Write from the Deep

Many things contribute to our creativity as writers, but there’s one thing that is vital for our creativity: brain health. Too few of us know, though, how to nurture and maintain brain health, which is where our wonderful guest, Tina Yeager, comes in! Listen as she shares her wisdom and insights. 

About Tina Yeager

Award-winning author, speaker, and life coach, Tina Yeager hosts the Flourish-Meant podcast and Flourish Today on Christian Mix 106 and publishes Inkspirations Online, a weekly writers’ devotional. She has been licensed as a counselor since 2005. Tina Yeager serves as director of traditional groups with Word Weavers International and as an active member of the Christian Women in Media Association. For life coaching tips or to book her as an event speaker, visit tinayeager.com. Look for her books, Beautiful Warrior: Finding Victory Over the Lies Formed Against You and Upcycled: Crafted for a Purpose.

As a special treat for our listeners and readers, check out Tina Yeager’s free nutrition guide.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Welcome, listeners, to the deep. We’re excited that you’re here. We’re continuing our fabulous discussion with the fabulous Tina Yeager, talking about God’s design for creativity and brain health. I know you guys are going to want to jump in with us. 

Karen: So let’s talk about brain health. Let’s talk about how that ties into creativity, how we can nurture that, what we can do about brain health, if anything, and how we can not do things that can damage it. 

Tina: Our brain is an amazing work of the Creator. It is an incredible organ. The neat thing about our brain is that it’s plastic, and it has the ability to regenerate, repair itself, and recover more than you would ever imagine.

That’s the good news about the brain, and there are ways that God has given us to be able to take good care of our brain and keep it healthy. One of those things are the things that he’s given us to eat. The whole-foods, God-created diet. If you exercise an anti-inflammatory diet, that is going to be best for your brain.

There are certain nutrients in that that are going to be beneficial to the brain. Omega three fatty acids. Magnesium is also really good. Exercising healthy nutrition to feed your brain is important. 

A lot of times when we’re emotionally unhealthy, we turn to unhealthy food because we’re trying to comfort ourselves in that. But that food actually does a double whammy. It not only doesn’t help us emotionally, because there’s a spike and a crash that happens with those foods, but it also doesn’t help us physically. It inhibits the brain’s functioning because it’s inhibiting the gut’s functioning. 

All of your neurochemistry is actually developed first in the gut. You need to pay attention to your gut health, so that your brain health is going to be in balance. One of the ways that we need to deal with that is bipedal exercise. That helps with gut health. It also helps with oxygenating your brain. Your brain needs plenty of oxygen in order to operate, and most of us do not breathe as deeply as we should during the day.

Are you getting enough oxygen to your brain? That could be breathing in deeply through your nose, holding that for four seconds, exhaling slowly through your mouth, and filling your diaphragm and lungs, and then emptying your diaphragm. 

Karen: I’m doing this as you’re talking. It’s hysterical! I’m being obedient.

Tina: Yes, that’s awesome! Actually that will also relax your muscles. One of the things that’ll do is it’ll help you get into that divergent thinking, that theta brainwave state in which you’re able to daydream and think of creative ideas. 

Creative flow happens in the theta wave, the lower brain wavelength brain states. You need to get into those instead of constantly being on your blue light wavelengths and keeping yourself on high alert in a beta and alpha and even a gamma brain wavelength state. 

Make sure you’re turning down those lights and taking time to not focus on the blue wavelengths. Get yourself in sort of a dimmer daylight spectrum and lower light level, and then get to breathing and relaxing. That’ll help you get into that creative flow a little bit better.

Karen: Interesting. I’ve been doing some research into the whole fight or flight syndrome for a lot of different reasons, but being constantly in that fight or flight, which God developed in us when he created us so that in emergency situations we could make the proper response and our body physiologically reacts to fight or to fly. Because of the entire physiological construction of who we are, if we’re in a dangerous situation or if we’re in a stressful situation, our body says, “Okay, fight or flight? And whichever one you’re going to do, I’m going to kick in and we’ll all work together to make that happen.”

But today’s humanity, people today, they spend so much time in that fight or flight syndrome because they get stressed out about things that aren’t life threatening, but they get stressed out about work, they get stressed out about relationships, they feel life threatening or relationship threatening or a threat to the lives that we enjoy, and so we react in that way.

As a result, your brain health goes straight downhill. Because when you’re in that constantly, instead of just in the emergency itself, it ends up being a negative influence rather than positive. 

Tina: Yes, if we apply the things that our brain is meant to do to the wrong situations, it can often be counterproductive. That’s absolutely true with anxiety, fear, untreated trauma responses, any of those things. Absolutely true. 

We want to make sure that we do a scan with the Holy Spirit and check to see if we’ve got any blocks to our health, our physical health, our brain health, our emotional health. All of those things work together. They’re not separate processes. They all impact each other. 

So if you’re experiencing an untreated trauma situation, It’s important to make sure that you go to find a Christian therapist, a life coach, if it’s applicable to life coaching or a Christian counselor, if you’re really in deep trauma due to some childhood abuse of some kind and dealing with that and help that be removed from being a block to your fulfillment of peace and your purpose. 

Erin: Yeah. I think, Karen, what you were talking about, too, as far as the fight or flight, I was reading about that at one point, and that’s like your sympathetic nervous system is engaged. But really, it’s the parasympathetic nervous system we want engaged more. That’s the one that’s the rest and the digest, and that’s the one that we want to learn to engage. 

But so much of our world is on sympathetic overdrive. It’s the gas pedal, it’s the constant rush. It’s the constant stress. You’re right, Tina, we need to figure out when that’s happening, why that’s happening. There could be lots of reasons, as you suggest, and some of them could be a deep trauma.

Some of it could just be we’re rushing around to get our kids here, there, and everywhere. It’s just life. So we need to learn how to go back and slow down, because you can’t be creative in sympathetic overdrive. You can’t be creative when you’re on that gas pedal all the time.

You’ve got to get the rest time, the digest time. I don’t know how else we could process and think and pray and check in with the Holy Spirit. 

I also was reading about the possibility of joy helping us grow in resilience and joy helping our brain health, which I thought was interesting. What are your thoughts on that, Tina? Have you heard anything about that?

Tina: The thing that joy does is if we’re using it as a way of praising God and thanking God and worshiping God, that connects us with God. It welcomes him into our presence, and when we worship, we see the power of God fall down upon us.

There is a power in the presence of God that inhabits our worship. Scripture says that God inhabits the worship of his people. When you are praising God and you’re worshiping God, that allows God to inhabit you with healing power, with anointing, with all the powerful works of the Holy Spirit. There’s all kinds of things that that invites into your body, your mind, and your soul.

That allows you to be powerful over the things that would normally block you, hold you back and get you to think about how the objects and the obstacles around you, maybe even facts, could be bigger than your God. You might not consciously be thinking it’s bigger than God, but when you’re stressing and obsessing, that’s when you’re starting to get in that mindset of unconsciously thinking, “Maybe God can’t help me out of this.”

Karen: We hear so often about putting on the full armor of God, and we envision ourselves as warriors with the belt of truth buckled around our waist and the breastplate of righteousness in place, and we think that that’s all active. But in reality, that preparation is done through study.

It’s done through worship. It’s done through seeking God in prayer. It’s done through using our brains and stillness and silence to go into the Word and dwell in there with God’s truth so that we do know what the belt of truth is, that we understand it inside and out, and so that we are ready, when the day of evil comes, to stand firm.

It’s not saying you need to have that on and fight every single day. It’s saying get ready for when the day of evil comes. Get ready in stillness. Get ready in immersing yourself in the Word. Even for your writing, get ready in stillness before you put your fingers on the keyboard. Be in the Word. Talk to God in prayer. Spend time letting him speak to you so that when you finally start the story that he’s given you to produce, you do it with his words and not with what you think is going to be best.

You don’t have to be active all the time. In fact, you shouldn’t be. 

Erin: I love that. So, Tina, what do you think you would say to the person who, maybe they’re just burned out, they just don’t feel creative lately, and now they’re discouraged because they’re just feeling like a total creativity black hole. What would you say to try to help get them back on their feet?

Tina: We need to approach creativity like children. When we were children, we were all creative. There was actually a study done by secular scientists that showed and proved that 99%, something like that, of all five-year-olds had all the markers of creativity. But we unlearned that down to a level of 2% in adults. 

Karen: Oh, my word. 

Tina: We’re unlearning our creativity that we were born with because we’re choosing to believe what the world is telling us about who we are, whose we are, and what we can do. 

Going back to what we did as children, creativity was fun. Creativity was play. Creativity was connecting with God and with others in joy and wonder. Get yourself back into a place where you can experience wonder and joy. 

Go out and play. While you’re at it, do some bipedal exercise, meaning ride a bike, walk, do something with both sides of your body at the same time, because that actually exercises both sides of your brain and it creates neural pathways that increase the corpus callosum, which is the center of the brain. It creates that genius factor, that spatial relational thinking pattern that allows you to be able to think more creatively. 

I like to go waterfall hunting when I get a chance. It’s a bipedal exercise. I go out in nature. I’m worshiping the Creator. I’m looking for something to bring me an experience of awe and wonder. 

Now, if you don’t happen to live in North Carolina where there’s a abundance of waterfalls like I do, you can go to an art gallery. You could go anywhere that gives you an opportunity to experience awe and wonder. Get outside of your own project and look at some other creative works and play with them.

Play in some things that are not what you’re planning to sell. It’s not work. It’s just fun. Play with paint, play with clay, play with gardening, play with cooking. Something that’s going to get you to experience joy in the process of being creative. That neural pathway will come back, and you’ll begin to experience childlike wonder again, especially if you’re playing in your relationships.

Did you know that relationships are also based on play? We bond with people through play. So, with your children, with your husband, with your family members, with your best friends, go play together. That will also invite the Holy spirit in your worship and your experiences together to come and inhabit you and bring you back to that childlike sense of joy, wonder, and play that is a wonderful fertile ground for your creativity to grow in. 

Erin: I love that. I think what you’re really saying, too, about that creativity is that it’s not judged. We don’t judge, like, our kids sandcastle. That’s play. If we could do the same, if we could play in a non judgmental way. If we could just be like, “It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to critique this. It can be any way I want.” That’s what we need.

It can be completely unnecessary. I read that elsewhere. This guy, Todd Henry I think, he called it unnecessary creativity, which is just, it’s for you. It’s just to stretch your creative muscles. I love that. You’re right. We all need to play more. 

But I do have one question that I just want to circle back on. You’ve used the word bipedal, I think, exercise. Can you define that? You said that it helps both brain halves work together. What is bipedal first of all, and how actually did that work again?

Tina: Bipedal is just using both sides of your body in exercise like walking or biking or, if you really have to, jogging. I don’t personally run unless something with teeth is chasing me. Just do whatever is going to feel good for you, and enjoy using both sides of your brain. 

They autopsied Einstein’s brain. They autopsied him to see what was different about his brain and they found that he had an enlarged corpus callosum because he often did bipedal exercise. You see that with several of our greatest geniuses in history. They too would go out and go for walks when they were thinking about a project. They would go out for a bike ride when they were thinking about a project.

You can’t really multitask two cognitive activities at the same time. That’s where we get burned out because your brain uses a lot of energy to switch—which is really what it’s doing, it’s not multitasking—from one cognitive activity to the next cognitive activity. 

But you can do a physical activity while you’re doing a cognitive activity, and that actually empowers you to do better at the cognitive activity. So if you’re studying, if you’re listening to a podcast while you’re walking, that can actually make that information sink in better. 

Erin: Okay, so you guys go get on your headphones and listen to this while you’re walking or biking or whatever. 

That is very cool information. This has been cool. Tina, do you have any final words of wisdom or encouragement you want to leave our listeners with? 

Tina: You already have everything that you need. The Lord told us in scripture that we were granted every spiritual blessing, so you have everything you need.

It’s just a matter of settling down all of the distractions and all of the blocks and allowing the healing power of the Holy Spirit just to flow into you and restore your connection with him so you can access it. 

In some ways you may need to physically make some changes to make your machine work better, to make your instrument of yourself work better. So there’s some physical aspects. You do need to hydrate. You do need to breathe. You do need to eat for your perfect nutrition for your body. You do need to sleep. Yes, we do need to sleep. You don’t need to wait until you’re dead to sleep. That is important. 

There are a lot of things that we physically need to do, but first and foremost, we need to stay connected with the power of Creativity Himself, with Jesus and the Holy Spirit he’s given us. 

Karen: All I can say to that is amen!

Erin: And amen! Thank you so much for being here, Tina. 

Tina: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to share with you and your listeners.

Is your brain healthy? @tyeagerwrites shares wisdom and insights on two things every writer needs: creativity and brain health! #amwriting #christianwriter
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Check out Tina Yeager’s free nutrition guide!

How’s your brain health? Is there something specific you can commit to doing to make your brain even more healthy?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Thanks so much to our August sponsor of the month, Priscilla Sharrow! She’s working on her memoir called Bonked! Life, Love, and Laughter with Traumatic Brain Injury, which will release with Redemption Press. Learn more about Priscilla at her website priscillasharrow.com and follow her blog for the TBI/PTSD community.

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 196 – Creativity and Brain Health with Guest Tina Yeager, Part 2 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

As writers, creativity is a crucial component of our lives and our work. But what exactly is creativity and how do we get more of it? Guest Tina Yeager shares some surprising answers as we explore God’s design for creativity.

About Tina Yeager

Award-winning author, speaker, and life coach, Tina Yeager hosts the Flourish-Meant podcast and Flourish Today on Christian Mix 106 and publishes Inkspirations Online, a weekly writers’ devotional. She has been licensed as a counselor since 2005. Yeager serves as director of traditional groups with Word Weavers International and as an active member of the Christian Women in Media Association. For life coaching tips or to book her as an event speaker, visit tinayeager.com. Look for her books, Beautiful Warrior: Finding Victory Over the Lies Formed Against You and Upcycled: Crafted for a Purpose.

As a special treat for our listeners and readers, check out Tina’s free nutrition guide.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Karen: Hey, guys, welcome to the deep. We’re so excited that you’re here with us today, and we’re even more excited because we have a guest, Tina Yeager. We have a wonderful topic for you today.

We’re going to be talking about creativity. Yes, creativity. When God created us, he imbued us with his creativity. We want to talk about what creativity is and how brain health relates to it. 

Erin: Indeed. Tina Yeager is an award-winning author. She’s an inspirational speaker and a life coach. She also hosts the Flourishment Podcast and publishes Inkspirations Online, a weekly devotional for writers.

She’s won over thirty writing awards, including a 2020 Golden Scroll Award. She’s been licensed as a counselor since 2005 and has over twenty years of experience teaching parenting and writing skills, communications, inner healing, and spiritual growth. She holds a BA in creative writing and an MA in counseling, and she just does so many other things, too!

We’re delighted to have her here with us again because we talked to her in February. That was episode 183. We talked about why writers get blocked when they’re digging into difficult emotional areas. You might want to check that out as well. We’re happy for Tina to be here again, bringing her wisdom and experience.

Welcome, Tina. 

Tina: Thank you so much, Erin and Karen. I am delighted to be back on the show. It’s always an honor to chat with you. 

Erin: We want to open with asking you, what does the deep mean to you? 

Tina: Well, the last time I had a different verse that I focused on. Today I really felt led to bring up 1 Corinthians chapter 2, specifically verses 10 and 11, where it says, “The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God, for who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them. In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.”

