When You Hit a Writing Drought

Since the time I was a reporter for my college newspaper, longer ago than I care to admit, writing has been an integral part of my life. I’ve been a reporter, editor, newsletter editor, speechwriter, public relations manager, novelist, short story writer, non-fiction book author, blogger, book reviewer, essayist, poet, and more. Writing has been central in every job I held and every employer I worked for. 

I never had time for writer’s block. A speech had to be written. News releases had deadlines. Contracts had to be met. Employers had expectations (or demands, often unreasonable). I might have a project where I had to pause to understand the challenge fully, but I’d figure out a way through it.

 

What I’ve had for the last year isn’t writer’s block. I still blog, write book reviews, and even write a few short stories. But the flood of writing that’s carried me for 50-plus years has slowed considerably. It’s less of a block and more of a “moderate drought.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog.

 

Photograph by Glenn Carstens-Peters via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Micro Monday #56: Cuba, Missouri, 1961 – short fiction by Tom Darin Liskey at Fictive Dream.

 

Murders for May – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

‘Institutional Poverty’ in Charles Dickens and Barbara Kingsolver – Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb at Mere Orthodoxy.

Go gently, gently

After Matthew 11:28-30 

We begin with rest,

rest from labor, rest

from burdens born.

We seek and find

rest for our weariness.

 

Then we take a yoke,

lightly placed, but a yoke

nonetheless, born like

he bears it, carried

with gentleness, with

humility, a servant’s heart.

 

Bearing this yoke leads

to rest for our souls,

a relief from turmoil,

a relief of the burdens

carried by our souls.

 

This yoke is easy,

this yoke is light.

 

Photograph by Reign Abarintos via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

California Son: On the Patron Saint of Lost Western People – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Sheep and Lambs – poem by Katharine Tynan at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Reflections on the Catechism: The Old Covenant – Dan King at Bibledude.

 

Has the Decline of U.S. Christianity Finally Stopped? – Joe Carter at The Gospel Coalition.

 

And the Peace of God – poem by Daye Phillippo at Rabbit Room Poetry.

Rest has meaning

After Exodus 20:8-11 and Matthew 12:1-14 

To rest is not doing

nothing; to rest is

to recognize we have

limits, that we cannot

do everything. To avoid

rest is destructive; it

will destroy you. To rest

is to acknowledge

dependence on one who

is greater. To rest is

to know we are not

the center of the universe.

To avoid rest is

to embrace slavery.

To worship busyness

is to worship self.

 

Photograph by Jessica Mangano via Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

Some Sunday Readings

 

The Bottle Collector – poem by Liz Snell at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Absent Fathers in Children’s Literature: A Problem? – Betsy Farquhar at Redeemed Reader.

 

For Richer, for Poorer: How to Steward Money in Marriage – Randy Alcorn at Desiring God.

A day of rest

After Exodus 20:8-11 and Matthew 12:1-14 

It is a day of rest,

a day set aside,

a day to set work

aside, and rest.

The example is

there from

the beginning,

to work hard

six days and rest

on the seventh.

 

Rest does not mean

idleness, or a day

to observe rigidly,

without exception.

It can be a day

to do good, to bless,

to show empathy,

to show care and

compassion. That is

not work; that is

loving the Lord

of the Sabbath.

 

Photograph by Sincerely Media via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

Autumn – poem by Rainer Marie Rilke at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

Every person is a tree. Every tree tells stories – Pierce Taylor Hibbs at Moments That Make Us.

 

The Good Life – poem by Rusty Rabon at Society of Classical Poets.

The Writer at Rest

I’ve invented a word: “misculturalized.” It describes being born, raised and living in one culture when you’re probably better adapted to another culture. And the culture I should have been raised in? The one that celebrates naps. Spain. Mexico. Argentina.

How could I have been born in United States, the country that hates – hates – naps? Think of everything we miss when we succumb to temptation and take a nap: getting work done; staying busy, looking like we’re staying busy; and rest.

Rest.

To continue read, please see my post today at Christian Poets & Writers.

On Being a Writer: Rest

I’ve invented a word: “misculturalized.” It describes being born, raised and living in one culture when you’re probably better adapted to another culture. And the culture I should have been raised in? The one that celebrates naps. Spain. Mexico. Argentina.

How could I have been born in United States, the country that hates – hates – naps? Think of everything we miss when we succumb to temptation and take a nap: getting work done; staying busy, looking like we’re staying busy; and rest.

Rest.

While I love naps, I have a hard time with the word rest. And rest from writing? Can’t happen. It’s too much of who I am. At least that’s the excuse I make. To myself.

