Blessings Writers Count

It’s November, a fitting time for storywriters called by Christ to take to heart the words of the old hymn.

1) Intimacy with Christ Himself, the Word Incarnate—the One and Only Who delights and satisfies the soul.

2) Desire. Writers are creatures imitating the Creator, the One Who Spoke everything that has been made.

3) For talent deposited within, invested and multiplied for the Master’s profit.

4) Opportunities to write whole reams or a page here or there, for a solitary reader or a world-wide audience.

5) Time. The minutes and the hours, these, too, are a gift.

6) Experiences. Writing occurs in the chair after you and I have lived in the street, in the shop, in the classroom, in the office, in the field, in the park.

7) God’s directing the forming-thinking-writing process in the telling of specific stories

8) Courage to risk both ideas and forms beyond the pale.

9) Successes of all kinds and sizes.

10) Failures, probably greater than successes not only in number and size but also in impact.

11) Writer friends both within our writers groups and outside them. Where would we be without comrades in often lonely trenches?

12) Mentors: my mother, who taught me to read; a father who loved books; for unsung writers of Sunday School papesr, whose words I deciphered during Sunday sermons; for Mrs. Amstutz, who slowly unfurled one letter, one case at a time the mysterious world of cursive writing; for Miss Barbara, whose skilled voice brought fiction to life; for Mrs. Peterson, who knew when to focus on the skill of diagramming sentences and the art of Greek mythology.

13) An unending future with the One Who, with a shout, will call us Home.

When we arrive will there be anything more to say? Another old hymn probably answers.

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years,

Bright shining as the sun,

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise,

Than when we first begun.”