in yesterday’s sunday paper, the Peanuts comic strip has snoopy at his roof-top typewriter, and this is what he types: “it was a dark and stormy night / suddenly, a shot rang out. a door slammed. the maid screamed / suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! / while millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury / meanwhile, on a small farm in kansas, a boy was growing up… / {PART II} / “in part two, i tie all of this together…”

i think snoopy and i write in much the same way. some people tell me that when i write i seem to be all over the place but then i bring it all back together at the very end in a way they don’t expect. reading my blog is much like an m. night shyamalan film in that way, except this is less visually stimulating and lacks much of m. night’s brilliance. otherwise, the two of us are peers.

i know i tend to write the way i think (which is, in turn, probably similar to the way i speak, except that when i write my word choice is slightly more refined and probably a good deal wittier than anything i can pull off at the spur of the moment). when i write i follow a train of thought that makes perfect sense in my head, but i can see how it could seem a bit like wandering.

when i write, i hope that readers will be able to get past the lines of ink on the paper, as if those things didn’t even exist, and instead feel more like they have entered a conversation or a story.

sometimes when i’m hanging out with friends, the topic of discussion will come to be something quite ridiculous, like something out of seinfeld, and i will wonder how we came to this point where we would be talking about something so strange. i’ll then set out to retrace the thoughts and words that led us to our conversational location, and in so doing i’ll discover interesting topical bridges and marvel at how seemingly unrelated topics actually tie in quite nicely. i think a lot of people can relate to this sort of thing, and in that way, i hope that my style of writing is more lifelike and believable than some more well-polished works with proper transitions and guidelines and all - you know, the kinds of things that would make english teachers proud.

i was at a church conference in atlanta a year and a half ago, and the conference was jam-packed with solid speakers giving solid messages and it felt a lot like trying to drink from a fire hydrant (which, i suppose, was fitting since this was, after all, the thirsty conference). in addition to main sessions we could choose from quite the array of breakout sessions. one day i opted to attend a seminar led by david crowder, which had a very telling title: “David Talks With Many People At Once About Various Stuff.” this particular breakout appealed to me in part because my head was spinning and i was ready for some cotton candy instead of steak - something fluffy that i wouldn’t need to chew on.

despite david’s insistence that our time would surely be better spent at any other seminar that day, a crowd of us stayed and sat through an hour of rambling that was basically made up of comical, yet totally disconnected stories. i’m sure a lot of those who stayed regretted doing so, but hey, they couldn’t say they weren’t warned. but then, in the final five minutes of his talk, david brilliantly brought it all together - how the neighborhood bully and the automatic toilet flushers and the power outage at the holiday inn and the ancient chinese secret all tied together. there was a method to the madness after all. it all now made sense in such a coherent and beautiful way that i almost got choked up. almost.

in my life experience, God seems to do that sort of thing all the time. all kinds of things happen to you in life, both good and bad. life may seem at times chaotic and at other times, mundane. you may wonder what the point of it all really is. you may wonder what God is doing behind the scenes when it seems He is doing nothing at all, or you may even question His very existence. but then when you’re just about sure it is all disconnected and meaningless - all these things in your life - God ties it all together for you and it begins to make sense and you realize that God is a genius after all, even more than a god who would keep everything orderly and manageable and easily understandable in the first place. if even what appears chaotic or mundane is being orchestrated by a sovereign, loving God, it sort of gives you a reason to trust Him, through the good times and the bad, you know? this is the sort of thing that will really choke you up if you think about it because even more than a goofy breakout session with david crowder, God’s ways are beautiful.

i don’t claim divinity by any means, nor even genius status by humanity’s rather finite standards, but in some small way i hope my writing can be an echo of what God is doing, what He has done, and what He will do in my life, and even in yours.

and if that means being ok with a life that seems (for now) pretty random, a life that lacks proper transitions and sentence structure and capitalization - a life that doesn’t seem to flow nicely, that even seems chaotic or mundane, so be it.

speaking of which, one time in guatemala…