I just really felt like getting deep in with the Spirit today was going to flow along with that line of becoming creatives created in the image of a Creator.

Erin: Mmm. I love that. 

Karen: Yeah, that’s really good. 

Erin: Deep things of God. Cool. Well, okay, let’s jump in to creativity. What would you say creativity even is? How would you define that? 

Tina: Creativity breathes life into all of our human experiences. It is not just art. That’s what we normally think of when we think of creativity.

It’s actually our ability to problem solve. To make something happen that isn’t already there. That’s looking outside of what exists to what could be, and that is important for every area. It’s important for our jobs. It’s important for the marketplace. It’s important for our relationships, making those work well. 

It’s important for our physical health for us to find solutions. It’s an important mindset to have. It’s important for our emotional well being because we cannot get inner healing without thinking creatively. 

It’s also important to us spiritually. Perhaps first and foremost, we need to believe we were created in the image of a Creator who can do all things, who is filled to overflowing with infinite possibilities. Therefore, so are we. 

Karen: That’s amazing. 

Erin: There’s so much to unpack there. 

Karen: No kidding. 

Erin: Let’s just even start with what you were saying. With us being created, I keep thinking, too, that we are living, new creations. When we come into Christ, we are a new creation. We’re originally a workmanship that God made, right? But now we’re walking in Christ. We’re new. We’re like this new piece of creativity. 

We don’t know what we’re going to ultimately be tomorrow because this creative process in us keeps transforming us, keeps changing us and sure, closer to the image of Christ, but also just new things we learn. I’m just thinking, I love what you said, Tina, because creativity is about so much more than just the arts.

It’s just this blossom of who we can be tomorrow or what we can do. It’s just, it’s cool. 

Tina: Yes, it’s our fulfillment. It’s potential. It is so many things. 

Just like Ephesians 2:10 says, you were created in Christ Jesus. That is that new creation process to do good works, which God, the Creator, the ultimate Creative, created in advance for us to do. He’s already made these works. He’s already got this story for our lives all planned out and the stories from our lives, those works that he’s having us do, are spilling out into creation from us. 

He is an amazing, creative God. He is the ultimate artisan and the ultimate problem solver. We need to remember that we’re under the authority and the power of that as we exist and as we create. 

Karen: Too few of us realize that and live that way. We don’t recognize being under the authority of Christ means that we can tap into that authority. We can call on God to enlist and release his spiritual warriors into our lives to help us battle those things that tend to obstruct any creativity, that tend to try to tear down not just our inner spirit but our relationships and our lives and keep us trapped in a sense of despair when we have at our fingertips, at our heart tips, we have access to the greatest creativity and the greatest Warrior and the greatest Fighter on our behalf in existence. 

Tina: That is so powerful, and we are connected with God as life, as the source and the origin of life, and that is part of that creative process. It’s the beginning of new living ideas, new living work, and new living words as well.

Erin: I was looking online about different things about creativity as I knew we were going to talk about this. I saw one quote that said, “Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality.” 

When we connect that with what you were saying, Tina, about God and his workmanship in us and his good works that he prepared, he’s the ultimate in imagination, right?

Karen: Right. 

Erin: So he’s got these works for us that are going to be reality. That’s the thing. When we look at our lives and our stories and our books and we’re just like, “Oh, how can that ever be?” 

Well, because creativity and God, he’s turning these imaginative ideas into reality. He’s the one that’s working through us to do this and his ideas are always great.

If we would hang on to the truth that what he’s working in us as people is going to be reality, and it’s a reality that we can just barely grasp, but I want our listeners out there to hang on to the truth that because he’s God, he’s going to see it through and he’s going to do it.

Tina: We need to resist the temptation to believe that the things that are in front of us are greater than the God that is over us. And that’s part of connecting with the ultimate creative resource, the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. If we don’t connect with God and believe that he is able to fulfill what he created us for through us, then we’re going to be missing the ultimate source of all of our creativity.

Karen: It’s interesting, you remind me of comments that I’ve heard from people where they say, “Well, God has forgiven me, but I can’t forgive myself.”

When I hear that, I really struggle, and I’ve said to the people who say it, “Then you’re putting yourself above God. You’re saying that your forgiveness needs more than God’s forgiveness. That God’s forgiveness isn’t enough.”

You can’t not forgive yourself if God has forgiven you. That makes no sense at all because the Creator of everything that exists has said to you, “I accept you and I forgive you.”

What stature, what place do we have to say, “Well, that’s nice, but I can’t forgive myself yet”? 

We have to see ourselves as we are in Christ not as we are as clay, as the brokenness. Like the scripture in Philippians 1:6, where it says, “He who began a good work in you…”

He began a good work, the work that he started in us, the creativity that he’s putting into us. It’s good from the get go, and “he will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”

I long for that day. I don’t know about you guys. I’m ready. 

Erin: Tina, you said something, too, about how connecting with the Holy Spirit and entering into that process with the Holy Spirit is important. How do we do that?

Tina: We need to allow the Holy Spirit to be in conversation with us. That means that we are praying, and we are listening. We are going to need to intentionally make time to be with God in a place where we’re actually listening, not just speaking. 

Now there’s a process of brainstorming in God’s presence that can happen where we’re talking, but if you don’t give yourself margin to listen, you won’t be able to hear the Holy Spirit inspiring you and bringing new ideas.

And again, of course, we know as creatives, you can’t wait for inspiration to work. You’re going to have to work every day regardless. But if you bring God to work with you by inviting him to be part of your thought processes and bouncing those ideas off of the Holy Spirit and asking him to just guide and direct your plots, guide and direct all of the content. Or your nonfiction work, whatever it is that you’re working on. 

If God is breathing his words into it through you because you’re allowing the Holy Spirit to breathe into you, you’re listening. You’re being receptive to him by praying in a listening attitude toward God, a surrendered attitude toward God. Then those words will be so much more powerful.

Erin: I like that. It reminds me of another thing that I read that said creativity involves two processes, thinking then producing. I think that thinking part is the listening part, you know? Just listening to what God says and pondering it and meditating on it. Not just, you know, going, “Okay.” That’s a surface thing.

God tells us so many things. Jeremiah 33:3 God says, “Call to me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things that you do not know.”

Well then we better listen. Then if it really is a great and mighty thing, like he promises, we better be thinking about it, too. We better be taking time to meditate. I don’t want the word meditate to scare people. Consider it just to think on it, to chew on it in your brain. 

But I like what you said, Tina, where we have to put ourselves in that position where we have that time to be quiet and to listen and to hear. That’s got to be tough in this world today because there’s so much input coming in. 

Karen: Well and because we often let our brains settle into areas that maybe aren’t all that helpful. We let those inner voices get into our heart and our mind and our brains, and we struggle to really hear God’s voice. 

Some of that is spiritual. Some of it can be physiological. I know that I’ve been struggling the last several years with what feels like loss in capacity with the brain. I was telling Tina and Erin before the podcast, I’ve been having tests done with neuropsychologists. I just had an MRI done a couple days ago to test and see if there were any problems in the actual brain.

Not only did they find my brain, there is one in there, but after the MRI, I contacted my neurologist and he said, “Yeah, your brain is normal.” 

Which I communicated to everyone that I know, and to which they all replied, “Yeah, no. No. It’s never been normal.”

But it was encouraging to know that there aren’t indicators in my brain of things like poor brain health or degenerative diseases…

…Wow, I don’t know about you guys, but I think this has been a terrific conversation. And here’s the good news, there’s more to come. You’ll get the rest of this conversation in the next podcast, so stay tuned.

Need a creativity boost? Guest @tyeagerwrites shares all about this crucial component of all writers’ lives. #amwriting #christianwriter
Share on X

Check out Tina Yeager’s free nutrition guide!

What does the word creativity mean to you?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Thanks so much to our August sponsor of the month, Priscilla Sharrow! She’s working on her memoir called Bonked! Life, Love, and Laughter with Traumatic Brain Injury, which will release with Redemption Press. Learn more about Priscilla at her website priscillasharrow.com and follow her blog for the TBI/PTSD community.

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 195 – Creativity and Brain Health with Guest Tina Yeager, Part 1 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Sometimes it’s easy to say yes to God. We can do it almost without thinking. But what happens when God asks us to do something that terrifies us? That we know we can’t do? Guest Lynn Austin is here to share the times God has done exactly that!

About Lynn Austin

Lynn Austin has sold more than two million books worldwide. She has won eight Christy Awards for her historical fiction and was one of the first inductees into the Christy Award Hall of Fame. One of her novels, Hidden Places, was made into a Hallmark Channel Original Movie. When she isn’t writing, Lynn can be found riding her bicycle or playing with her four grandchildren. She and her husband have three grown children and make their home in western Michigan.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Hello, listeners. We’re glad you’re here with us. We’re continuing our interview with guest Lynn Austin, and we’re going to jump right in. 

Lynn: I’m very surprised by the success that God did grant once it all took off. Very surprised by the movie. That was amazing. And meeting Shirley Jones. 

Erin: How did that come about? The movie?

Lynn: I was with Bethany House, and Hallmark had done another one of Bethany House’s books. They went to Bethany House and said, “Do you have any other books that you think might work for a Hallmark movie?” 

I guess they gave them several, and they chose my book Hidden Places. Then the publishing company offered to fly me out there. That was when the Johnsons were there. Gary and Carol Johnson.

We flew out for a day to watch the filming, and it was just surreal. Absolutely surreal. This book that’s only in your head, right? And here’s your characters. I mean, you see your characters running around talking. It was just unbelievable. That was a very pleasant surprise. 

Erin: I bet you could never have imagined any of this when you got that garbage bag. You know, this was the payoff. All of that hard work, all of that sowing and sowing and sowing you did, and you didn’t reap for years. Then, just an amazing and abundant harvest, so to speak. I love how God does that. 

Lynn: Even after that, God wasn’t really done with surprises. People think that if you write a book, you should be able to be a speaker. In my little hometown, different churches started asking me to come and speak at Coffee Break Bible Study. And I very humbly said, “No. I am not a speaker.” 

My friend came to me and said, “Lynn, you’re a writer. You can write a speech.” 

I said, “I could probably write a speech, but why don’t you give the speech?”

Karen: That’s right. 

Lynn: I’m very much an introvert. I’m very happy to be in my little office with my characters. I don’t need to get up in front of people. I hated speech class, every class I ever had. But this friend of mine just kept poking me. She said, “How do you know you’re not saying no to God?”

Karen: Good question. 

Lynn: Thank you very much. 

Karen: Put your face in this, right?

Lynn: Yeah. So she promised to pray for me. She had a real prayer ministry. So I started doing all these little coffee break Bible studies all around. Of course they talk to each other, and so you go to one and then the next one wants you. Pretty soon, the International Coffee Break organization asked me to come and speak at their convention.

I said, “No, I don’t think so.”

Again, my friend said, ” You better pray about this because this might be something God wants you to do.”

She promised to come with me to this convention, and I said, “You better.”

The day of the speech in the afternoon, they called me to do a sound check. I went in this auditorium, and there’s like a thousand chairs out there. They were empty, but I’m up on the platform, looking out at these empty thousand seats. I could not get a word out of my mouth. Nothing came out. Just this fear took over and just swallowed me up.

I heard this voice booming, “Lynn!”

And I thought, “Oh God, take me to heaven!” 

But it was the sound guy. He said, “You have to say something.” 

Erin: For a sound check you must make sound. 

Karen: That’s right. 

Lynn: My dear sweet friend comes running out with her Bible that she carries in her purse, and she opens it up to Psalms and she says, “Just read.”

I’m reading in this shaky voice, “The Lord is my shepherd…” 

We finished the sound check and she sweeps me off back to our room and down on our knees. ” You’ve got to pray. You’ve got to pray!” 

Nothing happened. Finally it got to the point where I’m just a wreck, and I don’t know how this is ever going to happen. 

Then we’re backstage when the event is starting and they wanted to pray with me, the organizers. The only thing I could pray was, “Help. God, you have to help me do this. I cannot do this by myself.” 

All of a sudden, this shofar started sounding. Now, my husband’s a trumpet player, so I know the symbolism of the shofar, but it was so commanding and it was so beautiful that they stopped praying midstream.

The symbolism of the shofar, it comes from when Abraham’s about to sacrifice Isaac and this ram is caught by its horns. They make the shofars out of them. For the Jewish people, it’s a symbol of how God will provide salvation, and I needed salvation at that point. 

As this just went on and on and on, it was like the voice of God. He couldn’t have picked anything that was more perfect to speak to my heart that he would provide. That if he called me to do this, to speak, he was going to do it. 

All of a sudden this calm went over me, and I walked out on that stage, and I gave the speech that I had written, and it was like walking on water.

Erin: Wow. 

Lynn: Truly. I knew I could never do this myself. But you say yes to God, and then you just keep saying yes. 

I was so glad that I said yes to that. I still can’t say I love speaking, or that I’m looking for opportunities, but whenever one comes along, I say yes to it.

God has taken me to so many places and so many things, and every time holds me up on the waves. Every time I can walk out and speak and not be afraid and not have that terrible fear. He always holds me up. 

On one of the most recent ones, I went on a book tour to Germany. They took me to the part of Germany that had been behind the iron curtain. I was talking at a church and they were sharing with me how, before the iron curtain fell, how persecuted they were.

Their children were persecuted just because the parents were Christian. They weren’t allowed to go to the good schools. They weren’t allowed a higher education. 

Yet here’s this church filled with vibrant, happy people. I mean, it was packed. Again, I’m the speaker, right? I’m getting up, and I think, “What a privilege that God would allow me to do this.”

Karen: Right? 

Lynn: So I always say, “Keep saying yes. Even when everything in you says this isn’t gonna happen, he can use you when you yield yourself to him and when you follow what he has for you.”

Karen: And when you stop focusing on your weaknesses, when you stop focusing on what you can’t do, and start focusing instead on what God can do.

When I first started speaking, my very first Writers Conference that I spoke to when I worked at Tyndale was the Florida Christian Writers Conference when it was in Titusville. I had been up in front of people since I was in my young teens singing with my dad. I always threw up before I sang because I was so scared.

Sure enough, before I spoke at this conference, I had to make a mad dash for the bathroom and throw up and then I could come out and do what I needed to do. But just like you, knees shaking, trembling, “…and when…you want…to be published…” 

But each time when I said yes, and the more that I did it, just like you, it became a part of who I am. God takes those things that we think we can’t do, and he supplies to the point where it becomes a part of the fabric of who we are. 

Lynn: Exactly. 

Karen: You may not love speaking, but God has made that one thread in the tapestry of who you are so that he can utilize you to speak to others.

I remember I talked to my dad once and I said, ” What if I forget the words? I’m so scared when I sing with you. What if I forget the words? Or what if I get choked up and cry?” 

That was my greatest fear because the hymns and the songs that we used to sing strike to the core of me. “What if I forget the words and I start to cry?”

He said, “Karen, if that happens, then God decided they didn’t need to hear you sing. They needed to see your tears.”

Erin: You know what I love about this though, Lynn, is that you said yes to something that was just terrifying to you, and that you did not feel realistically that you could do. But saying yes was the only way to see the miracle. That was the only way to see that miracle happen. 

