Recently I heard a sermon about stewardship. The sermon was a part of a series on the “Five Marks of a Disciple” the pastor said that without stewardship then the other marks (Spiritual Growth, Service, Small Groups and Sharing the Gospel) were all irrelevant. Of course when I think of stewardship I automatically think of money. I grew around churches that was always asking for money for a building or a renovation. But stewardship means a lot more than money. It means taking the gifts that God gave us and making them better. Of course he used the parable of the talents to illustrate what he meant. The sermon was exactly what I needed especially because I’ve been searching for a church and the process has left me exhausted both spiritually and physically and I felt at home in this church. I left thinking about how hard it is to hide the gifts that God wants to expose.
My parents bought me this domain when I was 13 and I didn’t even know that I liked writing. When I was old enough for high school I auditioned for the only program available at my high school, a writing program. In college I fought hard against an English major only for my professors to push me toward an English major that I eventually loved. Even now people ask me to read their writing or write pieces on my thoughts even though it gives me so much anxiety.
Despite all the signs, I thought that if I just found something else that I was good that, something that didn’t give me anxiety it would all be fined. I thought I could be a better photographer so I bought a film camera and used my dad’s old SLR. I am still not a visual person. I started knitting and thought maybe I could just make knitting my thing. I still like knitting but it doesn’t inspire me. I thought that maybe I could just jump into marketing until I realized that I actually get hives whenever I try to sell anyone anything.
Every time I tried to hide from this gift that God gave me I ended right back here: writing. I would neglect journaling for months only to find that once I journaled I felt lighter than I ever had. I would edit other people’s work and when they read mine they would ask “why didn’t you just write this yourself” and I would laugh it off.
During my writing program in high school, there wasn’t a lot of space for my kind of writing. I tend to write almost exclusively Creative Nonfiction, a genre that for many seems like an oxymoron and I really like Playwriting, a genre that many don’t consider literature at all. My classmates were all poets or fiction writers. I wanted so badly to be a poet or write short stories because I wanted to have somewhere to fit. Senior year, I won an award for my creative nonfiction. I still didn’t want to claim it as mine.
I say all of this to say that God has been hunting me down about writing for years. I know that it’s God because it comes naturally and it doesn’t feel boastful or cocky when I say that I am good at this. I am good at taking my thoughts and putting them into words. I am good at writing a draft and making it into something better than before. I used to think that everyone was good at that then I realized that’s one of the lies that we are fed.
We are told that our gifts aren’t special because someone else already did it and when they did it, they got a book deal or thinking that their ideas and your ideas are identical so there’s no point in writing the same thing twice. It’s something I struggle with now. I am not writing this from a place of healing but a place of confusion.
I don’t know what writing looks like when I claim it as a gift. I don’t quite know how to steward this gift. I know that in all my years of studying writers the only piece of advice writers give is to write. Write when you don’t feel like it, write when you think it’s bad and (often you have to get through the bad to get to good) write when no one is watching. So for now, I’ll just write and see what happens.