What if, in hindsight, the director's cut of your life reverse engineers your current grasp of common sense.

Church is — well, not an optional extra, of course, and yet I can't help thinking that sometimes artificiality leaves us feeling depressed, while sometimes pushing back leads back to God.

Oh, those helpful calligraphers. They always get in the way when you're trying to build a raft.

News stories and memories colliding around rollercoasters, circuses and empty church buildings. Outrageous, glorious, both?

The kinds of questions around mystery that end up drifting because they're not allowed to land — in this lifetime — without permission.

Six months from now, on a dull day, when someone stumbles through the Stage Door into Chapter Seventeen, thinking — Where am I?

Just notes on certainty and hearsay, as I thnk aloud about how artificial intelligence shows us more than we wanted to see about what we're full of.

When I got a new mobile router, I was staring at Spicy Ginger Biscuits. The whole thing got me started on memories of 1980s Olympic-style evangelism. That's technology for you.

I'm thinking aloud about Chapter Seventeen, but you're welcome to listen or read, climb in or create, write or study, collaborate or unplug — and carry on doing all the same things in the real world…

How can I say this loudly enough. There are sites that get the job done, and there are sites that don't think that was the point.

These things would only ever happen in church or in a crisis. (Like Tom Hanks with an ice skate — needs must. Sometimes. Other times it's inappropriate, dangerous, outrageous and misguided.) Hence my new fancy word, ship-wreck-less-ons. The kind of things any one of us might learn in Chapter Seventeen.

Fork handles. Scaffolding poles. Metal things and metaphors that might be in a box out the back, but I'll have to look. Was this what they meant by theological imagination?

The way I think about things like this — like Hezekiah's story — is like walking around a shed filled with metaphorical mechanisms. But then, my grandfather was a toolmaker.

Yes, I know it looks like what I'm doing here is creating a website. After all, I'm creating a website. But don't misunderstand me. The website isn't really the point.

My website looks quite standard until that menu item — Stage Door. It's what happens with a literary imagination birthed in Bible and Bagpuss.

Am I alone in finding everything I encounter brings up a thousand other things? Now apply that to reading the Bible. I know.

Just an average writing day, but genuinely finding my private thinking interrupted by questions about how that might seem if said aloud.

What happens in the space where faith, muscle memory, and a Bible story meet — this day. Or Thursday…