When we don’t say yes to that opportunity because we’re afraid, oh my gosh, we miss seeing God do something amazing. I love that your friend made you, too. Sometimes we have such a struggle doing that on our own, and yet someone comes alongside us and intercedes for us and helps us and prays. Even the way God supplied the shofar, that’s just God up and down.

Lynn: Exactly, exactly. It was so perfect. 

Karen: I attended a silent retreat one year, if you can imagine that, me at a silent retreat. It was led by Robert Benson, who is just a terrific man. He had us make these life maps where we mapped out the crucial times in our lives and things that happened.

It was fascinating to me because as I did that, and then as I went back and looked at it, I saw even more with hindsight than I did when it happened, God’s presence, God’s provision, God saying yes, God saying no. 

I think we forget those things. I think it’s great that you have such good memories about what God has done for you because that testimony and that history for you helps you each time you’re afraid to step out and say yes, because he’s proven himself over and over and over again. 

Lynn: Amen, that’s true. 

Erin: We’re coming to the end of our time here. Do you have maybe any final words of wisdom you want to share? Or anything we haven’t covered yet that you want to leave for our listeners? 

Lynn: I would say If you’re a writer, dare to ask God for a sign that you’re called, because that changes everything.

If you know you’re called, like God gave me this miracle with my mentor, then you can’t squander it. You can’t dilly dally around. You know, there are days you don’t feel like writing, but how can you say no to God’s calling? Unless you’re sure of that in your heart, you know, you could find a lot of better things to do.

Maybe you’re just called to write one book. Maybe you’re just called to write one article, or just to tell your story in some way. Maybe that’s all it is. Maybe it’s not like a whole career in writing, but we have to learn to trust God. Ask him, “Is this something you really want me to do?”

Or is this just like, “Hey, I think I’ll write a book”? How many people do you know that say that? 

Karen: Every single person I’ve sat next to on a plane!  

Lynn: “I have a book inside me!” 

Karen: Yeah, everybody does. 

Lynn: Right. But it’s God’s idea… I meet people at writers conferences and they’re there year after year after year, and they never actually get around to finishing it or submitting it for publication. They’re just playing at it. 

If you ask, God will tell you, “Yes, you’re called to write.” Or, “No.”

I think it’s very important to know that because then when those hard times come, the garbage bags and all that stuff, you could go back to that calling. You could say, “You’ve called me to write and I’m going to trust you in this calling.”

Because there’s going to be challenges. There’s going to be doubts that we have and everything else, and that’s what really keeps you on track. If God does confirm the calling, then that’s the discipline to stay in the chair and to keep working and to not give up. Print out another copy of that manuscript and send it in a stronger box this time. I’m glad we don’t have to do that anymore, by the way!

Erin: Yeah, I love what you’re saying because it’s important, especially when you have to keep on with: pursue, pursue, pursue. I don’t think you’re saying that, hey, we can’t write just because we’re creative. I mean, we can. We can write just because we’re creative, and we can write journals, and we can write whether God has told us to or not. We’re creative people. 

But there’s a difference between pursuing, pursuing, pursuing because he’s called us to. And I think that’s an important distinction. I love that you’ve brought that up, that we know, if we have that call, that’s something that you keep walking through the fire for. 

Lynn: It works at the end, too. Like I’ve been writing forty years or something like that now, and a lot of books. When all these changes were taking place in the publishing industry and there were changes within my publishing, I got very discouraged. I thought, “All right, maybe it’s time. Maybe God’s asking me to retire?” 

I thought of other good things I could do. So again, I asked God to show me. Don’t you wish when you would ask God for an answer, he’d send you an email or a letter or something? You don’t often get that, but in this case, I really did. I got a letter in the mail and the return address was prison.

When I opened it up and read this letter, it was a young woman in prison. At the top of the page, she had a quote from one of my books. In this book, somebody was going to commit suicide. She went on in this letter, saying what a dark place she was in in prison and that somehow or other at the prison she had read my book and God changed her life, and she realized she wasn’t going to commit suicide after all because of my book.

She said, “Thank you so much for changing my life. I hope I can influence someone else someday.”

I cry every time I read that letter, but you know, I thought, “If I wrote that book, if I had my whole career for that one person, is it worth it? Absolutely.”

He will answer your prayers, and obviously I did not retire. I figured I’m going to keep writing. He sent me this letter that this book has this influence in a reader’s life. God was very gracious to show me that, to show me the result of all the hard work just in one life.

Karen: Well, Lynn, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to come and talk with us. I got chills when you’re talking about the shofar blowing and how God used that for you. I encourage all of you who are listening, keep your eyes open to God’s confirmation. Keep your heart open to God’s confirmation and whatever it is that you feel he’s wanting you to do, say yes.

It’s just that simple and just that difficult. Say yes. 

Erin: Amen. 

Lynn: Amen.

What happens when God asks us to do something that terrifies us? @LynnNAustin is here to share the times God has done exactly that! #amwriting #ChristianWriter
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Long Way Home by Lynn Austin

What is the hardest thing God has asked you to do?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Thanks so much to our July sponsor of the month, Tammy Partlow! She’s a speaker at women’s retreats, and her debut novel Blood Beneath the Pines, a suspense set in the deep South, is now available. She’s hard at work on the next book in the series!

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The post 194 – When God’s Surprises Are Hard with Guest Lynn Austin, Part 2 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

We believers talk a lot about God surprising us in wonderful ways. When God does exceedingly, abundantly beyond what we imagine. But some of God’s surprises are hard. Even devastating. Guest Lynn Austin shares how God’s hard surprises have been some of the best surprises in her writing journey.

About Lynn Austin

Lynn Austin has sold more than two million books worldwide. She has won eight Christy Awards for her historical fiction and was one of the first inductees into the Christy Award Hall of Fame. One of her novels, Hidden Places, was made into a Hallmark Channel Original Movie. When she isn’t writing, Lynn can be found riding her bicycle or playing with her four grandchildren. She and her husband have three grown children and make their home in western Michigan.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Welcome, listeners. We are so delighted that you have joined us here in the deep, and there’s extra excitement today because we have a guest whom Karen will introduce.

Karen: Our lovely guest is Lynn Austin. She’s a prolific writer, and she’s award-winning in her writing and as a speaker. She’s published twenty-three novels. You get that guys? Twenty-three novels and one nonfiction book. Her novel All She Ever Wanted was chosen as one of the five inspirational top picks of 2005. 

Her novel Hidden Places was made into a movie for Hallmark Channel starring actress Shirley Jones. I just think that’s so cool that she got to meet Shirley Jones! And Shirley was nominated for a 2006 Emmy Award for her portrayal of Aunt Batty in the film. 

Recently, Erin heard Lynn speak at the Florida Christian Writers Conference and was struck by what she had to share. We asked her to join us here and share her experiences and wisdom with you. Welcome, Lynn.

Lynn: Thank you. So glad to be here. 

Erin: We are delighted to have you here to talk with us. We’ll start with our first and “always” question. What does the deep mean to you?

Lynn: I think for me it means writing from my own wounds, my own doubts, like all the spiritual struggles I had, to not just gloss over them, but to use them in my work. And to not be afraid to ask the hard questions, confront the hard questions in my writing, like unanswered prayer. I mean, theologians battle over these. For example, why does God sometimes not answer prayer? 

I don’t have the answers to that. But I have to be able to have my characters express those questions and their doubts. My most recent book, Long Way Home, tackled the Holocaust of all things for goodness sakes. How do you have answers that? 

Karen: God gives you easy topics to write about. 

Lynn: Yeah! But I think to go deep, you can’t be afraid to do that. You can’t be afraid to do that and to touch on your own experiences in doing it.

I went through a period of unanswered prayer for probably about seven years, praying for a child and not having one. To tap into how I felt that, and to be honest about it. How I felt my arguments with God, because those are the times you grow. So I think for an author to go deep is to handle that tough stuff. 

Karen: Erin and I were talking about that just before the podcast. Sometimes writers are afraid to tap into those deep places because they want to share a message, but they’re not willing to go into where their own wound is. 

Lynn: Right. 

Karen: As a result, the writing can be on the surface. While things are happening to the characters, things aren’t happening within the characters, and that doesn’t communicate anything to anyone. It’s just words on the page if we’re not tapping into that deep part of who we are. I have been doing gardening at this new house that we have in Washington, and there’s one rose that they had planted here that’s a type of rose that I absolutely abhor. I do not like this kind of rose. 

Erin: You hear that? There’s a flower Karen doesn’t like!  

Karen: I decided this thing had to die. I dug and I dug and I dug and I got down to the ball that all the shoots were coming off of. I dug out one root and then there was another root twice as big. Then there was another root that went straight into the ground. My husband brought out a Sawzall for me, you know, one of those automatic saws. I cut apart the part of the root ball where the shoots were coming up, and I was exhausted. It took days. 

I know that there are still roots and there are still sections of that stinking rose down there. We need to go that deep. We need to cut that deep into what we’re doing, get to the core and the heart of who we are in order to have our books touch and change people.

Lynn: Right. Sometimes I think we’re afraid to do that deep digging in our own life, so we gloss over it. But, we have to resolve these deep issues in our own life, and I think it does deepen your writing. 

Erin: I love how you put it: confront and confront with honesty. I think sometimes we feel like we can’t ask that question because, you know, maybe God’s going to disappoint us. Or maybe we can’t ask it in the book because we have to somehow defend God and not let him look bad, you know? As if God can’t take care of himself.

Karen: And not let us look bad. I mean, putting it on the page, people are going to think that we’ve struggled with that, so, you know, “I’m not gonna put that down there because then they’ll know that dark place inside of me that I haven’t told anyone about.”

Lynn: Exactly.

Erin: Very true. Well, one of the things that I loved when I was passing through at the Florida Christian Writers Conference, I heard you say something to your class about surprises on your writing journey. I was just like, “Aw, she has cool surprises. I know she does.”

So I’d love to hear you share your experiences. What kind of surprises did God have in store for you on your writing journey? 

Lynn: I was surprised right from the very beginning that I was called to be a writer. Because when I went to college, I was a psychology major. It never occurred to me. I was not one of these kids that has been writing ever since they’re little and make little journals. 

I had a conversation with Beverly Lewis, and she said she always knew she wanted to write, and I’m like, “Eh.”

I didn’t always know that. But I finally got to the place where I was so disappointed with so many books. I wanted a book with hope. I sat down one day when my babies were napping and I thought, “I’m just gonna try to see what happens when I write.”

And I loved it! I figured out that God had wired me to write, because when I was a kid I was always off in my imagination. So that was the first surprise: Hey, maybe he’s calling me to do this.

But then there was a long period where I struggled with it. It was a secret. I didn’t want to tell anybody that I was writing, because of course then they ask you a week later, “Hey, have you gotten your book published yet?”

Karen: Right, right. 

Lynn: You know, no clue at all. So, I didn’t tell anybody. My husband knew, but I would just sort of sit in the dark and write and was enjoying it more and more. I felt God say at one point, “If you really believe I’m calling you to write, you have to take a risk and call yourself a writer.”

That was very hard for me because I wasn’t entirely sure. So I kind of stepped out and said, “All right. I am going to take this risk and I’m going to call myself a writer.”

I was writing in my home. The kids were playing around me. I had my typewriter, that’s how old I am. My husband’s a musician. He was giving music lessons, and kids were filing in and out. This young man came in waiting for his turn and saw me working and he said, “Whatcha doing?”

Well now, you know, I didn’t want to tell some sixteen-year-old kid I’m this wannabe writer, but I said to myself, “No, I’m gonna take a chance here.” 

I said to him, “I’m writing a book. I’m a writer.”

He didn’t laugh. He said, “That’s really cool. My mom’s a writer. You should meet her sometime.”

I said, “You mom’s a writer? What kinds of things does she write?”

He got a little bit shy and he said, “Well, we’re Christians, and my mom writes devotional books for a company in Chicago called Moody Press.”

I was completely blown away. The next week when he came for his lessons, and his mom came with him. She turned out to be this kind of person who loved to mentor other writers. She had been doing it for a while. 

Now I lived in Canada in a city of about 700,000 people and God brought probably one of the very few published Christian writers right to my door when I took this step of faith. I often wonder, “Would I be a writer? Would I have the success I’ve experienced if I hadn’t taken that step?” 

But you know, I think it’s important and what I try to tell other writers is, confirm your call. Ask God to confirm it. Because there were many times in the years afterwards when I wanted to quit, but I remembered that. When I took that tiny little step of faith, he confirmed that call in such a surprising way. A trumpet student’s mother of all things!  

Erin: But such a God thing, though. That is absolutely such a God thing. Those are the kinds of things we have to hang on to. Like, that’s an Ebenezer, you know? You have to write that down and remember those stones that he gave us, those promises that he fulfilled.

Lynn: Right. 

Erin: Because everything builds off of that. Our faith, we have to keep going back. We have to preach that to ourselves. Because there’s going to be dark roads. Long paths. 

Lynn: There were a lot of those. I think what it showed me, too, is that it’s not just a matter of writing books and getting published, but that it is a spiritual journey that I’m on and that, you know, that if God could do this miracle, I mean, you gotta admit that was miracle, right?

When I was starting off, she took me under her wing and mentored me and taught me everything I needed to know. Took me to writers conferences. She had a writers’ critique group. Everything I needed just right there at my doorstep. It showed me this is a spiritual journey, and that he is going to teach me along the way and coach me, and that’s what it turned out to be. It was a matter of learning to trust along the way.

Karen: He’s amazing in the way that when he asks us to do something for him, he then equips us. We like to think that it’s all on us and our reaction is, like Moses, “Here am my Lord. Send Aaron! I’m not a man of clear speech. I can’t do this, but send my brother. He’s really good.”

Yet God supplies every single thing we need along the way. If we just will be willing to step out one step at a time and move forward on that step. And like you said, would you have been a writer if you hadn’t taken that chance?

Well, hard to tell, but God will continually pull us to do the thing that we need to do to accomplish what he has for us. Not because he needs us, but because he wants to bless us, which he has done for you in your writing.

Lynn: Yeah. Starting off I didn’t know anything. I barely knew how to write. I was reading Writer’s Digest Magazine and trying to figure out writing. And here’s somebody who not only knows writing, but the whole publishing process and everything. Just anything I needed to learn about the whole thing. 

Karen: Just amazing. God is good. 

Erin: Right! I’m guessing that’s not the last surprise he had in store for you, though. 

Lynn: No. It was a matter of learning to trust. Because it started off with such a bang and such blessings, there were a few surprises along the way of learning to trust his timing. 

It had been my prayer early on that family had to come first. I didn’t want this big writing career and send my children off to nursery school so that I could write. My family came first. 

I reached a point where I had a manuscript finished. This was the days before agents, and I’m sending it off and getting it back, and sending it off and getting it back. Finally a publishing company down in the United States said, “We’re interested. Send the whole manuscript.” 

Which I did, and the waiting period was about a year. Waiting, waiting, and waiting, and hearing, “Okay, it’s got another committee it has to go through,” and all that. 

Finally it was in the last stages of the publishing process and it was like, “You should be hearing any day.” 

So I’m not leaving the house. Back in those days, the phones were hooked onto the wall, so you didn’t wanna go too far. So I’m waiting for God to open the whole world of publishing up to me. The doorbell rang. It was the mail carrier. He had a big black plastic garbage bag with my name and address taped onto it.

My first thought was, “Somebody’s sending me garbage? I guess I don’t have enough of my own?”

