Sad and Scared

    Last night I was sad and scared and am still sorting it out.

    The sad part is easy:  it was our last official choir practice of the season. 

    The scared part is harder to explain.  I can say, though, that God knew I was scared even without me telling Him.  And not only did He know, but He made sure He addressed that fear several times.

    First was Wednesday’s Upper Room reading from Ephesians 2: 1-10.  Verse 10 was the clincher:  “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (NRSV).  It is incredibly comforting to be assured that “we are what he has made us”  and that He has a master plan.

    Then came the reading for June 2 from The Daily Message.  I’m not going to quote Phillippians 1-2 or Psalm 73, but in them was the assurance to keep loving and trusting and letting Him lead (or attempting to, at least).

    You see, writing articles for The Log and my blog scares me.  Okay, that’s not quite right.  The writing is liberating and exciting—I rarely know where that first sentence will lead.  The creative process somehow gets unleashed at the computer keyboard.  It’s the later realization that people may be reading what I write that sometimes strikes terror in my heart.  It’s not just knowing that now they know more about me than I know about them.  It’s also the fear that I am being totally presumptuous that I actually have anything of value to say, which is made worse by the sense that writing is my ministry.  (Well, maybe not the writing about slugs.  There has to be room for my Lussmyer sense of humor.)

    It helped then, to turn to some of Henri Nouwen’s writing in which he explains his sense of writing as vocation.  His words resound with me.  They remind me I am not alone.  Granted, it is a presumption to even put myself in the same sentence as Nouwen, but it is a comfort to share a sacred sense of God’s particular call to write.

    Now that I’ve sorted out last night’s feelings, I am more aware and still scared.  But I am posting this anyway.  After all, you don’t have to read it unless you want to.