C.S. Lewis says in his book Letters to Malcom, Chiefly on Prayer, “You and I are people of the foothills…two people on the foothills comparing notes in private.” Very few of us, if any, live on the mountain top of expertise, and very few of us wallow about in the plains of ignorance. Most of us live in-between on the foothills, and the best we can do is compare our life-notes with each other. Sometimes these notes are helpful, and sometimes they aren’t. But if we don’t take the time to compare our notes with one another, we’ll never know.
George MacDonald, in Unspoken Sermons I: The New Name says, “There is a chamber…in God Himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man,— out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. That is that for which he was made—to reveal the secret things of the Father.” Each of us encounters God uniquely and each of us was made to share that encounter with others.
This is why I’ve embarked on something I would have never considered a few short years ago: writing a blog. And given that there are more than 3,000,000 new blog posts per day the chances that my blog will be read are fairly small. But the weight of such statistics should not silence our voices. If we are designed to communicate that which we have found in the “chamber in God Himself,” then the size of the audience should not matter. The only thing that should matter is that we have exchanged notes with another fellow-traveler on the foothills.
Finally, I believe the words written in these posts have come about as a result of proper study of the Bible and a deliberate search for the meaning of each text, but I must admit that the possibility exists I may have read into the text those things I wanted to see, not those things that are actually there. As you should with anything written about scripture, you should approach my explanations through prayer and proper study on your own. Should you find something I have written that seems inconsistent with scripture please respond to the specific post or e-mail me at onthefoothills@gmail.com.