The worst thing about writer's block is you can't even write about how frustrated you feel when you have it.
And if that's not the best quote ever about writer's block... feel free to quote me anyway.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Today We're Sharing
I didn't start this blog as a place to journal or talk about myself and my life. This blog's purpose is to write meaningful - even inspiring, if I do say so myself - articles that have at least two quotable sentences in each paragraph (because, considering how the world is going, I believe eventually everyone will be famous enough to be quoted by someone).
However, today I am going to share a little of my journey through life; just a snippet, a single moment in time as I grow and mature spiritually. Today's spiritual pit stop was... instructive, I suppose. I think it should be shared, passed on to others.
So here goes. After you finish reading this, go to this webpage:
http://www.bibleprobe.com/abortion.htm
If the pictures about a fourth of the way down the page don't make you burst into tears or have some other violent emotional reaction, YOU HAVE NO SOUL.
For the past year or so I've become increasingly detached from reality and I had thought I was becoming a psychopath (that word doesn't mean what you think it means; look it up). I was seriously beginning to doubt if any part of my soul was left, and if it was, is God going to save it. (I still think the answer to that may be a big fat no, but at least I've got a brighter hope now than I did before.)
Today I did a google search trying to find the latest statistics on how many abortions happen per day, and I found that website. I guess God wanted to reassure me that I still could experience emotion, because I looked at those pictures in shock for a few seconds, whispering a phrase generally used as blasphemy, but I think I meant it more in the sense of literally saying "Oh my God." There wasn't much else to say. Then I exploded into tears like I haven't since... well, probably since I was a baby myself.
There's a warning above the pictures that says some people may not want to look at them because it might make them sick. Good! If you're human, you should get sick over this. Look at those pictures. I don't care if a kitten posed holding a fake gun is all it takes to give you a heart attack. Sensitive as a sweet old lady in Victorian England or with a heart hard and cold as a stone, you need to see these pictures of the reality of abortion. You can't hide from the truth. The truth always hurts, but you can't get away from it. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you sick to your stomach, weep uncontrollably, and give you the most painful freedom you've ever had, but for Christ's sake you will be free.
Now do something with that freedom.
Quote me, re-post the whole article, shave your head, wave signs, shoot an abortion doctor (Um, don't actually do that. We're pro-life here, remember? Not pro-shooting-victims-who-have-lived-longer-than-some-other-victims). I don't care what you do, but do something. Doing something means freedom, apathy means slavery to the way things are.
However, today I am going to share a little of my journey through life; just a snippet, a single moment in time as I grow and mature spiritually. Today's spiritual pit stop was... instructive, I suppose. I think it should be shared, passed on to others.
So here goes. After you finish reading this, go to this webpage:
http://www.bibleprobe.com/
If the pictures about a fourth of the way down the page don't make you burst into tears or have some other violent emotional reaction, YOU HAVE NO SOUL.
For the past year or so I've become increasingly detached from reality and I had thought I was becoming a psychopath (that word doesn't mean what you think it means; look it up). I was seriously beginning to doubt if any part of my soul was left, and if it was, is God going to save it. (I still think the answer to that may be a big fat no, but at least I've got a brighter hope now than I did before.)
Today I did a google search trying to find the latest statistics on how many abortions happen per day, and I found that website. I guess God wanted to reassure me that I still could experience emotion, because I looked at those pictures in shock for a few seconds, whispering a phrase generally used as blasphemy, but I think I meant it more in the sense of literally saying "Oh my God." There wasn't much else to say. Then I exploded into tears like I haven't since... well, probably since I was a baby myself.
There's a warning above the pictures that says some people may not want to look at them because it might make them sick. Good! If you're human, you should get sick over this. Look at those pictures. I don't care if a kitten posed holding a fake gun is all it takes to give you a heart attack. Sensitive as a sweet old lady in Victorian England or with a heart hard and cold as a stone, you need to see these pictures of the reality of abortion. You can't hide from the truth. The truth always hurts, but you can't get away from it. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you sick to your stomach, weep uncontrollably, and give you the most painful freedom you've ever had, but for Christ's sake you will be free.
Now do something with that freedom.
Quote me, re-post the whole article, shave your head, wave signs, shoot an abortion doctor (Um, don't actually do that. We're pro-life here, remember? Not pro-shooting-victims-who-have-lived-longer-than-some-other-victims). I don't care what you do, but do something. Doing something means freedom, apathy means slavery to the way things are.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
The Writer's Words
Words.
Words are the writer's friends and the writer's enemies. They make me feel safe and secure, happy and satisfied, and they hold me prisoner until I've written them all down. The writer bending over a piece of paper or the keyboard of a computer is bending under the cutting whip of the cruelest slave master since Rameses II. And the reward is only fleeting, but the reward is heaven. The only satisfaction intrinsic in discovering the perfect word is a satisfaction that lasts for half the time it takes for a pondering to become a realization. It's an elusive millisecond, a non-existent fraction. It can't be measured, it can only be felt. It can't register on a scientific instrument, but it can addict a person so hard that they become a writer for life.
Words.
I can't write them all down. How many words are there in the world? There are more than I can learn. If I want to get anything done, I have to ignore the irritant of the factual knowledge that I'll never even finish skimming the cream off the top of the potential of all the words to know, to say, to read -all the words to write. In the haze of just writing, facts settle into the background and sit there like berry-colored lumps of juicy luminosity shining through a thick fog. They're real, but I don't look at them. I feel them, and if I let myself feel too much of them, it burns. But mostly I blissfully ignore them and just write. I don't want to know how much I don't know, I just want to devour as much knowledge as I can as fast as I can.