And yet.

We’ve several beach vacations – Gulf Shores and nearby Orange Beach. Some with kids, and once empty nest. On the empty nest beach vacation, I’d wake early each morning, walk down to the beach, rent my umbrella and chair, and sit, reading. To be honest, it was a project – the second time I had read the unabridged version of Don Quixote. And I was doing it because my high school English teacher who taught our class the novel said you should read it three times in your life – when you’re young, when you’re middle-aged, and when you’re old.

Sitting there on the beach each morning, listening to the sounds of the waves and birds, feeling the heart, smelling the salt of the gulf, I read the Cervantes classic. And it seemed like a very different book than the one I read when I was 17.

Even though I was technically doing something, it was still rest. Sitting for long stretches of time and reading, finding myself transported to Spain in the late 1500s, and tilting at windmills, was restful.

It was the kind of experience Ann Kroeker describes in On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts (co-authored with Charity Craig). She finally convinces herself to go with her kids to a family camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and she finds herself reading and resting.

“At camp,” she writes, “I sat a lot, often with a book but just as often with nothing. I sat at a picnic table. I sat in an Adirondack chair. I sat on a beach towel on the sand, on a couch in the lodge, and in a folding chair by the calm, cold water of Lake Huron.” She did go jogging one morning.

What she was doing was engaging in mental rest. We have to take time to let our minds rest and regenerate.

Our minds, like our bodies, need a Sabbath.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing chapters of On Being a Writer by Kroeker and Craig. This chapter is entitled “Rest.” There’s one chapter left, and I’ll discuss it next week.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A Rebuke to the Culture

Thirty years ago, we still had blue laws (Sunday closing laws) in Missouri. Just about everytjing except for convenience stories, drugstores, and sports/entertainment events were surrounded by empty parking lots on Sunday.

The blue laws disappeared in a statewide vote, driven largely by a combination of powerful commercial interests and individuals hungry to find extra time to do grocery shopping, clothes shopping, and other activities that strained two-income families.

We’ve already lost Thanksgiving and I suspect Christmas is not far beyond. Thanks to the reach of electronic communications technology, vacation time, and even weekends, should be called “work release” time rather than days off.

The idea of Sabbath – a day of the week devoted to worship and rest is already coming to be something quaint from another era.

It shouldn’t be. We probably need it more than ever. Even people who don’t believe in God need a day of rest.

A Sabbath, say Christopher Smith, John Pattison and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, is “an obvious rebuke to the culture—and even a church culture!—that prides itself on its busyness, scorns leisure as laziness and boasts that we’ll sleep when we’re dead.”

That sounds like modern American work life to me.

I knew a CEO who once claimed he could run a $16 billion corporation with five MBAs. When he was asked what would happen when they dropped dead, he replied, “Find five more.”

The Slow Church authors point to Exodus 16 as the first mention of Sabbath in the Bible, although you can find the first reference to a day of rest in the first chapter of Genesis.

Even God rested.

The Exodus reference contains three lessons, they point out. The Israelites are wandering around the desert, grumbling over not having enough to eat, complaining about starving to death. God gives them manna six days a week, with a double portion on the sixth day because God said the seventh day was a day of rest, and holy to him.

They Israelites learn the lesson of enough, the lesson of redistribution, and the lesson of Sabbath faith and discipline.

That’s an arresting idea – the Sabbath takes faith and it takes discipline.

No wonder we voted it out of existence in Missouri.

For the past several Mondays, I’ve been posting a discussion of Slow Church. Today’s post is on the chapter entitled “Sabbath.” It’s worth the price of the whole book. Next week, the discussion will be on “Abundance.”

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Disruption That is the Sabbath

When we first moved to St. Louis, we lived in a suburb that had two large synagogues or temples. In fact, we were the westernmost of three adjacent suburbs with large numbers of people of Jewish faith. On Saturdays, it was not unusual see Orthodox Jews walking to their synagogue. In St. Louis society, this observance of the Sabbath set them apart as few other things could or did.

At the same time, Sundays were governed by state blue laws. Very few stores or businesses were allowed to operate on Sunday. Shopping malls were closed, as were grocery stores. As a result, Sundays were phenomenally quiet and relatively unhurried days.

Thirty-five years later, those notions of the Sabbath as a day of quiet and rest seem charmingly quaint. Our secular society has roared ahead, driven by frenzied schedules, the demands of commerce, and general “busy-ness.” We need those weekend days to get done what we don’t have time for during the week, and if we fill them with children’s and professional sports activities, entertainment, and yard work, well, the time is there to be utilized.

