Reflections

As a creative writing graduate student, summer break has been providing me with an important opportunity: time to revise. Throughout this summer, I’ve been working on poems, essays, and a short story I wrote during the school year, trying to make them stronger. Revising can be slow, sometimes frustrating work, especially if you’re interested in addressing a piece’s deeper-rooted issues and not just the grammar or spelling. At times, revision involves a total re-evaluation of what one’s already written. Beginnings and endings can change. The whole heart of a narrative can change! This deeper form of revision can involve both contemplation and experimentation.

 

I suspect the act of revision has something to say to us about our journeys with Christ. After all, becoming the followers of Jesus we are meant to be is also slow work; it can include many evolutions, moments of rethinking, and even some experiments. At times, we have to make attempts even if we’re still asking ourselves, Will this really draw me closer to God? or Is this how God wants to use me in the world? Sometimes in our trying, we might realize God is asking us to go in a completely different direction.

 

Someone who I think understood this slow journeying with God is Evelyn Underhill, an Anglican mystical writer who lived from 1875 to 1941. She wrote: “Our spiritual life…consists in being drawn, at His pace and in His way, to the place where He wants us to be; not the place we fancied for ourselves.

 

Some people may seem to us to go to God by a moving staircase….Some appear to be whisked past us in a lift; whilst we find ourselves on a steep flight of stairs with a bend at the top, so that we cannot see how much farther we have to go. But none of this really matters; what matters is the conviction that all are moving towards God, and, in that journey, accompanied, supported, checked and fed by God.”

 

I appreciate this assurance that even if our journeys feel slower than those around us, we are still being held by God. Some of the most valuable work in life – whether I’m thinking about writing or about developing one’s character in the image of Christ – is slow.

 

I wonder: What in your life – in your heart – is being revised right now? Reworked? Rethought? Refashioned? Rearranged? What in your walk with God isn’t meant to be rushed through, but sat with thoughtfully or maybe even playfully? What might become clear if you allow yourself to be immersed in the process of discovery?