Dear God,

I know I just talked to you, but I need to come back again. God, there’s so much to cringe about in the world- floods, joblessness, hopelessness. People are trying to find answers when they don’t really know what the questions are. We need help. We need to know that our lives count, that we matter, just as much as other people who seem to have it all. What will happen when the money runs out? Who will take care of us? How do we deal with cancer and diabetes? How do we deal with loneliness and isolation?

It’s a lot to think about. It can look scary. Really scary. But that’s why I wanted to talk to you. I know you’ve got a plan. For all the issues, all the problems, you have a plan. You have a way to take away all the fear. You can restore what’s been lost and build what’s been torn down. You can make the new better than the old.

The thing is, we’re not good at listening to you. We like to think that we don’t need you. We want to be in control, despite the mess we live in. Silly isn’t it! Help us to see that when we act like stubborn children who won’t let mom help, we have to live with our own decisions. Help us to see that you are close, that all you’re waiting for is for us to ask. So easy. So simple.

I like that you have a plan. Thanks for that. I know that your plan is way better than mine. So much better than mine. Help us, as a community, as a country, to see that you know how to bring food to the table and health to our bodies. You are so much bigger than the issues that hurt us and worry us. I give it all to you. I know I still have responsibilities, but I will listen to you and do what you say. I’ve been pretty happy so far.

Self-control would be a pretty good one to get a hold of. Our society is pretty messed up from domestic violence, gang violence, obesity, debt, abortion. Just think how self-control could change so much.  Self-control demands limits to our own wants. We usually know what those limits are, we just choose to ignore them. It’s hard. We feel a rush when we indulge in something that’s just outside our control. It’s a mixture of pleasure and guilt. If our conscious is still sensitive, we’ll feel terrible afterward, but will still be helpless to avoid doing it again.

God has a gift to help with that. It’s free. It’s available. All you have to do is ask for it. Don’t think you don’t need it, you’re human. God knows who we are and provided everything we need to live blessed and happy lives. It’s our responsibility to ask and receive those gifts. He wants us to be proactive in this. How much of Him do you want? I going for the full banquet. All the fruit looks pretty good to me. I want more. There’s only so much I can take in today, so I’m going back for more tomorrow.

I want self-control in my life. About that writing project, will I dedicate my time better to finish it? Yeah, I need help. Will I stop before saying something hurtful and negative? Need help. Will self-control help me walk in kindness and consideration for others? Youbetcha. If there’s a blessing from heaven that’s available to me, I want it, as much as I can take in.

I’ve been a Christian for years and years and years. I thought that meant that I loved God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and all my strength. I believed Him. I loved Him. But I was wrong.

Knowledge of and passion for are two different things. God showed me very clearly that I did not love Him totally, passionately. In fact, there was nothing in my life that I was passionate about. Nothing. There were things that I liked, even loved, but nothing that burned with passion inside me. I was all words, no fire.

I became ashamed of my faith because it was weak and valueless. I asked God to forgive me. I confessed the sin of my self-indulgence and arrogance. I shook off the platitudes of pretense and lay before Him stripped of my self-assurance. He gave me back a heart full of blessing and hope.

I tell Him everyday that I love Him with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and all my strength. He can have all my dreams and hopes. There is nothing I love or want more than Him. He is my heart, my soul, my mind and my strength. And the more I love Him, the more He shows His love for me. I lose nothing and I gain all of heaven. And He still chooses to give me the desires of my heart. He makes my dreams come true.

We hold back our passion because of fear. We’re afraid of what other people will think. But we forget that other people are afraid of what other people will think. Fear is insidious, diabolic, a cancer to our spirit. Confess it. Repent and renounce it. Receive joy and love with arms as wide as you can make them. There’s no shame in heaven, there should be no shame in your heart. When Michal sneered at David’s public dance of joy, she remained barren the rest of her life and David received an eternal crown.

What has this got to do with writing? Passion. My passion for God spills into my writing, just as it spills into every area of my life. The more of my heart that I give to Him, the more He can clean it up, the stronger my gifting becomes. He set fire to my pen, in a good way,  a God way. I don’t stress about what will or will not happen with my writing. I gave that to Him when I gave up my need to win. I’m just along for the ride now and we’re having fun.