What happened to the idea of rest?

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling.


Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Time and again

What is it that virtually every one of us wishes to have more of?

Time.

We citizens of Western civilization, and likely Eastern civilization, find ourselves living in internet time – when information increases exponentially at warp speed, and our lives often seemed frenzied collections of non-stop activities.

Our mobile phones, our tablets, and our apps allow us to maintain schedules unthinkable even one generation ago.

And if we were asked what we would like to do with extra time, more than few of us would likely say “rest.”

In the concluding chapter of The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time, Judith Shulevitz calls this “mobile time,” as opposed to what for thousands of years has been “mechanical time.” And, she asks, “Mobile time is the time we’re in charge of, and who would want to lose that?”

I read that statement, and I thought about raising my hand.

Mobile time – internet time – has erased the boundaries between work and the rest of our lives, to the point where work is becoming the rest of our lives. My cell phone was off on Saturday (the battery had died and I had to recharge the new one for 24 hours). When I turned it on, I had 24 new email messages from work, including one unexpected email with instructions for work that had to be ready Monday morning.

Two months ago, I would have spent part of Saturday or Sunday frantically getting the work done for Monday. But now I’m drawing boundaries. The work will have to wait until Monday, replacing work or meetings already scheduled. Or perhaps not happening at all.

Reading The Sabbath World has helped in this drawing of boundaries, but it’s only been a contributing factor. The most important thing has been my stubborn insistence that work is no longer invading every other part of my life. If the work is not important enough to resource properly, then it’s not important enough for me to blow my weekend doing it.

Will there be consequences? Likely not. Internet time forces everything at work to be classified as urgent, and everything to be considered a crisis. I know the work well enough to tell the difference between the urgent and the important.

Internet time also erases any notion of the Sabbath, of taking a day of rest whether we spend that day at church, napping, or getting away from the cell phone.

Why is this important? Why did God rest on the seventh day of creation? Shulevitz has an answer, and it’s a good one: “God stopped to show us what we create becomes meaningful only once we stop creating it and start remembering why it was created in the first place. Or…why it wasn’t worth creating, why it isn’t up to snuff and should be created anew.”

We can’t live for long in a world of first drafts and “good enough to get by for now.”

We’re reading The Sabbath World over at The HighCalling. To see the discussion about this week’s chapter, please visitthe site.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Finding Rest – in Meekness?

At dinner the other night, my wife and I were discussing the changes that will likely be coming from Congress and our federal government on taxes and a lot of other things.

“Why had the stock market jumped in the past two days” she asked.

“The market is assuming a deal on taxes and the fiscal cliff is going to be reached,” I said.

“But taxes will be going up on everyone, business included. Why would that be good news?”

“Because there’s one thing the market hates more than costs, and that one thing is uncertainty.”

We spend considerable time and effort to control our lives and what happens to us. We hate uncertainty. We hate not knowing what’s going to happen next. We create elaborate structures in our personal lives and our work lives to minimize uncertainty. Uncertainty means we are not in control, and if there’s one thing we absolutely hate, it’s not being in control.

We consider uncertainty a burden, and we will go to great extremes to reduce or eliminate that burden. The stock market will accept (for now) higher taxes and costs because, well, at least uncertainty will be reduced. We will create new burdens to ease the burden we think is too heavy, because all we think about is a respite, or rest.

“The burden borne by mankind is a heavy and a crushing thing,” says A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God. “The word Jesus used (for burden) means a load carried or toil borne to the point of exhaustion. Rest is simply release from that burden. It is not something we do, it is what come to us when we cease to do. His own meekness, that is the rest”

Tozer is paraphrasing what Jesus said as recorded in the gospel of St. Matthew. He described himself as meek and lowly in heart, and said it is there we will find rest.

In today’s culture, seeking rest in meekness seems tantamount to becoming a doormat to be walked upon – not a way to find rest. Yet, like so much else that Jesus taught, meekness is counterintuitive. It does not mean to become a doormat; instead, it means to become more like Jesus.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. This week concludes our discussion of chapter 9, “Meekness and Rest.” To see more posts, please visit Jason’s site – Connecting to Impact.

I Hate PowerPoint

I hate PowerPoint presentations.

Part of the reason why, I suppose, is that when it comes to speeches and presentations, I’m a traditionalist. I prefer words, written and spoken. It’s today’s popular culture of visual communication, I’m something of a Neanderthal.

My lack of hipness notwithstanding, I also understand PowerPoint enough to know that very, very few people actually know how to use it effectively.

They don’t know, for example, that it was designed for charts and graphs. Not words.

