IF THE LORD WILLS

I have dreams.  I have aspirations.  I have plans.

When I grow up, I want to be a writer.

A paid writer.

Realizing, at 50 years old, that I am perhaps past the age of "When I grow up...," I decided over Christmas break to set some goals.  Real, practical, concrete, attainable goals. Write more on the blog.  Regularly submit articles for publication.  Rewrite that manuscript.  Goals with hard, cold numbers to them:  X number of proposals this week, Y number of queries this month.  Armed with a calendar, a financial worksheet, a binder, ink and paper for the printer, and a copy of Writer's Market (Thank you, Lisa!), I was ready to DO the writing thing.  For real.  Jumping in with both feet.  No looking back.

I threw my first proposal - made a pitch for an article in a national magazine.  My proposal was accepted!  (You can pause and do a happy dance for me right here, if you'd like - woohoo!)

Then life happened.  A lot of life.  The pages of my wall calendar for January, February, and March are full of ink.  Black ink - appointments, meetings, church activities, social commitments.  Red ink - rescheduled appointments, meetings, church activities, social commitments.  My kitchen calendar looks like a bad job from discount day at a disreputable tattoo parlor.  And both the tattoo-er and the tattoo-ee were, shall we say, a little stoned.

Not only was life a little more crazy-busy than usual, but my computer crashed.  Stone dead.  Black screen.

Still, presumptuously, I blogged back on February 14th:  "Whether my computer can be fixed or I end up having to shop for a new one, I fully intend to be more consistent in showing up here at The Hurricane Report.  Thank you, Dear Readers, for sticking with me through the long silence!"

Ahem.

So, here it has been another long month of silence.  Forgive me, and thank you - again - for patiently sticking with me.

What have I learned in this month of black-out?

1.)  It is presumptuous - even sinful - to assert that I will most definitely do anything.  I have no idea what tomorrow holds.  How can I declare that next week I will blog, or submit a proposal, or write an article?  Yes, I can hope to do those things; I can purpose and work to do those things; but I cannot unequivocally say that I will most certainly do those things.  I can work today with a hopeful eye on tomorrow, but I probably shouldn't write on my calendar (or my blog) with a jumbo Sharpie.

2.)  If I am going to write, I will have to do it because this is what I want myself and not because it's what someone else wants for me.  No one else wants so earnestly for me to be writing that they will see to it that I have the time or the equipment to do so.  Yes, I very badly want to write!  Whether anyone else reads it or not!  Not being able to write for these many weeks has been incredibly frustrating to me - not because I haven't been meeting those goals I set over Christmas break, but because I haven't had an outlet for the thoughts and ideas and energies that constantly flood my cranial cavity.  As I told a friend yesterday, I feel like a one-legged chicken with an irrepressible urge to scratch - can you sense my frustration?!

3.)  I have awesome friends.  No, they can't shoulder the obligations on my calendar.  No, they can't resurrect my dead computer.  But they have been praying for me and encouraging me while I've been unable to write.  They have patiently endured my groaning and my crying and my flailing around for solutions.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, dear friends, for loving me and praying for me and praying with me and encouraging me to press on.  I'm ready now to wipe the snot off my face and get back to work, back to the joyful work of writing.

If the Lord wills, I'll see you here tomorrow.

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit" - yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.  What is your life?  For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.  Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that."  As it is, you boast in your arrogance.  All such boasting is evil.  So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin. - James 4:13-17