Living in the Space Between?

I have just provided a gift for you. It is a new eBook called, Living in the Space Between: A Conversation About Tough Topics, Faith, and the Jesus Way.

 Download Free eBook Here and share it with your friends.

Living in the Spaces in Between 3DLiving in the Space Between. It is a provocative title. At least I hope it is. But what does it mean?

The genesis of this phrase came while sitting at a table in the Horsebrass Pub in Southeast Portland, Oregon close to fifteen years ago. My friend Don and I were talking. He was just finding his stride as a writer with a brand new bestseller called, “Blue Like Jazz,” and he was passionately encouraging me to explore writing as well.

Don looked at me, while we were brainstorming his next book and said, “I have a book title for you. I love it so much but it represents your life better than mine. You should take it. The title is “Living in the Space Between.”

That conversation from a decade and a half ago has obviously stuck with me and the phrase “Living in the Space Between” has been a bit of a mantra to my writing career, which has happened in no small part thanks to Donald Miller.

Living in the Space Between means:

  • * I want to live and think somewhere in between the polarized rhetoric that rules most of our public discourse (especially religious discourse.)
  • * I refuse to be labeled and coopted by political, moral or religious power structures.
  • * I want to crawl into the warm risky space between me and the person that I am striving to love by understanding what they think, hope and believe.
  • * I reject the false-hierarchies that says some people are my “teachers” and others are my “students”. Instead I want to live in constant anticipation that every person might be God’s teacher for me in that moment. Like the ancient prayer says, “May He be in the mouth of each who speaks unto me.”
  • * That I want to discover a Jesus-faith that is honest and challenging and all the while is still the most attractive and imaginative thing I could ever share with another person.
  • * I long for a Christian church that embraces its place as a healing, serving, sacrificial, sacramental blessing to all peoples.

“Living in the Space Between” means that I invite every relationship (old friends and brand new encounters) to drift together into that experience where:

  • * Both feel vulnerable and yet courageous.
  • * Stories are freely shared.
  • * I am not stuck in my space, nor codependent with the other’s space but together we seek shared space.
  • * Each finds the other more fascinating than a blockbuster Hollywood movie.
  • * Where the electro-magnetic fields from our hearts begin to harmonize.
  • * Where neither feels the need to “one-up” the other.
  • * Where neither spends their mental time planning their counter argument but instead are comfortably lost in the confessions of the other.
  • * Where both experience healing.

This is my hope… my hope for my life and my hope for yours.

That is why I compiled this book. Please download and share it with your friends.

 

Let the epiphanies come,

Tony

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