I gave myself a special birthday present (I mean, besides the Bose noise-cancelling headphones that are fantastic!) I also gave myself something entirely immaterial but much more important. Well, I didn’t actually give it, because it had already been given to me. But I reclaimed it.

I reclaimed my given name: Michael. For as long as I can remember I’ve been called Mike, though I have no idea who started that or why. I always accepted the short form, took it for granted, until a few years ago when I began to feel a wistful longing to return to my true name. After all, Michael is a wonderful name—good, solid, biblical. I really think it’s my favorite name of all, and I especially love what it means. It’s Hebrew for Who is like God? In youthful naiveté I used to interpret that phrase as meaning godlike. But no, there’s a question mark at the end. It’s a rhetorical question expressed numerous times in the Bible, as in Exodus 15:11: “Who among the gods is like You, Lord?”

It’s those two little letters at the end of Michael that stand for God, or Elohim—the very letters that the short form of my name omits. Not a good idea to leave God out of the picture!

A couple of years ago I became a Catholic, and I took as my saint’s name Michael, after the archangel. I don’t know how an angel gets to be a saint. Don’t you have to spend time in the flesh to earn that title? In any case, I realized then how much I desired to be Michael myself.

The only problem is that all of my books have appeared under the name of Mike, and there’s no way to alter that. This is what has kept me from making the change long ago. But if a person can’t do what he wants at the age of 60, when can he?

So Michael it is, from now on. I’ll solve the problem of my books by keeping Mike as my pen name. But in my personal life, to all those close to me, I’m Michael.

It’s high time. There is, indeed, no one like God, and having been made in God’s image, I know there’s no one like me, either.

There is a heady, breathtaking freedom in love,
and the marrying kind is the headiest of all.
In a person about to be married
there is a quality of footloose derailment,
as if an old rusty locomotive had suddenly sprouted wings
and soared away from its tracks.
Being engaged is like
entering a new stage of childhood,
like having a new body,
like being a brand new creature just emerged from a cocoon,
with shining skin not quite dry.
One stumbles around, lumbers, cranes, reels.
And what are those ponderous appendages on one’s back,
those preposterous, unwieldy contraptions
that keep lifting one up into the air?

There is an obviousness about true love, a certainty.
To doubt it is to be plunged into darkness and confusion.
But to believe in and accept it is to be filled with light.
There is really nothing else like it.
Few other decisions in life will be anywhere near as crucial
as the decision to love or not to love.
And once made, there can be no reneging.

Make no mistake about it:
the joining of a man and a woman in matrimony
is a supernatural event,
founded upon a mutual exchange of holy pledges—
the only true vows that most people will ever take.
The saying of them requires about thirty seconds.
But keeping them is the work of a lifetime.

A marriage is not a joining of two worlds,
but an abandoning of two worlds
so that one new one can be formed.
The call to be married is like Jesus’ advice to the rich young man
to sell all his possessions and follow.
It is a vocation to total abandonment—
the single most wholehearted step we’ll ever take
toward a fulfillment of Jesus’ command
to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

Finally someone has noticed! Not only that, but my poem has become the lyrics of a song. Follow this link to listen to Marchel Kelley’s beautiful version of “The Lover’s Hermitage.” Thanks, Marchel, for this great gift!

*****

Love, you are my hermitage,
my dwelling for ever.

Just as a happy bachelor
may aspire to be a hermit,
so as your husband[/wife] do I dream
of being more married.

Your body is a path leading
through a golden wood;
your love is a clearing
in the center of the forest.

Here have I built my home,
here in you alone.
With you I know a solitude
deeper than my own.

One table, one rocking chair
by the hearth of you—
and in your face a window
brighter than the sky!

When you smile I’m warmed
like earth in the sun.
Your laugh is the brook
at my doorstep.

Your words are quieter
than my thoughts.
Gladly shall I spend my life
in the cool still hush of you.