They also don’t know that every study done on the subject demonstrates that the maximum number of words for an effective PowerPoint slide is – believe it or not – six. And that’s the maximum.

When was the last time you saw only six words on a PowerPoint slide?

We see a blank slide on our computer screen, and we immediately set ourselves to doing what we have the technical capabilities to do – we fill up that blank slide with words, charts, graphs, colors, photos, embedded videos, visual jokes and anything else we can cram on it. We make the slides so complicated that no one – including ourselves – can understand them.

But they look impressive.

If you’re in the audience listening to a speech or presentation, and the speaker is using PowerPoint slides, what do you look at – the speaker or the slides? (Answer: the slides – they’re usually better looking.) And if the speaker reads the slides, do you follow his or her voice, or do you let your eye race ahead to finish reading the words on the slide? (Answer: The eye is faster than the speaker’s voice.)

In fact, everyone might be a lot better off to forgo the speaker altogether and just slow the slides, perhaps with some appropriate Muzak playing as background.

Unfortunately for all concerned, the person of the speaker – body language, voice, personality, physcial appearance, clothes – is a major portion of any speech – some say well over half of the actual communication that happens. And in a PowerPoint presentation, all of that gets lost.

The slides overpower the speaker, and they overpower the message. Everyone forgets that often the most important thing you can do is leave a lot of whitespace on a slide. It provides emphasis and focus, not to mention needed rest from the presenters who never met a whitespace they didn’t immediately try to fill up.

The whitespace in our lives is like that. We have it, but we usually try to fill it up with activities and stuff. Yet that whitespace is the rest time, the thinking time, the quiet time that we need to let be quiet. It’s the time when God speaks most clearly, or when we’ve pushed away all the distractions we allow to invade our lives or we embrace in our lives so that we can hear God speaking clearly.

Whitespace can be simply sitting and reading from a familiar Bible passage, and discovering something you’ve never seen before. Or it can be just sitting. Or lying down. Or walking. Or riding a bike (I had to throw that in there). Taking a hike. Or even, as my wife will tell you, turning off the stupid BlackBerry.

We need whitespace. We crave it. And we can reclaim it.

We can also wage guerilla warfare against PowerPoint presentations. But that’s another post for another time.


To see more posts on whitespace and spiritual rest, please visit Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista, who’s been hosting a blog carnival on rest during the month of March.

Photograph: Blank Monitor by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

In Praise of Naps

Depending upon how you consider it, I have either a blessing or a curse.

Low blood pressure.

It’s something that I think I’ve always had.

The first time I became aware of it, I was having a company physical at Shell Oil in Houston. I was all of 22. The doctor pumped up the pressure gauge, and then a look of surprise appeared on his face. He looked at the reading, looked at me, then looked at the reading again. He shook his head.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

He shook his head. “According to your blood pressure reading, you should be asleep.”

It explains a lot of things.

For example, my uncanny ability to nod off during church sermons, as long as my wife is with me. By myself, I stay awake (so it’s obviously her fault). So, I take notes during sermons. Lots of notes.

Then there’s the serious medical condition I call post-lunch slump. After lunch, it is very difficult for me to stay awake, usually for about 45 minutes after eating. Unless I can move about. Meetings after lunch are the worst, and my company likes having lots of meetings, and lots of them after lunch.

I should live in a Spanish-speaking country; they understand post-lunch slump, and the cure for it has a very pretty name.

Siesta.

Or, as we say in English, the nap. The glorious nap.

I love taking naps. Light naps. Deep naps. Short naps and long naps. Naps of all kinds.

When our Cavalier King Charles Spaniel was still alive, he was my nap partner. In the wintertime, he was the ideal nap partner – a kind of hot-water bottle somewhere in the vicinity of my legs. He had an internal clock that went off at after almost exactly an hour. He’d awaken and then start bugging me to put him on the floor. Sometimes he’d settle down and take another nap. Sometimes he’d start to bark.

As it is, I can usually only manage a good nap (or two) on weekends. If I do a bike ride, I have to kiss the nap goodbye. And while I could probably figure out a way to manage both a nap and a bike ride, there’s this other person living in my house that often has other ideas on how to spend a weekend afternoon. The one who makes me fall asleep in church.

She tells me I should get more sleep at night. She’s right, of course. I should. But it’s become increasingly difficult to sleep past 5 a.m. After that, I’m wide awake.

I have a solution to the problem.

Naps should be required by law.


To see more posts on rest, please visit Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista, who has a “Restoring Soul Rest" carnival going on during March.

Photograph: Afternoon Siesta by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.