From the time I learned my alphabet and could begin to form words, I was a writer. I vividly remember an instance during one of my family’s cross-country moves:
The space under the hotel room desk was the perfect size for little five-year old me. I crawled under with my notebook and pencil and began to write (and even illustrate!) my first full story: Basko and Boppy. It’s a wonderfully nonsensical story of two cars who were brothers. It is complete with rudimentary one-syllable rhyming like “frog” and “log”. It is a story I hold dear to this day, because I see it as the birth of my love for storytelling.
Writing is an intense process for me. I used to hold my pens and pencils so tightly that my hand would cramp up. I still find myself doing this sometimes, and I have the writing callus to prove it. While most of the world prefers to “write” using keyboards, I almost always put pen to paper before transferring it to type script. I like to look at my rough drafts, words crossed out and arrows indicating where phrases or paragraphs should move. There is something so freeing and so beautiful about seeing the work of my hand.
I ususally even keep these rough drafts of the things I pen. I have the “evolution” of most of the songs I’ve written in different notebooks. It’s intriguing to look back and see my thought process and how much I have grown in my ideas and my abilities. It shows me how far I’ve come.
I’ve learned that it takes a lot of refining to produce anything worth sharing. It takes rewording, spell correcting and even removing full paragraphs of text. The writing process can be painstaking – which is probably why it is taking me so long to finish the book I’m writing.
But just as I work hard to write and refine the stories I share, God has been working in my heart to refine me. He knows all of me. He has seen the rough drafts of me and has worked tirelessly in my life to make me into the person I need to be. He doesn’t look at me and see all the scribbles and arrows, He sees my potential. He doesn’t see the crumpled and scattered pages of my life, he sees the beautifully bound finished product.
Philippians 1:6 “Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
Songs of Deliverance 