Average Creation: A Poem by Franki

So, while I was writing my blog post "Average Creativity", Franki decided to take make a new attempt at poetry. I think the result is pretty good, though I may be biased both by my relationship to her and my experience of the subject matter (spoiler, it's about doing our dishes). I'll leave it at that though and let you judge for yourself.

Just one more thing, if you were inspired to create something after reading my post I'd love to hear about it. Okay done, now read the poem.
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The Basin of Despair (also, the Sonnet of the Sink).
by: Franki Batten

The porcelain stage where my drama set
Is ordained with precious and paltry stone.
In the apron I soak in the near debt
Due to me as I sweat upon my throne.

The curtain is drawn as I don my crown

And the floodlights wash the foul aftermath
Of a stomach feasting on greed. I drown
In self pity accompanied by wrath.

Yet there is a scene, though hidden by blacks,
That tells of a king and his daughter dear.

His sweat paid her debt in his crowning act.

Now she is learning her character here.

I am being washed as the water flows

from springs on dry land that rise ever slow. 

Observations from Stories

If you pay attention, you will find that every story has something to teach you. Maybe you think curling up with one of your favorite novels is just a pleasant pastime, and I certainly hope it is that, but for the observant reader it can be so much more. Stories have the power to stir the deep waters of the human heart, and by looking carefully we can get a glimpse of the truths hidden in those depths.

For example, my understanding of romance was recently expanded by reading a fantasy novel that was probably targeted at teenage boys. “The Name of the Wind” is a novel written by Patrick Rothfuss and, like many science-fiction stories, it draws in readers by allowing them to vicariously experience the danger and power of a magical world through the adventures of the main character. Of course, such a story would not be complete without a woman to make things complicated, and this story spent a lot of energy developing a particularly ill-fated romance.

What surprised me about this story was how strongly I reacted to the ups and downs of the main characters fumbling relationship with the elusive and alluring love interest. Rothfuss actually does a brilliant job connecting the reader with his characters. You come to feel and agree with the way the two young lovers admire and respect one another, and recognize how good they could be together. But you also come to understand that their relationship is all but impossible due to life circumstances and the mix of pride and fear making up their own personalities. The author creates very mature and genuine affections in the hearts of two people who are too young and inexperienced to know how to handle them properly. Towards the end of the story I actually threw the book across the room after the two come infuriatingly close to speaking their hearts, only to bury them again as the world begins to pull them apart.

After I finished the story I kept wondering what it was about this fictional, and very juvenile, romance that got me so worked up. I still cannot decide whether or not I even want to read the next book. Rothfuss is a compelling writer sure, but I think there is something more about this high-school level romance that simultaneously draws me in and makes me want to stay away, something inside my own heart.

My current theory is that there is something inside me that believes the romance between a man and a woman is supposed to be as passionate and simple as a high-school romance. That  a man is meant to desire a woman’s beauty with all the passion in his heart. That romance should be simple, almost foolish, without any need to be wise or guarded. Yet, because I am not in high-school anymore, I also know that reckless love cannot navigate the troubles and brokenness of the world we live in. Lasting relationships require wisdom and dedication in addition to passion and admiration. To love is often a conscious choice, yet maybe once, before the fall, it did not need to be. I think my heart knows that the love between a man and a woman was not originally designed to require the caution and prudence it now does. That when it sees the ill-fated bloom of an unguarded romance it both craves and weeps for what can no longer be.

Maybe I am misreading my own emotions, but I am confident there is something to learn from the way my heart stirred as I experienced this story. Maybe a theology book could teach me more about the role of a man and a woman or the effects of the fall, but some things need to be felt to truly learn what they mean. Stories, and our reaction to those stories, can teach us much about the state and affections of mankind if we are really listening when we hear them. So next time you sit down with a good book, be observant of how you are being affected, and see if you can’t learn something about the inclination of your own heart.

Average Creativity

I want to see more mediocre creativity. Not from those people who love to express themselves by drawing strange pictures or write confusing stories that seem to have a moral you can never quite understand. That stuff is weird, and really not very good. Rather, I want to see what might come out of people who you do not immediately think of as artistic if someone told them they should try and create something.

