Inspiration: The Shovel of God

I take inspiration wherever I get it. Today, my inspiration flows from an article … no, really just a single line I read yesterday in an article.

During my morning ritual of drinking coffee and telling my Abbey she’s the absolute best dog in the whole world, (she waits at the fireplace each morning with a waggy tail for this reminder) I was reading an article in Relevant magazine. It was a conversation with Anne Lamott, who is a very good writer and essayist about some of the inconvenient truths of life and Christianity. Anne loves dogs too.

The article was decent, with some rehashing of a lot of the stuff in her books. But one particular line she said grabbed me. It forced me to re-read it, mouthing each word quietly. Then it made me read it aloud to my wife, Ellen, who was checking her email in the chair next to me. As usual, Ellen made listening noises (something that married couples tend to do for each other). But the line compelled me to read it again … louder … this time getting her attention. When I finished, we both sat there, quietly, in stupid awe. And then (as only older married couples and close friends can do) we both made the hmmph grunting sound at the same time.

We looked at each other, and each knew what the other was thinking.

This one line was provoking us to change, to do something we’d felt we should do for years.

This one line held our attention all day.


Words can awake and exhume the dead

It’s strange how one sentence can challenge and inspire a person to change their life … or their outlook on life. One particular line spoken in a movie or in a song or poem can lift us up and give us wings to rise above the messes we’re in, or they can break us down and make us face our deepest fears. And when it happens, it usually re-awakens something inside us that fell asleep. It re-ignites some former passion that was once alive in us, but had been snuffed long ago out by circumstances. It exhumes something in us that had been buried by the dominoes in life that tend to fall on us.

Words have the ability to bring thoughts to us at our deepest level. Like shovels, they rudely dig through the daily junk of our lives deep into our being and inspire us at our very core. And when we pay attention to the trajectory of what inspires us at this depth, we see that in the grand scheme of life, we are continually being drawn into a certain direction. When we pay close attention to what re-ignites us and awakens us and inspires us, we recognize a particular theme developing in our life … some connection of deep desires strung together by a certain purpose.

Some people call it finding God’s will. I’d rather call it … finding God’s inspiration.

And it happens for all of us in different ways. There is something powerful about words, whether spoken, written, or sung. Different venues affect us each differently. Whether they rhyme or whether they are printed in a beautiful way. They hold the mysterious ability to uncover implanted desires in our heart and soul and mind … things that God placed within us and wants us to discover. Dreams, hopes, direction, etc.. And on the other hand, they also tend to uncover some harmful things in us that God wants us to deal with. Anxieties, fears, addictions, etc.


Ready to be unburied?

They say (the anonymous plural, “they”, whoever that is?) that we are all just 3 questions away from breaking down. And if you’ve ever spoken with a therapist who knows how to read people, you know what “they” are talking about. We are all on the edge of insanity. We are all oppressed to some extent by our fears. In one way or another, we are all screwed up so bad we are ashamed when others realize it. It is the price we pay for living in a fallen world. On the flipside of that though, I think that we’re also just one line away from being inspired. That is the grace of God in action. That is the power of words.

So read on.

Listen to another verse.

Take in one more line of a poem.

Struggle onward to that bit of inspiration.

Uncover where God is leading you … who he is revealing you can be.



Lazarus Come Forth
Simply from a simple line

Up from the grave I rise
From ashes of my demise, again
~William Sojourner


Toby Stevens


www.thejourneyanchorage.org