a little about indigo …

I had a pretty good idea this writing was turning out nice, but honestly, one never really knows how readers are going to respond. So, I started asking my very favorite people to read and give input. (Who would those people be? Oh, easy, it's those who have subscribed to my Patreon and Substack newsletters!)

Ha, I remember zooming with my friend, Derrick. We were meeting about something else, but as soon as the camera turned on and I saw his face, I knew he had been reading indigo. He said, "I'm a wreck." The next day, my friend Matt and I met at a coffee shop. I knew from his body language—the way he walked in, sat down, looked at me—that he had been reading the book. He just stared at me, shook his head slowly, and said the one word that summed it up: "Dude." I got a few emails back from friends like Nancy, who simply said, "Speechless." And Melissa, who said the work was "Poignant and beautiful." And Amy, who said, "No words."

And then I asked some author friends to consider writing endorsements, which is always a tricky thing because you want to avoid asking colleagues to weigh in on something this personal that's not great, you know? Honestly, I was really moved with their response ...

Paul Young, author of The Shack didn’t say he loved the book, he actually said, "I love, love, love this book." Well, that's pretty cool.

My author and podcasting friend, Glenn Siepert, who I know has been through some significant loss in his life, emailed me with two words: "Absolutely stunning."

Brian McLaren, who has been such a huge help to me (and many of us) over the years, said, "Jonathan, this is a beautiful piece of work ... simultaneously heart-breaking, heart-opening, and heart-expanding."

Two of my favorite theopoets, Catherine Keller and John Caputo, went out of their way to tell me how much they loved it. Catherine used words like "gripping," "epic," and "poetic grace," and John (or Jack, since we're now buds) said, "I had to put this down once to regain my composure ... it's remarkable."

My author, pastor friend, Tim Suttle, summed up what a lot of people have been trying to express when he said, "I wasn't expecting this ... I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this ... Write me an essay, and I’ll play with it, argue with it, even try to pick it apart. With art, I'm defenseless. I think they call it aesthetic arrest, the way I cried and laughed my way through this piece of writing—so beautiful and sad, so funny, raw and insightful that I literally couldn’t put it down."

All of it was nice, if not a bit overwhelming.

And good grief, typing comments from these people is embarrassing. Still, I guess this is the place to do it because this is the place where I'm trying to convince you to invest in this thing, which is to invest in a theology that is as startling and absurd as it is gracious and poetic, though if the folks mentioned above are responding this way, maybe we're on to something here. And the something we're onto just might birth hope. (And if you have hope, the world might have hope because the world goes as you go ... and you go as the world goes ...)

👉🏼 indigo: the color of grief on amazon