Yes, I live in heaven.)

And earlier this morning, I finally found this poem. Or I should say it found me. People kept sending it to me. Quoting it back to me. And I realized it was time to climb on the swing, time to get in the boat again.

In honor of my own occasional Poetry Friday, in honor of my recent comment on Becky’s blog, in honor of good friends and new friends who like poetry, in honor of God really, the original poet who (Howard Butt taught me) makes all of us into his poiema, his workmanship…

Sometimes

Sometimes
images are
too intimate,
too desperate,
too honest.
Sometimes
reading is
a little death.
Sometimes
writing is too.

At Laity Lodge, we’ve had a close connection to J. I. Packer for many years. Every year, I get the chance to hear this man speak and open the Scripture. At first, his style seemed dry to me, but gradually I came to appreciate the incredible wisdom he has. One Laity Lodge director described listening to Packer as being something akin to drinking from a firehose.

In the first ever posted Laity Lodge video, here’s J. I. Packer describing his calling to write. (I’d be curious what you think of the video, too.)

Oh dear. I didn’t realize I couldn’t be both evangelical and emerging. According to Out of Ur’s latest post, I have to choose one or the other. It sounds to me like David Fitch is talking about fundamentalism rather than evangelicalism.

Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, I joined Mary DeMuth’s Authentic Parenting blog tour. I’ve posted about the book’s powerful stories and its practical tips. I even posted a quick “hard sell” post just to see what would happen. (You can read more about Mary’s book on her site RelevantBlog.)

Today I want to think about what the book does theologically. Continue reading →