Writing a book about God should be a terrifying experience. That sentence might not make sense until I unpack it. (A phrase I learned from counselor #3). But in the last eight months or so as I’ve worked on two different book concepts, that is exactly how I have felt. And there are two reasons primarily:
1. He’s a hurricane and I have crayons.
Trying to capture the might and majesty and power and beauty of God with a keyboard is like trying to capture the sheer terror of a hurricane with crayons on a piece of paper. It’s impossible. No matter how good your words are, or how tightly wrapped your ideas are, on some levels, you are left with a shadow of a shadow of a shadow.
2. Volleyballs don’t care.
If I write a really horrible, just flat out sucktacular book on volleyball, I’ll never have to answer for that when I die. I won’t go before Wilson from the Tom Hanks movie “Castaway” and be forced to explain why I chose haiku as the best way to express the game of volleyball. But I think when Christian authors die, God is bound to say, “You spent longer filling out your NCAA college basketball bracket then you did writing most of your books about me. That is bogus.”
I believe both those things are true, but sometimes not everybody does. How else can you explain the reams and reams and shelves and shelves of Christian literature that bloom anew each year. How often have you heard a Christian author say, “I knew that this material possibly had eternal consequences so when the publisher asked me to write a quick spin off after the success of the first book, I said ‘No.'” Not that often or maybe just not often enough.
I am terrified of writing a book about God. And I think this idea applies to a lot of the other things we do in God’s name. It’s OK to be a little scared. It’s OK to have a sense of gravity surround you when you sing on stage for the Lord.
He’s a big, massive, wild guy and hope we never grow callused to that idea.
