Confessions of an Author
At the risk of sounding like Adele, hello from the other side (and sorry if that’s now stuck in your head)! The book has been submitted to the publisher and has entered the editorial process. Now we have a year to prepare Stories From the Sidelines for its debut. I fully intend to include you in this adventure, so you’ll be the first to hear updates. Thank you for coming along!
You know those nights when you can’t quite fall asleep, and you remember the most random things? Of course, that always seems to include awkward moments where we wish we had said or done something differently. That’s also where my brain is with the book, considering tiny details or a complete start-from-scratch revision! And so I get the difficult opportunity to practice trust as I place the book in God’s hands (and the publisher’s, too). Why doesn’t releasing control of these things ever seem to get easier? God has consistently proven His goodness and capabilities, yet when it’s once again time to let go, I’m grasping so tightly that He practically has to pry my fingers off the matter. It’s not like I can do a better job of handling these things than the Creator of the Universe. Still, the Lord and I wrestle with my control issues each. and. every. time.
It would be easy for me to grab a comforting passage of Scripture and remind us that we don’t have to worry, how great God is, how much He loves us, and that He‘s working all things out for our good. While all of these things are extremely true, it feels a little too neat and tidy, skipping over very real challenges in favor of desired results.
First, we wouldn’t only read the first chapter and last few pages of a book, right? Yes, I know there are some of us who skip ahead and read the end, then go back and find out how it reaches that final conclusion. But no matter how we prefer to read, we’re still invested in everything that happens in the middle- the victories, the failures, the jokes and the drama, the relationships and character growth. What a waste it would be if we only read the first and last chapter, put down the book, and moved on to the next! You see where I’m going with this, I bet.
The messy middle is where our lives happen, and it’s so rich and full: hard sometimes but joyful at others, thrilling occasionally, a little mundane more often than we’d like. We have our own victories, failures, jokes and drama, relationships and character growth. The steps we take to living out the words of Scripture are vital. That’s how they go from our ears to our minds to our hearts. Then we’ll truly know that God is great, His compassion is infinite, He’s always with us and working things out, and therefore, worry isn’t necessary. But getting to this confidence takes more than reading the occasional Bible verse. We have to live it, and that’s hard.
Besides, that brings us to the second reason that a neat and tidy explanation misses something: the ending is often unexpected. Yup, even for the skip-ahead readers. What we think we saw on the last few pages is very often much different when we have the full context of the story. When we read Romans 8:28, we often have a determined idea what good God is working out for us. But if things don’t end the way we think they should, disappointment and confusion can creep in. At that moment, we remember that the story is still being told, and it’s going in a surprising direction- and still a good direction.
When I sat down to write this to you, I was going to tell you about my inch plant (or tradescantia, as all the serious plant people seem to call it. I’m not sure I even know how to pronounce that). What seemed like a disaster became something beautiful. I thought I would write about God’s transformation of broken things into wholeness, but it seems that little Inchy is demonstrating something else. You see, I didn’t buy this plant from a store or receive it from a thoughtful friend. Instead, I noticed purple and green striped leaves lying on the ground. It was just a scrap, an 18” vine with some leaves. I don’t know where it came from because there weren’t any other similar branches nearby. This lost and discarded piece was no longer attached to a whole, rooted plant. It was dying and at the end of its story.
But there was more life left for the inch plant. It came home with me, and I trimmed it into two pieces. I don’t know that plants have feelings, but I can’t imagine pruning is any more comfortable for them than it is for us when our lives seem to be in seasons of painful purpose. The trimmings were soon settled into a pale green vase filled to the brim with water and low expectations of their future. If anything, they’d bring some color to my windowsill. Maybe that was their purpose and how their story happily ended.
But not yet.
Inchy grew roots and moved to a pot of soil, where it began to spread out. One day, I was careless, and accidentally broke off one of its vines. My initial sadness about destroying my plant was interrupted by the memory of those cuttings in the vase. You guessed it- the broken piece found a nice place on the windowsill. Once it had time to grow, I planted it in the pot with its leafy brethren.
Our stories continue, too. The plot twists may be outrageous and full of colorful characters, but we’re going in a good direction. Unexpected endings can still be wonderful. That’s another reason we can fully trust God when life is spinning out of control or when we struggle to let go of little things. There’s no reason to rush through the messy middle and miss the treasures woven into the details. When we look back, we can confidently say to God, “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in You” (Isaiah 26:3).