This week I had an epiphany. Then, as I noodled with the fruit of my brilliant “aha” moment, I found that my next-level insight could be best described as …
Obvious.
What a letdown! I went from “Yes! That’s it!” to “What took me so long to see it?” in record time. Perhaps you can relate (please tell me you can relate).
What was this obvious-to-anyone-and-everyone-else grand revelation? It was this:
In addition to calling me to write, God has given me the time to write.
Obvious, right?
What Took So Long?
My difficulty in realizing such a clear and obvious truth stems from mental barriers of my own making.
In a previous entry, I shared how God has promised to sustain my family, and how He has fulfilled that promise. In that post, I also touched on the call that He has placed on me to serve Him by writing.
At the onset of my writing journey, I spent my hours on freelance work—mostly web articles and devotionals. The good months and the bad months usually balanced out. When my workload was light, I squeezed out my first book, an 11,000-word Advent devotional. In the summer of 2022, I drafted my first novel, which came to just over 102,000 words.
Now, I am researching what will be my third book. So far, I’ve drafted a 147-word introduction and I have no idea what the finished length will be. I envision something in the “novella” range, but it’s still too early to tell.
How has shifting more of my time to my own projects affected my freelance work?
Simple. Since I began drafting Coin and Dagger, my freelance work has been almost nonexistent.
Where Did the Work Go?
It would be easy to blame the lack of freelance opportunities on several external factors. The economy of the past couple of years no doubt put a strain on paying for content creation. Add to that the proliferation of AI, and it is easy to see why this is such a difficult environment for freelance writers.
Still, I’ve spent a good portion of the last 18 months reviewing the freelance job boards and applying to what appeared to be good matches.
Yet, I have nothing to show for these efforts.
The few freelance gigs I’ve secured in the past eighteen months have all come from clients who first approached me. This is the realization that led to my not-so-insightful epiphany. Even as I not-too-seriously chastised myself for missing this connection, I was overcome by a sense of freedom at the realization.
Good News
My motivation for going after freelance gigs is, of course, financial. I chase after the work because it is paying work.
Yes, I have my part-time job, and my wife has her job. In recent months, I’ve been putting time and effort into promoting my new novel and (‘tis the season) my Advent devotional. But is this enough?
As it turns out, yes! God has sustained us through another year, and He has done so with less financial stress than the previous year. Are we less stressed because we are making more (maybe a little), because our expenses are lower (ha ha ha), or because we are trusting God’s provision more?
I like to think that we have learned to trust more, and the conversations that my wife and I have during “Budget Committee” meetings confirm that we have learned a thing or two about trust.
But I’ve also learned that I need to rethink my approach to writing, keeping in mind the freedom to do the work God calls me to do.
Sustained For a Purpose
God sustains us because He has a reason for doing so. He’s called me away from the corporate world of maxed-out full-time work and sat me down at the keyboard to write. For Him.
Now, He has shown me that I don’t need to fill my time with gig work because He sustains our household without it.
So He has given me this gift of time each week in order that I may give it back to Him. The question now is, what does giving my time back to God look like?
When God Decides
In Acts 16, Luke writes about the Holy Spirit preventing Paul’s travel to certain regions.
Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to. So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas. – Acts 16:6-8 (NIV)
It makes sense that Paul would want to continue ministering in much the same way he had been, among similarly situated people in a familiar region. Yet, God had a different task in mind for him.
During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them. – Acts 16:9-10 (NIV)
God called Paul to minister to different people on an entirely different continent. This doesn’t invalidate anything that Paul had done before, it simply means that he was entering a new season in his ministry, a season that would take him to a less familiar place.
I was just beginning to feel a sense of familiarity as a freelancer when God called me to turn my attention to different tasks. Perhaps the freelance season was a time of training and nothing more. Or maybe I’ll return to it in a later season. I don’t know, and I’m okay with not knowing.
What I do know is that God has preserved a block of time for me in this season to complete this season’s work.
My Next Book
Like many writers, I have a catalog (some written and some mental) of future book ideas. I even have some notes and outlines jotted down for a couple of them.
My plan was simple—pick up one of these projects and get writing. I even knew which book I would write next. Until …
A few months ago, I was drafting what I thought would be a future blog entry about the personality and motivation of a minor character from Coin and Dagger. I found that his story was much bigger than a blog post would allow. Now, this man who appears in exactly one gospel story is the protagonist of my next book.
Any guesses as to who it might be? Leave a comment with your thoughts.
Moving Forward in Freedom
It is freeing to know what God is asking me to write. Actually, it’s more than freeing—it’s exciting! Yes, I still have to do the research, the drafting, the revising, and everything else that goes into writing a book.
Still, it is a joy to have the clarity of knowing the framework of the story, to get inside the mind of the lead, and—most of all—to know that God has ordained this work, so I can trust Him to sustain this work.