Part III: On Being Grafted

Part I: Why I Wanted to Write
Part II: A Long Road in the Same Direction

So I've been accepted into my top choice for graduate school. To study at a school that has, for me, resonated everything I've always thought. The way faith has synthesized with art has, for even before I wanted to be a writer -- since I first read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton -- been immeasurably important to me. But in words I've never been able to express. That's why writing as a television producer never satisfied me at my inmost. Never resolved that long-plucked note. You just can't fathom things like filioque and Incarnations and Atonements in twenty-second, less than 15-words-a-sentence news copy. But in fiction, after reading O'Connor, I had arrived at the conclusion that it was possible in fiction. And having always been a lover of theology and "deep-thinking", a kind of syncretism became, for the first time, a quantifiable reality. I could become a writer.

Five years later, in at Seattle Pacific for degree a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I'm still not anything like a writer. More like I'm this wild branch that's been granted this opportunity to be grafted onto this well-producing, abundant branch (read your Bible if you think I just came up with that). But that's really a good way of explaining where I find myself this morning. And how I feel about how things will now proceed for two years. It's just simply that: I've been grafted onto this tree of well-producing, inspiring fruit. And that I know have an incredible responsibility because who is to say that I can't just as easily end up un-grafted from it all. Don't think I haven't been on my knees in this past week expressing my utmost to God. At the joy. At the blessing. And for the hope of what now happens. Last night, in my devotions, I read this whole metaphor for Romans and it's hard not see it applying to me in this sense, considering where I am right now. And I got this sense of my new responsibility to being grafted onto this incredible community of writers to whom faith and art are not so much grafted, but have grown up from the same roots.