As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.
Colossians 3:12-14
“Oh,” she said, holding my manuscript and shaking her head, “this is defininitely better than one of those trash romances.”
“This is a literary, historical romance,” she said, smiling.
I returned a weak smile, my mouth barely able to hold its edges up.
I understood where she was coming from. After all, I had a Ph.D in literature with a Shakespeare dissertation from a university housing one of the country’s leading Shakespeare scholars. I understood literary elitism.
But I had learned humility the hard way.
Eight years ago, I decided I was going to transform myself from writing teacher to writer.
I set out to write the great American romance. In three months, I realized writing a romance was a skill that had very little to do with my scholarly understanding of Reniassance literature, or my ability to teach a classroom full of squirming freshman how to carve out an essay that mattered.
I began practicing my craft and studying the masters.
I found among those “trash romances,” fine writers who could hone a sentence until it sparkled and who could set a scene that stayed in my memory as if I had experienced in real life.
So much for smug, literary elitism. I realized quickly how much easier it is to write about literature than it is to write literature.
I was humbled.
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility, value others above yourselves,not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. Philipians 2:3-4
Writing is, in many ways, the ultimate vanity. In order to continue writing, I have to believe my words are worth reading. But when I step out of the way, when I pray for God to guide my writing, to show me His way, I am no longer writing out of selfish amibition or vain conceit. I am writing because I feel God’s Glory when I write.
Perhaps if God is guiding me, I will humble myself and learn something from everyone. I will see all writing, indeed, all people, as gifts placed in my path from whom–if I am paying close attention– I can glean understanding, knowledge, wisdom.
If I can see all writing as the human desire to fill that God hole within us, to make sense of what it means to be human, then within all writing I can find God.