I suspect that many people operate on an unspoken, and never challenged assumption that they are not the “creative type” and could never create anything that anyone else would want to see. Then too, creating something is really pretty risky, because in so doing you open yourself up to what other people might think about it. It’s much easier just to label yourself a “left brained” person and pretend you have no interest in “artsy” stuff so that no-one expects you to create much in the first place. Whoever said “it is better to try and fail than never to have tried at all” had clearly never had to risk... being laughed at...

Possibly some of this kind of thinking is driven by the outsourcing of creativity to pop culture and the media. We don’t need to learn to tell stories because we have new movies coming out every week, and bookstores with more novels that we could ever read. Who needs to play an instrument when we can download free music in more genres than can effectively be named. Who needs to learn how to decorate, much less paint, when we can buy ready-made living room sets, or look in a magazine to figure out what things should look like.

But art is for more than entertainment, and I want to see more than what a majority of people think is the best sound or most exciting action movie. At it’s heart, art is a means of communicating things that cannot be explained by reading wikipedia. The color blue, the feeling of pride, the wonder of the Gospel; these things are too complex to communicate in dictionary. But a creator who truly understands and appreciates them can explain them to us in their music, stories, or art, using dimension that go far beyond simple words.

I believe most people, an especially those who have experienced the love of Christ, have something deep inside their heart that they could communicate, if only they were willing to test their artistic abilities. They should probably not expect to be on the same level as Motzart or J.K.Rowling their first go-round, but I think they would be surprised at what they could create if they gave it an honest shot. On the few occasions where I have put pen to paper and tried to express some thoughts that other people might appreciate, I have found that I actually had something to say, and that the few people I let read it heard something fairly close to what was in my head. It wasn’t ground-breaking stuff, and I don’t imagine I will ever make any money as a writer, but it was definitely time well spent.

Now, just to be clear, writing a poem for your girlfriend that you would be embarrassed for anyone else to read does not count as artistic expression. People need to be okay when their creations are average, there is a big difference between accepting mediocrity, and aiming for it. If you do not care very much about the thing you are trying to share, and are not willing to work at creating something that does justice to that image, then I have very little interest in anything you create.

But if you have learned to deeply enjoy or appreciate something, and think that something is worth capturing and learning to express in a picture, a story, a poem, or a blog post, then let me be the first to encourage you to go for it. Don’t worry about whether anyone will like it or not, instead, simply try to express that thing as best you know how in the hopes that someone else will get a glimpse of it through your eyes, and come to understand one more piece of the goodness that was originally created for us to enjoy.

Author of Eternity

Anticipation

Confession time, I have always had trouble being excited about resurrection. Not “The Resurrection” as in the climax of the Biblical narrative when Christ rises victorious, turns to death and mocks “where is your sting”, resolving once and for all the paradox of expressing God’s love and justice to a sinful humanity. That story is awesome. What I mean is that I don’t think I am particularly excited about the idea that one day I will follow Christ and be raised myself to everlasting life. Maybe that sounds unchristian, but I doubt if I am the only one who feels that way.

What makes this issue particularly challenging for me is that it sits more in my heart than in my head. It is just hard for me to be excited about living in a new earth that apparently has none of the things that I love about this one.

It is not that I imagine being given a harp and a ring of neon lighting, then told to sit on a cloud and practice playing harmony until I like it. Nor am I upset by the idea that I may never again taste bar-b-que, watch a movie, or play ultimate frisbee. It is not even Jesus’ claims that we will not be marriage in the resurrection, or any of the things that go with marriage, that is throwing me off.

As far as that goes, I’m actually pretty excited to see the new earth, which I expect to be everything this one was meant to be and more. I fully expect magnificent waterfalls, astonishing animals, towering mountains, and every other National Geographic image to be infinitely better than the ones we have now. And to live in a city that had needs no sun because the glory of God is constantly giving it light... that I want to see.

