The present moment

But God will make his voice heard

Isaiah 30: 15, 18, 26, 29-30 Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved. In quietness and confidence is your strength. … The Lord must wait for you to come to him so he can show you his love and compassion. For the Lord is a faithful God. Blessed are those who wait for his help. … Your own ears will hear him. Right behind you a voice will say, “This is the way you should go,” whether to the right or to the left. … So it will be when the Lord begins to heal his people and cure the wounds he gave them. … The people of God will sing a song of joy, like the songs at the holy festivals. You will be filled with joy … And the Lord will make his majestic voice heard. He will display the strength of his mighty arm.

People have been asking me, “When will Book 3 be out? I want to know what happens!” This is gratifying, of course. I had hoped it would be out by Christmas, but Easter is my new target.

So, I’m pouring my time and energy into completing the rough draft of Facing the Faeries 1906, Book 3 of the Cally and Charlie series. My big goal is to finish it and read through the whole manuscript once before the end of September. I want to send it to early readers before I travel for most of October. In November, I can make revisions based on their feedback, do the final edit, and send it–I hope!–to AE Books by Thanksgiving.

To accomplish this, though, I’m neglecting everything else. Other projects are piling up. People I long to spend time with are multiplying.

What tends to keep me awake at night, though, is this concern: By trying to write fast, will I miss hearing God’s voice? Will I leave out something he wants to be included in this book? Am I capable of writing the vision I believe he has given me, of how the distress of my characters will resolve into joy?

Last night was one of those nights. I believe God guided me to read a chapter from The Soul of Desire by Curt Thompson, as well as Isaiah 30. The verses I’ve cited speak directly to my heart and my concern. They encourage me to take time to go to him, be quiet. and listen for his direction. Even if it’s in the middle of the night. The Lord will make his majestic voice heard.

Here’s a brief excerpt from chapter 6 of Soul of Desire, in which Curt highlights Psalm 27:4, One thing I ask from the Lord … to gaze on his beauty. I felt like Curt gave me a flash of insight into Karis’s ability to find joy in even the most distressing circumstances:

“Earlier I noted that our imaginations must be stretched, at times painfully so, if beauty and goodness are what we are going to see, create, and become. … Every moment is a crossroads of choosing to move toward or away from integration, toward or away from Jesus and each other, toward or away from goodness and beauty. … One of the most difficult things we have to do is wrest our attention from the painful memories of the past or dread of the future and … imagine beauty while still lamenting what is painful.”

Shutterstock: LeManna

The Lord taught Karis to do this, to make this choice, from the time she was very young. A zillion examples spring to mind. But writing about that must wait for another day.

Here’s Curt again:

“When our attention is firmly ensconced in the past or the future, we remain outside the present moment, the only dimension of the temporal domain of integration in which we are able to find joy and create beauty, even in the presence of our suffering. … Who among us doesn’t have something in our life we have simply given up on—some wound we assume won’t ever be healed, some ruptured relationship whose future we can picture only in images of the injured past, some addictive behavior we believe we can’t overcome, some part of our character in which we are so embroiled that we no longer even consider that it can change? Our discouragement and even despair about such things are, more than anything else, deeply dependent on the degree to which our minds and hearts are living in isolation. Becoming deeply known, living interpersonally integrated lives, enables us to persevere in the face of all that tells us not to, to “will one thing” in order to see the beauty of the pure in heart emerge, to see God in places and ways that heretofore we could not.”

The Lord will make his majestic voice heard.

The people of God will sing a song of joy.