Introduction

Drop me a line at: Metaphors27@comcast.net
A PDF version of this blogbook can be downloaded here.
My actual blog is here.

This is a blog-book about obtaining a special kind of happiness that will never leave you nor forsake you and is as proof against as many forms of unhappiness as you will let it be.

Since what it offers you is happiness, I could have called it a self-help book. All self-help books ultimately offer happiness. But since this happiness comes from God, I have to call it a God-help book. Its purpose is to help you understand the happiness that is offered in the Christian Gospel. The word "gospel" comes from a Middle English word for "good news" Once you have read this book, and done the very consequential homework assignment I will give you towards the end of it, you will agree that it is indeed good news, because you will have gotten a grasp on a happiness that is able to grasp you back and not let go.

Unlike most books about the Gospel, this one does not relentlessly bang you on the head with the Bible. (At least not at first) What this book instead does is lead you through a cumulative set of metaphors, twenty-seven in all that inexorably guide you into a grasp of the best and highest happiness you can ever or will ever know. (But if you are the type who likes being banged on the head with the Bible, I have an appendix for you in the back.)

"What is a metaphor?" you may ask. A metaphor is a way of using language to bridge from one way of understanding something to another way of understanding something.

Sometimes it’s a bridge between something familiar, and another familiar thing. For a example, in a phrase or figure of speech, we say "drowning in work," bridging between the idea of water and the idea of having too much work.

Sometimes it’s a bridge between unfamiliar things to something familiar. Parables are like that. They are extended metaphors. Little stories that can translate things we are unfamiliar with (like the kind of existence that is yet to be) into things we are acquainted with in everyday life (the existence we have now).

The benefit of using metaphors is that you do not have to use hard words to explain things that might not be immediately obvious, and that you can say things as if they have been said for the first time, and thus have them heard as if for the first time.

So this book is a God-help book about some metaphors to a grasp of a unique and special kind of happiness. You may think of that happiness as being at the center of a flower that has not opened yet. As you read each metaphor, you are pealing away one petal after another, until you arrive at the core, and the nectar of happiness therein.

My only excuse for adding this book to the endless pile already in existence is that I wish someone has written a book like it for me a long time ago. I have been, for a good part of my life, very unhappy indeed, and I had a long twisting road before I finally got a grasp on the happiness that now grasps me. Walk with me then, down through the metaphors, and see if you can grasp that happiness too. I don’t guarantee that you will always be happy if you do (there are still times when I am not), but I do believe that it will grasp you back.

The first metaphor is about happiness itself.