The Rabbit Room

Do Not Despair

I’m guessing that many of you may feel like I do a lot these days when you look at the news—both angry yet impotent to do much of anything significant about the world’s ills. It’s one of the problems of our age, that our sphere of knowledge dwarfs our sphere of impact. In these moments I often find myself “doomscrolling”, thumbing through one bad thing after another on the Internet until I’m in a bad mood.

A Global Cinema Event: The Hiding Place

A year ago this month, Rabbit Room Theatre launched with my stage adaptation of Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place. It was a project that stretched me and the whole theatre team in a wealth of ways, and we were overjoyed with the reception. The show ran for 4-weeks to sold out performances at the Soli Deo Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and since then theater-goers and Corrie-lovers all over the world have been asking, “What’s next?” Well, the time has come to tell everyone what we’ve been working on for the past year. What most folks don’t know is that during the run of shows in Nashville, the stage play was filmed for cinema audiences over the course of two marathon-days of shooting.

What A Friend: The Companionship of Mission House

“What a friend we have in Jesus.” We sing those words, and we take comfort in our personal relationship with the Maker, but just a moment’s pondering reveals our inadequacy. We do not rate such access. We have never before known a friend so giving, so interested, so committed. We can only fail in our half of the relationship, but somehow that’s okay. 

A Constant Sword

The drug of comeuppance no longer satisfies me. I’ve tasted it too many times, mostly in movies, or in the rolling celluloid fiction of my mind. The high has vanished now, leaving in its place a shadow that looks like Saint Peter drawing a sword at Gethsemane, an echo that sounds like a Savior disappointed, even slightly alarmed.

Joyful Abundance: A review of Andrew Osenga’s Living Water EP

Waking up to joy can feel like spring. One day, it’s all gray skies and brown sticks. The next, the ground has softened into mud and the trees are covered with flowers you barely noticed were budding. That’s the feeling of Andrew Osenga’s new EP Living Water, five songs that prepare the way for his upcoming album Headwaters like a garden bursting into bloom.

Papa Keller

Creators of dystopian fiction often emphasize the losses of a post-apocalyptic world by featuring remnants of a former, easier life. From the H.G. Wells 1936 film Things to Come to the 2023 HBO release The Last of Us, directors show everyday objects we take for granted grown precious in the realm of the survivor: a box of shoelaces, a Top 100 Billboard Hits book, airplane parts, a can of peaches–bits and bobbles of pre-disaster ease now precious to people trying to scrap together life in a world grown dark.  

Remembering Timothy James Keller (A.D. 1950-2023)

This Friday last, pastor, teacher, and author Tim Keller took one final drag on the air of old creation, then breathed his first breath of the unadulterated rest of Christ, in which rest he now awaits the further glory to be revealed at the Resurrection. For Tim, this transposition is great gain, though it is a hard loss for many left behind: thousands whom Tim pastored and mentored; hundreds of thousands whom he taught through his incomparable sermons, lectures, and writings; many personal friends; and, of course, for Kathy, Tim’s wife of nearly fifty years, and their three children.

But It Never Gets Easy: A Review of Running With Our Eyes Closed

We could never go back and be strangers
All our secrets are mixed and distilled
But you’ve taught me to temper my anger
And you’ve learned what it’s like to be still

Jason Isbell sings these lines in a song called “Running With Our Eyes Closed,” which is also the title of a new documentary by Sam Jones that follows the recording and release of Reunions–the chart-topping record put out by Isbell and his band, The 400 Unit, in early 2020.