I’m an introvert, well-accustomed to the fight against anxiety, have a chronic disease which limits my strength and live on the opposite side of the world to the majority of Christian publishers. I set out on this road to publication almost a decade ago with no publishing contacts, a tiny platform and very little chance of ever making my way out of anyone’s slush pile. It was disheartening, to say the least.
And yet, every time I wondered if it was time to give up on my dream of being published, God would send along someone to give me hope.
A rejection, with a personal note from the agent telling me what I’d done well. A competition judge saying they couldn’t wait to read the whole book. A text from a friend complaining that an early draft I’d sent her had kept her up all night reading – the night before she was heading off to Olympic trials. A hand-written note from my 95-year-old Grandma, whose memory is failing but still prays for my writing and wanted to let me know. The time I knelt beside my bed one night, crying and begging God to give me some direction only to wake up the next morning to an email, totally out of the blue, from a multi-published author who’d been an anonymous judge in a competition I entered and wanted to encourage me and ask if there was any way she could help me figure out what next.
I knew God was faithful before I started writing but looking back, over almost a decade of writing and sending out proposals and not knowing what the next step would be until it was right under my nose, I couldn’t possibly doubt it.
He is faithful, and he is the God of the impossible. One look at my book and I’m reminded of that.
Whatever you’re facing today – an empty page, a rejection, a character who won’t behave, the letting go of a dream, more expectations than you can handle or one of those million-and-one things that’s just one too many to deal with – God is faithful. There is hope. God still does miracles. He’s held you before, he’s still holding you now. You aren’t forgotten. Your dream still matters. Where you are today is not the end. God is still writing your story just like he’s writing mine.
And I, for one, can’t wait to read it!
Where you are today is not the end. God is still writing your story just like he’s writing mine. #SeriouslyWrite #amwriting
