From the Middle of Nowhere to the Center of Everything.

Last night, my husband said something to the effect of, "In two days we've gone from the wilderness to the center of the world's news." From Saturday through Monday, we did a couple of things that were not exactly our normal routine. And boy, were those two things different!

Monday night, we sat in the studio at CNN with Nancy Grace as she did her show live. (I apologize in advance to my sister, Frankie, and Dave for the following photo. I don't usually subject them to appearing on the blog, but this picture is just too good. Plus, Nancy showed us on camera for about two seconds, so we've already made fools of ourselves, anyway.)







Nancy and I have known each other since we were six. I lost touch with her for years, but it's been fun to reconnect lately. She invited me, Dave, and Frankie to come to her show. What a fascinating experience, to see all the feverish activity that's going on around Nancy while video clips or commercials are playing. How she juggles all that information, and the folks talking at her in her earpiece, and clips and callers and guests is beyond me.


Our destination the weekend before was a little bit different from a bustling place like CNN. Dave and I, his boss and boss's wife went hiking. We stayed at the Len Foote Hike Inn at Amacalola Falls State Park.

To stay there, you must hike the five-mile trail to the inn, so the plan was to hike up there on Saturday, spend the night, and hike back down. (Again, I apologize in advance for the photos. I took these with my cell phone, and apparently I always hold the cell phone sideways when I snap the picture.) I took this one in back of the Visitors' Center, just before we started out, which shows that you're near the start of the Appalachian Trail.



I was a little nervous about this trip. Dave and the others are experienced hikers and campers. I'm experienced at taking elevators and staying in hotels. I was afraid I couldn't keep up, and they'd be sick of me by Sunday. But we took our time, and it was fine.

Still, I've never been so happy to see anything as I was to see the Lodge about three hours after we started the hike.

Especially since, right before we reached the Inn, we saw a sign that said, "Please don't feed the bears." If I had realized there was a possibility that I might provide food for a bear on that trail, I probably would have waited in the van!

Overload Syndrome

God is truly looking out for me. My church's library is fairly small, and yet when I was feeling frazzled a couple of weeks ago and hoped they might have a book that would help, I found two about dealing with overload.

The first is called The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits by Richard A. Swenson, M.D. I think Swenson is my long-lost twin brother, because this man sounds exactly like me. Except for being a successful doctor and actually managing to publish a book. But on this overload thing, we're right in tune.

Swenson starts off talking about his own brush with overload and what he did to change things. He goes on to say this kind of busyness is a fairly recent phenomenon, peculiar to western culture (particularly American) in this day and age. I had wondered about that. How, I wondered, could I feel so stressed and overburdened all the time when, frankly, my parents worked a lot harder than I do? And when I don't even have children?

Swenson was quick to explain. Change in society, in the way things are done, came about fairly slowly for hundreds of years. Then suddenly, things started changing at a head-spinning rate. I know this is true. My father tells me stories of how they lived in his childhood on a farm in Florida, plowing with a mule and picking cotton by hand. It's probably not all that different from the 1800s. But how things have changed since then!

You would think all this progress would make things easier for us, and in some ways, it does. But there's a downside, says Swenson. We've been taught to constantly want more and more, faster and faster. We push the envelope. We push our limits as far as debt and time and energy, until we're way beyond them.

Swenson goes on to talk about the concept of margin--a wonderful idea that means you allow some breathing room between your load and your limits. But he says we've been conditioned to think we're being lazy or doing something wrong if our schedules aren't full up with good things. Swenson has a totally different take on it. According to him, if we have overloaded our schedules with our plans, God may not be happy about it.

"Margin allows availability for the purposes of God," says Swenson. "When God taps us on the shoulder and asks us to do something, He doesn't expect to get a busy signal." (p. 18)

Swenson quotes a theologian named Henri Nouwen. "In the spiritual life, the word discipline means 'the effort to create some space in which God can act...." Discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on." (p. 18)

Wow! That's completely different from my idea of discipline--that every moment must be productive, accomplishing something I had planned. And what's one of the symptoms of not leaving that margin in our lives? According to Swenson, we start to resent friends or loved ones when they need us, when they interrupt our plans and ask us for help.

The man just described my life!

I'll probably tell you more about this wonderful book as I read on. For now, though, it's a tremendous help to realize that I'm not alone and that it's okay to admit I have limits. That maybe, just maybe, God hasn't wanted me to be pushing so hard, anyway.