But as I daydream about all of beauty and wonder of God’s recreated earth, I find that my heart is using those images to console itself to a fate it fears I cannot avoid. Because in all of that perfection and beauty and bliss, I am afraid that I will have no purpose. And without purpose, how can I not eventually become bored, looking wistfully back on the days when I fought to be a man of God in a world that opposed Him, to proclaim his Truth to the nations, and make disciples for an army that fought valiantly against the powers of darkness?

Everyone loves a story about overcoming challenges, accomplishing a mission, defeating an enemy. We love to see the hero defeat the dragon, the boy get the girl, the adventurer accomplish the quest. Yet if there were no challenge to overcome, no dragon to defeat, what kind of story would be left? Would anyone want to read the story of “boy meets girl” if they simply met, fell in love, had kids and lived happily ever after, without a bit of trial or challenge?

Yet in a perfected earth, every challenge that we have ever faced, every battle we have ever fought, every enemy we ever strove against will all be ended. There will be no need to work hard to sustain ourselves, because we will have the Bread of Life. There will be no enemy to fight once the great commission is complete and Satan is forever cast down. We won’t even have those little sins in our own hearts to wrestle with, because our sanctification will be complete.

This is what my heart fears, that my existence will be basically purposeless because every purpose I have ever been put to will no longer be necessary. As a man I was made to work for my King, yet what place does a laborer have in a world that is already perfect?

Uncertainty

Maybe my desire for purpose is self-centered, and just another way of looking for fulfillment outside of God, but I don’t think so. When God set Adam in the garden he gave him a purpose, and I think the desire to be used for something is inherent in the way God created man. We were given the ability to think and to feel and to work, and to desire an opportunity to do those things is to desire that which God has called good. Though it is probably confused by my limited by a sinful mind, I think my heart is right to desire an eternity where I am still used by the Lord.

Here, as with many things in the life of faith, I am finding that God responds to the deepest questions of my heart, not with answers, but with Himself. The more I see of the complexity and beauty He has created in this first world, the more my heart learns to trust in the Author of all worlds.

The history of this world is one amazing story of God glorifying himself through his interaction with humanity. No novel has ever come close to the depths of emotion and wonder in the great epic of God’s redemption of his people. The villainy of humanity is rife with irony and despair as we blunder about, trying to save ourselves and create a kingdom cut off from the source of all life. And then, just when we realize there is no hope for us, comes the greatest twist ending of all time as God saves the world, at the same time winning for himself the greatest glory we have ever seen, by turning the greatest sorrow of the world into the greatest joy as he transforms death into grace and love.

This story has so many twists and turns, and most of it still hidden by time and space, that no human writer has ever conceived of anything that even compares. This is the story that I love, the one I keep re-reading to find all the details I missed last time. This story is alive, and it jumps out and changes me each time I contemplate even one small section of it.

It is the wonder of this story that makes me afraid to leave it. Because here, in this story, I know how God has chosen to write me in, and I rejoice to see how very good it is. I cannot understand how God will create anything to match that, no matter how wonderful or perfect he makes the next world.

But how foolish is it to fear reading the next book because the first was so good? How much would I have missed if I had stopped after read only the Hobbit, because I couldn’t imagine anything being better than that? What’s more, if C.S. Lewis, or J.R.R. Tolkein were still writing today and came out with another novel, I would order it this very moment and start to think that two days is an intolerably long time to wait for a package to arrive, because I have learned to trust those authors. Then if they wrote to me, and told me that this story was better than anything else they had ever written, I would pay to overnight it and disappear for the next week until I had read it cover to cover, possibly twice.

But isn’t that exactly what God has said to us? “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.” (Isaiah 65:17). The Author of my favorite story has promised me that the story ahead will so eclipse what has gone on before that the life I am living now will be less than a blip on my memory.

I cannot imagine anything that good. That I will never reminisce and wish to be here in the best moments of fighting alongside my Lord for His kingdom against all the powers of this world? It is inconceivable to me. But I suppose that’s because I am only a reader, and not the Author.

