Since May, I’ve felt like the Lord was asking me to write. See, I have these big dreams of writing something great. I don’t know what it is or what it’ll look like, but I do know that I have a lot to say. I love words. I love journaling. I love writing out what the Lord is teaching me and debriefing my life with pen and paper. So, you can imagine how frustrating it is that I can’t seem to make myself do it.
There’s always an excuse. I used to be in school for Secondary English Education, and now I’m working in campus ministry at the University of Kentucky. It’s been easy to tell myself in every season that this phase of life isn’t good soil for the cultivation that writing requires. When I was in school, I had too much homework. Now that I’m working full-time, I don’t have enough time.
But at the end of the fall semester, I sat down to spend my daily time with the Lord. Immediately, I was confronted by my reading for the day.
“Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.” -Romans 6:16-18
My lack of writing was not a cute act of resistance, but a direct act of disobedience; and that act of disobedience was leading me toward death instead of life. I realized that by willfully resisting writing like the Lord has asked, I was missing out on His best for me.
So, I’ve started writing again. What I’ve been learning lately is that we’re all scared and sometimes a little lazy. But it’s the people who are scared or stagnant and do it anyway that taste the most beautiful parts of what the Father has to offer. And so, I write. Though I’m scared of what will come out. Though I lack the inertia. What I do know is that there’s a burning itch inside of me that begs to be scratched and putting in the hard work of calling it into being seems to satisfy that itch. So, write I will. Write I must.
Here’s the poem that came out of that day after I read Romans 6:
sanctification
it’s funny, growth.
old steps in new directions
don’t fit quite as sure.
and new steps in old directions
just feel wrong.
but the sear of truth
as I press forward
stings and scrapes
and new skin grows back
strong and wise
until a constellation
of scars
sing proudly
of the changes made
and the story told.
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