New Every Morning

Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.”
Lamentations 3:22-24

Participating in National Novel Writing Month is teaching me about a lot more than just writing.

It’s teaching me about God’s provision for my life and in my life.

In the final days leading up to National Novel Writing Month, I had all kinds of doubts and second guesses about participating. I won’t mention them here because they were the subject of a devotional titled, Doing the Impossible (read it here), but they were significant.

I’m now past the halfway mark on National Novel Writing Month. On the down hill side, you might say.

The story I’m writing is progressing beyond my wildest imaginations. When I was agonizing about whether or not to participate, I never thought I reach the 50,000 word mark on November 14, but that’s exactly what happened. Amazing!

But the real eye opener didn’t happen as I was wrapping up work that day. It happened when I opened my eyes that morning. Before I even got out of bed.

I went to bed the night before with no idea what I was going to do the next day. I’d written everything I could think of on Friday, November 13. There was nothing left. The tank was empty when I coasted to a stop at about 11:50 p.m., saved my documents and turned off the computer. I had no idea where the story was going from its current point. No idea what would happen next to the two main characters, what plotting device to use to get to the Next Thing.

When I woke up the following morning, there was a phrase in my awareness.

“Louise McKay-Baxter was not a happy woman.”

That was it.

I knew who Louise was, but she had made only one appearance in the story and that happened through a telephone conversation in the first chapter. Nothing since. I hadn’t planned to introduce her into the story at all. She was a ‘support character’; one of those characters about whom the main characters know or talk, but who never appears in person.

But after awaking with the above line in my mind, I decided it was time to rethink that plan. Writing for the day started there and concluded for the day with enough new words and chapters written to push the story past the 50,000 word mark.

That morning’s circumstance made me think of all the other days so far this month that the same thing or something similar happened. Yeah, the story is at 50,000, but very few of those words came easily. There were days in the past week when I thought about not writing at all because I didn’t know what to write.

Whether the ‘blank’ came over night or in the middle of the day, though, something has always happened to get things started again. God has put a word or a phrase in my mind through watching other people, listening to the radio, talking with Neal or from some other source and that word or phrase has led to many more.

And that has led me back to the passage with which I started this post. Specifically, “Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

God does provide compassions every day. Sometimes every hour and even every moment if that’s what we need. We aren’t given an allotment of compassions that must last all our lives and that can be exhausted. God is inexhaustible, therefore his compassions are inexhaustible.

What’s been going on this month has been truly humbling to me. I love to write and have loved to write for almost as long as I can remember. I also happen to think I can turn a decent phrase and string words together to tell stories people want to read.

But I’m not responsible for what’s going on here beyond making the time to sit down and write. There is something going on that I can describe only by saying I’m being equipped to the task for each day. It is still up to me to do the typing and I can mess it up major big-time.

But the more I write, the more I see that if I give the story over to God and seek His leading, something will happen.

This month’s experience tells me that sometimes the ‘something’ will be a whole lot more than I could ever imagine or expect.

Praise the Lord!