How To Be Here. Rob Bell
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here,
you’re breathing,
and you have received a gift,
a generous, extraordinary, mysterious, inexplicable gift.
I once visited a man named John who was dying of cancer. I’d never met him before, but a mutual friend had asked me to see him at his house. He was lying in a hospital bed in his living room when I came in, his body frail and ravaged. And yet his eyes were clear and full of shimmering life. After we shook hands and I sat down, he told me,
People just don’t get it
as he smiled and then repeated,
People just don’t get it.
He said that phrase over and over and over again for the next hour, in between bursts of conversation. When I asked him what he meant by it, he said that people don’t understand how precious and incredible life is. He said he hadn’t understood this truth until he knew that it was being taken from him.
Because that’s how it works, doesn’t it?
Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.
You’re driving down the road arguing with someone you love about something stupid when a car almost runs you off the road—and suddenly your hearts are pounding as you turn to each other and say, That was close! And you aren’t arguing anymore.
You’re frustrated with your kid and then you hear about someone else’s kid being in the hospital, and when you get home you hold your kid extra close.
You go to a funeral and you sit there grieving the death of this person you loved but when you leave you realize that mixed in with your sadness is a strange sort of energy that comes from a renewed awareness that you’re here and this is your life and it’s good and it’s a sacred gift.
Why do we react in these ways? Because deep down we know that all we have is a gift.
Jesus taught his disciples a prayer that begins,
Our father, who’s in heaven …
… which is another way of saying,
Begin your prayers—begin your day—by acknowledging that your life is a gift and this gift flows from a source. This source is responsible for the air in your lungs, the blood that courses through your veins, and the vitality that surges through you and everything around you.
… which is another way of saying,
Begin whatever you’re doing by remembering that you are here and you have been given a gift.
The blinking line reminds you that whatever has happened to you, whatever has come your way that you didn’t want, whatever you have been through, you have today, you have this moment, you have a life that you get to create. The universe is unfinished, and God is looking for partners in the ongoing creation of the world.
Boredom is lethal. Boredom says, There’s nothing interesting to make here. Boredom reveals what we believe about the kind of world we’re living in. Boredom is lethal because it reflects a static, fixed view of the world—a world that is finished.
Cynicism is slightly different from boredom, but just as lethal. Cynicism says, There’s nothing new to make here. Often, cynicism presents itself as wisdom, but it usually comes from a wound. Cynicism acts as though it’s seen a lot and knows how the world works, shooting down new ideas and efforts as childish and uninformed. Cynicism points out all the ways something could go wrong, how stupid it is, and what a waste of time it would be. Cynicism holds things at a distance, analyzing and mocking and noting all the possibilities for failure. Often, this is because the cynic did try something new at some point and it went belly up, he was booed off the stage, and that pain causes him to critique and ridicule because there aren’t any risks in doing that. If you hold something at a distance and make fun of it, then it can’t hurt you.
And then there’s despair. While boredom can be fairly subtle and cynicism can appear quite intelligent and even funny, despair is like a dull thud in the heart. Despair says, Nothing that we make matters. Despair reflects a pervasive dread that it’s all pointless and that we are, in the end, simply wasting our time.
Boredom, cynicism, and despair are spiritual diseases because they disconnect us from the most primal truth about ourselves—that we are here.
All three distance us from and deaden us to the questions the blinking line asks:
How are you going to respond to this life you have been given?
What are you going to do with it?
What are you going to make here?
What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know. And remember that plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story.
—Stephen King
I once had an idea for a book called Fire in the Wine.
I had a big black sketchbook on my shelf and I had this insight about the human body and soil and the food we eat and how when we die we’re buried in the earth, which is what we do with seeds that then grow into the food that we consume that sustains our bodies that will be buried when we die … so I made a drawing to represent all of that.
It was just one sketch.
And then a few months later I came across a quote which somehow connected with that drawing that I had copied on the next page of that big black sketchbook.
And then something happened to me that reminded me of that first sketch and that quote which connected to something I’d read in a magazine around that time.
This continued for several years until I could see a book emerging on the pages of that sketchbook, a book I decided to call Fire in the Wine. As I began to organize the content of Fire in the Wine into chapters I realized that I needed to do some reading to give more breadth and depth to the ideas I was working on. So I read. And read. And read. Thousands of pages. And whenever I came across something that spurred a thought or clarified something I’d been thinking about, I underlined it or marked the page. I then went back through those books and took notes on what I’d underlined, copying each idea onto a 3×5 card.
Which took months.
I then laid all those cards out on the floor and looked for patterns and connections and common threads. There were a lot of those cards, and so just out of curiosity I started counting them. I lost track somewhere past six hundred.
Once the cards were organized, I started writing the book, crafting the chapters, creating the introduction, working on the first draft.
Which