Use It For Your Glory

Something really encouraging BTW that I must share.

You know about my journey of faith, with regards to writing. Thank God for Kin Wee, who inspired me to consider writing as a career. (He quit his teaching job to pursue writing as a career. It's not easy, and I really thank God for him. Yes, we prayed together one day, and waited on God for His answer.)

So, as I was saying, I've been thinking about what else I can learn from my internship attachment. So, yesterday, I asked my boss to give me advice on how I can get started on writing. She smiled, immediately took a book on her table, flipped to a page and told me to read it.

It was a post by E.B. White. He was the author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little.

"You asked me about writing - how I did it," E.B. White replied to a seventeen-year-old who had written to him, wanting to become a professional writer but feeling discouraged. "There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed. I must have written half a million words (mostly in my journal) before I had anything published, save for a couple of short items in St. Nicholas. If you want to write about feelings, about the end of the summer, about growing, write about it. A great deal of writing is not 'plotted' - most of my essays have no plot structure, they are a ramble in the woods, or a ramble in the basement of my mind. You ask, 'Who cares?' Everybody cares. You say, 'It's been written before.' Everything has been written before. ... Henry Thoreau, who wrote Walden, said, 'I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dream and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.' The sentence, after more than a hundred years, is still alive. So, advance confidently."

Wow. I was so touched and encouraged by E.B. White's words. It was as though the writer was speaking to me personally, a 20th-century writer writing across time to a 21st-century wannabe, face-to-face.

Then, this morning, my boss told me about the boss of Armour Publishing (a Christian publishing firm). My boss told me that if I want to publish a book, she can introduce me to the publisher personlly. I went, "WOW. THANK YOU SO MUCH." She chuckled and said, "Don't thank me. Just write your book first."

Wow. Thank You so much, dear Father, for making a way for me in the wilderness. Not that I consider myself to have already taken hold of it, but I see Your goodness. I see Your precious providence. In the day I see Your cloud sheltering me through the heat and in the night I see Your fire blazing before me and in me.

Again and again... and Ruey Fong's hortatory speech comes fresh again in my mind. "There are so many people who are so talented, but they don't have a chance to succeed in life, simply because they never got the chance. That's why you need God to give you these chances. So walk right with God, and He will walk right with you!"

Yes, Lord. I offer my life to You again today. Everything I've been through, USE IT FOR YOUR GLORY.

In Jesus' most wonderful name, amen!