You Want Me to Build an Ark!?

In the 2007 film Evan Almighty, Steve Carell plays an ambitious newscaster-turned-Congressman whose life is turned upside down when God (Morgan Freeman) shows up and tells him to prepare for an impending flood by building an ark. Not surprisingly, Evan resists. Who wouldn't? After all, what kind of sense does it make to build an ark in suburban DC?

None, of course.

But intuition rarely makes logical sense, nor does it often follow the dictates of "conventional wisdom," which is nearly always more conventional than it is wise.

I thought about Evan a couple of weeks when I woke up one Monday morning annoyed that I continued to feel strongly called to press ahead with my weekly writing workshops at a time when attendance was plummeting.

It wasn't so much about offering the workshops. I have been writing about and teaching this material for more than 25 years. I know it inside out and need little prep time. Putting it out there and showing up is easy.

Instead, like Evan, who would have been fine had God told him to buy a rowboat and stow it in the garage, I have felt impelled to redesign all my workshops from the ground up and create several new ones – making them all more visually appealing and creating/scheduling a dedicated video for each that is independent of the live event. And to put it all into ark-like proportions, I am to do one a week until I have covered all my topics...regardless of attendance.

No, Morgan Freeman didn't show up at my front door and tell me to do it. Nor did instructions arrive at the end of a thunderbolt. I simply knew. It was an intuitive thing.

If you drill down deep enough, you will discover that pretty much everything I write and teach has to do with intuition...with fostering that inner knowingness that is wiser than our conscious mind...with finding the strength to trust it and the courage to surrender to it.

My signature writing technique, which I call "writing on the Muse Stream," is at its core a tool for tapping into that well of creativity...that wealth of wisdom. And the protagonists of all my fiction always seem to find themselves on a journey of deepening trust, just as I do.

As I put it in my Acts of Surrender memoir, it's not about trusting some white-bearded, white-robed celestial gentleman. Rather, and I don’t pretend to have solved the theological/scientific question of the ages, it's about listening for and trusting something that is both within me and of which I am part, something that is infinite and infinitely wise.

And that's where intuition comes from – mine, yours and everyone's.

These days, when we are being bombarded more than ever with conflicting information, it's more important than ever to foster that inner wisdom that we all have access to. That inner wisdom carries us past our fears and prejudices and into our highest good, if we are open to hearing it. Not only our highest good with regard to COVID-19; our highest good in every realm of our lives.

Back in 2007, after having seen Evan Almighty for the first time, I wrote a blog post about the experience.

"I have never been asked to build an ark," I wrote, "but I have been guided along roads that seem equally bizarre and incomprehensible, in directions that others have judged or mocked. Ultimately, though, as with Evan and his flood, the higher guidance has always proven itself wiser and more knowing than a limited human mind that is always trying to figure things out and cling to control."

As I meditated in the days that followed my recall of the film, all I kept hearing over and over was "Be like Evan." In other words, listen, get past my resistance and surrender.

"Trust"

And so, week by week, I continue to reimagine and redesign my existing workshops and to create new ones, trusting (to the best of my imperfect human ability) that there is a higher purpose at play that will reveal itself in its time, not mine.

"As the film credits roll," I wrote back in 2007 of Evan Almighty. "I'm reminded of author Madeleine L'Engle's description of the Old Testament as filled with bearded prophets shouting up to the heavens, 'You want me to do what!?'"

Evan is just such a prophet, as am I, as are you. For in every moment, the higher wisdom we all carry within is calling on us to do and be the impossible, to build our own version of Evan's ark, even though it makes no conventional sense, even though we don't know where to begin or who we'll be when we're done.

All we can do is be like Evan: listen, get past our resistance and surrender.