Write, let it go, and see where the tides take it.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5).

I do not write for you to remember me.

Ancient writers often did not sign their names to their scrolls.  They signed the name of their teacher.  We call that forgery.  They called it honor.  They wrote to share the truth they gratefully received.  Today, we don’t know their names.

Well, you know my name.  It’s in the address of my web page, and it’s accompanied by my picture at the bottom of this post.  But I would rather write as an ancient.

I write because my cup overflows.  After all these years of thinking about faith and life while eating my cereal, brushing my teeth, and shaving before work, I faced a choice: Either present to the world nothing more than a clean-shaven face, well-fed body, and strong, tea-tinted teeth, or share with all takers the daring sense of wonder that faith engenders.

Don’t trust any writer or artist who denies that some degree of narcissism motivates their work.  It motivates mine.  But if only that motivated me, it couldn’t sustain me through a post any better than a lollipop could sustain me through a day.

I follow through and publish these posts not because I’m special but because I’m not.  You and I share more in common than difference.  Without common ground with you, my words fall on stone and take no root.  Despite our inevitable differences, I trust the wild promise that my faith echoes yours and yours, mine.  Faith demands a meeting.  I send out these words in a bottle with a prayer that you will find something of your heart where I slipped a note.

So I don’t write for me.  I write for us.  Again, I do not write for you to remember me.  I write for you to remember yourself.  Find words for your experience in my words.

Meanwhile, we live in a marketplace of words.  The din rises.  Who can hear over the noise?  Who can hear deep calling to deep?

It tempts me to retreat to silent places, to write poems to myself, to sing verses far from human ears.  Doesn’t the soul then profit?  Doesn’t God then hear and smile?

Well, I heard another call.  Someone said if you have something worth sharing, you should make it available to as many as will profit.  They say people won’t read without a name and picture.  I don’t want to hear that.  But I don’t want to hide my light under a bushel either.

So between eating my cereal and brushing my teeth, I go to my laptop, read over the post for the 50^th time, pray, click, “Publish,” and for better or worse, you get what you see.

Let me repeat: I pray.  That it will touch at least one heart.  That someone might share the post if it helps their deep cry out to another’s deep in the same way.  It’s not my property any more.  It never was.