BREAKING THE MOULD OF NOT WRITING

How can we marry God’s call on us to write with our fears and life’s practicalities?

Our hearts long to respond. Pleasing God will please ourselves. Above all, we want to serve, whether by writing a cracking story with a message, like Jesus told, or offering guidance through reflections, meditations and poetry.

Doubt

Yet sitting down to write often doesn’t make it anywhere near the top of our To Do List.

Doubt overcomes us. We respond to His call with, “Surely not me, God?”

How can we do this knowing that, one day, we will be accountable? One day, we will stand before Him and try to explain what we did with our ten talents. Or our one.  What will we say then?

Speculative

My own challenge through the years has been that writing is speculative. Mum would wax lyrical about, “going out to business”, by which she meant becoming a shorthand-typist. “You’ll always have money in your pocket,” she would say.

Writing seemed a self-indulgent luxury, a whimsical way of spending my time.  

Practicality has stood me in good stead in many aspects of life. But it took God hollering, “There. Now write that!” after bringing me to faith in Jesus in a highly dramatic way, to galvanize me into writing a book.

Lonely

Another detractor is that writing is lonely. We do it shut away in a room or at the back of Pret or Café Nero, (when that is allowed.) More than anything else, Covid has underscored to me the value of human warmth, fellowship kindness and physical presence.

Self-sufficient as I am, (I know that’s a sin – I’m working on it), I yearn for the kind of closeness I used to have and didn’t know it, a closeness like that of Acts 2—teaching, fellowship, breaking bread together, prayer, sharing, meeting in the temple courts, praising God, (v.44-47).

Busy

Because writing causes us to doubt our ability, seems an indulgence and is a desperately lonely pursuit, we find ourselves other things to do. These displacement activities take priority and voilà! We are too busy to write.

Which means we don’t do what God is asking of us.

I have two small but powerful remedies to offer. If you have others, please put them in the comments:

1.     Get closer to God in order to hear Him better. Pray at all times with all kinds of prayers. Pray every time you write, as you write, while you plan to write.

2.     Link with other Christian writers in worship and fellowship and mutual accountability, to encourage one another.

ACW Competitions Manager Bobbie Ann Cole is an Amazon no.1 bestselling author who offers courses and groups aimed at encouraging and inspiring Christian writers to write. Her report: ‘10 Reasons Christian Writers Don’t Write and 1 Compelling Reason They Do’ is available free at www.forchristianwriters.com.