Why write?

  Well, yes. Why write? All that time writing, editing, proofreading, proofreading again and again …

After all, I could be baking delicious cakes for the family to enjoy or digging weeds from our overgrown back garden to allow the lettuces to emerge. Or else – sigh – tidying my study. I can see only a small part of my lovely wooden desk now.

If I were earning a fortune with my writing, it might be different. But I no longer am. I earned a reasonable amount at one stage but I seem to have outgrown that stage. Can I justify this self-indulgent use of my time? Admittedly I sometimes feel I have something Really Worth Saying, something God-birthed. But anyone else could write it, couldn’t they?

 

My memory prods me. Didn’t God say writing was one of my talents? The bible has a lot to say about talents; they are for use, not burial.

So yet again I replay the scene.

 

Gods’ view of my talents

Back in early 1980, I was sharing a flat with a friend in Bardon in Brisbane. Our flat was situated at the bottom of a very steep hill (Bardon, you know?), so we had no view. Only the surrounding houses and hillsides everywhere I looked.  The flat was old and rickety, one of about five flats in an old block and the steps shook when I walked up them. The balcony was visibly unsafe.

The main attraction which had led us to rent the flat was we had friends living at the top of the hill. When I went to their place, if it was late afternoon I was treated to the view of a brilliant sunset out the large kitchen window. The sunset over Mt Coot-tha sent dazzling golden shafts of light into the house.

It was beautiful but – I had to go home to my weather-beaten old flat.

 

Photo of sunset by Arlene

 

One winter’s day I sat in my room in the flat and looked around me, discontented.

‘God, ‘I asked him, ‘how come they (my friends up the road) have a lovely big house and that wonderful view? – and we’re living down here in the valley in this bomby old flat?’ It wasn’t as if they were especially wealthy.

God impressed clearly on my mind, ‘Because they’re using their talents.’ Admittedly they had responsible positions in the church I attended and did their jobs well.

So did that mean I wasn’t using my talents? Where did that leave me, in the light of the parable of the talents?

I took a deep breath. ‘So what do you see as my talents?’ I asked my heavenly Father.

Clearly the words formed in my mind. ‘Writing and praying.’

 

Writing? I’d more or less given that up after becoming a Christian several years earlier, considering several traditional religious activities more important now. And praying – well, I did often find myself praying and God seemed to answer quickly, but was it an actual talent?

Is spite of myself, I felt a sudden desire to write gospel tracts forming inside me. Gospel tracts? Me! That would be so un-Jeanette-like.

 

 

 

God confirms it

Some people – like I was then – must need more confirmation than others. The very next morning the man in charge of printing at church asked me, quite out of the blue, to write some tracts for the outreach team to use. So that tract idea was God! I loved writing the tracts and I heard they were a great success.

They were some of the first things I wrote as a Christian. It grew from there until at last I wrote my first book in the late 1980s and it was published in 1991.

 

I was excited to find it sold well and is still selling in its third edition. I’m about to start selling my sixth book, a Christian women’s novel with threads of adventure and romance.

 

cover photo of first edition of Jodie's Story

 

cover photo of Amelia's Island (my lovely sparkly water pic was not high enough resolution to use but they have done a great job)

So – I’m still writing. Why? Because I love it and have written most of my life. And above all, because I believe God wants me writing. He gave me the gift and a mandate to use it.