Can I be . . . ?
Can I be committed?
“You’ll never do it if you don’t start”, I told myself earlier this week. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to start writing (i.e., half-done blog sites I’ve never published or kept up, copious amounts of worn & scribbled notebooks labeled ‘musings’ in invisible ink only I can see), but this is the first time I’ve approached writing enlightened to the fact that prose is a recipe never perfected.
I’ve always romanticized the end project of writing, the glory, the prestige; however, I lacked the passion and commitment to sit in a quiet corner of some secret room and allow the words to spill out of my spirit. I feel a calling from God to write — for what purposes, I do not yet know. I do know, however, that if this is what I am to be, a writer, then in order to do so, I must be . . .
So I suppose I must be vulnerable. I must be honest. I must be the “messy human-being” I know myself to be (so prepare for some messy discourse if you’re committing to reading). I must be committed.
I suppose that means that I’ll write, and I’ll write often. I’ll write when I feel like it, and when I feel like doing anything other than writing. I’ll carve out time, altering the landscape of my already convoluted schedule to churn out words, whether they be comically terrible or delightfully true. Here we grow!
Wait . . . have I just entered into another intimate relationship of exposure, truth, risk, love, frustration, self-denial, soul building, joy, tears, laughter, introspection, retrospection, dreaming, planning, working, exhaustion, rest, and a myriad of other qualifiers that I could bother to list aimlessly only to portray the fact that relationships cannot be defined by the summation of text? If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then an authentic relationship is worth more words than stars in the sky.
It’s becoming apparent that commitment was the right choice of word. . .
The mark of maturation is coming to the wisdom that these things require more than a feeling (thanks, Boston), but a heart of devotion even when the feeling ebbs for a season. C.S. Lewis describes love incredibly in Mere Christianity:
“…it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable [loving] is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings…do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”
In other words: practice makes perfect. I believe that this description applies to the love of anything — people or habits.
This too I love.
So I’ve arrived here — writing about writing. Is that paradoxical? I hope so. The first lesson I’ve learned is this: even when you have vast and sundry things you want to say, hold them in your heart and treasure them until the time is right. It’s of no use to just vomit a hodgepodge of passions and knit them into one literary Frankenstein (I almost did that with this piece).
I’m committed, will you be too? If you’ll accept this invitation to walk with me here you’ll see a lot of different things: depths of Christian theology & orthodoxy, petitions for the Church to be the Church, tirades about tea, more information about wild edible mushrooms than you ever wanted to know, just enough about jazz, me talking about how amazing my wife & son are and how I’d hate to imagine what I’d be in a world where I don’t have them in my life, my convictions about youth ministry and the things that plague our youth today, and, probably not lastly, some of my most challenging struggles that I’m sure are shared by an unspoken majority of people across the globe. After all, to quote American treasure Bob Ross:
“Gotta have opposites, light and dark and dark and light, in painting. It’s like in life. Gotta have a little sadness once in awhile so you know when the good times come. . . .”
What else can I be . . . . ?
