I Want to Open My Heart
“If I do not allow Christ to see me, and if I do not accept Him in His extreme humility, then I will have no part of Him. I may have His teachings, I may even have His miracles, but I will not have Him. I want to have Him. I want my feet washed, not because I just want to be cleaned, but because I want nothing to stand in the way of the love He has for me.”
A Series of Reflections on the Vulnerability of Jesus — Visual Edition
Jesus and the Knife
In 2013 I had a dream that I have yet to forget. In it, I saw a man standing in the corner of my little rented room holding a small curved knife. Instead of coming to me with the knife, he took it and plunged it into his own chest.
His bones became exposed. His chest was heaving with shuddering breaths from His lungs. He began to beat and tear at His ribcage. He pounded them with His fists. He wrapped His hands around each rib and pulled them apart. I heard this terrible snapping. He opened Himself like one rips apart a pomegranate. Trembling and with grunts and gasps of sheer pain, He frantically cut away at muscle and sinew until I saw it.
There before me was the beating heart of Jesus the Christ.
Turning Little Essays into a Photo Book
This was my first foray into creating something that was both a compilation of essays and an art-forward product. Alongside a book formatted for Amazon, I published a “visual edition” that was sold as a limited photo book.
With each essay, I curated a series of images that coincided with the content. Some were made as chapter breaks and others were placed alongside the essays. The goal was to slow the reader down and have an experience with the material beyond matter-of-fact reading that many of us experience with Christian, self-help, how-to literature.
Writing to Myself
The big shift came in the edit. As I read through each essay, I realized that very little had to do with my own work of becoming more vulnerable. I wrote to an audience of imaginary people. I wrote to those who would be “taught” by me. But nothing of what I believed to be true was directed to myself. I addressed these readers as “beloved.” The whole premise had to do with telling people about how to be more open and vulnerable. But every sentence was written to someone else.
As I saw the incongruity between the dream that began everything, the topics of the essays, and the complete lack of my own vulnerability, I began the work of rewriting every essay and pointed it all back to me. I changed the tense and tone from this rhetorical homiletical poetry into the honesty I needed. All the “we’s” were redirected to me. The second person talk just didn’t fit; it had to come from me and it had to be for me.
While this Visual Edition didn’t sell nearly as much as the kindle edition, it did transform my writing style from the ground up. Everything since this has been grounded in conversation and radical vulnerability. Now I tell people that if they want a shortcut to knowing me deeply and intimately, they should read my books.