Figuring out how faith works confounds the practical mind. It’s not a question of learning how to turn faith on (Five Ways to Get God’s Blessing), but a Proverbs 20:12 process involving hearing ears and seeing eyes, observation and recognition. Will you notice what God puts in front of you today and recognize its worth?

Faith stands like an angel beside us, beaming light on something good for us to see, amplifying a word we need to hear. I experienced this a few weeks ago at our local used book sale. 

Idling at a table display of hardback novels, my eye was drawn to a trade paperback called Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional, by Jim Belcher. This is out of place, I thought. I picked it up. I don’t need another book on theology, I continued thinking. It might answer some of the questions I have about the struggles in the Christian church. I paid the fifty cents and took the book home.

Reading the book not only broadened my understanding, it gave me some useful concepts to help sort out truth and improve my communication and my writing. Here’s a sampler of terms Belcher used put in my own words:

Cognitive humility: Realize you are not one hundred percent right and the other guy is not one hundred percent wrong. A conversation between two people who each believe they are the sole possessor of all truth is not possible.

Broad brush: Trying to define a movement with one stroke of a brush is generally not possible. It helps to know where people are on a spectrum. Don’t presume to define their position for them. Ask them how they define themselves.

Common grace: Blessing is available to all, regardless of their beliefs. A person may not know the Author of our faith but still receive and acknowledge acts of grace, mercy and providence.

Common grace is a term I’m familiar with, but I had not thought to apply it to my writing. Often Christians are hard pressed to put churchy language (buzz words for complex doctrines) into easy-to-understand phrases that describe human and divine interaction. That’s my job as a writer! I am not called to explain doctrine but to write in a way that encourages ears to hear and eyes to see; to create a story arc that does justice to our most dramatic moments, when we interact with the divine.