Struck Dumb Coming Out of Work

It’s the end of the work day like the end of any other work day. Turn off the computer, pack up the briefcase, put on the jacket, turn out the light, and walk quickly down the hall to the entrance door in the building lobby.

I glance at my watch. I have, perhaps, just enough time to get ahead of the swath of traffic that will soon clog the southbound streets. A normal commute home is 15 minutes. Many days, however, it’s 30 and 40 and 45. If you hit the traffic just right, it will be the normal 15.

I come out of the entrance of the building and turn toward the parking lot. I work in a campus-like setting – buildings no more than three stories tall. The time is approaching dusk.

That’s when I glance up. And I am struck so dumb that I literally stop in my tracks, all thoughts of beating the traffic gone.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling. 

Chesterton on Poetry

In A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Made to Live, author Emily Freeman quotes G.K. Chesterton on the difference between poetry and reason.

“Poetry is sane,” Chesterton says, “because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion…To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”

The first time I read that, I thought two things: first, it sounded just like Chesterton. And second, it appeared to be a salvo in the religion versus science debate. But on reflection, I don’t think it’s that at all. In fact, it makes perfectly good sense.

I just finished reading The Adam Quest by Tim Stafford, in which he profiles 11 scientists exploring human origins who also happen to be Christians. The 11 cross the range of understanding, from ardent creationists to equally ardent evolutionists. But whether it was Stafford’s unstated intention or not, they all sounded more like poets than they did what we think of as scientists. None of them sounded like someone seeking “to get the heavens into his head” (and not all were male, I should note).

What I think Chesterton is actually contrasting here is faith and reason, and he is putting the poets, and poetry, on the faith side of the ledger. The fact is that we, as the general mass of humanity, will never actually be able to “know everything.” Poets understand this, have made peace with it, and are comfortable floating in that “infinite sea.”

Those Chesterton calls logicians are not comfortable with this. They reject the notion of the infinite, replacing it with the “finite if not yet known.” They are confident all can be and will be made known.

It occurs to me that this may be another way of saying that logicians seek to understand and control, while poets seek to understand and accept. This is not an argument against science; far from it. But it is an argument against a certain kind of philosophy and belief, one that often shows up in the workplace. It includes the notion that we can control everything that happens in our work environment.

Freeman considers this idea of Chesterton’s, and recognizes there’s more to it than a surface reading (and I’ve only touched upon it here). She suggests we become comfortable with the idea of floating upon the infinite sea, and “show up within your limits.” Know yourself. Show up human. Show up authentic because, ultimately, it is our only choice.

“Showing up where you are with what you have is all you can do,” Freeman says.

The rest is pretense, and possibly self-deception.

Over at The High Calling, we’re discussing A Million Little Ways. Today’s post will be live at 2 p.m. Central time. Please visit to see what others are saying about the chapters on showing up, waiting, and offering.

A Desire to Write

I don’t exactly when I decided that writing would be a significant part of my life. But it was later than one might think. A lot later.

It wasn’t when I was a child, even though, when I was 10, my father brought home a blank-sheeted book he had bound at his printing business – for me to write a story. But it was largely because I was a voracious reader, and he thought I could write my own story. I did, or at least part of a story, a mystery, about a kids who discover that a grandfather clock hides a tunnel. (That’s all I remember about it.)

It wasn’t in high school, even though my favorite subject was English, and even though I has discovered Twain, Dickens, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Frost, T.S. Eliot, and so many other writers and poets.

When I started college, I was in a pre-med curriculum, and that lasted all of two semesters. By the end of my freshman year, I had already taken two semesters of life sciences and two semesters of chemistry. And I had another 13 hours of chemistry to go. Since Glynn + chemistry = total misery, it was time to rethink what I wanted to study. I ended up in journalism because I knew I could write, and because I wasn’t going to lose any course credits.

