I grew up with a feeling of fear about people because I had been told over and over again, “Don’t make friends with people who aren’t Christians because they’ll pull you away from your faith.” In general, as the church, we seem to grasp the “Don’t be of the world” part pretty well, but the reality is we’ve moved to a place where we’re nowhere even near the world. Instead of carrying God’s grace into our culture, we’ve created our own little subculture. And when the world pokes fun at our subculture, we think it’s persecution. It’s not. Persecution happens when someone’s reacting to the person of Christ. What we see is usually people’s reacting to our little subset of laws and rules and connections and commerce—how we do our stuff. I, personally, feel a need to begin to break free from that in whatever ways I can. I think it’s time to think differently about how we approach our faith in the world. We have to find a way to be human and let our faith express itself in our humanness while we’re involved with other human beings.

– Chris Rice, freelance nice guy, songwriter, and philosopher

I promised I’d gradually pull the curtain back on what I mean when I say I want this site to be (in part) about “exposing the big ubiquitous thing.” Consider this the first of many glimpses of the wizard. He’s little and, ultimately, powerless, but he puts on a big show as long as he has the curtain for cover.

[NOTE: For those who struggle with metaphor, Chris Rice is not the wizard. The Big Ubiquitous Thing (aka the BUT) is the wizard. Don’t worry, we’ll keep working on this.]