Gentler are you than breath,
stranger than death.
Just to touch your hair
is more peaceful than sleep.

Surely all my wandering
finds its end in you.
In the depth of your eyes
may I safely die.

Love, you are my hermitage,
my dwelling for ever.

Well, not exactly the press. Fact is, I’ve just launched my first self-published ebook. Having sent my manuscript to some 30 publishers over the years, I finally decided that this thing needs to see the light of day. 

Adventures in Heaven is the true story of a man who has had multiple (i.e. thousands) of visions of heaven. What is it like in heaven? Is there really a river of life and a holy city? Does the apostle Paul wear little wire-framed glasses? Or how about Mary—does she look like her Son? And how green is the grass?

In one fascinating story after another this book opens the windows of heaven on detailed vistas of the New Jerusalem, the throne room, the altar, heavenly plants and animals, and meetings with biblical figures such as John, Ezekiel, and Moses. 

What’s not to like about such a book? Frankly, I don’t understand why publishers didn’t slaver all over it. Especially these days, when accounts of true experiences of heaven are riding high on the bestseller charts. For example, there’s Todd Burpo’s Heaven Is For Real, the story of his young son’s trip to heaven during emergency surgery. It’s a great read, but it’s nowhere near as extensive and detailed as my book. Nothing is. You won’t find another book anywhere like Adventures in Heaven. That’s why I wrote it.

Is that why publishers won’t touch it? Because it’s too unique, too detailed, too graphic, too RADICAL? But I thought good writing and publishing were all about being radical? I thought the whole point of great writing was to get beyond the average, the status quo, and to say something no one else is saying.

Isn’t that why we read? I’ve always loved that quote from Franz Kafka: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skulls, then why do we read it? A book should be an ice-axe to break the frozen sea inside us.”

Adventures In Heaven certainly did that for me. Of all the books I’ve written, it’s my own favorite. Partly because of the wonderful effect it had on me, opening my eyes to the reality of heaven and my heart to its deep truths. But also because no book has given me a sweeter, more joyous, more thrilling ride. From beginning to end, writing it was pure bliss. Every time I touched this book, it rang deep and true.

Is it any wonder that I want to pass on this experience to readers? How perplexing, then, that every publisher and agent I’ve approached with this project has turned it down cold. In my three-decade writing career, it’s the one and only time I’ve been shut out.

How come? It must be because somebody’s crazy, and it’s either them or me.

I vote for them.

For the record, I just want to set down something of this book’s publishing journey, or non-journey. I began by sending it to the various publishers who had worked on my other books, people with whom I had a relationship. That didn’t work.

Next, I sent it to a dozen or so other large Christian publishers. And then I sent it to every other publisher, Christian or secular, who had ever published a book about visions of heaven. In my cover letters I carefully pointed out that these publishers seemed to have an interest in the very subject that my book dealt with in spades.

No luck.

Okay, time to get an agent. I’d never had an agent before. I’d published eight books without one. Agents just didn’t seem necessary. But now I was desperate.

As luck would have it, the phone rang. Out of the blue. And on the line was the biggest Christian literary agent in the biz.

Hot dog! Now things were smokin’! Now I could get my book published….

Or not. I did sign up with the Big Guy, but it turned out that every time I mentioned Adventures in Heaven, he plugged his nose as if it were a rotting fish. No, he had other plans for my career. Big Plans.

After two years, the Big Guy and I parted ways. All his Big Plans had come to nothing, and I was back on my own.

Now what? I turned to writing children’s fiction, and once again, in order to find a market for these books, I had to hire an agent. The new fellow was really nice, and I’m very grateful for his help in getting my novels published.

However, when I tried sending him Adventures in Heaven, a funny thing happened. He dropped me like a hot potato! Over a couple of years we had built a very good, friendly relationship. Now, all of a sudden, he wouldn’t answer my emails or phone messages. Nothing. He never did reply to me. To this day I haven’t heard back from him.

