Unveiled

I hope to become a writer. I guess maybe I already am. I just get nervous making that claim. For sure one of the reasons I hesitate is because I am pretty plain in word and thought apart from observing what is going on around me. What I mean to say is that I write only because I watch life go on about me and then my mind gets moving the Spirit starts pointing things out and soon I am moved to go write something down because something has come together for me.

Just today I was putting my daughter Kanah down for a nap. She goes down for a nap with her bottle in a dark room. As I was holding her I fell into a daydream until I felt her suddenly get heavier in my arms. I looked down at her and could tell she was sound asleep. I couldn’t help but wonder if God felt that about me sometimes. I allow him to carry me but I still hold back my full weight, kind of like if someone were to carry me on their back, I wouldn’t want to hurt them so I feel like I’d be tense so as to not be dead weight on them. So I wonder when he carries us through life if he’s just rocking us, waiting for us to fall into that place of dead weight on him. He wants us to fall fully on him, as heavy as we and our hearts really are and to not hold back some of the weight for us to manage.

See now that happened just today. I learned so much from her just falling asleep on me. And I didn’t come up with that little word picture. My daughter just did it. And I just experienced it and watched it with an eye opened and so I saw something there to cling to. Without the provocation of daily life like this story and of the Holy Spirit who unveils our thoughts, I am afraid my mind is a little dull. I am just a Plain Jane.

This both alarmed me while simultaneously putting me at ease. Because you see when you are a writer writer you have to do these things that you kind of don’t want to have to do to market yourself to the public, whom you fain to desire the approval of and yet also despise because you feel you must perform. So this realization made me feel like even if I got the honor of being a writer writer one day, I would be put up on a stage to do my dog and pony, only to squint blankly into a disappointed audience.

Yet it did put me at ease too. Because all I can do is be where I am and be who I am. And that’s it. If a picture, a word, a story is unveiled to me, I must pull off the veil to show others. If nothing is unveiled, I must wait. I must not pretend there is something there. And in this, there is ease. The yoke is easy. The burden is light.

So in all of this I feel I may have come up with a name for the writing group that my friend Jessi and I would like to start. “Unveiled.” I called her today with this unveiling of sorts. I suggested the name, I downplayed it, I took it back, I said we could scrap it. But really I think this is the name. I believe that we can only write and understand and feel inspired because life is unveiled to us. And as Corinthians says, this is from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

Lord remove the veil. And let us write about what is revealed to us even as the train is just lifted.