I think I was lying on a hammock in my backyard. Typing furiously and joyfully with my thumbs upon my iPhone. It was Labor Day weekend two years ago. I was laboring excitedly despite the comfortable position and holiday weekend. I love it when inspiration strikes in weird ways like that.
Pages and pages poured out of me. My arms got tired from holding the phone above me as I typed.
The first words written have been lost to the editing process at this point. I wish I remembered what sentence got the whole thing started. I did find these notes (click on the gallery below) I took about the book concept a few months later.
That’s how it started. Almost accidentally. I didn’t go into the backyard and set up the hammock so I could write a book. I went back there to take a nap. To get a sunburn. To enjoy the waning beams of summer.
But a book happened. Well, the beginning of it did.
I responded to a post on social media not long ago… a person had asked, “Do authors really write on their phones?” A bunch of other respectable authors were like, “No way!”
But I replied, “Honestly… yes. My notes app is the birthplace of almost all my writing. It’s never finished there. But… yep. I write on my phone. It actually seems to bring out a different writing voice for me that I kind of love. I’d guess I wrote about 20% of my upcoming book on my phone.”
So, there’s a confession of sorts: Parts of this book were tapped out with the faint sound of thumb-on-screen patter. I moved to a proper laptop when things got serious, but my phone and a hammock were the original midwives of Cathedrals of Connection.
Of course, that’s not the part of the origin story that really matters. The real question isn’t “Where did you start writing this book?”, it’s “Where did this book actually come from?”
That’s a much harder question.
This book didn’t come from my phone. It came from that untouchable, unseeable, unfeelable stuff of God between us. The ineffable substance that I had tried to point to and name for years, but that I could only tell stories about in the end. It came from feeling like I was the only one who sensed the divine truth in my encounters, but knowing for sure it couldn’t just be me.
It came from something deep.
That’s the best way I can describe it.
Like how in Genesis, the storyteller says:
“The earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2)
It came from there. The formless void. The dark face of the deep.
Or how in Psalm 42, the poet sings:
“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.” (Psalm 42:7)
It came from those churning waters inside me and all around me and in the space between me and so many people I’ve encountered in my life.
When I have written before that we are “social mystics,” this is part of what I mean.
You and I have made contact with that soft rising spirit mist that fogs up our hearts in even the most ordinary interactions.
You and I have felt the cool waters of truth surrounding us in our encounters with others — and they’re hard to describe, but they’re alive in the stories we have to tell.
The folks like you and me who find BETWEEN meaningful can probably sense the deep between us. You know the depths from which this book could have arisen in your own life.
Deep has always been my social comfort zone. I can joke and chatter on the surface; no problem. But my biggest social faux pas is my reflex to go too deep too soon. I love it down there. I love the realness of the deep. I love when folks share their heavy bits with me. I love when we’re done trying to play our parts, we take off our masks, and we just swim together in the deep waters of our lives.
So this book is me trying to have a deep conversation with you. I’ve said before that I believe I was put on this planet to help people gather together to talk about the important stuff of life. The stuff of the deep. That’s the origin story of this book. It’s my attempt to do that for a lot of folks.
This book is full of stories that are all attempts to point at the divine rising mist coming from the churning waters of the deep. Forty tales of my life, each anchored to ancient scriptural wisdom, that seem to point to some essence of that mystical truth you and I can sense in the space between ourselves and the people we connect with in our lives.
This book came from a lazy Labor Day Weekend hammock… but maybe I needed to slow down and get horizontal in order to reach down that deep.
I’m really excited for you to read it.
I have the same social faux pas, and I love “deep calls out to deep” too. 🙏🏽