What is it with this book??!! Is it really so bad? Is it poison, or what?

Maybe it is poison. Maybe it’s the best kind of poison: the kind that utterly destroys the spirit of the world and replaces it with the kingdom of heaven.

That’s what I think, anyway. For what it’s worth.

By the way, I forgot to mention that years ago I self-published a paper version of Adventures in Heaven. The print run was 400, I think, all of which sold out quickly. I have just two copies of that edition left, and I don’t mind telling you that they’re the most precious books I own—with the possible exception of the first book I ever published, A Beast With Two Backs, hardcover copies of which are scarcer than a pullet’s molars.

So that’s the story on Adventures in Heaven. You can understand my excitement that now, finally, it’s available as an ebook. Why not check it out and see what all the fuss was not about? At $0.99, it’s a steal.  

One caution, however: I do realize that THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR EVERYONE! It’s very different from any of my other books, and who knows, there may be good reasons why 30 publishers and several agents turned it down.

So there, I’ve warned you. And no, this is not a reverse marketing ploy. You really might not like this book!

Then again, you may love it.

Available only for Kindle, Nook, and other digital platforms.

Read an excerpt. 

From Carrie Padgett of Author’s Choice: “Mike Mason’s story will take its proper place next to Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and other speculative fiction that points the reader to God and expounds on the nature of good, evil, creation, and redemption.”

From Maria Martin of Book Previews: “A fantastic story…. Mason is an expert wordsmith, and he weaves brilliant plot twists into a simple story to build engaging action…. Most impressive, though, is his ability to use symbolism to integrate faith deftly into the plot.”

From Amy Lignor of Once Upon a Romance: ”I fell head-over-heels in love with The Blue Umbrella. And this time around is no different…. Readers once again take a journey that will have their hearts beating, their tears at the ready, and their brains working overtime as they find themselves immersed in the most beautiful, fantastical book they’ve read in a very long time!”

From Karen Lee: “I just have to tell you how much I enjoyed The Blue Umbrella and The Violet Flash. Those characters and events were so compelling, rewarding, and seemed so very real to me. I barely put the books down. The teenagers in my house wondered why mom was reading children’s novels but your books are for ALL ages. I can hardly wait for the third book and I just adore Chelsea’s character.”

Also, you might want to check out a character study I did of Chesterton Cholmondeley for an Australian website, in which I compare Ches to Harry Potter!

“Well, here we are at Porter’s, the store that has inspired two famous novels!”

So began my talk at the launch party for my new fantasy novel The Violet Flash, sequel to The Blue Umbrella. For all of you who couldn’t be there, here’s a link to a VIDEO of the event. It’s 34″ long, so at any point feel free to fast forward to the Q&A session at 20:42, which went pretty well, I think. Many thanks to Arthur Doerksen for producing the video, and to Ron Koyanagi for providing the music.

I’ll just add that Friday, June 17 was a beautiful evening at Porter’s Store as friends gathered from many different corners of my life to celebrate the new book. We had a packed house and I signed my name about a hundred times—a good number, but nowhere near my previous record of 600 signings in one evening. That was at the launch of my first book, The Mystery of Marriage, and it changed my signature. After about 200 signings my perfectly legible Mike Mason morphed into a sophisticated, scribblesome scrawl in which not a single letter of the English alphabet was discernible. And for the next twenty years, that was my signature …

… until the day just before The Violet Flash launch party, when my wife Karen said, “I wish you’d go back to signing your name in a way that people can read. As it is, noboby knows if you really signed their book, or if it was some kindergarten kid, or maybe a baby—or a worm!”

After that, I relented, and from now on I’ll sign books with the old puerile Mike Mason—puerile because it’s exactly the way I wrote my name when I was a child. And the curious thing is, it looks very much like the printed version of my name on the cover of The Violet Flash. Now there should be no doubt that the author himself has really signed your book!

I ran into a similar problem wondering what to write as an inscription. Many readers want their book signed “To So-and-so,” and usually I add some sort of greeting appropriate to the book’s content. For my book on joy, Champagne for the Soul, I wrote “Cheers!” For The Blue Umbrella I often wrote “Blue Skies!” But when it came to The Violet Flash I was stuck. I had no idea what to say. On the internet I searched for idioms related to the book’s themes, but nothing jumped out at me.

Finally Karen said, “How about De Colores?” Certainly color is a major theme in my book, and we’d both been part of a renewal movement called Cursillo, where De Colores (Spanish for “of the colors”) was the signature greeting, a kind of secret handshake. It refers to the title of a song that everyone in the Spanish-speaking world knows.

“But nobody here will know what it means,” I objected.

“Maybe that’s good,” said Karen. “Makes it interesting. A mystery to be solved.”

I wasn’t persuaded until finally I looked up the lyrics of De Colores. And it turns out they’re a beautiful reflection of just what I meant to convey by the theme of color in my book. So, for all of you who may be wondering why I wrote “De Colores!” in your book, here is the English translation of the lyrics:

In colors, in colors

The fields love to dress in spring.

In colors, in colors

Are clothed the little birds all year.
 
In colors, in colors

Is vested the luminous rainbow.



Spreading the light that illuminates

Divine grace from the great beyond.
 
Spreading the light that illuminates

Divine grace from the great beyond.

“We have a wonderful heritage of fantasy writers for children who desire to capture the truths of the Christian faith in their books—George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, and now Mike Mason.” -D.S. Martin

“As a professional editor and aspiring novelist myself, I can only say that Mike Mason’s The Blue Umbrella is easily one of the best books I’ve ever read … It’s a great read for any adult or young adult as a fantasy story, but when you drill down and find layer upon layer of brilliant allegory woven in, you’ll want to read it again and experience the depths.” -John David Kudrick

“The Blue Umbrella speaks to all ages and carries themes that will enrapture its readers and fill them with hope.” -Amy Browning

“Mason’s book is certainly among the ‘best of the best.’ I couldn’t put it down and neither will you.” -Amy Lignor

“This fresh tale, reminiscent of Roald Dahl and C.S. Lewis, has Classic written all over it.” -Violet Nesdoly

“For some time, Christian literature has lacked fairy tales in the Narnian tradition, tales which reveal truth about ourselves and the gospel. Thankfully, Mike Mason has debuted The Blue Umbrella.” -Gabe Knipp

“As a novelist, Mason has it all: vivid and convincing characterization; engaging dialogue; absorbing and unpredictable plotting with an underpinning of serious concerns; humour which entertains without distracting from the narrative; and above all, a fine writing style…. It’s no exaggeration, in my view, to call this book a classic for fantasy lovers of all ages.” -David F. Dawes

“I’ve loved all of Mike Mason’s writings—his imaginative short stories, his thoughtful essays on vital topics like marriage, children, and joy. Now, here’s another side of Mason: The Blue Umbrella begins a series of wild and wonderful novels where invention truly takes flight…. Reading this magical work makes me wish for my own blue umbrella, makes me hope that this series will join others in the minds of readers who loved Madeleine L’Engle’s sci-fi writings. As L’Engle herself insisted, this kind of fiction is not just for children. It’s for people. People like you!” -Luci Shaw, author of Breath for the Bones and The Angles of Light.

“I expect great things for The Blue Umbrella…. You can’t go wrong with this book!” -Becky Warkentin, House of James bookstore.

