I have a love affair with the word attest. It means “to bear witness to” in the verb form. The noun form is attestation.

My friend Jim sent me seven more pictures–seven more attestations–bearing witness to their and our Creator.

Enjoy.

Last year I came across a book of Richard Ford’s short stories, Rock Springs. From the first sentences of the first story, I knew I had discovered my kind of writer.

Many critics like to box writers in, place them in neat comparments, and Ford is placed by many critics in the school of Dirty Realism. The critics view Ford’s worldview as similar to that of Raymond Carver, Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Tobias Wolff, and Cormac McCarthy. I am quite familiar with all of those authors, and I do recognize some of Carver’s understatement, some of Larry Brown’s focused emotional unravelings and longings of his protagonists, some of Harry Crews’ elements of fleeing one’s childhood environs but never succeeding, and perhaps some of Wolff’s tendencies to reflect upon contemporary American moral decline, but I see little of McCarthy in Ford. McCarthy is an idea and word-saturated writer. Ford is a wordsmith, too, that is evident, but he’s a minimalist unlike McCarthy. McCarthy is, in my view, America’s most important literary writer of the last fifty years, but McCarthy is no minimalist. Reading Suttree is as demanding as reading Ulysses. Both are far removed from minimalism.

Ford’s skill is best revealed in his character studies. Like in many of Hemingway’s best short stories, Ford’s characters are emotional tempests inside. Their paucity of spoken words camouflages inner turmoil.

In “Nothing to Declare,” the first short story in the Sorry for Your Trouble collection of short stories, the two main characters are a man and woman who have had an affair when young, traveled to Iceland from America together, learned about sex and adulthood via one another, tested ideas with one another, and tried to find the way forward for their lives.

But they separate, return to America, go their separate ways, marry other people, and find themselves both–years later in life–in a kind of world weariness and existential malaise. They are bored with life, with their respective spouses, with their careers, etc.

By chance their paths cross again–years later–in New Orleans at a bar. They notice one another and the old attractions remain. They walk together; the man records mental notes of the woman’s beauty. He kisses her. But it goes no farther than that. Again they separate and we readers are given the impression they’ll not reunite anymore.

The title of this story says it all: nothing to declare seems to be a resignation to which their former great expectations have come. Now it seems that what lies ahead is a sort of acceptance, a kind of sad acknowledgement that they’re both still longing but mostly just deeply dissatisfied.

Recently a friend from church gave me a biography of one of my favorite thinkers and writers, C.S. Lewis. When I read the introduction by Lewis’s step-son, Douglas Gresham, and read what he had to say about Brown’s bio of the intellectual titan C.S. Lewis, I knew I would devour this book.

In it Brown traces the theological and spiritual and intellectual pilgrimage of Lewis from his earliest years in Belfast to his boyhood years being shuffled from one English public school (what Americans would know as private schools) to another, to his being tutored by Mr. Kirkpatrick (among others), and of Lewis’ voracious reading. He learned Greek, Latin, the Classics, mythology, philosophy, history, and on and on. His lone weakness was mathematics. But his learning and his self-discipline to learn were absolutely formidable.

We read of Lewis’ struggles between materialism/atheism and theism/Christianity. We read of how little glimpses into beauty pricked the facades of intellectual hubris Lewis adopted at various stages of his growing. We read of the vast amounts of reading Lewis inculcated his entire life: G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, Latin, Greek, the Bible, medieval and Renaissance literature, George Herbert, Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Euripedes, Bunyan, the history of philosophy, Dante, Augustine, and on and on.

But Lewis’ thinking was refined over and over again. God was on his tail, he’d later write. Lewis began to see that one’s worldview must necessarily be either materialist/atheistic or theistic/supernatural. Here is the way Lewis put it himself:

Long before I believed theology to be true, I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false. One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it. The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. . . . Unless Reason is an absolute, all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one. (122)

Lewis’ works matter because they clarify what’s at stake. If materialism is true, how would men know it to be true? After all, to posit truth is to, in some sense, step outside of the system one is critiquing. But materialism is just that: material. And why should material imagine itself capable of thinking? When’s the last time a rock wrote a poem or sand wrote an opera?

Lewis finally came to understand that the biblical view of man is the true one. The biblical view of man explains why we suppress truth in unrighteousness. It explains how pride besets us. It explains why the world hates Jesus the Christ, because he told and lived and died for the truth, and because even when Satan and his legions tried to bury the Christ by murdering him, Christ was raised bodily for all to see. Aslan was on the move, you see. That’s why Lewis’ works matter.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explantion is that I was made for another world. (1)

Lewis’ works matter because he saw that man is not just a random, meaningless, cosmic accident of material in motion. That’s the materialist’s view. (Isn’t it interesting that materialists write books trying to persuade people of the truth of their position? Hmmm. Seems odd if they believe what they profess.)

Lewis’ works matter because he saw and heralded the realities that we all know. We sense that some things and moments and pictures and novels and plays and operas and songs and sunsets and vistas are beautiful.

And we also recognize that hypocrisy and lies and unnecessary cruelty and betrayal are ugly.