The Queen Visits the Faire

I knew I was going to enjoy the Renaissance Festival this past Saturday when I found this t-shirt right inside the gate. Obviously, these people understood royalty, and I would no doubt feel right at home.

Of course, I was a bit miffed when I attended the joust and saw that some other young upstart was sitting on the pavilion and calling herself Queen. Imagine!

I've been taking my niece, Kristi, to the Renaissance Festival since she was a little girl. Now she works there as a Kissing Wench. I'm so proud! (I really am, actually. She's about to get a degree in Theatre and Performance Studies. I discovered that the actors playing these characters rehearse for weeks and are chosen for their ability to improvise.)

You knew I'd have to find a few pirates, didn't you? Even I was surprised to find Captain Jack himself!

This guy was a bit of a shock after Jack Sparrow, but he was pleasant enough if you could get past the toothy smile.

All in all, a very pleasant way to spend a Saturday. Even if my sister did force me onto a kiddie ride--a big swing in the form of a ship. The most embarrassing part was that I had to beg the lad pushing it to slow down, ere I threw up on him. (At least I used proper Renaissance language for it.)

Settling on the East Side? Part 2

When I ended yesterday's post, I mentioned I was getting a little uncomfortable by all the messages I seemed to be getting about crossing the Jordan into my Promised Land of writing. I feel a definite need to stop striving so much and trying to compete with every other high-powered writer in the world, but was God trying to tell me to stop whining and go forward no matter what?

I picked up my Bible for the day's reading in Numbers 32, where the Israelites are finally preparing to cross the Jordan River and fight. Representatives of the tribes of Reuben and Gad came to Moses and said, "If we have found favor with you, please let us have this land as our property instead of giving us land across the Jordan River."

Okay, now I was interested. Some of the Israelites were asking not to cross the Jordan, but to be given land where they already were?

Moses didn't seem too happy with their request. In fact, he blasted them. "'Do you mean you want to stay back here while your brothers go across and do all the fighting?' Moses asked the Reubenites and Gadites. 'Are you trying to discourage the rest of the people of Israel from going across to the land the Lord has given them?'" Moses reminded them that their timid ancestors had done the exact same thing. They scounted out the Promised Land, got scared of the people living there, and decided to stay where they were. Moses warns the Reubenites and Gadites that the Lord was furious with those earlier scouts, and he'll be furious with them, too. (Numbers 32: 5-10, NLT)

Uh-oh. So was the the Lord furious with me for my timidity, my lack of energy? Gulp.

Part of my quandary as I've been praying about my writing is that I set out with this blog to try to encourage other writers and dreamers who might be having a hard time hanging in there and completing their journeys. So if I admit I need to slow down, or that I can't keep up a certain writing pace, will I discourage everyone else? If completing the journey to the Promised Land was becoming God's message to me about staying the course, these verses seemed to make that a very real possibility--that I might be discouraging folks instead of encouraging them.

But then I read further.

The people of Gad and Reuben protested to Moses. "We simply want to build sheepfolds for our flocks and fortified cities for our wives and children. Then we will arm ourselves and lead our fellow Israelites into battle until we have brought them safely to their inheritance...But we do not want any of the land on the other side of the Jordan. We would rather live here on the east side."

They weren't out to discourage or desert their brothers. They planned to fight with them and stay the course. But they had a feeling their inheritance from God was going to be a little different. And when Moses heard that, he calmed down. He thought their request was reasonable and granted it.

I never remember reading this before or hearing it in sermons or in all those other places about crossing the Jordan--that some of the Israelites asked for and received an inheritance on the near side of the Jordan.(v. 16-19)

What exactly does this mean for me as I try to figure out what I'm supposed to do? I'm still praying and pondering, but for now, I've drawn a few things from this:

God does have a promise for me, a destination. Something I'm supposed to achieve.

I am not supposed to give up, wallow in doubt, and quit--thereby discouraging everyone else who's on this difficult writing journey.

On the other hand, it may be all right for me to show that there's more than one way to do things. More than one destination ahead of us. I put a lot of pressure on myself when I try to be just like everyone else in my huge online writers' group. When I try to turn out just as many manuscripts as they do, and go to all the conferences, and write a blog, and read writing books, and think of nothing but how I will discipline myself and publish. No matter what.

But all our lives are different. The stresses and demands, the amount of energy we have, all of it.

God has a promised land for each and every one of us. But we won't necessarily end up in the exact same spot.

Settling on the East Side?