“Bravo! Fantastic! Beautifully done! … I’m so excited to read the next volume!” -Matt Erickson

“The three of us have read your book many times each and absolutely adore it! Our Grade 7/8 class does a monthly book report and we chose to make a video presentation of our favourite book, The Blue Umbrella!” -Faith, Kayly, & Sarah

“This book is an absolute treasure!” -Laura

“When I gave The Blue Umbrella to my son he was skeptical … but he stayed up ALL night reading it! Now that’s a compliment. He LOVES it!” -Carol-Ann Flanagan

“This is the BEST book I have ever read! You HAVE to read it too!” -Emma, nine years old

“My son Asher has been saying for weeks that he wants to meet Mike Mason! We have both thoroughly enjoyed your book…. I love your use of the English language. It is a long time since I have read such wonderful sentences.” -David Chapman

Good evening, everyone. Thank you all for coming out.

I saw a bumper sticker recently that said, “Having a wonderful time. Wish I were here.” Well, I’m not much of a party person, but I can assure you that tonight I am here and I am having a wonderful time!

This is a great occasion for me, because it’s the launch not only of a new book but of a new career. When I first began to dream of being a writer at the age of eleven, I assumed I would write novels. Fiction, I thought, was where it was at. Now I am 57, and while The Blue Umbrella is my tenth book, it’s my first novel. Why it took me so long to grow up is a long story, but tonight I’m just happy finally to be a novelist.

I think that’s something to celebrate. And how better to celebrate than by opening an umbrella indoors? You thought this was a book launch, but really it’s a Grand Opening! I hope none of you are superstitious. While I was writing this book, many times I opened my umbrella indoors, and as far as I know it caused me no harm. So here goes.

Gandalf has his staff.
Harry Potter has his wand.
Luke Skywalker has his light saber.
And Sky Porter has his blue umbrella!

At this point, to a round of applause, I opened my spring-loaded, blue-sky-with-fluffy-clouds umbrella.

And now for another Grand Opening …

Here I opened the book itself and read from Chapter One, followed by several other readings interspersed with comments. I think my favorite was the beginning of Chapter 8 which describes Zac’s first visit to Porter’s Store. It was so fun to be reading this passage aloud in the very building that had inspired it!

Rather than trying to reproduce my other comments, what follows is a conflation of two interviews I’ve done, one with a blogger and the other with a university newspaper:

What memorable events have you enjoyed with the release of The Blue Umbrella? Can you share a favorite moment with a fan? A memory of holding the finished volume in your hand? What stands out most about this fiction debut?

The best part was my book launch at the real Porter’s Store, just three blocks from where I live. It was one of the most wonderful events of my life. Not since my wedding day (27 years ago!) had so many people that I know gathered in one room. And it was a great community event. Before this, as a writer of non-fiction, none of my other books was really rooted in a particular place. But with this one I love the feeling of the neighborhood connection. One neighbor played jazz piano, the store managers were as excited as I was, and the owner even baked cookies in the shape of blue umbrellas! As for a favorite moment with a fan, I think it was the little boy who asked, “Are you famous?” I suppose I should have said something about there being degrees of fame (“I’m not as famous as Hannah Montana!”), but instead I just beamed and said, “Right now it sure feels like it.”

The Blue Umbrella is your first journey into fiction. What drew you to the children’s fiction genre? Were you surprised by Zac Sparks’ adventure as it flowed from your mind to the page?

About ten years ago I started reading children’s fiction for the first time as an adult, and I’m still at it. I find it so refreshing. Children’s literature is allowed to be idealistic in a way that modern adult literature is not. There are happy endings, heroic characters, a clear battle between good and evil, and portals leading to other worlds—all things that reflect, I believe, the deepest truths of life. Writing one of these stories for myself has been an amazing experience. I was at a point in my writing life where I needed a new challenge, and I definitely got it! With the change to a new genre, suddenly I was in the midst of a very steep learning curve, and I often felt terrified. What was going to happen next? Could I really do this? How would it end? So yes, I was very surprised at how the story took on a life of its own and tumbled, or sometimes stumbled, forward. Eventually I learned to relax and just trust the process. Which is very interesting, considering that my story is fundamentally about learning to trust.

Can you say more about that?

