I started writing seriously as a Creative Writing student at Penn State, in the same years I first picked up a guitar in earnest. Music and poetry have always felt like two settings on the same instrument to me — one you sing, one you read silently, but both trying to say something true before the feeling gets away from you.
Ministry didn't interrupt that. If anything, it gave the writing more to work with. You cannot spend decades sitting with people at hospital bedsides and funeral homes without your sense of language changing — you learn to distrust easy comfort and to listen for the sentence underneath the sentence.
People sometimes ask why a pastor writes poems that are funny, or irreverent, or unresolved. My answer is usually the same: because that's what being honest actually sounds like. A poem that only tells you the tidy, reverent version of a life isn't telling you the truth of it.
Writing, for me, has never been about waiting for inspiration. It's closer to a discipline of noticing — carrying a notebook the way you'd carry a hymnal, ready for whatever needs to be said before you forget exactly how it felt.
From the Collection
