For me there were months in these beginning stages of writing a book that had no part in actual writing. I had to have a quiet, pulled-back stage of mulling. I had to wrestle with God, and I had to walk away blessed to work out my gifts, trusting He won’t let me turn into a clown in the process of getting literarily naked for my readers. It turns out that I’ve written under a great deal of fear in the past, and there is no way a book can be written under such fear.
It seems to me that we’re surrounded by writers who either write about the cupcakes of a beautifully tidy Christian life or by those who write with oozing unhealed rawness. I tend to identify altogether more with the raw writers, but I long for the underlying zeal for truth and faith in the healing hand of God beheld by those who tend toward answering with a formula. As always, the more I tend to worry about becoming like one or the other, the worse and more confused I get.
I’m sure I’m not alone in how I feel like there are many courts, how I have no place in any of them. I once found my place in the orphan-care court, but then we cancelled our adoption and God changed our perspective on what orphan care even meant. Sometimes prayer about such things is like smelling the stew on the stove, a little glimpse of home, of belonging. But then we open our eyes, and we’re still here – strangers.
If we pray for God’s kingdom and power and glory now and forever, then we are saying with our mouths as Jesus did. There is kingdom now in the smell of the stew and the inner rest of home, and there is Kingdom come when we actually get to eat of it and rest our new bodies tucked up in God’s wing. I think I’m learning that Kingdom now is a realization that there is no other fit but of one rested in a Good Father’s care.
I say it in advance. My writing doesn’t fit. I know it as it happens. It doesn’t fit, but it smells like home to me, and that’s the direction I’m headed. Kingdom come.
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