I still do not know what the resurrection will be like. But when my heart begins to mourn the future loss of the things I now love, I will remember who is writing the story. I know I can trust that He is not such a poor writer as to abandon the characters he has spent the entire first book saving to a minor or purposeless role in the sequel. Instead, I will anticipate the next instalment of my favorite story, and all the more because I have no idea just where it might go

Telling Stories

Pleasant Nothings

Communicating the Gospel to someone is hard.

Of course I know that a large part of that is due to the reality that people’s hearts are fundamentally opposed to the Gospel, and that my heart is often opposed to risking what people think. But even beyond that, I find that effective evangelism is made a lot harder by a lack of effective communication.

Often times, when I do get up the gumption to share my faith, I find that there is a significant disconnect between what I am saying and what people are hearing. Sometimes that’s because they grew up in church, think they already know what I am saying, and so they stop really listening. Sometimes they simply assume I am a willfully ignorant, wishful-thinker the moment they hear me talk about believing in God. Whatever the reason, many people seem to be unable or unwilling to listen to me when I start using “religious” words.

Cultural Linguistics

Now obviously I cannot give up trying to tell people about the best news I have ever heard just because they do not understand what I am saying. But I also sorta doubt it will be helpful to simply repeat myself, even if I did it a little slower and louder, to see if they understand me the second time around.

So recently I have been pondering how I can effectively navigate the waters of people’s presuppositions and the swirling current of cultural phraseology to more effectively share my faith. It will be no surprise to those of you who are the frequent audience of my less disciplined ramblings to hear that I have found the idea of story to very helpful in this regard.

Actually, story is increasingly the way that I understand God’s saving and sanctifying work in my own life, and so some people could probably see this as just a complicated way of saying “share my testimony,” In one sense, I probably agree, but I want to do more than simply tell people what God has done for me individually.

I think that the Bible itself is telling one big story, you might say “The Story”, of how God is revealing his glory by redeeming a rebellious world to himself. What’s more, I think that we are all playing a part in that story, and that learning to play our part is the purpose for which so many people are looking, which presents an interesting way of presenting the Gospel.

The need for the Gospel is written across world history, and all over the story of people’s lives. I expect that if you looked closely, you would find that most people feel directionless because they are living in a story that is only as big as their own “dreams”, while they were meant to live for a Story that is much bigger. As Christians, we have the advantage of knowing that The Story, and how he desires us to fit into it. I think, that if I understand that story well enough, I can ask people about the story of their lives, and point out what it is missing, that is, where it needs the Gospel.

Even better, I am pretty sure I could do it without having to use very many “churchy” words. Or even if I did use words like “grace”, “forgiveness”, “redemption”, and the like, they would be used in terms of people’s lives, and so it would be much hard to misunderstand what I meant. I could give examples of the stories of the lives of friends who had found redemption of their own story by fitting it into the One Story that God was telling all along. I do not know if this approach can make people more willing to accept the Trust, but I think at least it can help them better understand what the Gospel actually is.

This method of sharing my faith will not be quick, and it will probably require me to listen much more than I talk (not something I am used to). But I think in a world of increased Biblical illiteracy and open antagonism to the Gospel, that we are going to have to learn to be patient, fight the long fight, and trust that the Spirit is working even when we cannot see.

To Be Clear

Now I am not saying that we should never try to share the Gospel with the random person next to you on the plane for fear that they will misunderstand what you mean. Accurate communication of the Gospel will always be a work of the Spirit, and the amount of groundwork done before hand is irrelevant when He decide to turn a heart of stone into a heart of flesh. Nor is this an attempt to make the Gospel more palatable or less offensive.  In fact, what I have understood of God’s Story puts us as something equivalent to the Orcs of middle earth. So please do not hear this as me looking for an easy way out of sharing the hard truths in the Bible.

What I am saying is that we need to recognize that effectively communicating the Gospel is not easy, and will not be getting any easier. We are commissioned to do everything in our power to overcome that challenge. Maybe you can do that by putting things in terms of stories, maybe you have another way of understanding and communicating the Truth. So long as what you are sharing is informed by God’s Truth, the method is not all that important. What is important is that you and I are actively seeking to better understand the Gospel, and how to better communicate it to the lost around us.

