The Courage to Persevere

During my spiritual walk I’m often faced with challenges or obstacles, but I try to remember what the bible tells us in the book of Hebrews – persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what He has promised. The same goes for my writing.  There have many times when I couldn’t find the right word to enhance that boring sentence, or the right sentence to pull that oh so important scene together.  However, when those times present themselves, I try to be patient (although not one of my strengths).  I keep pecking away, hoping that it will eventually come together and I end up with something that I’m happy with.

It’s exciting when a story comes together the way you envision, but the things you mentally and emotionally go through to get it to that point.  For days I battled with which direction to take my second work in progress (WIP) and frustration settled in preventing me from going in any direction.  Part of me blamed it on the busyness of the holidays as well as life’s numerous surprises, but now that I look back, it probably had more to do with timing.  When we stop trying to force things to happen, that’s when things start working out.  Despite the fact that my story just sat, I’m happy to say that the time wasn’t wasted.  Someone once told me, that even if you’re not working on your WIP, you should still write daily.  So I forced myself to sit down and write, sticking to my writing schedule.  Some of the writing had nothing to do with my WIP, but it turns out that a lot of it did. Though I probably won’t use half of what I came up with, it felt good knowing that I was able to stay true to my schedule of spending x – amount of time writing.

As in our spiritual walk, we often get frustrated when we’re trying to make something happen that isn’t ready to happen, something we can’t do anything about.  So when your story isn’t coming together the way you would like, the key is to persevere – hang in there.  And when it’s time, everything will come together for the good.