Thank you Bryan, Mel, and Jesus.

All this is rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through;
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin;
I talk of love--a scholar's parrot may talk Greek--
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
--C.S. Lewis

The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives within my chest.

--Donald Miller
'Blue Like Jazz'

Okay so I started this book today, and it's already got my brain doing flops like a kid with a fever convulsion (Nate had one of those once and the visual has never left me) .

I just finished Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, and as it happens Donald Miller has been likened to 'Anne Lamott with testosterone'... it's funny how God provides these mental and spiritual excursions by way of 'coincidence.' Cosby had mentioned the book a while ago, and I sort of filed it away somewhere in that dusty and dishevelled filing cabinet of my brain, and then while at Mel's last weekend I spotted it on a shelf, and she let me borrow it. Mel--I'm afraid I will have to purchase you a new copy, as this one has already put in some bathtub time, which is always precarious for an unsuspecting paperback.... and of course I have already folded over pages that I want to mark... and by the way please don't unfold any of the same in the book I loaned you... you will see those passages again someday--on the blog, at the beginning of a chapter I someday write, misquoted out of my mouth...etc.

Thank you Bryan and Mel. And thank you Jesus for making people like Anne Lamott and C.S. Lewis and Donald Miller, who are able to write words that reveal truth, sting a little, okay a lot, and cause me to take a reluctant look, perhaps with one eye closed, inside my own burgeoning, blundering, burning heart.