The Time Is Now

My mind has been chewing over a verse of Scripture these days:

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." Proverbs 29:18

This verse sums up my life these days. No vision, check. Feel like I'm perishing, check. Perpetual state of limbo, check.

Then again, when I looked up the verse, I did note that some translations use a slightly different terminology. These other versions say that without vision or revelation or restraints, the people "are naked." Oh, my!

I shouldn't shrink back too much at that, however, because I suppose those words could, indeed, fit as well. Without vision, I feel as if I have nothing to show for myself. Nothing splendid to look upon - only the wrinkled, failing flesh of my humanity.

Bob Hostetler, in his Desperate Pastor blog, wrote a post recently about when a pastor feels like quitting. He quoted Jonathan MacIntosh as saying,

"Mark Driscoll calls them “bread truck Mondays.” A Sunday that was so difficult or draining that the day after makes a pastor wish he was anything but a pastor – even the driver of a bread truck.

Not every pastor wants to quit all the time, but from time to time discouragement sets in and often it’s hard for pastors to find a safe, anonymous place to talk about it."

As I read that, I thought to myself, "Boy, I'm having bread truck days in response to my mothering role."

Yesterday, knowing that my husband would be available to manage the boys, I couldn't bring myself to pull the covers off from over my head for a long, long time after I awoke. I would have happily driven a bread truck. I, not so happily, rose anyway and started my day by reading some books to my two little boys (one of the true joys of my job).

Of course, this isn't the first time in life when I've experienced those gnawing questions like "What in the world am I doing here? Am I really supposed to be dedicating my whole self to this job??" And, usually, those are the very jobs I look back upon with wisdom and recognize how very much I learned.

Still, I'm finding it hard to keep my eyes trained on the vision of raising responsible sons (perhaps this is because I fear that I'm not really all that successful at this job and the only reason I haven't been fired is due to a shortage of possible replacements). Days seem to run together with the same themes playing out time and again.

Tonight, it was the standard bedtime ritual: put the boys to bed at 8:15, deal with the bathroom excuses - first #1, then #2 for both boys, listen to a horrendous teen phone conversation accidentally caught on the answering machine without ES's knowledge ... resulting in much fuming and gnashing of teeth in his direction, followed by a grounding, leave to buy a gallon of milk and return at 10 p.m. to find the two little boys still awake and my husband on the verge of murdering them (not literally - no need to involve DCFS).

It is no surprise that when the dust finally, and I mean FINALLY, settles, I sit in front of the computer writing on my blog (or staring into space enjoying the silence). However, for as long as I can remember, my dream was not to write a weblog read by a handful of family and friends, but rather to write a novel. Sadly, I have pursued this dream (especially back in the days when I was bolstered by encouragement from my writer's group) but have usually given up midstream. I have a handful of novels started and another handful of novel ideas constantly percolating.

So, I have decided that the time is ripe for a new vision, even if it is a somewhat temporary vision. I have decided to become a participant in NaNoWriMo. What is that, you ask? That little acronym stands for "National Novel Writing Month" and it takes place every November. I have signed on and set a goal of writing 50 thousand words in the month of November. The blessing in this exercise is that every participant is encouraged to set their sights on quantity rather than quality. They encourage you to write "on the fly," while waiting for a red light, while kids bicker in the background, in whatever moments you can grab and to write whatever you can get down on the page, whether it is worthless drivel or gems of inspired prose. Like Dory's mantra, in "Finding Nemo" they encourage you to "just keep writing, just keep writing ... writing, writing, and more writing."

I'm not sure which of my novel ideas I'm going to chase. Every night before I fall asleep, I seem to latch onto another new idea. Then, I spend the following day trying to determine whether that particular idea has enough steam to sustain me for 50K words.

I may fall flat on my face. I may write next to nothing. Or I may write a fantastic novel about a mother who is toiling away in a dungeon, never seeing the light of day, and then suddenly wins a dream vacation to tour the Bodlein Library in Oxford, England accompanied by a small group of recently acquired blogging friends. Who knows. May the vision keep me from perishing. May God bless my pen (or keyboard) with productivity instead of procrastination.