Meaningless!

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the blogger.  “Utterly meaningless!  Everything is meaningless!”  thus exhausting my quota of exclamation marks for the month.  Actually my response has had a bit less flourish - more akin to a banal “Ugh!” than the poetic angst of the writer of Ecclesiastes.  But it’s all the same, frustration over labor that bears no fruit.  Running hard only to find myself stuck on a treadmill.  I’m right where I began. 

You see, I have misplaced my memory stick.  This is not good. 

This stick is where I save my writing projects.  Cue the lecture on the importance of backing up my files.  I didn’t.  Most of what is on that memory stick has no duplicate. 

Much of the material is in its infancy – ideas that catch my attention as having potential.   I’ll jot down a synopsis in a couple phrases.  Most recently this nugget – “The marshmallow experiment.  Delayed gratification.”  This means little to you. To me it is an article that needs to be written.  Fortunately, this one is fresh enough that I remember it. I have dozens of these - all manner of kernels just waiting to be planted.   Most I will not remember.

Some of them have been massaged a bit – the subjects of writing exercises.  I give myself fifteen minutes to take one of those seed thoughts and type whatever comes to mind.  Amazing how often this becomes the substance of blog posts or articles.   In fifteen minutes I may write 75% of the article.  It will take another few hours to write the last 25 per cent.  A lot of rapid progress happens on the front end.  Inspiration provides substantial momentum.

A handful of these documents have been almost finished, awaiting some final editing to be ready for public viewing. A couple I have begun shopping around.  Queries have been sent.  Dialogue with editors has been opened. 

All of that lost.  This is not good.

Oh, there are bigger tragedies in the world; even bigger problems in my own life.  And in this I still find grace.  I had a deadline yesterday for an article.  I happened to save a nearly finalized draft on my hard drive.  Good fortune.  Or grace.

But for now I feel mostly frustration.  The idea of starting from scratch feels overwhelming to me.  I choke on the prospect, finding it too big to swallow.  I guess some would respond to set back with further resolve.  I throw up my hands, cry uncle, go watch television.  To sit and write feels futile.   I’m disgusted with the treadmill. 

But God brings me back to this.  What has served as an outlet for thoughts is now used as an outlet for feelings.  I need some way to vent my frustration.  I will write it.

No wild insight here.  No point that will make you ponder. No new angle to consider.  Just me frustrated.  I know there is more to the book of Ecclesiastes than the author’s cadence of  meaninglessness.  There is a conclusion.  But reading the book, the beat that resounds is the futility of life.  The author does not hedge on his expression of this. Nor will I. All that hard work lost, a waste of time, a chasing after the wind. I am frustrated.

Blog News:  This month I began writing for Good News Florida and will be contributing monthly to their newspaper.  I also have an article in The Journey Christian Newspaper (see page 3) that appeared on this blog about a month ago.  

Don't Shoot the Editor

Recently, I received a complimentary copy of a magazine with a piece I wrote.  It is a bi-monthly publication that has a daily Bible reading with a short reflection on that passage.  As a neophyte writer, it's still a novelty to see something I wrote in print, so I quickly browsed through the magazine looking for my contribution.  When I found it, I was disappointed.  The piece ends with a brief prayer, which they included as I had written, but then added the Lord's Prayer to fill the space remaining on the page.  I didn't like it.  It didn't fit the theme I was developing.  It felt cobbled, sloppily tacked to the end of what I had written.  It wasn't my voice.  I value the Lord's Prayer, but I don't use it rote in my own prayer life.  I would never have written that myself. It put me in a bit of a funk.

A few days later I received a copy of an edited article I wrote for a magazine coming out in February 2012. The editor asked me to look through her edits and reply with any feedback. As I read through the article, I found that none of the edits were substantive.  Small changes in word order, replacing vague pronouns with clear nouns, and rewording a couple sentences was the entirety of the editing.  Ninety-nine percent of the article was left untouched.  I felt validated as a writer, pleased that little was altered.  In this case, my voice would come through clearly, unaltered by a stodgy editor in a remote windowless cubicle.

Soon after, I read Psalm 131
    My heart is not proud, O Lord
       my eyes are not haughty;
    I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.
    But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
      like a weaned child with its mother,
      like a weaned child is my soul within me.

The weaned child as a picture of a still and quiet soul.  It's compelling.  Only my soul is decidedly not like a weaned child, stilled and quieted.  My soul is restless.  More like a suckling child, rooting for its mother's breast, frantic for nourishment, unsettled and impatient.  That's why I react so viscerally to any tampering with my writing.  It is an expression of the proud heart and haughty eyes that are resisted by the Psalmist.  Mine is an arrogant pen.

