Keep On Keeping On

I need about two more weeks to get ready for writers' conference. But instead, I have two days. I've been focused on preparation for more than a month.

Early on, I studied the list of authors, editors and agents coming to the conference. I requested meetings and pulled out articles I wanted to present. I had plenty of time, I thought, to get the writing done.

But this morning, I was still struggling with getting one article just right. How could I best say what I wanted to say in those worrisome paragraphs?

I needed some help. Then one of Oswald Chambers' devotions from My Utmost from His Highest came to mind. From December 15th, "Approved Unto God":

"If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can. If you do not, someone will be the poorer all the days of his life. . . Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily. . . . The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance."

This morning I wanted to quit. I didn't see how I could finish the article. But I know this: just when we want to quit, it's time to keep on.

All an editor at conference can do is say no. And if she does, then I have a completed article to send to another market when I get home.

An Excellent Gift

More than thirty years ago Marc and Gayle Bellomy gave my husband a little book for graduation that still has us turning pages. We've lost contact with the Bellomys, but we still have their gift. The spine of the book is broken, the red cloth is pulled away in places from the cardboard cover, and a few of the pages didn't survive the nine moves our family made since 1978. This 52nd printing of Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest, first published in 1935, with marginal notes in my handwriting, is one of the items I'd hope to be able to pull from a house fire if we ever had one. Though tattered, this bound copy is one of my treasures.

Consider this message appropriate for writers from the December 15th devotional, "Approved Unto God":

"If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can. If you do not, someone will be the poorer all the days of his life. . . Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily. . . . The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance."

Can you imagine your words making others rich, living on to encourage some person eighty years down the road?