“Go write”
I may have sniffed, flipping one shoulder up with a dismissive wave of the hand. “But what if I can’t anymore? Maybe…maybe I’ll quit.” He shot me a look. I sighed, knowing the truth, and slinging my backpack over my shoulder, I left for the coffee shop.
To be brutally honest, I ended the year on a low note. Working like crazy, praying for help, I’d cobbled together two columns and sent them in ahead of our trip because, as I told my editors, “I don’t want to write one.single.wordwhile I’m gone.” And I meant it.
The return from my hometown did not bring a return of my zest for writing. Somehow, it had been buried, lying dormant beneath a heap of anxieties, fatigue, discouragement, and uncertainty. But deadlines don’t wait, and callings can’t be neglected forever…
“Go write.”
To this day, I find it utterly amazing. How God took a girl who knew she could tell stories and make people laugh and put her with a man who saw a book in her. How she didn’t see the books. How she saw the mountains instead and shrugged it off and kept on typing. How once- or twice-a-year prayers thrown up, scarcely the size of a mustard seed, were answered in a most astounding way, and a door opened up.
After four years, there are several things I’ve learned. Sometimes it’s very hard, using your gift. At my high school reunion over the holidays, this is what I told my classmates (it was surreal, by the way, sitting in the place where I’d taken composition and speech classes, never dreaming of a future column or speeches at Kiwanis clubs): “It stretches me so far out of my comfort zone, it’s unreal.”
Most weeks, I’m terrified. That’s all. Scared to death. If Beth Moore was right when she said, “God chooses vocations for us that stir up all of our insecurities so He can scoop them out, one spoonful at a time,” then God is scooping like crazy over here.
I know this, too – I can’t possibly do it on my own. Frankly, I don’t want to. There’s no possible way a mother of four with a day job could write through diapers and potty training and cross country and school meetings, week after week after week. It’s too big for me, and that’s why I need Him.
And there’s this – we’re sinners here, we six, and the days that this fact becomes especially apparent, those are the days I want to quit. To hide; to go back to being anonymous. It’s those days that the whisper (“what right do you have to talk to others?”) makes perfect sense.
However. I know something, too, of the faithfulness of God; that “where He guides, He provides.” I’ve felt the exhilaration of offering up my fish and loaves and catching glimpses of what Jesus can do with them.
I know the indescribable thrill of dreaming new dreams, of holding “maybe’s” and “I think I could’s” in my hands. I know both the beauty and the pain of giving birth to something new and becoming something new in the process.
And now, how about you? What is the “thing” that you need to go and do? It’s okay to take a break sometimes; it really is. But maybe (maybe?) it’s time to get back in there and do it one more time.
Insecure about it? Good. Let the scooping begin. Afraid you can’t sustain it or it won’t be good enough? That’s fine. He can and He is. Tired of dreaming dreams so big and waiting for mountains to move? That’s okay. The God who made them can – and will – move them when the time is right. For after all, “Faithful is He that calleth you who also will do it.”
All is well,
Rhonda