A farmer needs a deep well. An athlete needs great conditioning. A businessperson needs "deep pockets." A communicator needs a versatile and fertile file of ideas and reference material if he or she is going to keep fresh and creative. With that in mind, I'd like to open some of my files month by month and offer a sampling of things that are provoking me to think and (hopefully) grow.

My files include some stuff that may end up as a book, an article, a sermon, or a lecture. On the other hand there are more than a few things that seemed significant at the time of their discovery but lost their charm.

The one thing I ask most of my files is that they stimulate my thinking and my creativity. At the outset I'm not worried about their profundity, their orthodoxy, or their practicality. That comes later.

My files are found in three places: in loose-leaf notebooks (carefully cross-referenced on my computer), in a filing cabinet in typical file folders (also numbered) and in my journal—the ...