Makes me think back to my young days when I first saw Romeo and Juliet, the Zeffirelli version. I was twelve. My friends and I sat through multiple showings because we were trying to see Romeo’s butt when he got out of bed. I was scandalized that he would really be naked under those sheets. But unlike my friends, that movie ushered me into a lifelong love of Shakespeare. I bought the paperback version of Romeo and Juliet and quoted the balcony scene for weeks. After that, I read all the comedies and several of the histories. I’ve never been a big fan of the tragedies, with one exception. Hamlet is my all time favorite play, with Cyrano de Bergerac a close second, even if it’s not one of the Bard’s.

Hamlet is perfect. He’s the perfect character and the play is perfect in construction. When my son was in middle school, he wanted to enter a school talent contest. He was thinking of quoting a poem, but I upped the ante and pulled out Hamlet’s soliloquy. Once we worked our way through it so he understood what was going on, he tore it up on stage. He said it better than anyone I’ve heard, and yes that’s Mom talking, but also a true Hamlet fan talking. I’ll pass on discussing my own lame version of Ophelia that I played at a Shakespeare festival. The poor girl suffered enough.

There’s just something wonderful about the wit and language of these plays, and sonnets. I find a lot of performances insufferably cute or horribly pretentious. So much so that I’m afraid to spend the money to see them. Best really to sit quietly and read them while the scenes play out in your head, try as you might to think of someone else besides Gweneth Paltrow playing Portia or Helena.

Shakespeare was the Michelangelo of wordsmithing. I almost wish he had also written prose. His language sweeps from coarse to sublime effortlessly. If novels more popular in his time, he would have, no doubt, written classics, though I suppose that he had a real love for the stage. It’s just amazing that the greatness of his writing continues to carry on. Just goes to show that excellence lives long after mediocre is forgotten.

The tradition in our family was that when babies were born, a silver cup was given to them with their name engraved. I think in my generation, it was my grandparents who bought the cups. When I was about eleven or twelve, it dawned on me that my other siblings had baby cups, but I didn’t. When I brought it up, no one believed me. There was a lot of discussion for a while until they realized that somehow, the cup was forgotten when I was born. 

That’s when my grandmother offered to give me hers. When she found it, it was dark and tarnished and there was a hole at the top where the handle had been broken. She polished it up and had it repaired. You can see the welding on the inside.

So I don’t have a baby cup with my name on it, but  I have something better. We were very close to my grandparents as kids so it was tragic to see my grandmother slip into dementia in her old age. She loved her fancy holiday dinners and I was always paid fifty cents to polish the silver, sometimes I got a candy bar. Invariably, she would have me crack walnuts and stuff them in to dates and roll them in powdered sugar for special appetiser. And when I was a real pain while she was babysitting, I was sent outside to pick violets along the side of the house so she could have some peace and quite. I never felt like I could get away with anything at grandma’s house because I was convinced that her two Siamese cats, Ying and Yang, who always watched passively, would tattle on me.

It seems like such a long time ago. I’m happy and a little sad to remember my grandmother, born a hundred years ago today. Gone, but not forgotten.

I can easily think of the earth having an inner child that lives through a cycle. In the Spring, he jumps up to play and brings out all the flowers in his exuberance. In the Summer, he roams around in lazy pleasure through trees and meadows. In the Fall, he starts getting tired and sits to watch the  fields turn yellow and the pumpkins ripen. In the Winter, he just can’t keep his eyes open any more and tucks in for a sleep, taking all the green and warm with him.

Our word for Spring comes from the Old English meaning to literally spring. Makes sense doesn’t it? We go from cold and leafless to sudden blossom in the blink of an eye. Spring leaps out as if the daffodils trumpet the change to wake up the earth child to come out and play.

But, of course, I understand that we live on a planet, perfectly sized and situated in our solar system to allow for an atmosphere and rotation that makes Spring happen. We have a protector planet called Jupiter that’s big enough to absorb errant collisions from blowing us apart. We have enough biodiversity to sustain life, despite our effort to progress. And I don’t think it’s all a happy coincidence of location and evolution. I’m absolutely firm in my belief that we have a God who happens to know a lot about physics and biology. I’ll take His intelligently designed Spring over randomness any day. It’s just so pretty.

