Write His Answer

I shudder when I think of how many times I almost gave up writing because my self-doubts were so loud and insistent. Why would anyone want to read what I wrote? What made me think that I could write for the Lord? I wasn’t qualified! How could He possibly use someone who was only a high school graduate? I felt ashamed and woefully inadequate.

How it must have grieved the Lord when I failed to see that the Cross turns my minus into a plus – when I believed the lies of the evil one instead of His promises. And how much time I wasted in my self-centered and selfish focus on my doubts instead of on the needs Father was calling me to address through the words He would give me if I would just trust Him.

Today I was reminded of the November 2010 ASSIST News interview, “Author of End Times Political Thriller Hits New York Times Best Seller List with His Latest Middle Eastern Novel.” Talking about the decision to write his first novel, Joel Rosenberg said:

Failure has a way of focusing the mind and I’d come off of ten years of political failure in Washington DC and I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m a Rosenberg, yet I am not a lawyer, a dentist, a doctor, an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, an accountant or even a stockbroker.

I’ve got no financial genes and I can’t do anything practical. I write ‘Op-Eds’ that people don’t read. I write speeches people don’t listen to; the only thing I know how to do is write and clearly badly. But these are my loaves and fishes and I don’t want to be a failure; I want to be a blessing.

So, I told the Lord, ‘I want to be a servant of yours, Lord Jesus, so could you take these loaves and fishes, limited though they be, and would you break them, and bless them, and somehow feed people with them.’

It was then that I got this idea of writing a political thriller; a Middle East-based terrorism story that would have the Gospel woven into it. I wanted it, as readers got deeper into the book, to see the spiritual temperature rise. But the problem was that I didn’t know how to write a novel as I’d never written one before. I’d never even taken a class on writing a novel and I didn’t even like to read novels. So that was a problem.”

Click here to read the rest of the interview. You’ll be encouraged.

Are you struggling to see Father at work in your life? Are you battling self-doubts, writer’s block, rejection slips, procrastination? My book, Write His Answer – A Bible Study for Christian Writers, has 33 chapters of answers I found during my journey of publishing 9 books and making over 1,000 sales to Christian periodicals. And to my amazement it’s been in print for 25 years! Click here for excerpts and ordering info.

Father, thank You for calling us to do what seems impossible and for Your faithfulness to do exceedingly, abundantly beyond as we choose to listen to You and not to our doubts.