The Goblins Won't Win

Choosing The Path of Creative Freedom

“Slam!”

The door outside my childhood room spoke louder than any words my family had shouted at each other. Then came that pregnant pause. The dread of what would happen next.

Earlier that day I had quietly closed my bedroom door to play. I remember lying prone on the tight weave blue carpeting whose geographic design of lines and squares looked just like ready-made streets and undeveloped plots of land. There were chaotic little piles of Legos, Lincoln Logs, and plastic figurines around me; creative possibilities as far as the eye could see.

Without any thought to where the day’s play would take me, I followed my intuition moment by moment and step by step. The boundaries of this world fell away as I combined disparate toys together and found fresh, new story worlds. Native American chiefs and plastic World War II soldiers took a joy ride together past a suburban Lego home. Nearby, G.I. Joe and Ultraman began building a log cabin. There was a creative freedom in that room that has taken me years to rediscover. But on that day I was in the zone for hours.

Then came the yelling. It spread like wildfire as teenage angst took over the world outside of my room. I was five years younger than my nearest sibling. I just wanted to continue with these stories that had opened up before me. But at the slam of that door, dread broke into my room. The joyriders stopped driving. The builders stopped building. A fat, warty goblin plopped down on my carpet and stared at me through heavy eyelids and bloodshot eyes. Dread was trying to take over my world too.

As I write this post, I am again face to face with a goblin. My elementary school bedroom has morphed into the second-floor library at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. This Substack channel is my new carpet design. Scattered around me are books, pens, notecards, and Post-it notes, and right in front of me are my laptop and a pad of paper. I’ve been combining disparate people and ideas to learn from the results. I spliced an autobiographical video of a Ghanaian theologian with the Western loss of faith and a new post blossomed, Christianity Opens the Enlightened Mind. Then I combined The Lord’s Prayer with the fantasy writing of George MacDonald. The result was another post, entitled, Finding Home. Rather than breaking the prayer into pieces as so many of the schooarly commentaries around me had done, we find meaning by using it whole to makegoodhappen in our everyday lives.

I have been at this for eight hours and I’m not tired at all. Instead, I am actually tempted to skip my afternoon workout to continue for another couple of hours. I feel like I could do this forever!

I pause to consider my options. Looking out at the beautiful Southern California sky I suddenly remember the pregnant pause we are all caught up in; our moment in history between Covid-19 and the next presidential election. The goblin’s reflection has appeared. I see the outline of his face staring at me in the window. He wants to consume all of the joy I have experienced today.

Then I think back to the slam of the door in my family’s house so many decades before. It’s produced fruit in spite of itself. Though my parents are divorced and my oldest sister died by her own hand, despair did not consume us. Our family tree branched out to support two new generations.

I’ve experienced many pregnant pauses since that day. Nevertheless, my life has gone surprisingly well. The reason for this is quite clear to me. Long ago, on the floor of my college dorm room, I decided to invest the very best of my time, talent, and treasure to seek and find a way of life that would withstand every goblin that would try to steal my joy. I found a path that is not only stronger than dread but encourages creative freedom and joyful innovation as our most important contribution to this troubled world.

I urge you to join me. Outside of our plaid-carpeted room, the slamming and yelling of the world increases. But inside this Substack channel, we will combine our faith with our rhythm of life to makegoodhappen in lives, relationships, and communities. Together we will keep dread from taking over the world.

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One month after launch:

• 275 subscribers

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• subscribers are beginning to interact with each other through the like/comment section of each post including Tara, another Substack writer from France. Welcome, Tara!