I once had a friend who...

I once had a friend in grade school who was a brilliant artist. Looking back on it now she was probably a genius. We were just children drawing stick figure people, and box homes, and animals that were just elongated ovals with stumps for legs. But not her. She would draw horses so real that you could see the wind shift the mane along their long powerful necks. She would draw faces so vivid you could see the laughter in eyes comprised of hundreds of tiny dots alone--entire worlds that she would quite literally "dot" into existence.

 We grew up and grew apart, but years later I asked her if she still drew, and she said not so much. I was just in high school at the time, but I remember the world growing grayer. It was just another beautiful thing that I had thought was eternal, which simply crumbled into the sea (Ps 46).

As I'm sitting here, I wonder what God had intended for her to do with that gift. She probably thought it of no consequence, whether she drew or didn't. When she put down her drawing pencils and pens, I can imagine her thinking to herself "what difference would it make if I ever drew again?..."

Sometimes our gifts seems so....unimportant, small, meaningless, powerless. Not everyone can swim as fast as Michael Phelps or sing as beautifully as Celine Dion. We're not all amazing speakers like Martin Luther King Jr., or funny and smart like Bill Cosby. We're not as brave as Joshua, or as faithful as Abraham, or as wise as Solomon. I can go ON and ON and ON! Sometimes I look at my own gifts and think, where in the world do I fit in? Where am I powerful? Where in my life do my gifts make a difference, and I don't mean little things here or there, but earth shattering, world changing differences? No where really.

I've always had something to say. Always some issue I felt deeply about. Always a book bringing me to new worlds. Always a song to sing. And I've always had words. Words flowing from the world around, grasped gently by my mind, and printed with care on any page I could find.

I look at this blog filled with almost a decade's worth of my life in writing and I sometimes think, why did I write all this? Who cares? What difference did it make? So I wrote yet another poem... big whoop.

Then there are other times that I look at this blog and think to myself, WOW! I can't believe I recorded so many of my thoughts. I'll read a poem and remember exactly where I was in my life when I wrote that, and I'll feel all the same feelings as I did then.

God inspires me to write, I just know it. Sometimes I can't help but to tap out another verse or poem or thought. I'm not saying that any of it is any good, but it's me.

I am reminded of David, who was a shepherd, lowly job- not glamourous or powerful by any means- but because of his work as a shepherd he had to fight bears and other wild beasts. And those battles prepared him to win the first great battle of his young life against Goliath the giant Philistine.
That humble beginning and against-the-odds victory were what propelled a young shepherd boy into a war hero, and ultimately into a KING!

I don't know what all my writing means to the world, but one can only imagine what it means to God.