by Rob Bell
Contents
PART 1 The Blinking Line
PART 2 The Blank Page
PART 3 The Japanese Have a Word for It
PART 4 The Thing About Craft
PART 5 The First Number
PART 6 The Dickie Factor
PART 7 The Two Things You Always Do
PART 8 The Power of the Plates
PART 9 The Exploding Burrito
Endnotes, Riffs, References, and Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from What Is the Bible?
Also by Rob Bell
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Copyright
About the Publisher
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.
An Unfinished World
Do you see your life as something you create?
Or do you see your life as something that is happening to you?
The blinking line raises a compelling question:
What are we here for?
For many people, the world is already created. It’s a fixed, static reality—set in place, previously established, done. Or to say it another way: finished. Which usually leads to the question: What’s the point of any of this?
But when we’re facing the blinking line and we talk about bringing something new into existence, we’re expressing a different view of the world, one in which the world is unfinished.
There’s an ancient poem about this unfinished world we call home. In this poem there are stars and fish and earth and birds and animals and oceans, and they’re all in the endless process of becoming. It’s not just a tree, it’s a tree that produces fruit that contains seeds that will eventually grow new trees that will produce new fruit that contains more seeds to make more new trees. It’s a world exploding with life and beauty and complexity and diversity, all of it making more, becoming and evolving in such a way that tomorrow will be different from today because it’s all headed somewhere. Nothing is set in stone or static here; the whole thing is in motion, flush with vitality and pulsing with creative energy. (This poem, by the way, is the first chapter of the Bible, in case any of this is starting to sound familiar.)
And then, right there in the middle of all of this unfinished creation, the poet tells us about a man and a woman. The man’s name is Adam, which means The Human in the original Hebrew language. It’s not a common name like you and I have, it’s more like a generic description. Same with the woman, whose name is Eve, which means Source of Life or Mother of the Living.
They find themselves in the midst of this big, beautiful, exotic, heartbreaking, mysterious, endlessly becoming, unfinished world and they’re essentially told,
Do something with it!
Make something!
Take it somewhere!
Enjoy it!
The poet wants us to know that God is looking for partners, people to help co-create the world. To turn this story into a debate about whether or not Adam and Eve were real people or to read this poem as a science textbook is to miss the provocative, pointed, loaded questions that the poem asks:
What will Adam and Eve do with this extraordinary opportunity?
What kind of world will they help make?
Where will they take it?
What will they do with all this creative power they’ve been given?
It’s a poem about them, but it asks questions about all of us:
What will we make of our lives?
What will we do with our energies?
What kind of world will we create?
Which leads to the penetrating question for every one of us—including you:
What will you do with your blinking line?
Ex Nihilo-ness
You create your life.
You get to shape it, form it, steer it, make it into something. And you have way more power to do this than you realize.
What you do with your life is fundamentally creative work. The kind of life you lead, what you do with your time, how you spend your energies—it’s all part of how you create your life.
All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world.
There’s a great Latin phrase that helps me make sense of the wonder and weirdness of creating a life. Ex nihilo means out of nothing. I love this phrase because you didn’t used to be here. And I wasn’t here either. We didn’t used to be here. And then we were here. We were conceived, we were birthed, we arrived.
Out of nothing came . . . us.
You.
Me.
All of us.
All of it.
There is an ex nihilo-ness to everything, and that includes each of us.
Who of us can make sense of our own existence?
Have you ever heard an
answer to the question How did we get here? that even remotely satisfied your curiosity? (Is this why kids shudder when they think of their parents having sex? Because we get here through some very mysterious and unpredictable biological phenomena involving swimming and winning? . . . Our very origins are shrouded in strangeness. You and I are here, but we were almost not here.)
My friend Carlton writes and produces television shows and sometimes I watch his shows and I’ll say to him, How did you come up with that? Where did that come from? We’ll be laughing and I’ll say, What is going on inside your head that you can make this stuff up?
Have you ever encountered something that another human being made and thought, How did she do that? Where did that come from?
When I was in high school my neighbor Tad, the drummer for the band Puddle Slug (they later changed their name to Rusty Kleenex to, you know, appeal to a wider audience) gave me two ceramic heads that he had made. One head is green and has a smiling face, and the other head is brown and has a frowning face. They are very odd sculptures. But at the time he gave them to me I was mesmerized.
You can do that?
You can take a pile of clay and break it in two and then mold it and work with it and make that?
As a seventeen-year-old I was flabbergasted with the ex nihilo-ness of what Tad had made.
He just sat down and came up with that?
(By the way, he gave them to me in 1988. I still have them; they’re on the wall next to the desk where I’m writing this book. Twenty-eight years later.)
The ex nihilo-ness of art and design and music and odd sculptures and bizarre television shows reminds us of the ex nihilo-ness of our lives—we come out of nothing. And we’re here. And we get to make something with what we’ve been given.
Which takes us back to this creation poem, which grounds all creativity in the questions that are asked of all of us:
What kind of world are we making?
Which always leads to the pressing personal question:
What kind of life am I creating?
Accountants and Moms
Now for some of us, the moment we hear the word create, our first thought is,
But you don’t understand, I’m not the creative type
or
That’s fine for some people, but I’m an accountant and it’s just not that exciting
or
What does any of this have to do with being a mom?
About ten years ago I was speaking at a conference and I decided to sit in the audience and listen to the speaker who spoke before me. He began his talk by saying that there are two types of people in the world: numbers people and art people. He explained that some people are born with creativity in their blood and so they do creative work and some people aren’t—they’re the numbers people—and that’s fine because they can do other things.
