Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

by N.D. Wilson

Words. Magic words. Words spoken by the Infinite, words so potent, spoken by One so potent that they have weight and mass and flavor. They are real. They have taken on flesh and dwelt among us. They are us. In the Christian story, the material world came into existence at the point of speech, and that speech was ex nihilo, from nothing. God did not look around for some cosmic goo to sculpt, or another god to dice and recycle. He sang a song, composed a poem, began a novel so enormous that even the Russians are dwarfed by its heaped up pages. You are spoken. I am spoken. We stand on a spoken stage.

But to an infinite artist, a Creator in love with His craft, there is no unimportant corner, there is no thrown-away image, no tattered thread in the novel left untied.

Looking out through the lens of true ex nihilo creation—at a spoken world—everything becomes an artistic touch. Every crack in the plaster, every bathroom-dwelling spider, looks out at me like a stage prop, an author’s added texture, a fellow character living at this time, inhabiting the same paragraph that I do. There are Christians in the world who bemoan the absence of God’s speech, who cry out for personal communication with God Himself. They want cues for their lines. They want explanations and specific directions from the Artist.

In this story, the Author became flesh and wandered the stage with Hamlet, offering His own life. In this story, the Author heaped all that He loathed, all that displeased Him, all the wrongness of the world, onto Himself. Evil exists so that He might be demeaned and insulted, so that the depth of His love and sacrifice could be expressed as much as is possible in the small frame of history.

Talk to the Fool, to the one who left a throne to enter an anthill. He will enter your shadow. It cannot taint Him. He has done it before. His holiness is not fragile. It burns like a father to the sun. Touch His skin, put your hand in His side. He has kept His scars when He did not have to. Give Him your pain and watch it overwhelmed, burned away by the joy He takes in loving. In stooping.

a creative God, a God without whom none of this would be, a God who spoke reality into being and shapes it even now, He has authority.

I fill my lungs with the world, with this life, with this gift beyond containing. There is only one thing I can say. Thank you. And I must say it with my life. Through my life. To the end of my life. And after.

The world is rated R, and no one is checking IDs. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away.

Go to Him or go to Hell. Those are the only two choices, because Hell will be wherever He is not.

When you have died and your leaves have been raked, when you have looked on the face of God and had your final conversation, exchanging words others may never know, you will be where you want to be. If you cannot let go of yourself, if you cling to the filth that you’ve loved for so long, stroking the cherished scabs that line your soul—hates and bitternesses that you cannot lay down, an imagined mirror picturing a glorious self—then He will push you away. You will be sent out into the darkness, far from His presence.

C. S. Lewis (from The Four Loves): “‘Is it easy to love God?’ asks an old author. ‘It is easy,’ he replies, ‘to those who do it.’”

Take a step and thank God, for He holds you in His hand. Never ask to be put down. Never struggle for separation or for worth apart from His gifts. Breathe, taste His world, His words, and marvel that you are here to feel the blowing swirl of life.