The book begins with a lively ten-year-old boy named Zac Sparks whose life suddenly changes. His mother is killed by lightning and he’s sent away to live with two cruel old aunts in a town called Five Corners that is full of dark mysteries. In this grim situation, Zac must determine where the light is shining and who he can trust. So it’s really a story about learning to trust in the midst of despair.

What made you want to write about an orphan?

We are all essentially alone in the world. Children, I think, at a certain point in growing up, feel this acutely. Certainly others can help us, but when it comes to facing difficult problems, ultimately we must go it alone, finding our own answers, our own courage. This puts us squarely in the place where, possibly, we can have a transcendent experience.

What is the significance of the blue umbrella?

The blue umbrella is what Alfred Hitchcock called a McGuffin. In a movie or novel the McGuffin is the physical object around which all the action centers. In The Lord of the Rings, for example, it’s the ring. In my book it’s the blue umbrella that belongs to Sky Porter. Why does he always carry it? What does it do? Why does Dada want it so badly? The blue umbrella is shrouded in mystery—a mystery so wonderful that I wish I could tell you all about it. I think it’s worth reading the book just to find out.

Weather is a significant theme in the book. What is your favorite kind of weather and why?

I’m not a sunny day sort of person. Like Zac’s mother in my book, I love weather with character, especially thunder and lightning and wind. This goes back to my childhood when, like Zac, I used to stay up with my mother late at night to watch storms. As it happens, the place where I live now (on the west coast) doesn’t have much electrical activity, but we do get a lot of rain. There’s nothing I like better than an all-day rain. It’s great writing weather!

You have a daughter. What weather events have you enjoyed together?

When Heather was about ten we had a holiday at a lakeside cottage. It rained solidly for several days, until we were sick of it. On Sunday we decided to have a little family church service. We read scripture, sang, and talked to God and about Him. Then at the end, moved by the Spirit, we did a sun dance! You’ve heard of rain dances? Well, this was a sun dance, to make the rain stop and bring out the sun. After all, it was Sunday! So we danced around the cottage and whooped it up and had ourselves a ball. And an hour later the sun came out and it stayed sunny the rest of our holiday.

What has been your most memorable weather event?

I’ve known some extreme weather, especially the tremendous blizzards when I lived on the prairies. There have been times when I didn’t know if I’d come out alive. But my most memorable weather event was actually very peaceful and beautiful. Again I was at a cottage with my family, only this time I was the ten-year-old child. I was on a hike with my parents and we got caught in a downpour. We found refuge in the woods, where my dad built a fire, and for the next few hours we sat around that campfire and had the most beautiful family time, with the sound of the rain all around us. I still have the wooden spoon that my dad carved for me with his jackknife that day. My father was a very busy man and I didn’t get much time with him. But that day I had him and my mom all to myself and I felt so happy and protected.

You stated in the After Words section of the book that the spiritual allegory was not intentional. However, the final scenes seem to reflect a deep sense of the gospel message (e.g. the color of Sky Porter’s second umbrella will be seen by many as representative of the blood of Christ). Were you pleased that the story so effortlessly represents your faith? Do you hope that others will sense your message as they read?

“The story effortlessly represents my faith”: Yes, this is exactly what happened. The red umbrella is a good example of a symbol that presented itself entirely naturally. Of course I could have made that umbrella some other color. But if the story itself wants to go to Connecticut, and I see a signpost that says “Connecticut,” then I’ll take that road. Writing is a matter of following, not forcing. I was deeply pleased to find myself writing a story with such spiritual significance, and I do hope readers will notice this and talk about it. But I’m also pleased that the book can, I think, be enjoyed without one being fully aware of this other dimension. If the story works well in its own right, then its spiritual truth can still be felt as a resonance, a perfume, that lingers in a reader’s heart. This is what C.S. Lewis meant by “baptizing the imagination,” and it’s what I experienced when his book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was first read to me as a child. I had no idea of its Christian significance, but the story stayed with me powerfully.

