Writing as Chore by Marcia Lee Laycock

My deadline was one hour away and the monitor screen was still blank. It had been a busy week and I hadn’t even started my column. Hadn’t even thought about it. Hadn’t even prayed. I typed the column heading and my name. I stopped. I clicked into my “ideas” file. Nothing inspired me. I went upstairs for a glass of water and decided my plants needed watering. I tidied up the living room. Half an hour later I went back to the computer. The screen was still blank. Finally, I prayed. Or rather, I whined. “Lord, I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. Maybe it’s time I just quit.” I was really asking for permission.

What came to mind was a story a Bible translator told me in Papua New Guinea. The translation work had not been going well. Then he got Dengue Fever. Then he ran out of food and had to almost literally crawl two miles to an airstrip only to discover the plane had been too full and couldn’t bring his supplies. He decided he couldn’t take any more. He went back to the village and told his national assistant he was quitting. The man nodded with understanding, then said, “But you must understand, I cannot quit this work. It is what God wants me to do.”

Those words were a rebuke to my missionary friend that day. The memory was a rebuke to me now. I put my hands on the keyboard and started to type. I deleted most of what I wrote for the next half-hour, but then a sentence came. Ah, I thought. Another followed and I had that assurance. Yes. Go with that. The column was a bit past deadline, and I thought it seemed a bit plain. But I copied and pasted it into an email and hit the send button.

The responses flooded back.
“You couldn’t have known ...”
“This gave me the courage to change ...”
“Thank you for putting this into words that helped …”

Some of them made me weep. All of them left me humbled by God’s work.
Sometimes writing is a chore. But we cannot quit. It is what God wants us to do.