Don’t Stop Planting

As most of you probably realized, my post yesterday Respond Like Christ (go check it out if you haven’t yet) was the first one I had done in almost a month. Yeah I know, its been a while. The truth is though, I had seriously been struggling with writing for various reasons.

1. It takes a lot of work. When I first decided to start this blog I figured it would be easy enough. I thought that my love for writing would make it a breeze and I’d just spend an hour writing what was on my heart, a little extra time to edit and that’d be it. But I was so wrong. It is a lot of work, especially if it’s not your full-time job and you actually do have a full-time job and other commitments in life.
2. Life was getting busier and busier and I was having a difficult time keeping up. Those who know me personally know what a perfectionist I am, and if I can’t do something to the best of my ability, give it 100% of my all, then I don’t really want to do it at all. The stress of trying to squeeze in sufficient time to explore my thoughts and deliver them in logical sequence  that my readers can understand was a heavy weight I didn’t know if I could bear with everything else going on.
3. Sometimes it was difficult to be transparent about things that I was going through knowing that many of those experienced involved people who would probably read these entries and I was really battling with keeping “peace” in my life and relationships.
4. I was not getting the kind of results/response I initially expected. This one was the toughest. Many times I think we start new ventures and we have this expectation that everybody is going to be just as excited about it as we are, and the support we’ll get (especially from those closest to us) will be phenomenal. But, that’s not always the case and I think that was the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. It starts to make you unsure of your effectiveness.

I was close to the point of throwing in the towel. The vulnerability of exposing my heart on my sleeve in hopes that someone would find relief was met with a seeming disinterest that became extremely discouraging. Until… I had an encounter with the Holy Spirit. My prayer in that moment was that God would help me focus my eyes on Him alone and that He would really speak to my heart and help me to listen; that His spirit would come and dwell with me and Never Lever!! 

I had been battling with the spirit in prayer trying to figure out why my ministry didn’t seem as effective as others and trying to reason why I should or should not continue. Too often though, our prayers are like monologues instead of dialogues and I decided to pause for a while, block out everything but Jesus and bask in the sweet stillness of the presence of the Lord. In the midst of that the Holy Spirit spoke to me.

He asked, “are you better or worse for it”? And to tell you the truth this was a revelation that stripped me of a pride I didn’t realize I was clinging too. I had been soo focused on reaching the masses but the truth was, if it had not been for the outlet this blog provided, my growth would’ve been stunted; stuck in the same place it was a year ago. It’s an incredible thing to watch a ministry affect thousands and even millions of lives for the better, but does that mean it’s less amazing/ffective when the ministry affects the one life, the one soul that was in need of rescue?

I felt chastised in the Spirit for failing to recognize that God was using me to minister to myself and I’ve experienced so much spiritual growth in the last six months because of it. And the revelations just kept coming: I was reminded of the instances in the past week where people (some I never expected) had stopped and asked me of the status of my posts because they hadn’t seen any in a while. Sometimes you really don’t know who you are reaching with what God has called you do to; whose life is being transformed; who is receiving a breathrough… So you just do it and let God do the rest. 1 Corin. 3:6 says “I planted the seed in your hearts, and Apollos watered it, but it was God who made it grow.”

And as if God was trying to spread the icing on the cake, about an hour or so after I made my previous post, a close friend of mine messaged me expressing how timely it was and how much it helped her change the perspective of a situation that she was going through that I had no idea about.

The funny thing is that I had already written the piece even before receiving these revelations, I had just yet to edit it for lack of time so I never posted it. It’s just amazing how God’s timing was so perfect. He needed me to go through the dry land because when I finally got a taste of the water I was able to share it with others who were also experiencing thirst.  You really never know whose life you might be impacting.

The point I’m trying to make is that your art, your skill, your talent, your efforts matter. Even if not to the hundreds, it does to the one and it should matter to you. As ministers of any sort, your heart should be feeding on what you are trying to give to others as well because we don’t minister of our own accord/knowledge/wisdom, we are essentially just the medium that God is using to reach his children and my friend,

you are also one of those children.

Be Blessed Chroniclers!!