I opened it up and inside was my manuscript, and the box that I had mailed it in, which had burst open somewhere in a post office along the way. They very kindly shoveled all these pages of my manuscript into this bag.

I’m looking through them, and some had tire tracks on them and footprints on them, just this whole mess, and this disintegrated box. In the bottom of the box was a letter and it said, “We’re sorry, but we’ve decided not to publish your book.” 

Karen: Oh my. 

Erin: That’s painful. 

Lynn: It was very painful. I knew God had the power in his little finger to get a yes, and I’d be off and running. I guess I was surprised by that. I mean, it could have been rejected, but to come in a garbage bag? You know, what are you gonna think? 

Karen: The symbolism there. It’s just a little too hard to ignore. 

Lynn: It was not lost on me, believe me. I’m asking for answers, “Lord, why, why, why?”

Within a week or two of this devastation, I was still very depressed. We were leaving on a family vacation. We were going from Canada down through the US and my husband wanted to stop at every national park along the way. 

Erin: Oh, fun!

Lynn: I’m viewing all these great wonders of nature, and just looking up at them and still going, “Why, God, why? Why?” 

I wasn’t feeling any answers. When I got home from this vacation, I was putting all the pictures in the photo album. Remember when we used to do that? Real photo albums?

I’m looking at all these pictures side by side, the giant redwoods, and the Tetons, and the Rocky Mountains. I realized God had been shouting at me all that time that he makes all things beautiful in his time, and that this just wasn’t the time yet. 

Now what, how many years later? Forty years later I can say that, yes, I would’ve had to sacrifice family life and a lot of other things if that book had been published at that time. But at that moment, I didn’t know. 

To see all those God-given things and at that point, did I have the faith? Did I have the trust? I’m sorry to say I didn’t, because I realized that even if I started the process all over again and printed out another manuscript and started sending it off, it could be a year.

So without praying about it, without thinking about it, I was in a little tantrum, I took a teaching job. By then my youngest kid was in school, so I went and took a teaching job. That was the worst teaching job. Worst job I’ve ever had. There was so much stress. Three different times I was in the doctor’s office with three different ailments, and every time they said, “Are you under a lot of stress?”

I happened upon the book of Jonah, and I thought, “You know, I think I’m headed in the wrong direction. I think I’m in the belly of the whale with this job.”

I was surprised yet happy that he would go so far to redirect me if I would listen. And I listened. This wasn’t right, and when the contract was up the end of the year, I said, “All right, I’m gonna give this my all again. Go full bore.”

It’s learning to trust that even the bad things, the garbage bags he sends, are for a reason and to keep going. 

Erin: It’s so interesting because we always think surprises are good. But sometimes surprises are hard. 

Lynn: Very hard. 

Erin: And we’re just not as prepared for them. I think that’s probably one of the biggest surprises even that I had as a new writer. It’s hard. Oh!  

Lynn: It’s very hard. 

Erin: If I’m supposed to do this, it should be easy. Surprise. It’s not. It’s hard. 

Karen: The other thing that we forget is that those hard surprises, those surprises we don’t really want, those are God’s answer. We could be saying, “God, why didn’t you answer my prayer?”

And God’s like, “I did. I just didn’t answer it the way you want it.”

Lynn: Right, and if you give two conflicting prayers: you want a family life that isn’t gonna change and you want a successful career, you have to leave it up to him to figure out which one. 

Karen: I think that’s why my husband and I both have glommed onto the prayer request that says, “I know nothing but Christ and him crucified. The rest is all God’s. God can handle all the other details. I know nothing but Christ and him crucified. That’s what I’m holding on to. Lord, your will be done. I may not like it. I may not understand it, but your will be done here.”

Erin: I love that because you’re praying like two different things. You’re wanting two different things and it’s like, how are we not gonna be disappointed? It’s kind of a no win situation. 

Lynn: Right. 

Karen: No, but there is a win. The win is that you, you submit. 

Erin: Yes. 

Karen: You surrender, and you accept that as his answer and then look forward to what he has for you next. 

Lynn: Right. 

Karen: So you don’t end up in a teaching job that sends you on Prozac.

Lynn: I’m telling you, you ever end up in the belly of the whale, it’s not a pretty place to be. You turn around and get spit out. I guess that I was learning, too, that I had this image in my mind of what my writing career would look like. At the time we had Janette Oak and we had Bodie Taney and you see the trajectory of their career, and I had to get to the point where I asked, “Do I want that this image, this idol, really, or am I gonna accept what his will is for my career?” 

Karen: Right. 

Lynn: So I was over forty before my first book got published. But that was his answer. 

Karen: Wow. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve had chills and been inspired. It’s just been a terrific time. It’s been so good, we’re going to do it again in part two, in our next podcast. Be sure to come and join us. 

Why does God send us surprises that seem far more hard than good? Guest @LynnNAustin shares how her hardest surprises were the best of all. #amwriting #Christianwriter
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Long Way Home by Lynn Austin

Has God sent you any hard surprises on your writing journey?

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Thanks so much to our July sponsor of the month, Tammy Partlow! She’s a speaker at women’s retreats, and her debut novel Blood Beneath the Pines, a suspense set in the deep South, is now available. She’s hard at work on the next book in the series!

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 193 When God’s Surprises Are Hard with Guest Lynn Austin, Part 1 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Guest Becca Wierwille joins us in an exploration of the importance of story, not just for our readers, but for ourselves as writers. We all connect with stories in wonderfully different ways, but one special power they have is the ability to challenge us to delve into our world, and the people in it, unearthing empathy and new understandings of relationships and faith.

About Becca Wierwille

Becca Wierwille writes stories to show kids they are wonderfully created for the unique adventures in their lives. Born with only half of her right arm, she aims to help others find beauty in what makes them extraordinary. Her debut middle grade novel, Road Trip Rescue, is set to release this fall, with a prelaunch campaign on Kickstarter running from June 20 to July 6. Becca lives in Pennsylvania with her family, where she spends her days as a mom, novelist, and editor. You can visit her online at beccawierwille.com or follow her on social media @beccawierwille.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Karen: Hey, friends. Welcome to the deep today. And boy, have we got a show for you. Erin is going to introduce our guest.  

Erin: Yay, a guest! Our guest is Becca Wierwille, and we got to know her, ironically, through this very podcast. It’s been fun! Becca Wierwille writes stories to show kids they are wonderfully created for the unique adventures in their lives. Born with only half of her right arm, Becca aims to help others find beauty in what makes them extraordinary.

Dozens of her short stories for children and her devotions have been featured in magazines, anthologies, and other publications, including Primary Treasure, Guide, Cadet Quest, and Keys for Kids. She has previously worked as a kindergarten teacher and man, I gotta give her props for that! A newspaper reporter and a writing tutor, editor by day, and novelist by not-too-late at night she wishes she could eat peach pie as often as most writers drink coffee. Despite her dreams of sandy beaches and mountain peaks, she loves living in Pennsylvania with her family. 

I’m excited for her because she has a Kickstarter campaign starting on June 20 for her very first book, and you guys can check it out!

Welcome, Becca. 

Becca: Thank you. I’m so glad to be here. 

Erin: We are excited to have you, and you know we’re going to put you on the spot like we do everybody and ask you, what does the deep mean to you? 

Becca: I’ve been excited to answer this question. I’ve heard so many guests answer it in so many fantastic ways.

To me, I think the deep means looking deep inside of ourselves and being honest about our emotions, about our experiences, about who God has created us to be. Instead of taking the easy way out of life, the easy way just doing things without putting much intentionality into them and without being truthful about what God has intended our days to be like.

I think of writing from the deep as the same thing: writing with honesty, writing with vulnerability, looking deep into our hearts as we craft our stories instead of just focusing on shallow topics that just kind of scratch the surface. They might be easier to write about, they might take less emotion, but they don’t really go anywhere.

I think a lot about my first college English professor. She really challenged me. I had my first college essay, and I felt pretty confident because I’d always, in high school, been fine with essays. I felt like I was a pretty good writer. She pulled me aside after class one day and said, “Becca, you’re a great writer, but you wrote nothing here.”

Erin: Ouch!

Becca: It was great. It really, at first, it hurt a little…

Karen: Yeah. This is totally useless, but it’s brilliantly written. Totally useless. 

Becca: Yep. Pretty language, but nothing was there.

After that, I really did start pushing myself more to be like, “Okay. I need to make sure something’s actually coming out of this writing.”

I really am thankful to her for pushing me like that. 

Karen: I love teachers like that. 

Erin: Yeah, they’re the kind of teachers you need. My in-laws are visiting, well, my husband’s sisters, and one has been a teacher forever. She actually had a parent come, after she had to say some harsh truths to a student, she had a parent come and say, “Thank you for helping my child know that lying is not okay, that honesty is important.” 

I love what you said, Becca, about honesty because I think you’re right. We don’t want to always take an honest look at ourselves. There are things we want to maybe push aside, or we want to pretend aren’t there. And those are the very things that God wants us to dig into because he wants to do something with them. To me that’s a great thought about going deep, doing that honestly, and not sweeping things under the rug. 

Becca: Yeah, because it can be so much easier to just take the easy way out. Not talk about the hard things. Not write about the hard things. Not think about the hard things.

I have a writer friend who I so appreciate. Recently, she sent me an email and she said, “I love your story,” because she had read my story ahead of time for me. Then she said, “The only thing I noticed is you have one arm, your character has one arm, well, half an arm, and I look on your social media account and I can’t even tell. I had to look for a long time before I saw a picture of you with one arm.”

I realized I’d never been trying to hide that, I hadn’t done it intentionally, but somewhere along the way I think I’d gotten used to hiding my arm in photos. You know, if there’s someone else with me, I’d put my right arm around them. And so I said, “I thank you so much! I need to change that right away.”

I think I put a post up that day on Instagram. I was like, “I need to be honest about who I am and this is part of me and I don’t want to hide my arm in photos anymore. I need to be intentional about that.” 

Karen: We’re so good in the church, and women especially, we’re so good at managing our image. It’s like managing our profile.

We only let people see what we want them to see, the happy faces and the happy families. We don’t want to let anybody know that we’re depressed, or that our family is falling apart, or that we’re missing half an arm, or that we’re missing half of our faith. 

We want everybody to think that we are who we present to the world, and I don’t know who we think we’re kidding. It’s not like God is fooled. It’s not like God didn’t create us exactly the way we are with exactly our faults and our weaknesses so that he could refine us and strengthen us. 

Erin: Yeah. Well, I love the topic that we were going to talk about today, why the stories we write and their messages matter to readers and to the hearts of writers.

Let’s maybe talk about readers first. Why, Becca, do you think that the stories we write and their messages matter to the readers?

Becca: Goodness, this is such a big question because there are so many reasons. Stories can provide healing, they can provide points of connection and hope. They can give readers a chance to grow an empathy, and so many more things than that.

I always think of Jesus’ parables when I talk or think about stories and why they matter so much. I mean, Jesus was an amazing preacher. The sermon on the Mount is a great example of that. He could have used whatever strategies he wanted while he was preaching, and he often turned to stories.

I think of the story of the good Samaritan. How easy it is for us to recite that or repeat it a lot of times, or how often we might see it in a children’s book because it’s a story that you can grab on to. It sticks with you. Whereas if you’re looking at a whole passage from Leviticus, for example, it might be a little harder to memorize.

Karen: Oh no, no. Leviticus is so easy!

Becca: The easiest one of all! But I do think stories, they stick with us and then they provide whatever it is, that healing, the connection, the empathy, and in a way that lasts a bit longer than it might if you just heard some words somewhere. Or scrolled past a meme on social media or something like that.

Karen: It’s interesting. I remember when some of the books came out in the general market where they were from the point of view of the villains in the story. Wicked came out and it was from the point of view of the wicked witch of the West, or whichever the green-faced witch was. And I think about a story like the good Samaritan, and how we so often see ourselves in the role of the good Samaritan.

But I think that we should see ourselves in the role of the people who passed him by, and in the role of the man who was attacked and left for dead. We need to explore who we are in all of the context of Jesus’ parables, because we are not the good guys. We’re the broken humans. We have failings, and we will pass by people without even thinking about it if we’re uncomfortable.

It’s an excellent way, in story, to explore those other sides of these stories that we recite so easily and so carelessly, but that have hidden meaning for us if we’ll just dig in and look. 

Becca: Yeah, that’s such a great point. Developing that empathy from different perspectives, I think that’s particularly powerful when you do read a story, like you’re talking about, and you think you have nothing in common with a certain character, certain type of person. Maybe it’s a person from another culture that you’re not familiar with or someone who has a particular struggle that you wouldn’t consider yourself to have.

But when you start to read from their perspective, you think, “Oh, they’re really not so different from me after all.” 

Erin: I think it’s a good way to learn to listen, also. It’s a way to get a picture into what that looks like. We’re not very patient people, we’re not very good listeners at all. But as we read from someone else’s perspective, we can’t help but listen to them. 

Karen: Right. 

Erin: That gives us that ability to empathize, I think is what you were saying, and just go deeper with that person and understand them. If this world needs anything, it’s people who are willing to be curious about someone else and listen and not talk. There’s a proverb, I think it’s 18:2, that says that fools delight in airing their own opinions. They don’t want to listen. It feels like we should just stamp that on today’s culture. 

Karen: That could be the world’s proverb.  

Becca: Yeah. 

Erin: What other thoughts do you have on that, Becca? As far as why our stories matter for readers? 

Becca: Well, along those lines, I think being able to experience from a different perspective is also giving you an experience that you’d never have otherwise. Because even if you’re very open to talking with people who are different from you, and even if you’re a good listener, which like you said, probably not many of us really are, we’re being able to actually see things from a totally other perspective. Put ourself in someone else’s shoes. We’re getting to meet different people and also to visit different settings. To go on adventures that we’d never be able to otherwise.

There’s this aspect of joy that I think is part of storytelling, too. I mean, every story’s going to bring something different, but I think that’s a really big component. We’re getting beyond what we’d experience in our daily lives and being able to see into people’s hearts in new ways and being able to see different struggles, being able to experience new parts of the world. All these things that might not always be accessible to us. 

Erin: Yeah. 

Karen: You know, it’s fascinating. I think exactly what you’re talking about is why it’s so important to not try to clean up our history. We need to remember who we are as a nation, and who we are as a people, and where we came from. I know it seems like I keep going to the dark side, but I’ve been thinking about the dark side a lot lately.

I’ve been working on a manuscript with a serial killer, so I’m in the dark side. But in every villain there is something we can empathize with. No matter how terrible a person is, there is an aspect of them that echoes to an aspect in us. We may not want to think about that, but when we clean up history, when we clean up the race difficulties, when we clean up all of the mistakes that we have made as a world and as a nation, that creates a false perspective for those who are the new generations. 

They lose, like you said, the ability to empathize. But also the ability to recognize within themselves that they…well, there but for the grace of God, go I. I could be guilty of murder. I could be guilty of having slaves. I could be guilty of doing all of these things. Even though I don’t want to admit that I have that capacity within myself.

Erin: It’s so interesting, Karen, because you’re looking at this from your recent experiences as an editor, and I’ve just been looking at this in an opposite way. When Becca said joy I hit on that, because I’ve been working on someone’s manuscript that was talking about how important joy is in terms of our brain health, our body health. It’s like one of the hugest things that help our mind and body bounce back from stress. 

