Writer's Block

We don’t love the edits and re-writes, but it is in these seasons that God teaches us and prepares us for the great story He has in mind.

For the first time since God led me to start this whole adventure, I hit a wall called writer's block. It wasn’t from a lack of ideas. I have articles stored and waiting for their debut. The problem is no matter what I tried to do, I wasn’t feeling it. I started writing sentences and then would hit delete or jump to another idea or throw my hands up in exasperation and beg the creative process to ignite; but NOTHING!

God has always clearly given me something to write about and has specifically laid an idea on my heart that He wanted me to share. So when this week rolled around and I waited and waited for God to give me the green light on something and He never did, I wondered if I had somehow gotten out of touch with God’s voice over the last seven days. I tried to think back over my week and come up with an explanation. Nothing seemed too out of the ordinary.

Writer's block is actually not a common problem for me in my writing. It may not sound great and it may need a lot of editing, but usually my fingers fly across the keyboard barely keeping up with my thoughts. So I sat, frustrated, looking at my page. Not a blank page, but a page filled with sentences and ideas going in every direction. A page full of expectation, but not completion. A page waiting to tell its story, but not finding the right words.

I went to my mom and I surrendered. I can’t do it. I’m stuck.

I knew she would tell me to give it a little more time. I knew she would say that I would pull it out in the end like always, but I didn’t expect her to give me an idea. I sighed and told her that I didn’t like to ride it out and wait and see what was going to happen. I wanted it to all fall into place and be wrapped up in a neat little bow.

And in that last, possible, desperate moment God spoke to me.

We get writer's block all the time in life. The way my blog looked was a reflection of my life lately. We feel so stuck and so confused and so unsure of how things are going to turn out. We want them squared away. We don’t want to have to wait and see what is going to happen. We have ideas, but we can’t get them going. We write a few words and then hit delete. We flip the page only to find we are no closer to the conclusion then we were before. Writer's block runs rampant in our lives and we keep on going, hoping our story will form.

But God does not work that way.

God is not stringing us along; He seeks for us to trust Him when we can’t see the road before us. He wants us to come to Him when things are not falling into place. When we come to a point in our lives where we seem stuck and are unable to see beyond the block, He wants us to take it to Him and wait to see how He will work. God offers the solution we’ve been trying to find on our own. We don’t love the edits and re-writes, but it is in these seasons that God teaches us and prepares us for the great story He has in mind.

It’s a lesson I choke on all the time. But I love what Ephesians 3:20 says, “Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine …”

God is not surprised by our problems, frustrations, disappointments, requests or blocks. He sees the whole story and not just chapter to chapter. He can do far more than we could ever imagine! The best cure I know for writer's block is to give it some time, look at it from a different perspective and never ever stop trying.

To us, a road block may seem like a stumbling block, but to God it is a building block.

-Only Hope—Keep writing your story!