Why do we recognize these things? Because we are more than mere matter, because God exists, because beauty and truth exist, because God has created us to know him and his creation and our fellow creatures and Christ whom God has sent. These are all reasons Lewis’ works still matter.

Like thousands who have come before me, I have read and reread C.S. Lewis’ works for years, and I discover more wisdom in them and from his own spiritual awakening through Lewis’ own works and through fine biographies of Lewis like the one referenced here. Take up and read–both Lewis’ oeuvre and this bio of him in particular.

Slice of Life: It is not unique to me, of course, but this week has been a very long week. Where I have been, the weather has been nearly perfect. I have had many pleasant conversations. I have been able to hang out with some people from work for whom I have great respect and affection. I have been able to jog in some of my preferred places beneath hardwoods. And I have trekked around ponds and creeks and the river–all of which surround me. So, I have experienced blessings, too–numerous blessings.

Perhaps meaning more than almost anything, I have spoken to my bride of several decades, and she has reminded me that she is praying for me. Because I’m military, we suffer a lot of separations due to my career. But I love to call her and/or text her in the mornings, when I know she is in her chair, with her Bible open, and she is reading it, and her little notebook will be near her wherein she writes her prayer requests and even dates them. She is specific in her prayers; I love that: specificity. Details.

And because I know she is praying, I smile to myself, as if to say, “I am to expect things now.” No, this is not some superstition I have. And no, she is not magical or anything like that. It is much simpler and more profound than that: it is that she just lays matters out plainly before herself and before the Lord in her heart’s cry to the God who hears his people.

It is possible to theologize rather than just to pray. Theology, done biblically, is of supreme importance. But if theology does not lead you to the founder and perfecter of our faith (Hebrews 12::2), then it can be made an intellectual idol. Perhaps you know the struggle.

This week especially, I have had a lot of things that needed to come together. And those things did not come together in my timing. In fact, they seemed to frustrate me at every turn. But when I’d be at my wits’ end, I’d receive a text or a voicemail: “Praying for you” or “God has you” or “I trust the Lord” would come to me from her and/or from others.

And you know what? Things did come together. At the last minute. Literally. But they did. And I am now reenergized, focused, and most of all, grateful.

Segue: I know few people read Scripture with the discipline and love that some of us do, but I want to share an encouragement I received from Matthew’s gospel this morning. I am a morning person and I read, think, and write best in the mornings. This morning, I was reading Matthew. When I came to Matthew 3, I read of John the Baptist. He was a striking Elijah-like figure, a fiery man, unafraid to tell the hard truths about the sinfulness of man and the holiness of God.

And then I came to one of my favorite passages in the Bible:

Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Matthew 3:8-10, ESV)

Isn’t that amazing? From these stones. That’s the image John the Baptist used. It was a figurative way of teaching a fundamental truth about God: God is able. He is the Creator. He makes ways when men let you down. He is faithful when we sinners are unfaithful. He is consistent. God can, John the Baptist was teaching, create a people for himself who are not consumed with their genealogy, their spiritual resume, their legalism, their facades. God can create worshipers in spirit and truth from the very stones. Why? Because he created them, just like he created all things.

Takeaway: It is easy to forget, to underestimate the God of Scripture, the only God who is. There are, of course, lots of non-God gods, targets of paganism, but they’re crafted of wood, hay, and stubble–idols fashioned by fallen sinners longing to escape the holiness of the triune God who is.

Isaiah put it this way:

They have no knowledge who carry about their wooden idols, and keep on praying to a god that cannot save. Declare and present your case; let them take counsel together! Who told this long ago? Who declared it of old? Was it not I , the LORD? And there is no other god besides me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none besides me. (Isaiah 45:20b-21, ESV)

The axe is laid at the foot of lies, in short. That was one of John the Baptist’s messages. God is not mocked. The God of Scripture is grander, better, more beautiful, more loving, more grace-bestowing, more creative, more willing to show mercy to us fallen repentant creatures, than I often appreciate.

But when one has a long week, when one has fretted and tossed and paced and exercised and gone without sleep … and then finds–once again–that God has shown him grace and mercy and favor, he cannot but appreciate the fact that … from these stones, God is able.

My vote is yes.

Some more, thanks to my friend Jim. Enjoy.

This evening after work I hiked into woods and watched. A soft wind picked up on occasion but for most of the evening the leaves remained unstirred. Saw filament curtains of spiders’ webs between trees. Jumped a doe while walking, who ran into the thickest brush downhill and hid, as if she knew hunting season was here. Heard geese and ducks fly in and land upon water. Watched a dove fly along the lane of a wash. Hour after hour. Near 8:00 p.m. the sun sank slowly. Mosquitoes fed upon the back of my sweaty neck. I watched a spider’s web bend in sunset breeze like the hips of Eve and those she named.

Nothing in my ears but sounds of squirrels, ducks, geese, the feeding of mosquitoes, the crunch of leaves as deer placed their soft cleft hooves into the soil, munched briers and acorns. The sun’s last rays of today shot gold pencil beams through the pin and water oaks and pines. And I beheld and grew more thankful.

Here’s Pirtle’s Pages, Episode 2: