Here are two things that have really been inspiring me lately:

1. “January Wedding” by the Avett Brothers.

Love their sound, and especially love this particular song. It talks about the winding road a couple takes to get to the point where they “know that they know that they know” they were meant to be together. I find the final lines particularly poignant:

No longer does it matter what circumstances we were born in
She knows which birds are singin’
And the names of the trees where they’re performin’ in the mornin
And in January we’re gettin’ married
Come January let’s get married

I’ll never forget that one indescribable moment when I knew Lisa was the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. While it was different from that moment in this song where he looked over and realized that she “can pick out a blue warbler high up in sycamore tree,” it was equally simple yet transcendent. We’re getting married, I thought to myself.

So I guess, like all great love songs, its not the lyrics themselves that inspire us; its the way they enable us to look back and remember why we love the person we’re married to so much.

2. Frederick Buechner’s Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC.

Buechner’s writing always inspires me, but what has brought me back to this particular book again (reading it now for maybe the fifth time) is the way he breathes fresh life into well-worn concepts. In Wishful Thinking he takes common theological terms like envy, love, and sin and invites us to look at them in new and enlightening ways.

“There are only two kinds of fools in the world: damned fools and what St. Paul calls ‘Fools for Christ’s sake’ (1 Corinthians 4:10).”

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

“Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.”

“Lust is the craving for salt of a person who is dying of thirst.”

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back–in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

Wishful Thinking is inspiring me again in a really dry patch. If you’re looking for a fresh take on faith I think it will speak to you too.

What’s inspired you lately?