A book about God is a book about everything. No wonder books about God sprawl all over the place: the topic ‘God’ touches every other conceivable topic. Any true thing about God will echo in the fibers of all that God has created.

Me, I have no interest in writing a book about everything. I just want to share how the surprising God I encountered lit up my life and rescued me from despair, and I want to help readers encounter that same God. I don’t want this book to sit on bookshelves as a compendium of Christian theology; I want this book to light readers on fire! Yes, to spread a holy fire, that’s why I’m writing this book, and to spread that fire quickly enough to keep it hot.

So when I look at the piles of books, articles, and notecards stacked wobbly around my office floor, my mouth goes slack and my eyes go vacant. I look at my research and I’m pierced with a paradox: all these collected hot-takes, personal testimonies, wise insights, Bible verses, and clever arguments truly helped guide my discovery, but they are not the discovery itself. They are arrows pointing toward a light, but they are not the light.

What am I saying? Maybe that I don’t want to get lost in a labyrinth of arrows. Trying to introduce people to this surprising God feels like trying to describe Michelangelo’s Pietà by carefully examining the dust and chips of marble on the sculptor’s floor.

Open most academic books about God and you often find one of two toils. Open the first book and you’re accosted by the exhausted jargon of a weary scholar, so entrenched in the same fruitless spirals of argument, so numbed by the same circuitous conversations, that their prose dribble across the page, dull and predictable. These books read how I imagine Israelite food critics would read in the 30th year of eating only manna and quail.

Open another book and you’ll find a different woe. Perhaps antsy to escape those stagnant loops of discourse, other scholars dive deep into minutiae. They pull out their microscopes to probe new depths of nuance—way down in the neglected deep—hoping to find a new clue, a new insight, a new twist which might shine new light on the ancient debates still hammering away far up on the dark surface. These books might explore dead languages from old scrolls, questioning the gender of a preposition, or the curious placement of an accent mark on an ambiguous word. Or maybe they spatter the page with symbolic logic until the whole thing looks like some contrived hieroglyphics that only four people in the known universe can understand. While the authors are clearly smart, and they may even be right, they’re so recondite they leave the reader not knowing why any of it matters.

When you write about God you can get easily stuck in the pedantic gravity of the bookshelf and never achieve orbit, never reach escape velocity. I don’t want to get stuck on those same tired intellectual roundabouts, nor do I want to get lost in the weeds of minutiae. I’m not writing this book to simply share information. I want to open a door for readers to hopefully experience the pervasive hope, purpose, and joy that I’ve experienced these past 30 years. I guess what I’m saying: I want to find the signal in the noise, the melody in the cacophony, and I want that melody to make readers dance, just as the melody has made me dance.