Our brains can be rewired if we will focus on joy. It literally is, as Philippians talks about, you know, thinking on all these good things, that’s really true. Our brains are literally wired that way. So I think that’s a part of going into stories as well, just for the sheer joy. 

I mean, I’m probably never going to skydive, because that’s just not me. But it’s interesting to read about it. I’m never going to be a pilot, but it’s interesting to read about it. I’m never going to do a lot of things, but it’s joyful to read about things where good stuff happens, eventually. You know, where good triumphs. These things do bring us joy and it truly is good for us and our mental health. 

Becca: It’s amazing how with stories we’re talking about two totally different things. Joy on one end, and then also seeing the darkness. And that’s a good thing because we tend to think, “Oh, I’m better than that,” or “I’d never do that…” Like you were saying, Karen. It’s so good to be able to see we’re broken, too. We have our struggles, too, and we’re not that far removed from that darkness.

It’s this joy and darkness all at once. It’s great at providing points of connection. We can connect with stories in all different kinds of ways that we might not anticipate at first. We might not anticipate being able to, well, I hesitate to say connect with a serial killer, but really to connect with in any way to think we would be able to see where they’re coming from. 

Karen: Right.

Becca: So to be able to experience points of connection that we’d never even expect is really important. I think part of the reason I write middle grade, stories, for ages eight to twelve, is that those are the stories I really connected with at that age. They stuck out to me and were a big part of my childhood. One of my favorite stories was Because of Winn Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo. 

Karen: Oh, yes!

Becca: I connected with Opal so well. She was lonely and she felt connected with her dog, and I connected with that feeling. The book helped me feel understood. There were also characters in that book that I’d never come across in real life.

One of the characters is an ex-convict, and there’s a lady who lives alone at her house, and there’s these twins that are really irritating to Opal, and all of these characters that I didn’t have in my life. But I loved being able to read about them in this story because then I was able to connect with types of people that I just hadn’t come across in my life. 

Erin: I love that because connection is in part, I mean that’s what God is all about. Relationship. We humans are created for relationship, and that happens through connection. It’s just cool to me that stories give us that ability.

So we did talk a little bit about how this matters as a reader, but what do you think in terms of writers? How do the stories and the messages matter to the hearts of writers? 

Becca: Whether we’re writing a fantasy novel with a completely made up world, or whether we’re writing a memoir or blog post with stories and experiences from our own lives, we’re giving ourselves a voice when we write stories and we share stories.

I think that process of creation can be really healing for our hearts, especially talking about the brokenness and the darkness we keep seeing around us in the world. We were created by God, who is the ultimate Storyteller, the ultimate Creator, and we live in such a world of consumption. We’re always watching the news and reading about what’s going on in the world and taking things in, movies and media and social media and everything.

I think in that culture of consumption, being able to create and to put things out is really healing. It teaches us about ourselves, too. We start to see ways that God has been working in our lives, even when we might not have noticed it before. 

Whether that’s by actually writing a real experience, or for me as I was writing my character Kimmy and realizing some of her character development reflected things that I’ve gone through in my past that I might not have ever considered before or put into words. I think that’s a really powerful process. 

Erin: I think that’s true. I think in the process, we need to understand first the message to ourselves. What is the message that God is telling us through our own experience? I think you’re absolutely right. Sometimes it’s just in the process of writing that that we realize, “Oh, hello. That’s why this, and that’s why that…” 

Without that writing and without struggling through that, wrestling through that, we might not ever get those lessons. 

Karen: Sometimes for writers, when they’re writing, it’s more of a catharsis. It’s that they are sorting through what’s going on inside them and their own life experiences. Oftentimes the first thing that they put down on paper and their first draft of a manuscript, if they set it aside and then come back to it, they can see, number one, what God has brought them to. But number two, that maybe they need to take a step back from the emotions of it. 

I’ve read a number of manuscripts that you could tell that the writers were still angry about the things that had happened to them. That they were still bitter about what people had done to them. They were writing the story more to stick it to those who had mistreated them than to give any insights or understanding to readers or even to themselves. 

I encourage them to go back, and I say, “This is something you’ve got to work through before you can write about it because you need to understand what God is doing in this rather than just putting your anger on the page.”

The writing process is just that. It’s a process. We come from our own places where we’re dealing with these things, and there has to be conflict, there has to be tension in a book. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, there has to be something that keeps people turning the page. But you also need to understand how to bring that ultimately to resolution. Or to a creative resolution that may not have all the questions answered, but may point to understanding better. 

Erin: Becca, what do you think in terms of this book—we mentioned that you have a Kickstarter coming out for this first book that you’re writing—how would you say the message in that book came out of your experience? Or how did that matter to your heart, the message you’re putting in this book? 

Becca: This book, called Road Trip Rescue, is written for kids ages eight to twelve-ish, and it’s about this girl named Kimmy. She’s twelve years old, and she was born like me, missing half of her right arm. 

The story opens where she’s flipping through a magazine and sees this photo of a dog that is her dog she lost two years ago. So she’s just determined to find this dog. Of course, she’s a couple years out from being able to have her own driver’s license, and her parents are oddly unsupportive, but she recruits her unpredictable aunt to take her on a road trip, and adventure ensues.

But I think the story for me started with this road trip, which was interesting. I’ve never been on a road trip to find a long lost dog, and I don’t have a pink-haired aunt like she does. But as I continued to write, I saw the themes in the story were really connected with my own story. 

Kimmy is lonely, and the reason this dog matters to her so much isn’t what you think. Well, she loves her dog, of course, but it’s this deeper loneliness and feeling like her dog was her only friend at some times. That her dog was more trustworthy than some of the people in her life. 

Karen: Which is probably true. 

Becca: Yeah, probably. Dogs are wonderful. 

Karen: Yes they are. 

Becca: Kimmy has these kids making these unkind comments, and I think that’s something I connected a lot with. I know what it’s like to have kids make maybe thoughtless comments that aren’t meant to be malicious or maybe ones that are meant to be malicious.

I know what it’s like to walk into a room and feel like everyone’s staring. You might have kids kind of looking over and their parents kind of nudging ’em away real quick, so you don’t think that they’re staring. But you already know they’re staring. Kimmy and I relate to those things.

It’s still funny for me that she’s not a real person. I talk about her like she is. So even though I don’t share this experience of going on a road trip after a long lost dog, I can connect with a loss that she experiences. I can connect with her feelings of loneliness. 

As I was writing her story, and as her character arc came to completion, God really worked in my heart. I pray that he would touch the hearts of readers in that same way, those who experience those feelings of loss and loneliness. 

But for me in particular, I came to see how he worked in my life. It’s interesting because since Kimmy is twelve and I’m past that now, I think back to my story then, and it’s almost healing from my past. Things that I never really knew bothered me, or things that I really didn’t think had stuck with me, had stuck with me more than I realized.

In that way I think it was healing. It was insightful. It taught me about myself, and it taught me about things that God did in my life that at the time I might not have even recognized. That was pretty cool to see. 

Erin: Yeah. 

Karen: Well, this has been a delightful time together talking about story. We’re always happy to talk about story again, whatever context it’s in, because as you said, I think you’re absolutely right, Becca, that Jesus was an amazing storyteller, and he knew how to share universal emotions in a story and draw people to their best conclusion for themselves in their relationship with God. 

I pray that that’s what we do as we write the books. I’ll be praying over you and the book that you’re writing and over your Kickstarter campaign. Guys, be sure to check out that Kickstarter campaign and support her.

We’re just so grateful that you’ve been here with us and that we can take time out of our days, good, bad, or indifferent, and say, “Yes. God has brought us to this place for a reason. He wants to work in us. He wants to work in those who read our stories, and we are blessed because of it.” 

Erin: We are! Thank you, Becca.

Becca: Thank you so much. 

Your stories matter in more ways than you know! Guest @beccawierwille shares why. #amwriting #christianwriter
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What has God taught you about yourself through the writing of your stories?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Thanks so much to our June sponsor of the month, Wendy L. Macdonald. She’s a writer, poet, podcaster, photographer, and nature lover, and she’s offering a free gift we can all use: 10 Good Habits to Help You Become a Great Listener!

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The post 192 – Why Story Matters with Guest Becca Wierwille appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Voice. Clarity. Dialogue. Character development. Hook. All of these, and so much more, are important for a strong book. But they’re not the most important. Not for a book written from a Christian worldview. So what is the most important element? Hope! Listen in to find out why your job as a writer is critical in this world.

But first, thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

As writers, you’ve probably learned that there are many important elements in a good manuscript. Things like plot, character, conflict, a great hook, voice, authenticity, anecdotes, dialogue, arc, and so much more. But for a manuscript written from a Christian worldview, which element is the most important one? Is there one most important element?

Yes. There is, but it’s none of those mentioned. If you’re writing from a Christian perspective, the most important thing you have to bring to the world is hope. Why? Hope is the foundation of everything we believe as Christians, and everything we have to offer to the world.

What even is hope? How do we define it?

That feels good. It evokes a positive sensation. When readers finish a manuscript written from a Christian worldview, there should be a positive sensation. Even in the midst of something sorrowful.

But this definition is non-specific. We can’t try to foster something non-specific in a manuscript, right? Other than a positive sensation. 

If someone desires something, that implies that they don’t have everything they want right now, or that everything isn’t exactly perfect. That’s the world we live in.

And we need to gain ground, don’t we? We don’t want to live our lives stuck in the same place.

But perhaps one of simplest ways for us as writers to think about hope is how a sociologist put it—a sociologist who happens to be Erin’s husband.

That evokes that positive sensation, but it’s a bit more specific in how. This is the kind of hope We’re talking about—how the future can be better than today.

How many of you listeners write fiction? What kind of fiction are readers interested in? The kind where the characters all have a great life with no pain, trials, or struggles?

No. Happy people in Happy Land is not interesting. Or real. Readers want to see characters struggle. And toil. And fight against all odds…and overcome!

Why? Readers experience that with the characters, the struggle the danger, the disasters, and then the victory. Readers live it vicariously.

What does it become inside that reader?

Hope. The future can be better than today.

How many of you listeners write nonfiction? You’re not writing memoirs that end in a place of despair and discouragement. That’s a therapeutic journal, and that’s good to do, but it’s not something you want to publish.

You write the book for readers when you find the key to overcoming the discouragement, when you’ve gained wisdom to share.

And you’re not writing prescriptive books that are like, “Yeah, I know the place you find yourself in stinks. Sorry, I don’t know how to fix that.”

That’s not prescriptive. Those are not the type of books hurting people are looking for.

You’re not writing how-to articles to keep people in ignorance. You’re not writing poetry to make people feel awful inside and never point the way out of that? No, even if we start by saying hard things, we want people to think and grow and change, and move toward some positive outcome. 

We want readers to expand their minds and look at possibilities and be inspired that the future can be better than today.

As Christians, hope infuses us. In Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, he wrote this in the introduction to 1 & 2 Thessalonians:

“The Christian faith has always been characterized by a strong and focused sense of future, with belief in the second coming of Jesus as the most distinctive feature…The practical effect of this belief is to charge each moment of the present with hope.” 

This is who we are and what we do. We’re Christian writers and we have an unswerving belief that the future will be better than today.

We portray this message over and over and over again in our novels, our memoirs, our how-to articles, our devotionals. We want people to grow and learn and move forward.

If a book is going to reflect a Christian worldview, it has to reflect the hope of God’s overall plan of redemption for humanity and all creation. Look at the big picture to see how hope is the underlying foundation. In the beginning, God created the universe and everything in it according to his perfectly ordered design. Everyone was in a right relationship with God and each other.

Then we sinned and broke everything. God told Adam, “…Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” Genesis 3:17

In God’s perfect time, Christ comes and changes everything. His life on this earth, his death on the cross, and his resurrection create reconciliation for us. This is where we live, reconciled, yet not having obtained the future perfection waiting for us in heaven.

For now, we’re still here dealing with the consequences of the fall. But we know God’s redemption plan is moving toward its ultimate fulfillment of the new heavens and new earth, where original perfection is restored.

That’s the hope. But we’re not there yet. We’re dealing with painful toil.

“We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” 2 Corinthians 4:8-9

Why? We persevere because of our hope. It’s not because we’re amazing and mighty people, but because we’re weak and dependent on the God who is Lord of all.

We persevere because God’s commitment to US is unwavering. He’s lifting us. He’s sustaining us. He’s giving us the life and breath to carry on.

He sees the grand design, the big picture. And he sees each individual component—every person, every tear, every heart break, every crushing wound.

And God does not waver in his commitment to us. He will not fail to sustain us. That is our hope.

And this is the message he gives us for the world: “The future can be better than today.”

Because we have a God who will make it so, who IS making it so.

With every word we write, we forge hope, because hope is at the core of everything we believe.

Do you know what happens when someone has no hope? Pastor and author Ray Johnston puts it like this. He writes:

“When people lose hope, they lose their ability to dream for the future. Despair replaces joy. Fear replaces faith. Anxiety replaces prayer. Insecurity replaces confidence. Tomorrow’s dreams are replaced by nightmares. It’s a lousy way to live.”

How many people are living like that right now?

Psychiatrist Neel Burton writes “…hopelessness is both a cause and a symptom of depression, and, within the context of depression, a strong predictor of suicide.”

Do you see what an important role you have? You’re hope-bringers. You’re truth-tellers.

Why is this truth, this hope that we as Christians have important? Because false hope is rampant in this world.

Scientology, Buddhism, Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam, just to name a few. The Bible tells us these are false hopes that lead to hell.

Then just watch TV for ten minutes. You’ll find “hope” for sale. Beer. Toothpaste. Perfume. Pretty cars. Deodorant. Dating apps. Diamonds. They all promise a lifestyle of satisfied desires. Remember that hope can be the anticipation of something desired? But that’s ultimately false hope. It’s empty.

Why? Because none of those things can deliver what God has designed for him and him alone to be, to deliver, and to satisfy. Psalm 65:5 tells us that God is “the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.”

God. Not shiny trinkets.

We’re not saying toothpaste and deodorant is bad, by the way. Please continue to use it. But that’s not going to take away the pain of a lost child, or heal the deep wound of rape or betrayal or abuse.

It won’t help anyone break the spiral of addiction or debt. It’s not going to inspire anyone to take a stand against human trafficking, oppression, or injustice, or any of the other great evils in this world. Take your pick, there are plenty to choose from.

False hope is rampant, so we as Christian writers cannot keep silent.

You guys, through your authentic words on the page, through your stories, Bible studies, articles, biographies, essays, poems, songs, and more—all those things that God puts in you are part of God’s master plan for you, for the body of Christ, AND for the whole world.

You have a purpose and a job. You’re heralds of hope. True hope.

You don’t have to have some character in your novel spelling out the four spiritual laws. You don’t have to have them preach. You don’t have to somehow turn your homeschooling article into a Bible study.

But you do have to understand what your bottom-line perspective is. Think of it as the overarching theme of your collective body of work. I love how author and editor Susan Bell defines theme. She says, “It’s an idea written in invisible ink on the back of your text.”

Hope is what’s written on our lives as Christians. Hope is what’s written across the pages of our manuscripts.

Hope is what you’re getting up at 5AM to write, or staying up late after the kids are in bed, or what you’re dictating during your coffee break, or on your exercise bike, or what you’re wrestling with on your commute.

And we do mean wrestling. We all know—or will find out soon enough—that this is not an easy job. It’s hard.

Learning the craft is hard. Facing rejection is hard. Being vulnerable on the page is hard. Dealing with disappointments and detours on your writing journey is hard.

