Joining my friends and Lisa-Jo this morning for Five Minute Friday. If you’re new here (welcome!) the rules are simple: Write, don’t edit, link your post to her page, and then share the encouragement like wildfire. You can do that, I know you can. The prompt this week is Again.
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” -Neil Gaiman
Go.
The chill in the house nips at my nose and my fingertips as they brush across the keys of this cold machine. I’m up early, writing again. This is a practice that’s become a habit, and not one I intend to break anytime soon. The words curl up inside around my edges and they push hard until the break free, I carry them timidly, from heart to hands, to screen–to you.
It’s scary, people. some days I’m nearly paralyzed by the fear of pushing these things out into the world.
I know they’re not perfect. I know the weakness of some of these words, the transparency of them, hung out there on the line, like a sheet, flapping in the breeze. The sun shines through it, and some days all is still, and they stand quietly–alone.
But I’ll wake up again and repeat this process. Writing is like breathing here, a way to decipher the swirling mystery of learning to live life well. It feels like there are always words. Except when there aren’t. But I’m discovering something about the quiet days, the days when the words won’t budge, when they’re simply too tangled to be set free, or maybe they haven’t pulled themselves together yet–
The quiet days are good and necessary and not meaningless at all. Tomorrow I’ll do it again, by God’s grace–should I wake up. I’ll write down the revelation because I can and I’m called. And because it feels good and right to do so.
I am refined through this process: creating, releasing, trusting hoping–repeat.
Then the LORD replied: “Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it. Habakkuk 2:2
