PART 1

       The Blinking Line

       You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.

       —Alan Watts

      I once had an idea for a book.

      I’d never written a book.

      I was a pastor at the time and I’d been giving sermons week after week and I noticed that certain ideas and stories seemed to connect with people in a unique way. I began to see themes and threads and wondered whether I could bring them together to make something people would read and pass along to their friends. I already had a job, so I figured the only way to write a book was to hire a stenographer—the person who sits in a courtroom and records everything that is said during a trial—and speak the book out loud in one sitting while he typed what I said.

      So that’s what I did. I stood there in a room and I spoke the book out loud while KevinTheStenographer typed away. It took an entire day.

      And it was awful. Seriously—it was so bad.

      There was a moment in the middle of the afternoon when I was talking and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t even listening to what I was saying. I had somehow managed to stop paying attention to myself.

      A few days later Kevin sent me the typed manuscript of what I’d said and I started reading it, but it was like a mild form of torture. It just didn’t work.

      It was my words, but it wasn’t me, if that makes sense.

      All of which led me to the shocking realization that if I was going to write a book, I was going to have to actually write a book.

      Which sounds obvious, but at the time it was a revelation.

      I remember sitting down at my desk, opening up a new word-processing document, and staring at that blank page with that blinking line in the upper left-hand corner. I wasn’t prepared for how intimidating it would be. Other people are writers—actual, you know, authors. And there are lots of them, many who have been doing it for years.

      I thought about Christopher Moore’s book about Biff the thirteenth disciple

      and Annie Dillard’s line about physics labs

      and everything Nick Hornby has ever written

      and Dorothy Sayers’s words about Trinitarian creativity

      and anything by Dave Eggers …

      I was now going to try and do that? The blinking line on that blank page kept blinking, like it was taunting me.

      There’s a reason it’s called a cursor.

       We all have a blinking line.

       Your blinking line is whatever sits in front of you waiting to be brought into existence.

      It’s the book

      or day

      or job

      or business

      or family

      or mission

      or class

      or plan

      or cause

      or meeting

      or task

      or project

      or challenge

      or phone call

      or life that is waiting for you to bring it into being.