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that this year, I'm on a quest to find out what God wants me to do about my writing at this particular time in my life. Specifically, should I keep on the path I'm on--striving to turn out a daily word count, to follow all the rules, to throw myself into trying to get published? Or should I allow myself to relax a little, take life and writing a bit more slowly, and try to rediscover the joy in this gift?

When I started praying about this, I seemed to immediately be bombarded by allegories about the Children of Israel crossing the Jordan into the Promised Land. You know how that is, right? When God seems to be trying to get your attention by sending you the same Bible verses or story everywhere you turn? That's what happened with this. I heard about crossing into the Promised Land in Sunday Schools and in sermons. I read it in two or three books. Of course I read about it every day in my Bible reading, because the Israelites are just now reaching the Promised Land in my one-year Bible. (Which is going to take me 18 months to read this time around, apparently. But that's a different story.)

But that's not all. I'm in a rental club for audio books, and I've had Believing God by Beth Moore on my wish list for months, but it was never available. Suddenly, there it was in my mailbox. Guess what Beth proceeded to talk about at great length? How the Israelites didn't believe God right away. Hence the wandering and settling for less all those years, rather than claiming the destiny He had for them.

Here's the craziest thing of all. The novel I'm currently working on is called Jordan's Shadow. My niece read a portion of it during this same time period and asked me why I called the character Jordan. I told her it was because when this mysterious girl with no memory shows up in the story, she goes around humming "On Jordan's Stormy Banks" all the time, so they call her Jordan. And the song plays a part in the story. Remember the lyrics to that hymn?

"On Jordan's stormy banks I stand
And cast a wishful eye
To Canaan's fair and happy land
Where my possessions lie.
I am bound for the promised land..."

So here I am, praying about the direction for my writing as I work on this book, and God seems to be bombarding me with messages about believing him and not being afraid to cross that river and claim what he has promised for me. It's even in the very thing I'm writing!

I started to feel a bit uncomfortable. Maybe down inside, I really have been wanting permission to slow down. And God seems to be telling me, "Stop whining and doubting like the children of Israel. Cross that river. Do what I called you to do!"

But then the story took a little turn from there. I'll tell you about that next time--hopefully tomorrow.

A Tax Day Story

If you're stressed over your taxes today, I thought I'd tell you a little story about what's going on with me. It might make you feel better.

No, I'm not trying to meet the tax deadline today. We've already filed. Already paid. Twice in fact. That's right. TWICE!

On March 31, I efiled our tax return and paid what we owed--a fairly substantial amount, at least for us--with my debit card. I only get paid once a month and that was payday, so I bit the bullet and sent the money. I received a confirmation email that our tax return was accepted. Received a receipt for the payment. Went to online banking and saw that the payment had gone through, taking most of my balance with it, on April 2. All was well.

Then came April 9. I check my online banking every morning just to make sure everything is okay and I haven't forgotten to record something. On April 9, I got quite a shock. I was severely overdrawn. Overnight, my remaining money for the month had disappeared.

You've probably guessed it by now. My payment to the IRS had gone through a second time.

Can't you just see where this is going? Yes, that's right. I was now going to have to communicate with the IRS and try to get my money back.

I spent an hour on the phone with them and with folks from the bank that day. An hour in which everyone agreed it was the same transaction, same transaction date, same amount, and same reference number. Everyone admitted it was a simple mistake.Want to guess how simple it's been getting my money back?

The rep on the phone told me they would get right on it and the money should be back in my account within a week. I frankly thought a week was unacceptable. And why should it take so long? Folks don't seem to have any problem taking money OUT of my account. If I go shopping on my lunch hour and buy something with my debit card, the charge has gone through by the time I'm back at my desk. And if the clerk at the mall makes a mistake, I simply hand them my card and they reverse the incorrect charge.

So why can't the IRS do that?

The story gets even better. Yesterday was the fifth day since I was told I should have the money back within a week. I got home and checked my mail. I had a letter, with a form attached. An affidavit that I must complete, sign, and return to them swearing that I have a right to have this money returned.

Uh...excuse me? They take my money, and suddenly I have to swear on an affidavit that the money is mine?

But at least they appear to be working on it.

Hmm...Maybe I shouldn't have published this until after I get my money back.

Winner of Sharon K. Souza book

The winner of Sharon K. Souza's book, Every Good and Perfect Gift, is Sherrie Ashcraft. Congratulations, Sherrie, and thanks for entering! Just send me your mailing address and I'll get the book on its way to you.

So what shall I give away next? Hmmm...

Keep watching and find out what I decide!