My 5-year old daughter woke me up at 3:30 this morning.

Thus roused from slumber, finding sleep again proved elusive. But the early bird gets the worm, and in a pre-dawn stillness punctuated with birds chirping outside my home-office window, a suitable metaphor to launch this blog finally dawned on me.

Many ask what drove me to write the book that gave birth to the blog. Perhaps they didn’t read the preface, or didn’t remember it, or didn’t believe it. Or maybe, given that we live in a fractured, ADD-trending, media driven culture, they want a soundbite. Fair enough, for without a good sound bite, it’s difficult to write a decent blog.

And while it sometimes feels like everything is different today, in many ways things haven’t changed. Sound-bites have always been powerful, and the best ones have survived. A sound-bite from the Savior provides the answer to the conundrum of explaining, succinctly, the reason behind my writing.

In Matthew 7:7 Christ stated: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:

That verse neatly sums up a self-evident truth to those of faith, which is also the Genesis of The People of the Sign.  The answers are out there, and we need to be seeking them.

We may have to ask more than once, or more than a thousand times.

Our knuckles may be bloody from knocking.

We may have to overturn every stone, within minefields in countries whose names we can’t even spell.

But the answers are not being withheld from us.

The place we are may just be very far from where the answers are found.

We may be heading in the wrong direction.

We may not know what it is we are really looking for.

But in the asking, and the seeking, and the knocking, there is already wisdom. And by obtaining wisdom, we can refine the questions we ask.

As the darkness begins to yield, outside my window, to the arrival of light, another soundbite comes to mind, one which frames the ask/seek/knock picture by revealing its opposite.  For if we are to learn/find/gain entry, we must, indeed, ask/seek/knock.  And that is why the closing offering, of this first blog, is a sound bite that is another self-evident truth.

He who knows everything can never learn anything.