I write to teach.  If you've read many of my posts, you probably recognize that.  Writing for me begins with having something worth saying, a nugget of truth that is worth communicating.  Hopefully it is something insightful and rich.  Trite is trite, no matter how it is packaged.  Let me not be guilty of serving up junk food on a platter.  What I write must have substance.

But I also don't want to be guilty of serving up bland or half-baked entrees.  Once the nugget of truth is settled on, the challenge in writing is figuring out how to communicate that well.  It's this challenge that causes me to labor over words, write and re-write, and even allow for editors to modify what I have written.  It can be an agonizing process with more time spent staring at a computer screen, reading and re-reading, than spent actually writing.  Energy spent makes me feel invested in what I have written.

This effort is always in service to that nugget of truth I am trying to communicate.  It's a truth that is not mine.  I merely convey what is laid out in the Word of God.  I am the messenger. If that is true, then I need not be so possessive of the things I write, nor fret over whether my voice shines through.  Self-promotion can eclipse that fundamental purpose of communicating that nugget of truth. But ultimately, God can be trusted with that.  It's his truth, after all.

It's mine to rest my soul.  Still.  Quiet.  Weaned.  Lord make it so.
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Welcome To My Blog

Today I launch my blog, another voice in the cacophony of the blogosphere.  I do so with realistic expectations.  My circle of readers will always be small – for some posts maybe even nil.  I do not aspire to build a following or start a movement. The explanation goes back to my birthday.  This summer my wife honored my 39 years of life with the book Blogging For Dummies.  She was trying to send me a message, which I hope was more weighted on the side of “You should be blogging” than “You are a dummy.” 

But actually the explanation goes back further than that.  Because for months Sue and I have been talking about what God wants for me. My job for the last six years has been as a retail manager.  I manage a large convenience store (think 24 pumps, 15 cooler doors, and a full service deli and brick oven pizza shop).  For the most part I enjoy the work, but it does not give me deep satisfaction.  There is the sense that God has something more for me. 

What I have realized is that what gives me the deepest satisfaction is preaching and teaching the Bible in a way that makes it come alive.  I love captivating people with the richness and relevance of Scripture.  Before working in retail I was a pastor for seven years.  And while that was closer to hitting the mark of being satisfying, there was enough about it that I didn’t enjoy that the thought of returning to the pastorate has not been compelling. 

Lately I have been contemplating the prospect of doing what I love without the baggage of all the stuff I didn’t.  To preach and teach without having to chair committees, plan services, lead worship, find Sunday School teachers, counsel parishioners, do hospital visitation, oversee the budget, follow up on absentees, and on and on.  None of those things are bad, but I found none of them enjoyable.

 

Maybe a distinction should be made between my occupation and my vocation.  My occupation is my job, Convenience Store Supervisor for Delta Sonic in North Syracuse, NY.  It pays the bills and provides for benefits.  It offers some security that each week there will be a steady flow of income.  All in all, it’s a good job.  But my vocation (in the truest sense of the word) is my calling.  And I think God has called me to preach and teach.  With occupation securely in place, I can pursue my calling, my vocation, with freedom.  I don’t have to worry about whether it is lucrative or sustainable.  I’m not bound by the shackles of having to support my family with it.  If God sees fit, this could some day grow to become my occupation, but until then, I can pursue it as a hobby – one that provides deep satisfaction in my life.     

So I am taking steps to make this a reality.  I’m starting to teach some and looking for opportunities to preach.  I’ve also started to write more.  For me, writing is just another avenue for teaching.  I write about the intersection of God’s Word and real life.  I realize that publication can be a means of gaining credibility and may open more doors for preaching and teaching, so I have begun sending out proposals to various magazines and journals.  Most recently, Weavings Journal accepted an article I wrote about fear and will publish it in the May/June/July 2012 issue.  All this is part of the process of pursuing my vocation while still gainfully employed by Delta Sonic. 

So the blog fits into this vision as a greenhouse of sorts – a place to put some seed thoughts down, ideas that could someday be the basis of a message or article. This is what God is teaching me, in the raw.  Just the process of writing things down is a discipline that helps crystallize an idea. This, even if no one ever reads the blog.  But this is also a place where I can put ideas out for some initial reaction. These are thoughts that will be in need of polishing.  I welcome any readers to rub a little and help bring out the shine.