Sometimes it’s so hard we’re in danger of losing hope ourselves. That’s when we go back to God and his unwavering commitment to us. To equip us for his purposes. To sustain us and carry us.

Remember the parallel storylines of redemption amidst the fall. We have hope. But we’ve got to preach the message to ourselves first and foremost. Then do not fear to walk through deep valleys with God. Don’t run when things get hard. Don’t try to hide, because your struggles refine you.

They prepare you. They give you purpose and understanding. God does all that through your trials.

You can acknowledge struggles and give them voice. You write about pain. You expose lies and write truth. Your insights help you both HAVE hope and SHOW hope through the characters in your novels overcoming. Through your how-to articles. Through your personal experience stories. Whatever you write.

But also through whatever you say. Whatever you do. Whoever you are.

Please understand that it doesn’t matter whether you’re writing for thousands or just for you and God. In your work, God works in you, and it is good. Your labor is never in vain.

Your writing turns you into a person who radiates hope. True hope for a world bombarded with false hope. A world that needs you doing what you’ve been gifted to do, being what you’ve been gifted to be.

Hope bringers. Truth tellers. Heralds.

We’ve probably all seen, heard, or read this verse before, but look at it again in the light of knowing that you are a hope bringer. God says to you:

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11

Share that hope with your readers. Live that hope with everyone you know.

The future can—and will—be better than today.

The most important element in your writing isn’t what you think it is. #amwriting #christianwriter
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Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

Thanks so much to our June sponsor of the month, Wendy L. Macdonald. She’s a writer, poet, podcaster, photographer, and nature lover, and she’s offering a free gift we can all use: 10 Good Habits to Help You Become a Great Listener!

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 191 – Christian Writers As Hope Bringers appeared first on Write from the Deep.

As we discussed in part one of the Writer’s Psalm, emotions are a natural, God-given part of life. But they also can lead us astray if we’re not careful. Especially when things on our writing journey don’t go the way we’d hoped or planned. So what do you do when you feel God has abandoned you? Come explore the rest of Psalm 42 to find out.

But first, thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

In episode 189, part one on Psalm 42, which we’ve dubbed the writer’s psalm, we ended with the truth that emotions have a way of ebbing and flowing. How often have you felt down one day, thinking it’s time to hang up your keyboard, and the next you wonder why on earth you were so despondent?

No, it doesn’t mean you’re bipolar. It simply means you’re experiencing the normal emotional ebb and flow of being a writer. And just when we think we’ve dealt with those emotions, something else happens. As it did with David.  

“My heart is breaking as I remember how it used to be: I walked among the crowds of worshipers, leading a great procession to the house of God, singing for joy and giving thanks amid the sound of a great celebration!” Psalm 42:4

There’s another of Satan’s tactics: encouraging us to focus on the rearview mirror. If you’ve been in publishing for a while, and especially if you experienced some success—success that seems far too long ago—the enemy loves to come whisper in your ear about how it used to be: 

“Remember how things were when you first started? How exciting it all was. How the newness of writing and being published had you waking to each day with anticipation? Even joy? How you felt so fulfilled? Well…all that’s gone now. So what was the point? You’ve wasted time and money that should have been used better…” 

This tactic is so very effective, isn’t it? Especially with the changes happening in publishing over the last several years. It often seems so much harder now. And many of us have lost contracts, or can’t seem to find someone who wants to give us a new contract. Or maybe we decide to go indie, but that, we discover, has its own big pile of difficulties. Why can’t it be like it was?

Oh, friends, remember how we’ve warned you against comparing yourself to others? Well, comparing where you are now to where you used to be, letting that comparison stir up a sense of defeat and discouragement, longing for what was doesn’t help with what is. Not. Ever. 

If you’re tempted to do that, go instead with the next several verses of Psalm 42 and say with David: 

“Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad? I will put my hope in God! I will praise him again—my Savior and my God!” Psalm 42:5 

Acknowledging who God is in the here and now is a powerful weapon against Satan’s lies. So please, every day, every time you feel the enemy tickling your ears and spirit, ask yourself one question. Because the answer will send the enemy and his forces scrambling away: 

Who is God to me?

Is he Elohim, the One and only true God? The Master Creator? No one is more trustworthy. No one else is Sovereign. There is no other God but him. 

Is he Jehovah-Rohi, the Lord my Shepherd? The One who watches over me, guarding me from all enemies? The one who fights to save me from predators like Satan? Whose staff will always guide and protect me?

Is he Jehovah-Jireh, the Lord my provider? The One who meets all my needs, no matter what they are? The One who has never let his own go hungry or be lost? The One who provided us with a way to escape sin and death?

Is he Jehovah-Rapha, the Lord my healer? God told Moses right out, “I am the Lord who heals you.” He will heal you on every front in his time, in his way. He will heal you of being downcast. Just keep your eyes and heart on him. 

Is he Jehovah-Nissi, the Lord my Banner? He is the Visible God who is seen in our lives. He is the sign to all, especially Satan, that we belong to him. As our banner, God lets everyone know HE is with us, our protection and shield, and they will try to do us harm at their own spiritual and eternal peril. Remember Isaiah 54:17: “No weapon formed against you shall succeed.”

Is he Jehovah-M’Kaddesh, the Lord my sanctifier? He makes me holy. I don’t do that. I can’t do that. But Jehovah-M’Kaddesh has already done it! He has given us his Holy Spirit for that very reason. How do you disperse being downcast? Come before him and ask for more holiness. Ask for the strength to see past what seems to be until your vision matches his for what is, and what will be in him!

Is he Jehovah-Shalom, the Lord my peace? Strong’s Concordance tells us that shalom means completeness, soundness, welfare. When the Lord is our peace, we are complete. We are sound in him, not to be shaken. Our welfare is in HIS hands. What better place could it be?

Is he Jehovah-Tsidkenu, the Lord Who Is Righteous? It’s frightening for many to even think of being attacked by Satan and his followers. But friends, there is no reason for fear! Not when we’re covered in the Lord’s holy righteousness. Not when Jehovah-Tsidkenu holds us in his righteous hands and his holiness is an impenetrable barrier between us and the ruler of this world. A ruler who is already defeated by God’s righteousness. 

Is he Jehovah-Shammah, the Lord who is there? Oh, how I love this one! My Lord is here. With me. Whether I feel it or not, whether my emotions recognize it or not, The God of the Universe is with me! He is near to you even now. He is ever present. You are never alone, friends. Never. 

Let’s pick up with Psalm 42 again, finishing verse 6:

“Now I am deeply discouraged, but I will remember you—even from distant Mount Hermon, the source of the Jordan, from the land of Mount Mizar.” Psalm 42:6

Here is such good news! Being downcast is temporary! When David says, “Now I am deeply discouraged,” he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to say, “but I will remember you!”

Being downcast is a feeling, an emotion. And feelings or emotions change. They may last for a few hours or days, or even for a season. It’s only a matter of time until it passes. 

Keep in mind that emotions, even unwanted ones like being downcast, have significance and purpose. Otherwise why would God have given them to us? Having an underlying sense of sadness, of being downcast, can be a trigger for you to realize that something’s not quite right. It helps to explore the root of those emotions. When we understand what we’re feeling and why, we can take steps to feel better. 

For example, a few weeks ago I was moping around the house. Don, my hubby, asked me what was wrong. I looked at him and said, “I’m depressed.”

Now, I wasn’t talking about true depression. What I meant was I was feeling down. Like something just wasn’t quite right. We talked about it and I realized we’ve had far too many gray, rainy days lately.

Don and I have always turned off the lights if we’re not in a room. Why pay for electricity that isn’t needed? But I realized I was missing sunshine and light! So we agreed that when the days are gray, we’ll keep more lights on and pull the window blinds up to let in as much light as possible. Within a few days, I was back to being cheerful, laughing at the antics of the birds and squirrels in my yard, and savoring God’s goodness. 

Not all causes of being downcast are easy to discern. But ask God to open your eyes to why you’re feeling as you are. Sometimes, you can make changes to lift the gloom. Other times, you need to wait on God to release you from these emotions. Whatever the case, it is temporary! Sometimes it lasts for days. Sometimes it lasts for a season. But, it will pass. 

Don and I recently visited Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. On the ferry ride to the island, I was struck by the varying currents, swirls, and white caps on the surface of the waters of the Puget Sound. I couldn’t help but wonder what was beneath the waters that caused these different actions, some within feet of each other. Was there some obstacle down there? Or was it caused by some fish or whales or orcas? Or could it just be a difference in water temperature?

But here’s what I loved: Whatever the underlying cause, the ferry just kept gliding along the surface, not the least bit bothered by the various whirlpools, white caps, or whatever. That vessel was built to ride the surface and keep moving forward. 

Just remember times of being downcast are often based on how things seem to be. Or even worse, wondering what’s happening until you grow afraid that maybe…just maybe…God has left you on your own. But the reality is that while we may not know where God is leading us, or why, what we do know, without a doubt, is that he IS leading us. And these downcast feelings will pass in the light of his truth. 

David starts to understand that with the next verses…

“I hear the tumult of the raging seas as your waves and surging tides sweep over me. But each day the Lord pours his unfailing love upon me, and through each night I sing his songs, praying to God who gives me life.” Psalm 42:7-8

In this moment, David’s soul isn’t downcast! It’s focused on God, on praising and worshiping Him. When you struggle, take hold of two of the most powerful tools in your arsenal: praise and worship. 

We’ve talked about praise and worship in other podcasts, but let’s review a few things here:

God is the only One worthy of true praise. And the praise we give God isn’t like praising someone for doing a good job. It’s not based on what we think of God. It’s based on WHO God is. 

Webster’s defines praise as a number of things—commending excellence, expressing approval, honoring others—but the praise due to God is different. In fact, that praise gets this definition from Webster’s: “The act of glorifying …God.” 

Here are a few of the definitions of glorify:

to make glorious : surround with glory : secure honor, praise, or admiration for 

to exalt to a state of glory  

to throw a resplendent light upon : make splendid with light. 

Resplendent. I love that word. It means lustrous. Shining with brilliant light. Imagine entering a darkened room, then someone turns on a number of large, sparkling chandeliers. I’ve seen that, and the glorious beauty of it is almost a shock. It takes your breath away, and then fills you with delight. 

Now think: How much more resplendent is God? How much more glorious? How much more worthy than any thing or any one of our praise and worship?

When you find yourself slipping into being downcast, jump instead into praise and worship just like these verses say:

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” 2 Corinthians1:3-4

“Through Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess his name.” Hebrews 13:15 NIV

Then there’s this blockbuster in Isaiah 25: 

“LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago… You have been a refuge for the poor, a refuge for the needy in their distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat. For the breath of the ruthless is like a storm driving against a wall and like the heat of the desert. You silence the uproar of foreigners (and critical readers and reviewers and naysayers!) as heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is stilled.” Isaiah 25:1,4-5

Do you hear that? “The song of the ruthless.” We like to think the enemy’s voice will be easily recognized because it’s full of evil, but remember, Satan is the deceiver. He will seem to sing to you, to woo you with a refrain of all you deserve but aren’t getting. The ruthless one will sing condemnation with the voice of an angel and the words of trickery. Don’t be fooled!

Isaiah 25 goes on:

“On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine— the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. The LORD has spoken. In that day they will say, ‘Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the LORD, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.’” Isaiah 25:6-9

Remember that old saying, “God said and I believe it!” God has said you are precious to him. Believe it! God has said he will never leave you or forsake you. Believe it! God has said he loves us so much he sent his beloved Son to die for us, to restore us to himself. Believe it.

Friends, if God has said you are a writer, then God has spoken. Believe it!!

But David’s downcast state isn’t over yet, because right on the heels of Psalm 42:7-8 comes verses 9-10:

“’O God my rock,’ I cry, ‘why have you forgotten me? Why must I wander around in grief, oppressed by my enemies?’ Their taunts break my bones. They scoff, ‘Where is this God of yours?’”

See? Same old tactics. Mockery. Unrealized expectations. Taunting.

How often have you heard people say things like:

“If God is real, why is the world in such a mess?”

“Why are so many people starving and suffering?”

“Where is this God of yours when nations attack nations, slaughtering innocents.”

“If God is so great and so loving, why did the person I love die an agonizing death?” 

“If God cares about me, why do I have cancer?”

Let’s face it, there are a lot of reasons to doubt God exists. Lots of reasons for people to mock us and our faith. Lots of reasons to doubt God and us. 

The enemy takes advantage of the most punishing reasons to derail us from doing whatever task God has given us. Good night! Satan doesn’t want us doing God’s work! He doesn’t want us ignoring him and just trusting God. 

Satan is so determined to get us downcast that he uses those around us, even those who know us best, to mock and taunt and undermine us in doing the work God has given us. Because when we fall prey to all that, when we become downcast, we can’t see what God’s doing. 

Or maybe it’s more that we aren’t looking for what God is doing. All the hard, negative things are so much more obvious. But God? So often he works in the background. Even in silence. Which seems so counter-intuitive to us. With all his power, all his glory, why isn’t everyone aware of what he’s doing?

Remember when Moses went up on the mountain to meet with God? How did God speak to him? In a still small voice. You see, that’s the thing with true power. It doesn’t have to blare its existence. It just is. God’s power is there, and it’s working for the good of all his children. For you. 

As we come to the end of Psalm 42, it seems David has learned that as soon as he heads back into being downcast, here comes the solution: truth!

“Why am I discouraged? Why is my heart so sad? I will put my hope in God! I will praise him again—my Savior and my God! My Savior and my God.” Psalm 42:11 

Say those words out loud! My Savior and my God.

Our hope is in him. Our joy and fulfillment and peace and wonder…everything we need and could ever want is all in HIM. 

Psalm 146 is the the perfect response, to that truth: 

“Praise the Lord! Let all that I am praise the Lord. I will praise the Lord as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God with my dying breath. Don’t put your confidence in powerful people (publishers, editors, reviewers, sales teams, marketers, producers…none of them deserve your confidence. ONLY God does); there is no help for you there. When they breathe their last, they return to the earth, and all their plans die with them. But joyful are those who have the God of Israel as their helper, whose hope is in the Lord their God. He made heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them. He keeps every promise forever. He gives justice to the oppressed and food to the hungry. The Lord frees the prisoners. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are weighed down. The Lord loves the godly…The Lord will reign forever. He will be your God…throughout the generations. Praise the Lord!”

Feeling down? Let the Writer’s Psalm lift your spirits! #amwriting #christianwriter
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In what ways does David’s psalm inspire you as a writer?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

A huge thank you to our May sponsor of the month, Priscilla Sharrow! She’s working on her memoir called Bonked! Life, Love, and Laughter with Traumatic Brain Injury, which will release with Redemption Press. Learn more about Priscilla at her website priscillasharrow.com and follow her blog for the TBI/PTSD community.

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing! 

The post 190 – The Writer’s Psalm, Part 2 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

Emotions are a normal part of being human. What’s more, they are God given. As writers, we certainly have our share of emotional highs and lows. But what do we do when our feelings drag us waaay down? When our careers seem stalled or over, when our efforts seem wasted, and we find ourselves spiraling deeper into darkness? Well! Have we got a psalm for you!

But first, thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

As creatives, writers tend to feel things deeply. Good things, troublesome things, hard things…we can become immersed in the emotions fueled by what’s happening around us. When our careers are going well, we’re on top of the world. When they’re not, well, it’s easy to get down. We even start to doubt whether we’re supposed to be writing at all.

