Howdy, Pilgrim!
Welcome! This is a place for respite, encouragement, edification, and thoughtful reflection on the worlds we inhabit. Our lowercase world is the one we see and experience, filled with good and evil, beauty and pain. The Uppercase world is the one this world is an echo of, the one we are being prepared for, the place those original tones lead us to if we endeavor to listen and follow.
Hope. It is the anchor of our faith, embedded in the eternal Rock that is Christ Jesus. Hope, therefore, does not tether us to this world; instead, it firmly secures our fix in the next. “This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is (not as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.” (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 10) I wholeheartedly agree with Lewis, who asserted that thinking of the next world is the best and surest way to do the most for this present one.
It is my aim that Uppercase Thoughts from a lowercase world will bring you a moment to take a breath and read a bit of thoughtful prose that brings clarity, or perhaps greater curiosity, about faith, imagination, creativity, hospitality, and making connections where none (seem to) exist. I aspire to make this little patch of words a sort of digital “Last Homely House east of the Sea.”
“That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported, ‘a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep, or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.’ Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
There is a chair for you here, a spot for engagement or quietude, a place for feasting on the words of authors who are my favorites: Lewis, Tolkien, Chesterton, Sayers, MacDonald, L’Engle, Willard, Baillie, and Austen; a place for sharing our own stories; or simply sitting together and thinking some Uppercase Thoughts.
I am a disciple of Jesus; that is to say, I am a woman endeavoring every day to learn from Him and be a faithful expression of Jesus in the world as a result. I am an artist learning the art of living, moving, and existing in Christ (Acts 17:28). As His children, we were created to be creative, and that creativity is, in fact, the birthright of the Christian. While I hope my writing here will be engaging and persuasive to all, I especially seek to encourage my brothers and sisters in Christ with the two questions posed by Luci Shaw in her book Breath for the Bones, “How does faith inform art? How can art animate faith?”
As we make our way through this lowercase world, I invite you to join me in aiming at some Uppercase Thoughts!
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.
—C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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