This post is part of the Write 28 Days Blogging Challenge. Participants choose a category, in which to concentrate throughout the challenge and the host provides a daily writing prompt. My category is Devotional/Study and the prompt for today is COMMIT.
2 Timothy 1:7 For the Holy Spirit, God’s gift, does not want you to be afraid of people, but to be wise and strong, and to love them and enjoy being with them. (TLB)
Today is almost the last installment of this devotional series, but I’m not done yet. I believe there is more to learn about our guiding verse, and I want to be committed to seeing this through to create a small devotional collection. Want to be.
So often I’m gung ho! in my writing and then fall off the grid in awe of those writers who post daily, send out newsletters, have absolutely awesome websites, are published authors, yadda, yadda, yadda. Yes, I fall into the comparison trap chickening out of posting something on Facebook, starting a Pinterest board, or anything else that could expose my ineptness. Then, I go into the not-good-enough cave for a couple of weeks (or months) until the cycle starts all over again. This keeps me just short of commitment. Incomplete.
I don’t like it, this incomplete feeling. God makes it uncomfortable for me. I like writing and I’m happy when I’m doing it. I’m committed in the moment. I don’t know if I’m any good and the enemy doesn’t want me to find out either, he just doesn’t want me doing it. He lives in the not-good-enough cave.
Here’s the good news! I can be confident God HAS a plan and He’s working it (Jer 29:11, Phil 1:6). God HAS given me the Holy Spirit, Whose power can overcome my self-perception of ineptness. God HAS given me a sound mind and self-discipline to keep going, to remain committed to writing just because that’s what He told me to do. God HAS put love in my heart, not a spirit of fear. I already have these gifts and, if you are a believer, so do you. Let’s dwell on these things (Phil 4:8).
Thanks to all the participants in the writing challenge and its readers. It is so important that we encourage one another to stay out of the comparison trap and the not-good-enough cave. They are dark places with lying graffiti-filled walls. These places we should never visit.
So, while we may not be done with our twisting, turning and sometimes roadblocked writing journeys we, the writers, are not incomplete. Rather, we are complete in Christ.
Photo credit: http://www.highdefpeople.com/commitment/
Cartoon credit: This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND
