In fact, the world's jam-packed with meaning.  It's no accident that butterflies and eggs and seeds make such fine metaphors for rebirth; that wind and fire, water and wine are apt images of the Holy Spirit; that the ocean brings to mind the depths of our own souls. Even the giant water bug Annie Dillard writes of in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the predatory insect that poisons its prey and then leisurely sucks it void--well, you've already thought up a connection or two for that one, haven't you?

God is the original artist.  He hides terror in a beetle, and crystalline beauty in an invisible jellyfish. The more you look at anything, the more you see--any child or scientist knows that.

And this artist God, who saturates creation with metaphor and meaning, this God made you in his image.  Certainly you're not the lone exception in all creation.  There is meaning, too, in your soul. 

Grasp this.  If you don't, no matter how many words you put on paper, how much paint on canvas, no matter what you do, your message will die with you.  You will borrow the message of another and make a dime store copy.  You will discount the images, words and phrases that burn in your gut day after day, because they don't form themselves into something you understand, they don't fit any outline you can explain. 

You will above all suppress the struggle raging inside you, because--well, who knows where that will go, if allowed to run rampant?

"Nothing important is completely explicable," says Madeleine L'Engle in A Circle of Quiet. That's because, quite frankly, you and I only understand small things, like the recipe for green bean casserole.

Big things, like messages in our souls? We don't comprehend those any more than we know how the bumblebee flies.  To excavate that message and expect it to fly--that takes faith. 

In The Elements of Style, E.B. White says, "Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar... Let (an author) start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and he is as good as dead, although he may make a nice living."

Or he may not. 

Author Mary DeMuth once said, "Trends are set by people who don't think about trends."