God's Calling

For God’s gifts and his call can never be withdrawn.  Romans 11:29, New Living Translation

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t telling stories.  As a young child, I would gather my dolls and stuffed animals together and make up tales about them.  There was an imaginary me living in my closet with her family.  She had all the things that I didn’t have, and through her I could imagine myself doing anything.  In fifth grade, my teacher convinced me to start writing down my stories.  In seventh grade, I wrote a short piece about walking along the streets of Heaven.  It was the reaction that I got from the people I showed that short piece to that made me think I might have something here. 

Maybe I did have a talent for writing.  Maybe I could make a job out of this.

A couple of years later, I wrote a piece I called A Conversation With God.  When I wrote it, I didn’t have a special reason in mind for it.  I just felt this burning desire, a need to get those words on paper.  For a while, I didn’t show it to anyone.  I stashed it away in a file cabinet drawer. 

At the time, I was active in my church youth group.  We had a mime team, and they were practicing for a performance at the state Pentecostal Young People’s Association convention.  One of our youth leaders mentioned there was a writing contest involved in convention.  I thought about that piece that I had written and tucked away.  Maybe this was the place where I should share that essay.  Because of my part-time job at a local golf course, I was unable to attend the state convention.  But I did fill out all of the paperwork.  I handed the essay to the youth group leaders to take with them.

I didn’t think anything else about it.  I remember praying that the mime team would do a good job in the drama competition, but that was it.  Then Saturday night, our phone rang.  My mother told me the call was for me.  When I picked it up, I at first had a hard time understanding what was being said.  The caller was Karen Cole, the wife of our youth pastor.  She was laughing and crying all at once as she told me that my essay had won first place in the state competition and that I had been chosen to represent the state of Michigan at the National PYPA Convention.

That was when I first felt that I wasn’t just a talented writer—I felt that I had been given a gift from God and that He was calling me to use it for His glory.  I was 16 that summer.  I felt a fire for God that I’d not felt before. 

The fire didn’t last for long, though.  By the time I graduated from high school, I was just going through the motions with God.  I went to church because that is what my parents expected of me.  Though I kept writing, the words I wrote were more about life and what my friends wanted to read than they were about God.

When I was 30, I learned that I was expecting my third child.  I was working in a job that I did not enjoy, one that gave me so much stress it actually was causing a danger to my unborn child.  I knew I needed a career change—and I knew there was really only one thing that I wanted to do.

I wanted to write. 

I read some “how-to” books to help get my imagination flowing.  In one of the books, there was something about the need for love scenes—sometimes explicit—in popular novels.  If I wanted my work to sell, even the novels I intended to write for young adults, I would have to add at least one “sex scene” to each story.  I wasn’t at all comfortable with that.  Could I write them?  Sure.  I’d done it before.  But did I want to?  No.

I though back to my teen years, when I was so sure that God was calling me to write stories that would glorify Him.  Explicit love stories would not do that.  Yet I wondered if maybe I was too late; had I already spent too much time running from God and His call on my life?  Had He decided that someone else should do the things He had once asked of me?

According to the book of Romans, God’s call is forever.  Even though I wasn’t ready to hear it and I was definitely not ready to obey it, God’s voice was always leading me on, calling me to serve Him in ways that only I was created to do.  Yes, there are other authors out there, other Christian novelists whose work is just as important as mine.  There are authors whose work may be more important, as they are reaching more people than I am.  But there is no one else who sees things exactly the way that I do, no one with the exact same experiences that I have.   I believe God gave me those experiences for a reason—because He wants me to share them with the world.