I Don't Know

I recently sat down to work on my novel and found myself in a familiar predicament. I had no idea, no direction, and no desire to write at all. I felt muddled. It was time for something different.

I opened a Google Doc and resisted the urge to format the page. I started typing.

My stream-of-consciousness is apparently very choppy, at least when I'm in such a mood. Lots of short sentences. Lots of parallelism. Lots of repetition. Lots of repetition.

Looking back over it, I found a theme.

"...I don't know why... I don't know why...I don't know what I'm saying...I don't know what I'm doing..."

I don't know. The title of this post. Because I really don't know much of anything.

Lots of people open up about their journeys when they're on the mountain top, and I am tempted to do the same. After all, if you don't know what direction you're going, if you're stagnant and lost, what is there to tell people? But I am here because the valley is important, and I don't want to leave a record of only when I'm alert and in the game. I'm writing this because I hope you can relate. And someday, when I've found my direction (which, realistically, will be a temporary thing anyway), I want to look back and remember something. And it's something I want all of you to hear and hold me to.

If I make it... if I can get a single book in print that isn't a disaster... if I can get my words to work together to make something complete and impactful... it's not me. It's cliche, I know, but some things are cliche because they are true.

My writing is a mess right now, guys. I don't know what I'm doing. I really don't.

And I really don't know if God has truly called me to be a writer. I think so. I chase it because I believe so, but I could be so wrong. Writing is something that I do far too often on my own. I push my own effort into it, hold myself to a schedule, brainstorm and troubleshoot, and try to force it together. And I'm very discouraged, because it isn't working. I want to give up. I really do. It's such a mess that when I sit down to write, I feel like nothing I put on the page will be worth anything ever.

Why do I keep going? Because I think about it every day. The story has become as jumbled inside me as it is on the page, but it still lives there, entertaining my thoughts, something vague and unfinished. And I keep going because I've been doing it for years, I'm scared to let go, and I still believe God planted the desire to write in my heart.

I could be wrong about all of it. I could be beating a dead horse with this thing. I really have no clue. God hasn't told me yet, and honestly, I don't think He will.

2 Corinthians 5:7 says "We live by faith, not by sight" (NIV). I apologize for ripping it out of context, but in summation, Paul is talking about the life we long for in heaven, when we can be "...clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life" (v. 4). It is hard to be surrounded by brokenness, to be broken myself. I want to be consumed by the goodness and glory of God Almighty and not have to trust my own wandering feet again, but be carried by Him. Unfortunately (from a human perspective), that's not what life is like here on Planet Earth. We have to stand on our own two feet and walk.

God doesn't invite us into His office each week to go over His plans for our lives. We're walking blind. We can't see what He's doing. We know His calling on all of us as believers, but He hasn't always given us clear direction for the day-to-day decisions that we have to make. We're walking in the dark. No direction, no idea, no clue. We're afraid. We're unsure. God has taken us by the hand, but we're not conscious of His leading us, because He doesn't say a word about where we're going.

This is the valley. This is the place where we learn to trust.

I am a blind writer at the moment. I can't channel inspired words to spill out on the page. I have to write them myself, which means I wind up trying to engineer and fix things without even knowing what the end product is supposed to look like.

There are a lot of encouraging words out there for times like this. You've got this! Trust yourself. You are enough. Push through, because you're stronger than you know.

I hereby condemn those words as lies, and I want you to know; if this writer ever makes it, if this child of God ever gets anywhere, it's because of God. Because there's no way my story can be anything if I write it on my own.

Hold me to it, friends. And I challenge you to hold yourselves to the same. Don't sugarcoat who you are and what you're capable of. Look in the mirror and memorize your inadequacies, your weaknesses, your failings. When you emerge from the dark with something beautiful in your hands, you need to know where it came from.

God bless all of you. May He bless you with struggles, darkness, and valleys, so you can learn to feel His guiding hand and know that He will be for you everything you're not.