Writing inserts us into decisions we can’t always make. Purpose poses problems perpetuated by restless reasoning and inconclusive ideas and intellectual idioms. The ordinary versus the extraordinary gnaws at our perceptions of value and forces us into thoughts of what really produces importance.
Suddenly our work seems shoddy, ill-conceived, meaningless and ridiculous. Why write this drivel? Who cares? Somehow it’s become important to us in the making. Whether funny—doesn’t everyone need a good laugh once in awhile? Especially in this dreary state of affairs? Whether thrilling—doesn’t everyone need a jolt to feel alive? To imagine the thrills of being someone uber-competent? Whether soaked in romance—don’t some people need to experience the passion of love? To share in the joy of attraction? Whether cloaked in mystery and tensed in suspense? Don’t some need to feel the intensity of finding the bad guy? Whether taking journeys to times past? Don’t some revel in what they might’ve missed? Whether forsaking contemporary reality and fantasizing in fantasy or embarking on voyages to the future? Don’t those need to indulge the make-believe and test their imaginations?
But can I elevate prose and story to the “important”? Will my words somehow convey this life or any life’s stature to the place it deserves? Or will it remain as ordinary as it appears to me in rejections and read-throughs? Will it ever achieve any kind of importance, any level of value? Is the Lord’s approval, perhaps just His smile, the only—and most superb—evaluation I can hope to attain? And if not His, then to what end?
Shades of the green and poisonous envy color my soul. How did he or she manage to compute such words? How did they use the same language and yet it flowered in some new bloom, a hybrid no one debuted until this writer bred the words and produced such worthy beauty.
And I persist in ordinary. Street talk. Languishing in unimportance. Along with so many others . . . Humbled in my shameful stew of incredulity and self-pity.
God, you designed this clump of humanity. The only value I carry is in you. Somehow I strive to please you. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.