IVP - Strangely Dim - Contact Papers

Contact Papers

One of the things about becoming an author is that your intersection with the world expands. No longer are you known only by people you've met, you're now known by people you've not met. And every so often those unmet readers introduce themselves to you.

I've met a variety of people through the Internet, some of whom introduce themselves to me as being fans of my writing. Go figure. I'm occasionally interrupted, for example, by an instant message from an undergraduate student in Wisconsin who tells me I remind her of Donald Miller. She's always writing funny stuff like that. And while in Miami one week I met a guy, quite serendipitously, who's read "everything [I've] ever written." We talked together and prayed together, and we've since continued our conversation through the World Wide Web.

I'm starting to think that books are, more than anything, springboards to a more particular, more meaningful conversation. For someone who makes his living in the publishing industry, I actually hold a relatively low view of books--not low in the sense that I think they're silly or meaningless but in the sense that they, like a "low church," are at their best when they close the gap between the inherent mystique of the thing and the lived worldview of its constituency.

Books, regardless of their particular depth or shallowness, can function as icebreakers that give people entry into one another's lives. From there we can move to weightier, more existential conversations--the newly discovered past abuse of a loved one and its impact on an adult relationship; the suspicion that God is calling someone to a dramatic shift in their life's trajectory; the nagging perplexity of a God who seems appealing and a religious system that seems oppressive. The best books carry content that's worth reading, but they go further by inviting the reader to go further--into an idea and into community. The best books, then, allow that there is a universe beyond them, and they seek to make meaningful contact.

Posted by Dave Zimmerman at February 16, 2009 7:11 AM