Of course, those emotions change when something good happens, but what if that good thing doesn’t happen? If it seems we’re stuck in a place where nothing, to our way of thinking, is going right. Too often the enemy sneaks in at that point to whisper lies to our writer’s heart: 

This is going nowhere. 

No matter what you do, your books will never be bestsellers. 

You’re wasting time and money. 

On and on the lies go, feeding our emotions until we spiral deeper and deeper. Friends, that is NOT the deep God wants for you! 

You may be reading this and thinking something along the lines of, “But, we’re believers! We shouldn’t ever be down!”

I hate to break it to you, but being believers doesn’t mean we’re not human. Nor does it mean we’re perfect. Far from it. Believing in Christ doesn’t keep us from feeling. Nor should it! God made us in His image, and those feelings He gave us are a reflection of His feelings. 

 Of course we’ll feel down at times! For so many reasons: Loss, loved ones who don’t know God, disappointment in our careers, expectations that don’t materialize… There is no shortage of difficulties in this life. 

 A writer friend of Karen’s was SO excited that her debut novel was coming out with a major Christian publisher. She’d done everything right, and everyone at the publishing house, from folks in editorial to marketing to sales, were just as excited as she was. Her release day dawned, and she was on the computer doing all the things she’d been told to do…

Then the world went upside down. Two planes came out of nowhere and crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. And just like that, no one cared that her book was releasing. No one cared about anything but the attack on America. Her much anticipated book faded into the background, and eventually went out of print with very few sales. 

Is it wrong that this happened to her? No, it was simply life. Life in a broken, sin-soaked world where hatred runs rampant. But you can understand how a writer in this situation would be downcast. 

Of course, that’s an extreme example of broken expectations. But we share it to say that sadness, sorrow, even just feeling blue are all a part of the human experience. And we, as writers, tend to feel those things to our core. 

In her online article, “7 Ways Christians Can Beat the Blues,” Lisa Appello points out that some of the biblical giants of faith struggled with those emotional downward spirals. She writes:

“The Bible calls this being downcast, and it’s an emotion that even some of the stoutest of faith dealt with. David often felt downcast and it’s reflected in many of the Psalms he penned. Elijah, following an incredible mountain-top experience of God’s power, hit bottom as he hid from his oppressor. Jeremiah, discouraged by isolation and constant opposition, felt so down that he cursed the day he was born.”

Now that’s as downcast as you can get!

A Crosswalk.com article by Debbie McDaniel points out that even Jesus knew what it was to be downcast. She writes, “Isaiah prophesied that Christ would be ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.'”

How do we define being down or downcast? Webster’s helps us gain a fuller understanding by defining it as being “low in spirit.”

I don’t know about you, but that definition sparked a lot of thoughts for me. So we’ll come back to that in a minute. 

First, let’s also consider a few of the synonyms Webster’s gives for downcast: “dispirited, dejected, disconsolate, woebegone.”

In addition, Webster’s explains that all of the words, including downcast, suggest a lack of “cheer, confidence, and hope, perhaps accompanied by shame or chagrin.”

Wow! Webster’s is always helpful, but in this instance, it’s perfect. Because this definition, and these synonyms, help us understand why our emotions get caught up in a downward spiral. What’s more, they give us insight into dealing with this emotional spiral. 

It’s About the Spirit

Remember Webster’s definition: “low in spirits”? And the synonym “dispirited”? When I read that, I sat back and thought, “Whoa. That can be the cause and the cure!” For believers, it’s being low in the Holy Spirit. Or as though the Holy Spirit has been displaced by whatever is fueling our sadness. 

You’re Not Alone

Charles Spurgeon went in and out of feeling depressed. He once wrote, “Fits of depression come over most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous and the joyous not always happy.”

And, of course, there’s David. Now there was a creative. A singer, musician, writer, and poet. His heart was tender toward God. And yet that same heart that made him a “man after God’s own heart” led him to feel down when things were hard. Or, as we said earlier, downcast. This, friends, is where Psalm 42 comes in.

When you heard in the introduction that this particular psalm was dubbed “The Writers’ Psalm,” I bet you wondered who did the dubbing. True confession time: Karen did. I happened to read this psalm right after our podcast with Lori Ann Wood (episodes 187 and 188). We’d been talking about writers’ struggles, and I was amazed at the way Psalm 42 acknowledged the struggles and then, as only God-inspired writing can do, gave us the solution to the struggle.

When you’re downcast or dispirited, when you’re low in the Holy Spirit, do what we’re going to do now: explore and follow David’s lead in Psalm 42.  

“As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I go and stand before him?” Psalm 42:1-2

 At first glance, it might seem that David is praising God or acknowledging his need for God. But when read in the context of the whole Psalm, you can see that this beginning is one of desperation. As though David is at the end of himself and has nowhere else to go. He’s crying out to God. “I need you, Lord, as much as I need water.”

We can survive for as long as twenty-one days without food. We can live even longer without things like shelter. But water? Three days max. After three days without water, you’re done. 

David knew he was in a bad place, and he cried out to God. When your heart and mood seem to be sinking, or if you realize you’re full-on downcast, call out like David did. Tell God how you long for him, how you thirst for Him and His spirit. Seek Him and Him alone. Not sales numbers, not Amazon rankings. Focus only on Him and His holy spirit. 

I confess I almost laughed when I read verse 2: “Where can I go and stand before Him?” 

David KNOWS where to stand before God: wherever he is. So I think this gives us a glimpse into just how lost he felt, how he feared he would no longer have God’s blessing and presence. 

If you struggle with these kinds of feelings, counter them with God’s truth, especially this truth expressed all throughout both the New and Old Testament: God will never leave you nor forsake you.

 “…be content with what you have, for he has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?'” Hebrews 13:5-6

When you start feeling down, seek God. Right where you are. 

David goes even deeper into his woes in verse 3:

“Day and night I have only tears for food, while my enemies continually taunt me, saying, ‘Where is this God of yours?’”

One of the enemy’s most effective tools against us is mockery. And questioning God:

If, indeed, He gave you the task to write, then why aren’t your books on the bestseller list?

Why isn’t your name a household word?

Where are the movies made from your God-given stories?

The good news is that this tactic of Satan’s is hardly new, as you see from the psalm. The moment mockery comes, go on the counter offensive. Attack the enemy with prayer and Scripture. Praise God. Sing to Him. Acknowledge His presence and power and close your ears and spirit to the enemy’s old and tired strategy. 

These solutions we’ve explored so far can lift your spirt from being downcast into the healing and encouragement of God’s truth and light. They are there, ready and waiting for you to use them, to stop the enemy cold. But our psalm doesn’t end here. Emotions have a way ebbing and flowing, and just when we think we’ve dealt with them, something else happens. As it did with David…

We’ll talk about that in the next episode, so stay tuned!

As writers, we certainly have our share of emotional highs and lows. But what do we do when our feelings drag us waaay down? Well! Have we got a psalm for you! #amwriting #christianwriter
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What do you do when you feel downcast?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

A huge thank you to our May sponsor of the month, Priscilla Sharrow! She’s working on her memoir called Bonked! Life, Love, and Laughter with Traumatic Brain Injury, which will release with Redemption Press. Learn more about Priscilla at her website priscillasharrow.com and follow her blog for the TBI/PTSD community.

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 189 – The Writer’s Psalm, Part 1 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

What do you do when your planned-out writing journey suddenly goes off the rails? Guest Lori Ann Wood faced this very situation. Through her God-ordained detour, she discovered three key questions that will help you in your own detours.

About Lori Ann Wood

Lori Ann Wood lives in an empty nest in beautiful Bentonville, Arkansas, with her husband, the love of her life whom she found in 9th grade. She currently serves as WomenHeart Champion Community Educator for Arkansas and American Heart Association Ambassador. Lori Ann was awarded the Frederick Buecher Narrative Essay Award, and her work has been published in numerous print and online venues. Having discovered a serious heart condition almost too late, Lori Ann writers to encourage others to ask their difficult faith questions along the detour of life. Lori Ann’s first book, Divine Detour: The Path You’d Never Choose Can Lead to the Faith You’ve Always Wanted, released with CrossRiver Media in February 2023.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Welcome, listeners, into the deep with us. We’re excited to have you, and we have a guest. We’re continuing our interview with Lori Ann Wood, and we’re talking about life’s unexpected detours and the deep questions that we have for God. We’re going to jump right in!

Lori: I think these are the questions that, maybe, they nag at everybody all the time. But when you get put on a detour, when you get shoved off on this road you don’t want to be on that’s kind of rough and out of the way, and you didn’t like it, and you didn’t choose it, that’s when those questions demand to be paid attention to. 

Erin: Yeah. 

Lori: That’s how my questions came about, and the questions were all derived from those temptations that Jesus faced in the desert.

Erin: Right. I like your first question. It’s a question of worry, you call it. “Is this life all there is?” 

How do you think that worked in your life? How did you answer that for yourself and how did that apply to your writing journey? 

Lori: I think if I were to look at all the questions as a whole, what’s true for all of them is that at some point I realized I didn’t necessarily want to know what the answer was. But I wanted permission to ask the question. 

I felt like I was at a point in my faith where I was almost embarrassed to be asking some really basic questions like that, but I needed permission to ask them. You know, I think about Job in the Bible. I don’t know that he necessarily wanted the answers, but he needed to ask the questions. That’s what I’m trying to pull up in the book. 

It’s just going deep and asking the questions, because when you’re asking the questions, you’re still communing with God. You’re still conversing with him. I think that was always meant to be the idea. 

For that first group of questions that you were talking about, that question of worry, “Is this life all there is?”, I looked at issues like loss, uncertainty, fear, and regret. 

Because we could get to a place when we’re on this detour where we don’t know, should I be just focused on my physical self? Should I be focused on, in writing terms, building my platform? Should that consume all of my day? Should I just be looking at the temporal part of whatever it is we’re doing? 

I explored that from different ways, but in terms of writing, I had to really look at the value that I was putting out there in terms of what was valuable in this life and what would be valuable to people on the other side.

So that question of worry, of “Is this life all there is?”, I had to struggle with it and really come back and answer it over and over again. 

Erin: That makes sense. I love the second question, too. The question of doubt. “Is God always good?” I think that’s an easy one for writers to struggle with in terms of, you know, when bad things happen. I can imagine you sitting there dealing with heart failure wondering, “Is God really always good?” 

Lori: Yeah. This one I think is just really one of the top questions. I think if you Googled the top questions of faith, this is probably going to be at the top of every list. Is God always good? 

You know, I was following God. He had been walking lockstep with me. I thought we were on the same page, and now I find myself on this detour and I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know if God’s left the scene. I don’t know if he has all of a sudden gone deaf to my prayers, or if I’m doing something wrong. 

We start to question if our current pain or our current position somehow indicates God’s level of care for us. Because it doesn’t feel like love sometimes. Just as human beings we’re like, “Wait, this doesn’t quite feel right.”

So we struggle with the question: Is God always good? In the book, I looked at things like protection and resilience and vulnerability and idols, and wondering how that plays into our faith and how we move that forward. 

In terms of writing, one of the things I was doing early on, and I didn’t realize it at the time, because in my heart failure journey, my heart function was really low, and then sixteen months in my heart jumped up to almost normal. 

Erin: Wow. 

Lori: It surprised everybody almost as much as the initial diagnosis. But it wasn’t permanent. What happens when you’re in heart failure is you’re on this downward line graph. When you’re on that downward graph, you can have some spikes up, but the general direction is still down. I was experiencing one of those spikes, but I thought that spike up was the end of my story. I thought, “Okay. Beginning. End. I get it.”

Then about three years ago, my heart function dropped quite a bit, and I was in active heart failure again. I, at that point, wanted to honestly protect God a little bit. I wasn’t sure what to write because I had been writing about answered prayer and healing. Then I thought, “Wow, how do I do this now? How do I reconcile what’s going on with my writing because I don’t know how this is gonna end.”

That was a hard one. In that question of doubt, as a writer, I had to really look at how do I move forward. That’s when these questions really came into focus for me. Because the only way to move forward is to be honest and say, “I don’t know how it’s gonna end.”

I also had to know at some point that God is always going to be good, and it doesn’t have anything to do with how much our life matches what we had imagined our life would look like. 

Karen: I think that that’s an important aspect of this, what you’re talking about with what we imagined life would be. I never imagined that at sixty-five I’d be pretty much incapacitated by diabetes, that I’d be incapacitated by interstitial lung disease, which is ultimately what will kill me.

It never occurred to me in those early years and in my faith with God that these things were where my journey would take me. But the cool thing is when you stop and balance your expectations with God’s character. We miss God’s character when we’re so focused on our expectations. 

I’m not saying don’t ask the question. I’m not saying, you know, don’t struggle with the question. I understand. 

Personally, I didn’t struggle with it because I had come to a place long before where whether I live, I am the Lord’s, or whether I die, I am the Lord’s. Whether I live, therefore, or die, I am the Lord’s. There was such a confidence in that. But I’m a very simplistic believer. I take God at his word in a simplistic way. 

People who struggle and come in and need to know the theology and all those kinds of things, I admire that. But I don’t want that. I like being able to just say, “Okay, Lord, I received that and I’m walking in that.”

I’m in prayer all the time. Conversing with him all the time, which doesn’t mean I’m any better than anybody else. That’s just my path. There have been times when I’ve struggled in my marriage. I couldn’t figure out why I married the man I did when there were so many issues, so many problems. Why we never had kids. There were struggles. 

But in the midst of all that, God led me, and he will lead each of us to look then and say, “Okay, here are my expectations of what my life was gonna be.” 

Don and I were in counseling for twenty years, and about halfway through we decided our mantra was, “God is in control. I don’t like it. I don’t want to be on this path. But he’s in control, and I trust that.”

The other thing that we always used to say is, “This is not the cruise I signed on for.” 

I fully expected to have children and grandchildren and all those things. That didn’t happen because of Don’s childhood, and the abuse he suffered. But I don’t think that that was God not being good or kind. 

I had a really honest, blunt friend who told me one day when I was talking with him and bemoaning the fact that I’d lost so much by marrying Don. He looked at me and he said, “What if you marrying Don isn’t about you? What if it’s about Don? What if God has given you this wounded, devastated heart to present whole to him as best you can by loving him?”

My initial godly response was, “So, not even my pain is about me? Really?” 

Lori: Oh, that’s so true. I can relate to what you said because my husband, faith has always come really easy for him. He’s a complete truster. When I was first in the hospital, he’s a runner, and he finally went for his run after I’d been in the hospital for a week. 

He came back in and he said, “Felt so good. I finally talked to God again, and I’ve realized that even if you don’t get better, everything’s gonna be okay.” 

I didn’t take it very well. 

Karen: He’s a really empathetic, sensitive sort, isn’t he? 

Lori: But he was there. I got there eventually, but he was usually way ahead of me. My dad, who passed away in 2020 from lung cancer, and I are similar. We both come to faith by this questioning. By questioning, we may not get the answer, but we are grabbing out for God’s hand and pulling him in. All the time. 

Erin: Right. 

Lori: I think people do that in different ways, but that’s the beauty of it. We don’t have to be the same. 

Erin: Karen, you touched a little bit on what’s going on with Lori Ann’s third question here. The question of control: Is God’s plan enough? 

