Rob Bell - How To Be Here

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook edition first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

First published in the United States in 2016 by HarperOne

Copyright © WORB, Inc., 2016

Rob Bell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover design: Baas Creative

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007591343

Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780007591336

Version: 2017-03-07

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

PART 1: The Blinking Line

An Unfinished World

Ex Nihilo-ness

Accountants and Moms

Suffering

Breath

Alert and Awake

Bored

PART 2: The Blank Page

Out of Your Head

Comparisons

The You Experiment

PART 3: The Japanese Have a Word for It

Figuring It Out

Someone Should

Step

Courage

The Bus Route

PART 4: The Thing About Craft

The Corvette

Honor and Privilege

Reconnected

PART 5: The First Number

Step 1

Overthinking

Suspend Judgment

Nerves

What You Don’t Know

The Ramp

PART 6: The Dickie Factor

Deep Waters

Failure

Alive

PART 7: The Two Things You Always Do

The Mail Room

Original

Rejection

Surrender

This Is Where I Start

PART 8: The Power of the Plates

Rhythm and Sabbath

Your Groove

We Have This Morning

PART 9: The Exploding Burrito

Presence

Seeing the Ocean

Endnotes, Riffs, References, and Further Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Rob Bell

About the Publisher

You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.

—Alan Watts

I once had an idea for a book.

I’d never written a book.

I was a pastor at the time and I’d been giving sermons week after week and I noticed that certain ideas and stories seemed to connect with people in a unique way. I began to see themes and threads and wondered whether I could bring them together to make something people would read and pass along to their friends. I already had a job, so I figured the only way to write a book was to hire a stenographer—the person who sits in a courtroom and records everything that is said during a trial—and speak the book out loud in one sitting while he typed what I said.

So that’s what I did. I stood there in a room and I spoke the book out loud while KevinTheStenographer typed away. It took an entire day.

And it was awful. Seriously—it was so bad.

There was a moment in the middle of the afternoon when I was talking and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t even listening to what I was saying. I had somehow managed to stop paying attention to myself .

A few days later Kevin sent me the typed manuscript of what I’d said and I started reading it, but it was like a mild form of torture. It just didn’t work.

It was my words, but it wasn’t me, if that makes sense.

All of which led me to the shocking realization that if I was going to write a book, I was going to have to actually write a book.

Which sounds obvious, but at the time it was a revelation.

I remember sitting down at my desk, opening up a new word-processing document, and staring at that blank page with that blinking line in the upper left-hand corner. I wasn’t prepared for how intimidating it would be. Other people are writers— actual, you know, authors . And there are lots of them, many who have been doing it for years.

I thought about Christopher Moore’s bookabout Biff the thirteenth disciple

and Annie Dillard’sline about physics labs

and everything Nick Hornby has ever written

and Dorothy Sayers’s words about Trinitarian creativity

and anything by Dave Eggers…

I was now going to try and do that ? The blinking line on that blank page kept blinking, like it was taunting me.

There’s a reason it’s called a cursor.

We all have a blinking line.

Your blinking line is whatever sits in front of you waiting to be brought into existence.

It’s the book

or day

or job

or business

or family

or mission

or class

or plan

or cause

or meeting

or task

or project

or challenge

or phone call

or life that is waiting for you to bring it into being.

Do you see your life as something you create?

Or do you see your life as something that is happening to you?

The blinking line raises a compelling question: What are we here for?

For many people, the world is already created.

It’s a fixed, static reality—set in place, previously established, done. Or to say it another way: finished .

Which usually leads to the question: What’s the point of any of this?

But when we’re facing the blinking line and we talk about bringing something new into existence, we’re expressing a different view of the world, one in which the world is unfinished .

There’s an ancient poem about this unfinished world we call home. In this poem there are stars and fish and earth and birds and animals and oceans, and they’re all in the endless process of becoming. It’s not just a tree, it’s a tree that produces fruit that contains seeds that will eventually grow new trees that will produce new fruit that contains more seeds to make more new trees. It’s a world exploding with life and beauty and complexity and diversity, all of it making more, becoming and evolving in such a way that tomorrow will be different from today because it’s all headed somewhere. Nothing is set in stone or static here; the whole thing is in motion, flush with vitality and pulsing with creative energy. ( This poem, by the way, is the first chapter of the Bible, in case any of this is starting to sound familiar.)

And then, right there in the middle of all of this unfinished creation, the poet tells us about a man and a woman. The man’s name is Adam, which means The Human in the original Hebrew language. It’s not a common name like you and I have, it’s more like a generic description. Same with the woman, whose name is Eve, which means Source of Life or Mother of the Living .

They find themselves in the midst of this big, beautiful, exotic, heartbreaking, mysterious, endlessly becoming, unfinished world and they’re essentially told,

Do something with it!

Make something!