Anne Lamott wrote Bird by Bird, a marvelous book about writing. In it, she says,“Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.”I’m going to attempt to do that today. I am going to attempt to write “from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth.”I hope I succeed, but you will have to be the judge.Another of my favorite paragraphs from Bird by Bird is when Anne Lamott says,“I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)”I have often quoted Anne’s friend because I believe his remarkable statement bears repeating: “You can safely assume that you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”I wrote to you recently about my first job in radio. It was at a Christian station in Tulsa owned by a wonderful man name Stuart who lived in North Carolina. He was impossibly tall and thin and looked exactly like a clean-shaven Abraham Lincoln.I had only been there a couple of years when Stuart flew to Tulsa, summoned everyone to the radio station, packed us all into the conference room and said, “People who work in Christian media often see and hear things that discourage them.” His face fell and he looked sad as he said, “And then they become bitter.”I could tell he was struggling to find the right words as he looked down at the ground. After a long silence he looked up into my eyes and said, “Promise me that you’ll never become bitter.”I looked into his eyes and nodded my head. One by one, he looked at every other employee until they nodded their head or said aloud, “I promise I’ll never become bitter.”When he had extracted that solemn promise from each of us, he drove back to the airport and flew home.It was a very short meeting that happened 40 years ago but I have never forgotten it.And I never became bitter.In later years I began to identify myself as “a follower of Jesus” rather than call myself a Christian, because “Christian” was coming to mean something that I don’t believe Jesus ever intended.I get uncomfortable when people sign God’s name to things Jesus never said.Thomas Jefferson, too, was uncomfortable with Christians who use the logic of Plato to extrapolate truths from the Bible. Platonists1 will argue, “If this statement in the Bible is true, then by extension this second thing is true. And if this second thing is true, then by extension this third thing is true.”I have been reading the personal correspondence of Thomas Jefferson in the national archives at founders.archives.govTwo hundred and six years ago – on October 16th, 1816 – George Logan wrote a letter to his friend, Thomas Jefferson, congratulating him for publishing,“a...