I especially love this for writers because we have our own expectations of what our writing is going to do for the world and accomplish. So, you know, is God’s plan enough? What if his plan is not the same as ours? How did you deal with that question or come about that?

Lori: That question of control is hard, and maybe it’s harder for people like me that question all the time. Because I like to know what’s ahead. I like to know what the plan is. And this writing thing, it’s not for planners, is it? 

Karen: Yeah, if you go into it thinking you will have any control whatsoever, you are deceived.

Lori: Right? My book is launching this week and the most helpless thing is wanting people to review the book and just sitting there and watching. Are they gonna review it? Will they ever review it? Because there’s not one thing you can do about it. You can’t buy it. You can’t do it yourself. 

I had to really struggle with how to even present the book because I wanted it to be not really about my medical events. Those are woven into it, but I wanted it to be for other people who were on a detour who needed to ask the question.

That was something that at some point in my life, and I think it was at a writer’s conference when I got some feedback and realized, “I don’t think I can just write a straight memoir. I don’t think that’s going to resonate. It’s not going to get out enough to people and do what God wants it to do in that form.”

I had to kind of go back to the drawing board and that’s when those sticky notes started moving around. 

Karen: You know, it’s really great because you can take each of these questions and you can do big picture about life. But then as writers, we can take them and utilize each one of them for our writing.

Is this all there is in my writing? Question of worry. What if my book doesn’t sell the way I want it to? What if I don’t reach many people? What if, what if, what if?

The question of doubt: Is God always good to me as a writer? If I’m not getting contracts, then God’s not being good. Again, you’re contrasting your expectations with his character.

Then the question of control: Is God’s plan for my writing enough? What if only one, and we’ve said this before, what if only one person reads it and that person’s life has changed? Is that good enough for you if that’s God’s intent for you as a writer? 

Erin: Right. I think that last question about God’s plan being enough, that speaks to people who may be having regrets about this, that, or the other thing. I have a friend who’s struggling with their career. They’ve been in their career for over twenty years and they feel disillusioned. Even bitter, even upset, even filled with regret of wasting their life. I just want to say, “But what if that was God’s plan? Is God’s plan enough?”

It’s a very difficult thing to dig our way out of when we have those types of regret. But that’s where we go back to, well, was it the detour? Was it the plan? What was happening there? 

Lori: Yes, and I think we sort of get our mind twisted around because we’re so driven now by numbers. How many followers do I have? How many people are on my email list? 

That seems like that’s where our worth is. But you know, we can know from just getting one email, or one response, or one comment from somebody who was really struggling with something. Those little glimpses where you’re like, “If that’s all I ever get, that’s gonna be enough.”

We see that from time to time and get these little flickers. But it’s so easy to just get caught in, you know, how many reviews am I getting? How many copies am I going to sell? How many people are on my email list? I’ve learned, and it was a hard lesson, but I’ve learned that my plan has never been anywhere close to as good as God’s plan.

Erin: Well, that’s fair. 

Karen: It is fair. And it’s necessary because, I mean, we did a whole podcast on understanding that success is measured by obedience. Not by numbers, not by sales numbers, not by reviews, not by any of that. Our success as children of God who’ve been given the task to write is measured by our obedience.

Have I been obedient? That’s the only thing that we have any control over, whether or not we’re being obedient to that task. God has everything else in hand. 

All these questions that you’ve been asking and what you’ve shared with us, it’s all so important for each of us to take the time and to take the courage, because it does take courage to ask those hard questions, to dig deeper into ourselves.

If you are feeling, as you listen to this podcast, if you’re struggling with a sense of disillusionment, with a thought like something that you have on your website, Lori Ann, which I really like: “Why trust a God who disappoints?” Then you have to go back when you’re facing that question and ask yourself, “But did God disappoint? Or were your expectations other than what God wanted you to do?”

It always comes back to, when we start to doubt God, we’ve got to make those hard studies and come to a point where we recognize that God is God, and we are His creation. You have to keep that in mind because he is using each one of us to save others. What more can we want than that?

Asking these questions and digging deep into: Is that all there is? Is God always good? Is God’s plan enough? Friends out there, I encourage you. Dig into those. Check out Lori Ann’s book, check out her story, and then consider your own journey. Your life journey, your writing journey, and consider who gave you the task that you have.

Who is he? Is God who he says he is? For me that answer is quite clearly, he absolutely is. And he will do what he will do. So ask yourself, what is my answer to that? 

Erin: Amen. 

Guest @lori_ann_wood has discovered three key questions that will help you when your writing journey and life seem to go off the rails. #amwriting #ChristianWriter
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Divine Detour: The Path You’d Never Choose Can Lead to the Faith You’ve Always Wanted by Lori Ann Wood

What difficult questions do you have for God?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

We have openings for our Patreon Sponsor of the Month. Along with our sincere gratitude, we also announce our sponsors’ books, services, and website on the podcast. Sponsors also get a banner and link in the show notes of both monthly episodes and right here in this space as well! Find more information at Patreon.com/writefromthedeep

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 188 – Detours on Your Writing Journey with Guest Lori Ann Wood, Part 2 appeared first on Write from the Deep.

It’s so hard when the journey we think we’re on in our writing takes a detour. We worry and wonder what God is doing. IF God is doing anything. Guest Lori Ann Wood shares the shocking—and life-threatening—detour in her own life and writing journey, and how God’s miraculous hand was at work for his amazing purpose.

About Lori Ann Wood

Lori Ann Wood lives in an empty nest in beautiful Bentonville, Arkansas, with her husband, the love of her life whom she found in 9th grade. She currently serves as WomenHeart Champion Community Educator for Arkansas and American Heart Association Ambassador. Lori Ann was awarded the Frederick Buecher Narrative Essay Award, and her work has been published in numerous print and online venues. Having discovered a serious heart condition almost too late, Lori Ann writers to encourage others to ask their difficult faith questions along the detour of life. Lori Ann’s first book, Divine Detour: The Path You’d Never Choose Can Lead to the Faith You’ve Always Wanted, released with CrossRiver Media in February 2023.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Karen: Hello, friends. Welcome into the deep today. We’re so excited to have a guest, who Erin will introduce. We’re going to talk about the reality of detours, whether they’re health or otherwise in our writing journey, and how they often turn out to be exactly God’s intended road for us. 

Erin: I’m excited to introduce Lori Ann Wood. She currently serves as founding leader of the Parenting Education Ministry at the Church of Christ in Bentonville. She also serves as WomenHeart Champion Community Educator for Arkansas and American Heart Association Ambassador. Y’all, I bet we’ll be talking about some of the reasons why!  

Lori Ann was awarded the Frederick Buechner Narrative Essay Award, and her work has been published in numerous print and online venues, including Heart Insight Magazine, the Christian Century Magazine, Just Between Us Magazine, the Joyful Life Magazine, Pepperdine University Press, and so much more.

Having discovered a serious heart condition almost too late, Lori Ann writes to encourage others to ask their difficult faith questions along the detours of life. Lori Ann’s first book, Divine Detour: The Path You’d Never Choose Can Lead to the Faith You’ve Always Wanted just released, so that’s exciting. Lori Ann, we’re glad to have you here today. Welcome. 

Lori: Oh, thank you. It’s so great to be here. 

Erin: Let’s just jump in. What, Lori Ann, does the deep mean to you? 

Lori: The deep to me is mostly when I personally am taking my faith to the point where I’m going deep enough. Because I think we get to a certain point in our faith sometimes, and we stop because we don’t want to go any deeper, because we don’t know what the answers might be or where we might end up.

To me, the deep is not being afraid to go in there and ask those questions and dig and dig and dig. That’s where I’m coming from when we’re talking about the deep. 

Erin: I love it, and I know from what I’ve learned about you that you have certainly faced deep places of trial and struggle. I’d love for you to start off by sharing that. For you as a person, what’s been going on? 

Lori: I got a very, well, I felt like it was an out-of-the-blue diagnosis about seven years ago. I thought I had the flu, or maybe I thought it could be pneumonia. I hadn’t had pneumonia. I was just a little draggy.

My kids were coming in for the holidays, and I was still functioning and doing all these things, but I wasn’t myself. I knew I didn’t have the energy that I should, but because it was a holiday week, it was Thanksgiving week, I didn’t go to the doctor. I went to convenient care a couple of times, but I didn’t go see my family doctor until the Friday after Thanksgiving.

He immediately looked at me, listened to my heart with a stethoscope like they always do, and took me to the x-ray lab and said, “If we’re lucky it’s pneumonia.”

Erin: That’s a little scary. 

Karen: There’s something you don’t wanna hear. 

Lori: Right? But I’m thinking that’s the worst case, and what he found on that x-ray was that my heart was very enlarged. The Cleveland Clinic cardiologist later told me it was the largest heart she’d ever seen. 

Karen: Oh my word!

Lori: I was immediately admitted to cardiac ICU. My heart was functioning at 6%. I had no idea. It was to me just unbelievable. I had no family history. I had no risk factors. I had great cholesterol and low blood pressure.

I had actually done an evaluation for a life insurance policy about a month before that, and they said, “Your numbers are so good. You have less than 3% chance of ever developing heart disease.”

Erin: Wow. 

Lori: Then I found myself in the hospital, and they diagnosed me with end stage heart failure. I had no idea, no clue. Didn’t know what it was. I started on this journey, really in my health, but more importantly in my faith, and I’ve been on that journey for about seven years. 

Erin: Were you a writer at the time or did writing come about because of this? 

Lori: I think I’m like a lot of people. I felt like I had a book lurking around in the back of my head somewhere, but I still had kids at home and I was teaching college at the time and just was not writing.

I had ideas. You know, I’d maybe write a book about how to plan children’s birthday parties or how to take a vacation on the cheap, something like that. But I never wrote. 

Once I got this diagnosis and I couldn’t stand up and speak for two hours at a time, I had to make a lot of adjustments in my lifestyle. I found that I could sit at my computer and I could type all day long. So this book started, and really the whole writing journey started, because I wouldn’t have taken the time to do it in a safer, healthier life. 

Erin: I love how ironic that is. It’s like, “Now everything is gone. Everything’s been ruined, so I’m gonna write.” You know, it’s like, “Now that my health is terrible, hey, let’s write.” 

Lori: Exactly. I didn’t want to even start writing anything down, but my husband told me when I was in ICU, ” We should be writing down what’s going on.”

I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t want to relive it. I just wanted to get back to my normal life. I wanted this to be kind of a blip on the radar and then get back to the normal planned route. I was in denial, but I did eventually start writing things down. 

Karen: We’ve had a couple of previous podcasts talking about focus and how to maintain focus as writers and the things that take away from focus. But in this case, God brought about this focusing of what it was that you were to do because you couldn’t do any of those other things.

Like you said, if you’d had a healthier lifestyle and were still teaching, and with the kids and everything, you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t write. But to discover that this is what you could do now, from that stepped-back perspective, I see that as God’s saying, “This is your task, and this is how I’m going to make sure that you do the task that I have for you.”

Lori: Yes. It’s one of the things I think back on. In one of my heart failure groups, and I think anonymous wrote this like so many other wise things that come out of anonymous, but it said, “Not all storms come to destroy your life. Some storms come to clear your path.”

I really felt like this storm cleared my path. I mean, another way to look at it is a lot of doors closed at that time. By eliminating options for me, I was able to focus down the hallway to the door that was open and bypass all those closed doors. 

Erin: I can see, though, that there would have been a great deal of reluctance because all of a sudden you are faced with this life-threatening situation and, you know, who wants to go there? That’s really scary. 

I mean, as you say, you wanted it to be a blip, but now you have to dive into it. You have to embrace it, and that’s scary. How did you find courage to do that? 

Lori: I’m wrestling with the word courage because what I did at first, a friend of mine dropped by a little notebook in my ICU room. I maybe had been there a couple days at that point, and it was just one of those little spiral notebooks. I think she meant for me to write down doctor’s notes or medications or instructions for the kids or something like that. 

What it ended up being is in the middle of the night when I would wake up, I would just write down complaints almost to God. Some angsty statements like, “I don’t get this. I don’t understand. Where are you? Why are you not showing up?”

I just started writing that down. That was one little element that was happening. The other thing that started happening at that time is, because I had this health situation, I started a blog because it was just easier to keep people up on my health news that way.

Erin: Yeah. 

Lori: Eventually stuff from that little notebook seeped into the blog, and that started resonating with people. Not people who were necessarily on a health detour, but for people that were on a relationship detour, or a career detour, or whatever kind of detour they happen to be on. They’re like, “Hmm, I don’t know anything about heart failure, but these issues seem a lot like what I’m wrestling with.”

That’s when I knew. That’s when I sort of dug in and thought, “Okay. I think I know what I need to be sharing now.” That was where the courage came from, if you can call it that. 

Erin: Yeah. I think what happened was it built very slowly. It started with just frustration. It started with just this little tiny step of writing something down in that notebook. Then you took that next step.

It was like God kind of just nudged your step. Small baby steps, and it did bloom into something that seemed courageous because pretty soon you’re exploring what’s going on. You’re exploring the deeper questions that God is calling you to explore, and ask, and find solutions for.

Let’s talk about that. In your writing journey, you were working on this book. It turned out to be the book that we talked about, the Divine Detour book, and you came up with some questions that every life must answer. I love that. Talk a little bit about what those questions are and what they meant and how they apply to writers.

Lori: When I started looking at everything I had been writing, at some point I put every title and every idea on a sticky note and started to move them around and figure out how I was going to make sense of all this stuff that was just sort of bubbling out of my experience at the time. 

Everything inside me wanted it to be chronological. I wanted it to have a beginning and an end. I even had my sections figured out. I was going to have my diagnosis and my device, because I have an internal device. The alliteration was there and I was liking that. It felt right. 

Then three years ago I experienced kind of a downturn in my health, and I had this sort of feeling like, “I don’t know the end of this story.”

I thought before I could write from beginning to end, but I don’t know the end of this story. That made me pause for a while. Then when I looked at those little sticky notes again, I happened to be studying about Jesus’s 40 days in the desert and the three temptations. It struck me that those temptations were really just internal questions that we asked ourselves.

Those questions looked a lot like three buckets that my little sticky notes were trying to go into. I felt like I was onto something, so I started exploring these questions and putting them out to people who were reading my blog, and other people who had supported my writing along the way. 

They said, “I’ve asked those same three questions!”

Karen: After listening to everything that Lori Ann has been through, I bet you guys are just on the edge of your seat waiting to hear what those questions are. Well, you’ll hear all about them in the next episode, so stay tuned and we’ll visit with Lori Ann again!

Guest @lori_ann_wood shares what happens when your life or writing is hijacked, and you find yourself on a detour you never wanted! #amwriting #christianwriter
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Divine Detour: The Path You’d Never Choose Can Lead to the Faith You’ve Always Wanted by Lori Ann Wood

Have you ever found yourself on an unwanted detour? What helped you cope?

Thanks to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

We have openings for our Patreon Sponsor of the Month. Along with our sincere gratitude, we also announce our sponsors’ books, services, and website on the podcast. Sponsors also get a banner and link in the show notes of both monthly episodes and right here in this space as well! Find more information at Patreon.com/writefromthedeep

Many thanks also to the folks at Podcast P.S. for their fabulous sound editing!

The post 187 – Detours on Your Writing Journey with Guest Lori Ann Wood, Part 1 appeared first on Write from the Deep.