I sat there listening, thinking, That’s total rubbish.
Take accountants, for example.
Accountants work with numbers and columns and facts and figures and spreadsheets. Their job is to keep track of what’s being made and where it’s going and how much is available to make more. That structure is absolutely necessary for whatever is being done to move forward. It is a fundamentally creative act to make sure things have the shape and form and internal coherence they need.
Obviously, bureaucracies and institutions and governments and finance departments can be huge obstacles to doing compelling work, but ideally—in spirit—the person who gives things their much needed structure and order is playing a vital role in the ongoing creation of the world, helping things move forward. (Which is an excellent litmus test for whether the work you’re doing is work that the world needs: Does it move things forward? Because some work doesn’t. Some work takes things in the wrong direction. Some things people give their energies to prevent other people from thriving. Some tasks dehumanize and degrade the people involved. Perhaps you’re in one of those jobs, the kind that sucks the life out of your soul and you can’t see the good in it. Stop. Leave. Life is too short to help make a world you don’t want to live in.)
And then there are moms. I’ve met moms who say I’m just a mom . . .
Just a mom?
What!?
Could anything be more connected to the ongoing creation of the world than literally, physically bringing new human beings into existence and then nurturing that new life as it’s shaped and formed?
All work is creative work because all work is participating in the ongoing creation of the world.
Suffering
But what about the things that happen to us that we never wanted to happen? What about tragedy and loss and heartbreak and illness and abuse—that list can be long.
What about all of the things that come our way that make us feel powerless and out of control, like our life is being created for us?
When I was growing up, my dad would come into my room every night before I went to bed and tell me that he loved me, and then he would stand in the doorway before he turned out the light and he would say, You’re my pride and joy. He coached my soccer and basketball teams, he took us on vacations, he made my sister and brother and me pancakes on Saturday mornings, he helped us with our homework. When I left home to go to college, he sent me handwritten letters every week, never failing to remind me that he was cheering me on.
I tell you about how present and involved my dad was in my life growing up because when he was eight, his uncle picked him up at his house to take him somewhere. His cousin was in the backseat of the car, and when my dad asked his cousin where they were going, his cousin said, To the funeral home—don’t you know? Your dad died.
That’s how he found out his dad had died: from his cousin in the backseat of a car on the way to the funeral home. His dad, whom he hadn’t known very well because his dad was gone during the war, had cancer and died at age thirty-four.
When my dad was fifteen, his mother became very sick, and he and his brother thought she was going to die. He once told me that while his mother was in the hospital, his brother clung to him through the night, repeating over and over with terror in his voice, Are we going to be all alone in the world?
She eventually recovered, but then a year later my dad’s brother, who was his best friend and constant companion, died unexpectedly in an accident.
How does a person bear that kind of pain?
How does a heart ever recover?
How does a young man make his way in the world when he’s experienced that much suffering?
Somewhere in the midst of all that pain and loss, my dad decided that someday he would have a family and he would be the father that he had always wished he had. And so that’s what he did.
How we respond to what happens to us—especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over—is a creative act.
Who starts cancer foundations? Usually people who have lost a loved one to cancer.
Who organizes recovery groups? Mostly people who have struggled with addiction.
Who stands up for the rights of the oppressed? Often people who have experienced oppression themselves.
We have power, more power than we realize, power to decide that we are going to make something good out of even this . . .
There’s a question that you can ask about the things that have come your way that you didn’t want. It’s a question rooted in a proper understanding of the world, a question we have to ask ourselves continually throughout our lives:
What new and good thing is going to come out of even this?
When you ask this question, you have taken something that was out of your control and reframed it as another opportunity to take part in the ongoing creation of the world.
Death. Disease. Disaster. Whatever it is, you will have to grieve it. And maybe be angry about it. Or be in shock. Or shake your fists at the heavens for the injustice of it.
That’s normal and healthy and often needed.
But t
hen, as you move through it, as time does its healing work, you begin to look for how even this has potential. Even this is a blinking line.
Breath
I once watched a doctor hold my newborn son upside down by the ankles and give him a shake.
I was shocked.
What? You can do that to a baby?
Because up until that moment I was under the impression that babies were incredibly fragile, like a high-grade combination of porcelain and glass. But the doctor handled him when he first entered the world like he was made of rubber. He did this, I quickly learned, for a very specific reason: He was trying to help my son take his first breath. Because if you don’t take a breath in those first few seconds when you arrive, you have a very, very serious problem.
And so my boy in all his shiny pink glory hung there, upside down, with strange liquids exiting his various orifices, and then he coughed and gasped and took his first breath.
Remembering that day takes me to another day, this one a decade later. It was a Friday night, August 22, 2008, and my family and I were visiting my grandma Eileen. My grandma and I had been great friends since I was young. When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, she and I had lunch together every Friday for a decade. We, as they say, rolled deep.
But when we went to visit her that evening in August, everything was different. She was in her mid-eighties and her health had been declining over the past year and she’d been moved to a different part of the nursing home where she lived. We knew we were getting close to the end, but I still wasn’t expecting what we experienced when we entered her room. She was lying in bed, her eyes closed, taking long, slow breaths, but something about her was absent.
It was like she was in the room, but not in the room. Here, but already gone.
If you’ve ever been in the room with someone who is dying, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a physical body right there in front of you, but something’s missing. Spirit, soul, presence, essence—whatever words you use for it, there’s a startling vacancy you feel in being with someone you’ve been with so many times before and yet that person isn’t there anymore.