Here’s where Ethical Traveler comes in. Every year they put out a Top 10 list of the World’s Best Ethical Destinations. This is a list of countries that are great to visit and have made serious improvement in the areas of environmental protection and human rights and social welfare. For example:

• Palau, which declared its waters a dolphin, shark and whale sanctuary, rescinded support for Japanese “scientific” whaling, and called for an international moratorium on shark finning.
• Costa Rica returned to the list, after falling off last year, due to increased efforts by recently elected president Laura Chinchilla to address human trafficking problems.
• Quantifying social welfare improvements are not as straightforward, but issues such as access to safe drinking water, sustainable water management, responsible sanitation practices, and agricultural management are carefully noted.

Taking our tourism dollars to countries working hard to improve the quality of life for their people and the environment affirms their good work. That sends a message to countries that don’t. It’s a passive-agressive way of telling some countries we won’t support your sex trade or toxic waste dumping.

To be honest, I never thought about how my travel affected the countries I visit. Do the few dollars I spend on a meal really make that much difference? Added to the billions of other dollars spent on food and travel, yes, I guess it does. Will I think twice next time I plan to travel overseas? Youbetcha. But what if I have a reason to go to one of those countries that didn’t make the Top 10 list? I would still go. It’s when I have a choice in a destination that I would consider where I want my dollars to vote. Think about it. There’s a whole lot of world to see. Why not check out the places doing good?

She talks about taking individual story ideas and putting them together with other story ideas. Maybe you think about a hurricane hitting a small seacoast town. Later on you think about a baby that’s born without legs. And then you something makes you think about aliens landing to learn about our culture. You might put those three story seeds together and write about a woman giving birth during a hurricane and being rescued by compassionate aliens. Hmm, that might be fun to write!

One of her examples was about visiting some elderly friends who both had Alzheimer’s. She went on to describe how she put that story together with two other story seeds, but I was stuck on the two friends with Alzheimer’s. My grandmother had that so I remembered what it was like in the nursing home, seeing her in her wheelchair, lost to the world. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t talk much, and when she did, it wasn’t really her. But two friends with the same illness in the same nursing home made me think of a story idea. What if the two of them could communicate to each other? What if there were lively conversations between them that no one else could see? It could be both sweet and painful.

I’m not very good at writing down tidbits of ideas that I get, but I’m going to start doing that. They may not turn into full-length books, but maybe short stories. Or maybe there is a breakout novel in those germ seeds. That’s the fun part of being a writer. It’s ok to let your imagination run away with you. If you don’t, your stories can be stilted. The three seed idea is intriguing too. Sounds like an interesting way to come up with ideas if you’re stuck.

What do you do to come up with ideas?

Now this is all my theory, of course, but I believe that, just as everyone has some amount of faith to believe, everyone also has some amount of creativity in them. They have to, it came from that first breath of life. And just like faith, we have to get serious sometimes to take hold of it. It’s amazing to see people like Akiane, who seemed to be born with a full understanding of their talents, but even Michelangelo spent time as an apprentice before creating his masterpieces. It’s there, but it may need culitvating. It may need some classes to understand how it works and years to bring into full development. Think about a normal child, not Akiane, who starts off coloring with crayons, then learns to use colored pencils, then watercolor, then oils. The talent is developed along with learning to access the creative part inside.

I’m sure that scientists can point to where creativity lives in our brain. “It’s right here on this brain map in what we like to call the Anterior Darwinian Lobe.” I don’t know where it lives, I just know it’s there. It’s hiding with all those other gifts we’ve been given and forget to access: peace, joy, patience, faith. Sometimes we have to just get quiet and ask God to help us find them.

Hmm, someone must be working on a new plot for their book! Someone must be pretty happy right now that said plot came after spending some time meditating on the good things of God! Hey, how did you know that? Yeah! It works. And I believe that it works in all kinds of ways. Just because you’re an artist or musician, doesn’t mean that that’s the only area of creativity you’ve got. In fact, I think the more you access that creativity, the more it spreads to other areas of your life. It might show up in the kitchen or garden or turtoring your kids.

I’m glad happy about this and I want more. And God is just sweet enough to give it if we ask. What’s cooking inside of you? What ever it is, it’s yours and unique to you. Don’t hide it, it would be such a waste.