What exciting things is God doing in your life? Any closing words of encouragement you’d like to share with your readers?

Finding the courage to identify myself as a fiction writer, committing to writing a long novel, and struggling through every difficulty to finally give it birth, has brought me to a mountaintop experience. I’ve never been happier or felt more free in my life, and I find myself with the closeness to God that I’ve always dreamed of. What happened is that I didn’t just write a novel, but I went on an epic journey myself. Although my book is a fantasy, in order to write it I, too, in my real life, had to face down villains, slay dragons, slog through darkness, and eventually emerge into the light. As I look around myself now, I see the battlefield strewn with the corpses of my enemies, and I am a new person. So I would challenge my readers to embark on a similar journey. It may not be writing a novel, but what is it for you? What is God stirring in your heart? Take hold of that dream and pursue it with all you’ve got, and don’t stop until you’ve achieved it.

Here begins a seven-part series from a book-in-progress whose provisional title is Want What You Have: A Guide to Contentment. I liked my original title better, but my wife nixed it, saying neither she nor anyone else would buy it. That original title was How To Fail Successfully. On the internet I looked up the phrase “how to fail” and was not very surprised to find not a single book bearing this title. By contrast, the three words “how to succeed” are featured in hundreds of titles.

We are a people obsessed with success. Yet isn’t failure––or at least the sense of failure––a far more common phenomenon? Among the vast array of self-help literature, shouldn’t there be instruction on how to fail well? Isn’t this a skill worth mastering?

A friend of mine said recently that he was having trouble getting his life together. But what if the goal of life is not to get it together? What if it’s just the opposite: to fall apart gracefully?

As a character in Tim Farrington’s fine novel The Monk Downstairs puts it, “We’re all spoiled, life does that. It’s what you do with yourself after you realize you’ve been spoiled that matters. It’s the life you make in the ruins.”

Paul Auster, in Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story, tells of a character with an unusual hobby:

“He opened a cardboard box and pulled out twelve identical black photo albums. This was his life’s work, he said, and it didn’t take him more than five minutes a day to do it. Every morning for the past twelve years, he had stood at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street at precisely seven o’clock and had taken a single color photograph of precisely the same view. The project now ran to more than four thousand photographs. Each album represented a different year, and all the pictures were laid out in sequence, from January 1 to December 31, with the dates carefully recorded under each one.”

As the narrator of Auster’s story pores over these albums of photos––at first glance all the same––gradually he finds himself turning the pages more and more slowly. “I paid closer attention to details, took note of shifts in the weather, watched for the changing angles of light as the seasons advanced.” He is noticing subtle differences. He is noticing, period. And the result is, “I was no longer bored, no longer puzzled as I had been at first.”

As we turn the pages of our own ‘boring’ lives more slowly, more deliberately, perhaps we too can shed our jadedness and become absorbed. Standing at our own little corner, looking out at the same thing every day, we may see that it is not the same at all, or else the fact that it is the same will no longer be boring.

Instead of shunning our ordinariness, why not rejoice in it? Shortly before I began work on this book, I received a prophetic word. At a church conference I sat at a table across from a young man and a young woman, and for a few moments we waited quietly on God. Then the young woman said, “I’m not sure what the Lord wants to say to you, because you look like such an ordinary man.” Then she said some other things, but I hardly heard them because I took offence at her opening comment. Who did she think she was, calling me ordinary? What an insult!

The more I reflected on this comment, however, the more I began to relax into it. By the end of that day I was resting in my ordinariness as comfortably as in a favourite old chair. I realized how much I like being just an ordinary man. At one point I laughed out loud at the irony: of all the things these two prophets told me, what stood out most was my ordinariness. And I laughed even harder when I suddenly remembered that I’d once thought of writing a book on this very subject! Maybe it was time to get out those notes and dust them off.…