One of the lessons I have learned in my writing journey is coming to realize that God does not expect me to be like anyone else or be at whatever level I perceive others to be. God takes us on our own personal journey, however fast or slow. God comes where we are, knowing that we cannot reach Him on our own. He makes our path unique to who we are and to whatever situation in life we find ourselves.
In my own journey, I walked away from my writing for twenty years, thinking I was foolish for holding on to my childhood fantasy of making up stories.
I misinterpreted Paul’s words in the verse:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. [1 Corinthians 13:11 KJV]
Time to be a man, I told myself. Get a career, provide for my family, make money, do “adult” stuff, and quit messing around with fantasy and science fiction. Fantasy is too often associated with witchcraft. Science fiction is too often associated with the hubris of mankind trying to make sense of a world without God. Sounds good and responsible. The mature thing to tell myself. So I did what I thought was godly and spiritual. I “put away childish things”. Only later, I better understood the “heart” of My Heavenly Father and His gifting. God’s gifts are not only the talents He placed within us, but the desires and interests that are characteristic of our tastes and preferences. The things that delight and inspire us. Every delight we have as humans can be satisfied under His direction.
Fantasy and science fiction could not be held to blame as genres for the darkened hearts of the worldly, unsaved writers who have highjacked the genres. C.S. Lewis, a great Christian thinker wrote God-honoring fantasy, as have many others like George Macdonald, Andrew Petersen, etc. Scientific inquiry and speculative fiction arose from a great many God-fearing, Bible-believing writers. Eric Metaxas writes “In The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy, Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton make the case particularly compellingly, explaining that it was the worldview of the Christian faith that uniquely enabled science to emerge and flourish.” I realized that I was looking at the genres all wrong. It was not the genres themselves, producing hostility towards God and the Christian worldviews, but the writers using these popular genres to attack our belief systems. I had missed the point. It was Christians abandoning those genres that produced such a result.
I was masking my doubts in a prideful cloak of my own spiritually worded justifications.
These genres were co-opted by secular writers because Christians had abdicated their positions as leaders in the genres. Tolkien was a firm believer in God, influencing even Lewis prior to his conversion. Yet, not one doubts Tolkien’s seminal place in the fantasy genre as a leader of meaningful mythology.
I was not the boy-man trying to relive his childhood and shirk responsibility. I was the little boy studying the meager lunch in my small hands of five biscuits and two fish, and looking at the crowd of five thousand around me, saying, “Impossible” and tucking my “gifts” away in my pouch. My point is, however you might perceive your writing gift, don’t be discouraged. Recognize that too often our enemy condemns and steals away what might be, merely because we focus on how we see what we have compared to others. He wants to marginalize us at the seedling stage, so we never truly plant them in God’s fertile soil and garden. Little is much in God’s hands. From the tiniest seed, a great and towering tree can erupt from the ground, and create shade and shelter for many.
We just have to be willing to plant that seed in the palm of our Creator.
There are seasons that God takes us through, telling us to rest in Him and wait. When He moves, we move, understanding that we don’t lead our Good Shepherd, we follow Him.
God knows the path He has called you to. Rest in Him. Listen to His voice above all others, for He knows the where and when. Don’t let fear impede you or cause you to lessen the value of your talent. In our weakness, is where we find that we rely on Him the most, and His strength is made manifest in that. The world presents the idea that we have to be this self-reliant, powerful, independent paragon before we qualify to be inspiring and viewed as successful. I bought into that hook, line, and sinker, for a long time, before I came to the place where I realized that God does not need “my achievements” for His glory, but instead wants my surrender, for His reflection to the world. That is the branch and the vine relationship that Jesus was speaking about in John 15:5.
I was given the image of a cup, one day, in my musings. And God revealed to me that the contents of the cup is what brings value to the vessel. If we put the cup under a flowing faucet, it gets filled to the brim and overflows the vessel. If we move the cup out of the flow of the faucet, it can only fill another empty cup with the capacity to which it was filled, and then it becomes drained and empty. In our service to others, too often, that is what we do. We move out from under the flowing faucet and empty ourselves into others, we drain ourselves of that which filled us. It struck me that we become depleted, and feel the emptiness of it, too often that it becomes unsustainable. I realized that whenever that happened I sought to remove myself from others that seemed to deplete me.
It is not until we come back under the flowing faucet again, that we experience the renewal and filling of God’s love and empowerment. But there is only one way that we (as representative cups) can remain full and filled when ministering outward to others through our unique gifts, and that is by not moving away from the running stream, but remaining in it, and encouraging others to move their emptiness under the stream as well. As we are overflowed, we naturally and sustainably spillover that life-giving “Living Water” into others aligned under the flow as well. It cascades out of us into others, rather than emptying ourselves. We are not meant to be merely singular vessels, but a stacked fountain, receiving the flow from the highest tier of that fountain, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Excavatia 