Words.
Words can make me wealthy. Words can make me famous. I can be a Homer or a Shakespeare or a Charles Dickens or a J.K. Rowling. The words I write can make people feel things. They can make people laugh. If they're very good words, they can make people cry. The words are tools, they're just a means to an end. Or so I keep telling myself. Somehow, I keep forgetting that the words are supposed to be working for me, and I start serving the words, worshiping at the altar of the words, doing whatever I can for the words, searching for days on end like a lost child hopelessly seeking a glimpse of a familiar face, looking for the right words, all in the hope that I'll get a smile or a pat on the head from those wonderful, wonderful words. I love them, I'd die for them, and they're just spiky black figures on a stark white page.
Words.
Damn.
Who am I? I'm a writer.
Will my words last forever? Will they be forgotten after today? Will they be rediscovered in the far future? Will they have any influence? Will anyone even read them at all?
Who am I? I'm nobody. But feel free to quote me anyway.
Words are the writer's friends and the writer's enemies. They make me feel safe and secure, happy and satisfied, and they hold me prisoner until I've written them all down. The writer bending over a piece of paper or the keyboard of a computer is bending under the cutting whip of the cruelest slave master since Rameses II. And the reward is only fleeting, but the reward is heaven. The only satisfaction intrinsic in discovering the perfect word is a satisfaction that lasts for half the time it takes for a pondering to become a realization. It's an elusive millisecond, a non-existent fraction. It can't be measured, it can only be felt. It can't register on a scientific instrument, but it can addict a person so hard that they become a writer for life.
Words.
I can't write them all down. How many words are there in the world? There are more than I can learn. If I want to get anything done, I have to ignore the irritant of the factual knowledge that I'll never even finish skimming the cream off the top of the potential of all the words to know, to say, to read -all the words to write. In the haze of just writing, facts settle into the background and sit there like berry-colored lumps of juicy luminosity shining through a thick fog. They're real, but I don't look at them. I feel them, and if I let myself feel too much of them, it burns. But mostly I blissfully ignore them and just write. I don't want to know how much I don't know, I just want to devour as much knowledge as I can as fast as I can.
Words.
Words can make me wealthy. Words can make me famous. I can be a Homer or a Shakespeare or a Charles Dickens or a J.K. Rowling. The words I write can make people feel things. They can make people laugh. If they're very good words, they can make people cry. The words are tools, they're just a means to an end. Or so I keep telling myself. Somehow, I keep forgetting that the words are supposed to be working for me, and I start serving the words, worshiping at the altar of the words, doing whatever I can for the words, searching for days on end like a lost child hopelessly seeking a glimpse of a familiar face, looking for the right words, all in the hope that I'll get a smile or a pat on the head from those wonderful, wonderful words. I love them, I'd die for them, and they're just spiky black figures on a stark white page.
Words.
Damn.
Who am I? I'm a writer.
Will my words last forever? Will they be forgotten after today? Will they be rediscovered in the far future? Will they have any influence? Will anyone even read them at all?
Who am I? I'm nobody. But feel free to quote me anyway.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
The Alpha and the Omega
Comprehensive is a comforting word. It feels like a promise; it feels like perfection. If you pick up a book with the word "comprehensive" in the title, you feel guaranteed that whatever you need to know about the subject of the book will be in there. And you sigh as you realize all you have to do now is find it.A popular slangy way to say "comprehensive" is "A to Z". If a book or website or person claims to have or know such-and-such "A to Z!" (the exclamation point seems to be a mandatory part of the phrase) it is claiming that nothing has been left out and no stone has been left unturned - indeed, not even one letter of the alphabet has been left in peace during the creator's exhaustive search for and organization of information on the topic of interest.
As tacky and commercial as the term "A to Z" seems compared to a solid, Latin-derived word like "comprehensive," it is more expressively visceral. It reaches more people at a level easily understood since their childhood. Just as Jesus Christ is our justification and sanctification, so does expressiveness justify and sanctify grammatically improper terms. The Bible, translated into language even a child could understand (for good reason; see Luke 18:16, Matthew 19:14 and Matthew 18:3) has always been a book of the people and the people's language.
It is not surprising then that in the last book of the Bible we find that familiar comforting guarantee, as contemporary and apropos of the moment as A to Z filing systems, that God is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. It is a simple statement of truth in simple terms anyone can understand. It speaks to the common sense in humanity which is so unpretentious that language with its rules shuns it as too common. Yet the Bible does not deal with pretentious rules, airs and propriety. God speaks to people, not ideas. His words to us tell us who He is, and in no uncertain terms.
"I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." I am everything! God is saying. I am all you will ever need. Not only am I all you will ever need, I am all you are able to need. Everything leads back to Me. Without Me there is nothing, not even a void-of-space nothing, because that's a definable concept and therefore is something. Nothing.
God is everything. He was here before us and he will be here after us. The buck stops here, right back where it started. There is no escaping God. He's comprehensive. Nothing is left out; nothing is left undone. Here is God's guarantee: whatever you are looking for, it is in Him. All you have to do now is find it, so start looking.
And... feel free to quote me!
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