Lessons, Soul Searching and Meditation

I haven’t been doing much fiction writing lately, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. Quite the contrary!

A few weeks ago, I joined the American Christian Fiction Writers. If you are a writer, want to be a writer or are learning to be a writer, I recommend this organization very highly. The archived workshops alone are well worth the price of admission. I’ve already gotten more than the membership fee worth of value from the half dozen archived workshops I’ve worked through and the e-loop coursework, too.

Most of those lessons, whether past or present, require a significant amount of writing, which helps keep up word counts on a daily basis.

A good many of them require soul searching and meditation, too.

While not entirely unexpected, these last two items have forced me to slow down quite a bit to figure out who I am, why I am the way I am, how those things influence writing and how those things might be used to influence characters. It’s not all good. In fact, one such question about identifying habits, quirks and behaviors left me thinking “Where do I begin?”!

I love writing.

I hate soul searching. The process is fine and I’m always the better for it. But God has a nasty habit of revealing things that I don’t necessarily want to see. Once I’ve seen them, He then usually requires that I do something with the revelation. Like change.

I’m dealing with one such issue right this moment. As you might guess, that means I’m not particularly thrilled with the thoughts that are percolating in the gray matter. Nor am I likely to be thrilled with the conclusion I reach, either.

But that is part of the process for writing and for life in general.

An egg needs to be cracked to make an omelet. That truism holds true for spiritual growth, too. In this case, my comfort zone is the ‘egg’ that needs to be cracked. The finished omelet is a closer walk with God and a more Godly life, but in between God’s reaching through the barrier of my comfort zone and God’s successful improving of my life and walk, there is all the necessary stuff of beating eggs and applying sufficient heat. This egg doesn’t like it very much, let me tell you!