Words Like Dew

Marcia Lee Laycock writes from central Alberta Canada where she is a pastor's wife and mother of three adult daughters. She was the winner of The Best New Canadian Christian Author Award for her novel, One Smooth Stone and also has two devotional books in print. Her work has been endorsed by Sigmund Brouwer, Janette Oke, Phil Callaway and Mark Buchanan. The sequel to One Smooth Stone will be released in 2011Visit her website at www.vinemarc.com

I was strolling through a local grocery store one day when an attractive woman in a business suit tapped me on my shoulder. “You’re the woman who wrote that book,” she said. Since I had three books in print at that time I asked which one she meant. “The one with the purple cover, something about a stone,” she added.

I smiled and nodded, chuckling to myself that she probably didn’t remember what the book was about. But she surprised me as she explained that she was working as a psychologist in a prison, dealing with many young men whose lives were much like the main character in my book. “It has really helped me as I work with them,” she said.

Wow. I was speechless. It was one of the best compliments I’d received as a writer. She went on to say how she had studied her chosen field in school, reading textbooks full of theories and strategies. But my novel had given her pictures, a story that she could relate to and characters that she empathized with. It had brought the theory to life.

As she talked I was struck again by the powerful impact words can have when they are wound into a story and the powerful impact the Holy Spirit has when He uses them. Her words convicted me, too, as I realized my responsibility to pray, to continue to ask God to use my book according to His purposes, to pour out his blessing on my readers.

Oswald Chambers, in his never-surpassed devotional book, My Utmost for His Highest, urges us to be careful not to take blessings to satisfy ourselves, but to pour them out before the Lord. He says, “If you are always taking blessing to yourself and never learn to pour out anything unto the Lord, other people do not get their horizon enlarged through you.”

That last phrase struck me, in terms of how I spend my time and especially in terms of my writing life. In a sense, that’s what all good writing will do – it will enlarge the horizon for the reader, give them a greater and deeper perspective that will ultimately lead them to praise God.

“Let my teaching fall like rain and my words descend like dew, like showers on new grass, like abundant rain on tender plants.” Deut. 32:2

Amen and amen.