I’ve been out of commission for three weeks, due to a series of health issues. The last was a bacterial infection and I took the last antibiotic pill yesterday morning. I have spent the past few days catching up on the bookkeeping work I do. That’s not finished, but today I feel free to turn my attention to the writing that has been on my mind.

You should be seeing the return of the Mid-week Reflections in a few days. As for the book that I have written, What was God Doing?, it has come to me during these weeks of inactivity that my approach has been too didactic. I have been pushing the conclusions that I have come to in reading the Bible rather than showing how I have come to those conclusions. That thought will guide my editing process.

Writers ask, Why do I write? For a Christian, I believe Dorothy Sayers had the best answer. Genesis 1:27 tells us that God created a man and a woman in his own image. This chapter gives no hint of what God looked like (we still have no idea), but it tells us what he did: he created. Sayers says the creative urge in mankind is the image of God. We cannot create something from nothing as he did, but images form in our mind and we attempt to enable others to see what we see by word pictures, stories, parables, allegories, metaphors, or poems.

When an image forms in our mind, that is our imagination at work. Like all gifts from God, imagination can be misused and perverted. Imagination is not the source of truth, truth must come from outside of ourselves. Yet we are free to take the truth given us and shape the telling of it in a way that will make it accessible and attractive to others.

I aspire to become more like British writers such as Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton with their mastery and elegant use of the English language. Does the word elegant surprise you? It simply means tasteful, and good taste is simple. When writing is decorated with unnecessary words, pretentious words, it ceases to be elegant. The best writers choose powerful short words and arrange them in a way that captures our attention and lingers in our memory.