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Every inchworm I have seen was stuck in long grasses. The wrestched inchworm hands from the side of a grassblade and throws its head around from side to side, seeming to wail. What! No further? Its back pair of nubby feet clasps the grass stem; its front three pairs of nubs rear back and flail in the air, apparently in search of a footing. What! No further? What? It searches everywhere in the wide world for the rest of the grass, which is right under its nose. By dumb luck it touches the grass. Its front legs hand on; it lifts and buckles its green inch, and places its hind legs just behind its front legs, Its body makes a loop, a bight. All it has to do now is slide its front legs up the grass stem. Instead it gets lost. It throws up its head and front legs, flings its upper body out into the void, and panics again. What! No further? End of the world? And so forth, until it actually reaches the grasshead's tip. By then its wee weight may be bending the grass toward to some other grass plant. Its davening, apocalyptic prayers sway the grasshead and bump it into something. I have seen it many times. The blind and frantic numbskull makes it off one grassblade and onto another one, which it will climb in virtual hysteria for several hours. And now—What! No further? End of world? Ah, here's ground. What! No further?

With a hint of addition and a bit of subtraction, The Writing Life could quickly become The Preaching Life—and I'm not sure you would need to make any changes to the passage above in the process. In the same tradition of the finicky writer, the panicky preacher is like Dillard's inchworm. On any given day—especially on a Wednesday that finds Sunday stubbornly peeking at you from just ahead—most of us are in our studies, crying out over a half-finished manuscript: "What! No further? End of world?"

I don't think we're dimwits or numbskulls or anything of the like; we're just prone to losing site of the grassblade just under our noses. But no need to panic. Simply remember you gather words and speak them by the power of a God who revels in revelation—a God who will always fill the minds and touch the tongues of willing servants.

When Dillard sees the inchworm, she says she cannot help but say, "Why don't you just jump? Put yourself out of your misery?" To the writer she probably wouldn't say such a thing—nor we to one another as preachers. Instead we might say: "Hang in there. Literally. And remember that most everything worthwhile is born out of the misery of a frantic search."

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