Carried away by words
I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphor these last few days. I find myself half way through writing a book about pilgrimage as a metaphor for discipleship. The deprivations, the effort, the companionship, the provisions, the rules of the road and even journey’s end all carry meanings for the disciple’s life of faith with or without the pilgrim’s staff. A meta-phor is, quite literally, something which should carry us with it into a realm of deeper meaning. This is certainly my hope for #Journey.
Consider the paragraph below:
Its a jungle out there, but there’s an elephant in the room and we’re balanced on a knife edge.
The boss is digging his heels in, but we’re all climbing the walls. I thought I saw a window, but in fact it’s just roadblocks all the way.
If we’ve jumped the shark then we might as well step aside and let the fat lady sing.
Of course, the person speaking is not actually climbing the wall, nor squeezing past an elephant to see out of the window. When we use this kind of language we allow it to paint pictures on the canvas of our minds, which then cause us to re-examine the realities which gave rise to the language in the first place. This is where a graphic enabler can really come into his own – turning concepts into visual realities, so that people tackle the concepts like concrete challenges.
As the pace of writing has picked up again, I have found one or two people asking me what the book is for. Essentially, I want to use the lens of pilgrimage to look at discipleship all over again. How can the lessons learnt on the pilgrim’s road help those of us whose path lies elsewhere? As the journey of writing the #journey continues, your company is greatly appreciated…
A snippet of a much bigger picture about the journey, by Josh Gifford
