Inspired

I watched Anne Lamott on C-SPAN’s Mid-West Writing Festival last night. She wrote Traveling Mercies, a book about her journey to God. It is one of the most beautifully honest and real descriptions of the spiritual life on life’s terms I have ever read. She is not your garden variety believer. To many mainstream evangelicals, she would be …….oh let’s see…..Out…… basically. She is a left wing activist…swears like a sailor and scandal of all scandals, often refers to God using feminine pronouns. But as you hear her speak, or read her books……you just know Jesus is all over her life. She is pushing 50, wacky, hippyish, tangential, extremely broken and profound at explaining the ineffable things of life through her writing.
I am reading her book, Bird by Bird about writing and it is hysterically funny. Her life screams authentic.

I was so inspired watching her talk about her Christianity, writing and life. She helped me momentarily be glad I was getting older and more gelatinous, that tangential-ness can almost look charming, that brokenness of mind could be a useful tool in writing and that God is the victor in the lives of the unlikely.

While I watched her, I had a fan crazed moment, I kind of mentally turned to Jesus as he lay there couch-potatoing next to me and said, “I’d love to have lunch with her some day.” He nodded in that, could- happen kinda gesture as he picked something out of his teeth with a toothpick.
I am considering taking her advice on writing:

1. Carry a pen and index card with you every where you go because you will never remember that thought you had standing in the grocery line again.
2. Write something everyday no matter how bad it is.
3. Don’t write for the purpose to succeed.

Read her books if you ever get a chance