Wednesday, April 21, 2021
10 a.m. I see I was losing perspective. I am diagnosed with a couple of ailments, one of them cancerous tumors, and I continue calmly with my life, because I trust life, and the situation calls for me to just live, trusting, and do whatever common-sense things the doctors prescribe. But I publish Papa’s Trial and I am led to press, to worry, to think I have to make things happen because the situation calls for me to interact with the outside world, and that is never very easy for me.
But then, like grace from God, in the middle of the night I remember, Trust. Either we trust or we don’t. We may alternate between the two, but there isn’t any stable middle position between them.
So, guys – comment?
Mainly, we are glad you listened, for your own sake and for the sake of the example that you will set, one way or the other.
Well, it’s hard to stay awake all the time. We nod off and don’t realize it until something nudges us, something internal or external.
Internal or external, so-called.
Understood.
If you don’t have a destination, any direction is the right direction. But if you want to get somewhere, you need to be traveling toward it. This means a little more than it may seem to at first.
I’m listening.
It’s easy to live in faith if you are oaky with whatever comes. It’s a little harder if you start hedging: “I trust life, but cancer would be unacceptable,” or “but I want my portfolio protected,” or, “but I have to keep my job.” And so on and so forth. But even if one learns to live in faith at that level, there’s always another level. In your case, “but I want my books to succeed,” or even a more detailed specification, such as sales of X number, etc.
I understand the concept of the spiral as opposed to the circle. We keep revisiting the same issues, only in different form according to how we ourselves have changed.
Certainly. Teenagers don’t do first-grade schoolwork. Nor is it any kind of failure that the teen has more complicated problems. It is what you should expect.
I really do get that. The only reason I was starting to feel pressed was that I forgot, for the moment, that it is a matter of trust.
And you may have been influenced by other peoples’ opinions of what you should be doing, as you guessed them (i.e. their opinions), or should we say, as you interpreted their smoke signals.
That too.
So live in faith, doing what you know to do, and are inspired to do, and as you do even when you are not sure if it is right or wrong for you.
And I realize that, as usual, this applies not to myself alone.
It applies to anyone wanting to live in faith so that they may have life more abundantly.
Our thanks as always.
I’m in a writing group that wrestles with these issues around publishing regularly. Some of us have finished books that sit with us like abandoned children. None of us are or know how to be or want to be self-marketers, but it’s also hard to give up the dream to be successfully published (success = 3000+ books sold). As you say, to live in trust is the only answer to this dilemma. To do what you’re inspired to do to help the book develop legs, and to “continue calmly with my life . . . ” A helpful post, as always.
Thanks. FYI I have never sold 3,000 copies of a title in my life. Sometimes we have to measure success more by what we put into it than by what we get out of it. That said, though, reader response has been a major reward.