Going where no man has gone before is more difficult than it sounds. Our cousins and ancestors were no less curious than we are, and were perhaps bolder. This world is their tomb. You should look under the bed.

Truth: We are the present. We are now. We are the razor's edge of history. The future flies at us and from that dark blur we shape the past. And the past is forever.

You fainted,' Tom said. Reg coughed. No, I didn't,' he said. 'Women faint. People afraid of needles faint. Men black out.

In this story, the sun moves. In this story, every night meets a dawn and burns away in the bright morning. In this story, Winter can never hold back the Spring... He is the best of all possible audiences, the only Audience to see every scene, the Author who became a Character and heaped every shadow on Himself. The Greeks were right. Live in fear of a grinding end and a dank hereafter. Unless you know a bigger God, or better yet, are related to Him by blood.

God is a God of galaxies, of storms, of roaring seas and boiling thunder, but He is also the God of bread baking, of a child's smile, of dust motes in the sun. He is who He is, and always shall be. Look around you now. He is speaking always and everywhere. His personality can be seen and known and leaned upon. The sun is belching flares while mountains scrape our sky while ants are milking aphids on their colonial leaves and dolphins are laughing in the surf and wheat is rippling and wind is whipping and a boy is looking into the eyes of a girl and mortals are dying.

We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment-nar rative catechisms.

In the Darwinian world, self-preservation is the ultimate shiny good.