“Life is not what we make of it, but what God makes of us.”

Life is a journey of learning what God wants to make of us. We can’t always make sense of the disparate pieces of our lives, but God can. He helps us find coherence in the confusion, transcendence in the transitory, and meaning in the messiness. As we learn to see fingerprints of his goodness, truth, and beauty, we journey from pieces to wholeness.

Faith | Life | Word | Art

 “Every piece of a puzzle has a story of its own to tell.”

The pieces of my life are not really that fascinating, but they have stories to tell. No overarching metanarratives, but hidden micro-narratives—small observations with larger implications; colored threads in a textured tapestry; clay on a potter’s wheel. No piece of a life is too small to have a voice if we listen to what it is saying.

 “Sign on an author’s door: ‘Books live here. Open and read.’”

Whatever else you hope to find in a book—information, inspiration, escape—you enter into an exchange with its author. You choose to engage with the mind and heart of the one who put those words on those pages. When I write a book, I’m inviting my readers to join a conversation. So open and read, but also engage.

“Only a musical Creator could make musical creatures for a musical creation.”

Every song—whether masterful or mediocre—is a narrative of words, stories, and ideas given life in a musical body. Personally, I write primarily for the creative pleasure, and only secondarily as a performing or a recording artist. And yet, like every other songwriter, my song does not become real for me until it is heard by others. That’s why they’re here.

 “Poetry is the music of words played on the instrument of language.”

Though I don’t pretend to be a poet, I do dabble in poetry. There is a complexity to it that intrigues me as a wordsmith. Though I’m not an artist, poetry seems to me like painting a picture, only with the verbal brushes and linguistic colors of words, rhyme, meter, flow, analogy, pattern, and more. It is the art of wording.

“A picture is worth a thousand words, a word ten thousand pictures.”

Even with all the right gear, I was never more than a wannabe photographer. With just my smartphone, though, I can be a phoneographer—no more bulky DSLR, cryptic settings, and bag of lenses. Now it’s about catching life in the moment—observing and capturing a story as it happens. For me, that’s a better picture.