What I didn’t know how to do was type, and typing was a requirement to enter the Journalism School. So the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I taught myself to type. Imperfectly. But adequately enough to get into journalism.

But as odd as this might sound, I didn’t think of journalism as writing. And I spent less than a year working for a newspaper before going to work in corporate communications.

It was in 1975 and 1976 that the idea of writing began to enter my head, writing apart from what I did at work. And it happened, I think, because I was unceremoniously pushed into speechwriting. I liked it; in fact, it is still what I consider the best part of all corporate communications work – the best and the most difficult. Speechwriting requires you to write stories to be told aloud, stories for people to hear as opposed to stories for people to read. And that requires work in understanding storytelling, rhetoric, language, and humor (among a lot of other things). It’s no surprise that most communications people don’t like speechwriting.

But I did. Speechwriting also led me back to poetry. From 1976 to 2006, I had many kinds of jobs and responsibilities, and speechwriting was always part of every one of them.

An interesting thing about speechwriting is that speechwriters do stand in the shadows. Someone else will get credit for their best work (and blame for their worst). In a very real and sometimes profound way, I was striving to do my best work for someone else.

In A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Made to Live, author Emily Freeman says something as simple as it’s profound: “I don’t believe there is one great thing I was made to do in this world. I believe there is one great God I was made to glorify. And there will be many ways, even a million little ways, I will declare his glory with my life.”

Freeman goes on to discuss why desires are put in our hearts, desires like a desire for writing. It’s not so that we can excel and become famous authors, receive honorary degrees and awards, and speak and be lionized at writing conferences.

I don’t believe I am “called” to write. I do believe that my heart has the desire to write, but not because I have wonderful stories to tell.

No, like speechwriting, my desire to write is defined by doing my best work, all my work, for someone else.

Over at TheHigh Calling, we’re discussing A Million Little Ways. Today’s discussion will be live at 2 p.m. Central time. Joinus, and find out what people have to say about desire.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Where Does the Poetry Come From?

What does it mean to be made in the image of God?

Consider the word “image.” It suggests a picture, an illustration or drawing, a photograph, an idea. But it doesn’t suggest the reality of a thing – only the representation of the reality.

Today, in the hypermedia, 24-hours news cycle world we live in, we hear “image” and we think “reputation.” But is our reputation the same the reality of our self? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

“Image” has a physical connotation. But, in the sense described in Genesis 2, where “God made man in his image, male and female he made them,” the idea of image is more profound, and more complex, than mere physical appearance or similarity.

One aspect of the complexity of the image we bear is the creative impulse. Made in God’s image, we image-bearers are creators as well.

In A Million Little Ways: Uncover the Art You Made to Live, author Emily Freeman explores this creative impulse. She notes the apostle Paul’s explanation in the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, that we are a masterpiece, or workmanship, made to do good things. And she notes that the Greek word translated as “masterpiece” is poeima, the same word that gives “poem.”

“What happens when God writes poetry?” she asks.

“We do,” she answers. “We happen.”

And she goes on. “We are walking poetry, the kind that moves, the kind who has hands and feet, the kind with mind and will and emotion. We are what happens when God expresses himself.”

This is the same idea behind my book, Poetry at Work. I wasn’t as direct as Freeman is; she’s speaking largely to Christians and I am speaking to a broader audience. The idea of my book is that poetry is inherent in the work we do. What I don’t say in the book is that the work we do is done in the creative image of God, whether we believe in God’s existence or not.

A colleague at work, going through kind of a bad patch, read Poetry at Work. “I had no idea,” he told me, “how much this would help me make sense of it all. Something much bigger than work is at play here.”

I make the implication at several points in the book, but it is my heart’s desire for readers of Poetry at Work to ask the question, if poetry is inherent in the work we do, then where does it come from?

Over at The High Calling today, Laura Boggess is beginning the February book discussion on A Million Little Ways. Her post introducing the book will be live at 2 p.m. Central time.

Image by Tony Melena via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.