Albert Einstein (Photo credit: mansionwb)
How do I work? I grope.
Albert Einstein
To grope means to search blindly or uncertainly. There are days when the way is clear and certain in my work. Those days are too few. Most often in my writing the way is unknown. We forge ahead blindly trusting that the words will come. Slowly one word at a time we find our way.
Maybe like life?
I’m groping today. How about you?
Betsy
We are a society of builders and often we focus on adding. When writing, I can focus on my word count and my daily production and lose the focus of the work. It’s nice to have a high word count and to see the page numbers grow, but it’s often in the rewriting and editing that the real work is done. In stripping away what is not real and authentic we find the essence of our work.
Can we focus on subtraction instead of addition?
In my spiritual life I can focus on building, adding. I have a bookcase filled with books about faith and prayer. Is another book going to help me grow my faith? Do I need one more retreat? Another service opportunity? More study? Or is there something about subtraction? Stripping away what is not real and authentic we find the essence of our faith.
What can I subtract today?
God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by subtracting.
Meister Eckhart
A. W. Tozer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Come near to the holy men and women of the past and you will soon feel the heat of their desire after God.
The stiff, wooden quality of our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire.
What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.
God never hurries. There are no deadlines against which he must work.
In the deep heart of man was a shrine where none but God was worthy to come.
Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea.
Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us.
God wants the whole person and He will not rest till He gets us in entirety.
Any faith that must be supported by the evidence of the senses is not real faith.
God is speaking. Not God spoke, but God is speaking.
He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken words.
In the living, breathing cosmos there is a mysterious Something.
It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.
The believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and whispers, “God.”
Has it ever occurred to you that 100 pianos tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other?
The whole course of life is upset by failure to put God where He belongs.
The Bible is not and end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God.
If my fire is not large it is yet real and there may be those who can light their candle at its flame.
We pursue God because and only because He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit.
Religion, so far as it is genuine, is in essence the response of the created personalities to the Creating Personality, God.
Do you have others? Do you agree with any of these statements? Disagree?
Betsy
Why do we focus on the “to do” list instead of the “not to do” list? Everything that I choose not to do gives me more time and energy for the things that are important.
What can you put on your “not to do” list today?
We might end up getting more done.
Happy writing!
Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Gustave Geffroy, 1895. Oil on canvas, 110 × 89 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The artist must raise everything to a higher level: he is like a pump; inside him is a great pipe reaching down into the bowels of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was pooled beneath the surface and brings it forth into the sunlight in giant sprays.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Am I taking things to a higher level? Am I writing about the muck of life and redeeming the circumstances or am I wallowing in it? Is there a goodness in my work that seeks the higher level? Is my work redemptive?
How do we balance the dark places of life, the grief, the unfairness, the storms? How do we find meaning from the circumstances that seem impossible? Can we as writers be vehicles for light? Can we bring understanding and healing to the dark places?
Bottom line, are we wrestling or wallowing?
After struggling with his horrible circumstances including the loss of his family, home and health, Job said that he had known about God but through his wrestling for meaning he knew God. As the world wears on us we can go two ways, down or up. To darkness or light.
As a writer I can dip into the darkness to bring light for myself and others. No wonder so many writers struggle with depression. We wrestle in the dark places like Jacob and sometimes come out with a limp. But in wallowing we don’t always come out.
Wrestling or wallowing. There’s a big difference. Wrestling involves God – wallowing we do alone.
Which are you doing today?