Personally though, I think “The Gospel as Story” is going to be hard to beat.

Every First Blog

Justifying Why You Should Waste Your Valuable Time Reading My Random Thoughts

I do not like blogs. I rarely read them. I do not ever follow them. It seems to me the two main reasons people start blogs are to vent their personal feelings, or chase the unlikely chance they will gain enough publicity to quit their real jobs and just sell adds. Both of those reasons I find just a little bit sad.

Yet (cue the obvious contradiction), I am writing all of this on a blog... So why does this site exist? More to the point, why should you keep reading? I am not even going to attempt to answer the second question, you are probably avoiding doing something anyway and really shouldn't waste your time here. But I do actually have an answer to the first question, and now that I have disclaimed any delusions of grandeur and made an appropriately self denigrating apology for you having stumbled onto this page, I will try my best to explain why I have decided to set these words among the ever increasing wasteland of internet blog sites.

“I should write” is a thought I have been kicking around in my head for the better part of the past year. Nothing much ever came of it, partly because I sort of hate the actual process of writing, but also because I had no real idea of what I should be writing.

I tried writing a few short stories, since it was fiction novels that I most enjoyed reading and that taught me the value of good writing. But after failing to get beyond the first half of any of my ideas without hating what I had already written, I have come to realize something about myself: I am NOT a fiction author.

It still hurts me a little to see that written down. I have enormous respect for authors like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, Andrew Peterson, and many other writers whose stories have taught me many things about good, evil, truth, love, sorrow, faith and hope. A small piece of my heart still dreams that one day I might create something half as helpful as their works. But in an interesting twist of reality, the love and respect I have for these stories has helped me see that I do not really operate on the mental plane as the authors who created them.

To create a story like Lord of the Rings or the Wingfeather Saga requires the author to see creation through an artist’s eyes and experience the world with an artist’s heart. Music moves us because it conveys an idea or expression to the hearer on two planes. The lyrics and the notes move together to explain to our hearts and paint in our minds a deeper understanding of the thought being played across the medium of sound. In the same way, a story teller can take an idea or concept and explain it in terms of actions, drama and consequences, such that the reader understands more about that idea than he ever could have with a simple definition or explanation.

To write a story that faithfully expresses the realities of our world, the writer must first be able to see and feel those realities in their fullness. Only then can he retell what he has understood in such a way that that fullness can be felt and understood by another. While I have learned to deeply appreciate what these men are accomplishing in their ability to write stories that are full of truth, I have not found that this same ability within myself. Possibly I am too analytical, too practically minded to fully rejoice at what is good, revile what is bad, and describe the quiet awesome wonder that is hope in the face of despair. I think one of the reasons I really love stories so much is because they have helped me to see and feel this world more fully than I ever would have on my own.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I both want you to understand the thought process which lead me to write this blog, and because explaining my thoughts on stories was the easiest way to show you what I actually want to write. I may not be good at capturing truth in a fictional story, but I believe God has given me a an ability to understand the substance of things (like what makes good stories so awesome) and then to explaining it simply and clearly to other people.

Some people call it teaching, some people call it philosophizing, some people call it blogging and a waste of time. Whatever you call it doesn’t really matter to me, but you should know that it is what I plan to do with this blog. I spend a lot of time thinking about random things and trying to articulate what I really think about them. Most of the time this comes out as rambling, and is directed at whoever will stay close enough to hear me. But I want to be more disciplined with my musings than that, so I decided to put the clearest of my thoughts into a blog where other people might read them. At least I will have to be disciplined enough to use correct grammar.

Initially, I did not see much value in writing anything if I couldn’t write stories, or at least a topical, in-depth study of something. But just writing this one post has helped me to understand my thoughts on writing and conveying ideas. For that alone it has been a valuable discipline. On the off chance that you read it this far and have been helped by what I had to say, then I will consider it time well spent.

Maybe one day, if this goes long enough, I’ll even stop saying that I hate blogs.