Returning to Eternity

So.

It's been a while.

Two weeks, but who's counting? Not this girl. *Cough*

What a full season. School-- and the ensuing preparations, communications, and oh yeah, delivery, of lessons-- pooled over my head. Throw in a few writing assignments and, well, you get two weeks of no writing.

I feel very unholy when I don't write, as if I've caved into the Philistine practices of irreverence, ill-discipline, and butt-laziness. I also think about all the really great copy I've let slip through my fingers on my way to accomplishing something else. Probably something that pays.

But sometimes there just must be times for something else, other than what we planned.

Man, this is something I've been struggling with. Hm, struggling, maybe that's a strong word. Have I wrestled an angel and bruised a rib? Mostly I've been impatient and skinned a knee and sliced a finger, as evidenced by this weekend. Maybe "haunted" is a better word. I've been haunted by the sense of something to be accomplished, like writing, but having other things that require attention.

Take for example, this blog. It's a symptom of a writing disease-- the condition where one believes firmly that things must be written. MUST. And when they are not, they either didn't happen or weren't important. So imagine what happens when one such person doesn't write-- it means nothing has happened to them lately and whatever did wasn't important. Talk about depressing.

So maybe I feel a little depressed.

I have been kneeling to the obligations of school preparation as well as the demands of paying writing projects, um, and a little bit to my own sanity--taking time in the morning for coffee and quiet. Not bad things in of themselves, by no means. But soon the absence of writing drove me a little crazy. I wasn't processing well, I was picking fights with my husband and generally felt lost, unmoored.

Why is that sometimes we leave the things that mean the most to us? It definitely makes the homecoming sweeter, but what about all that other time? Was it lost time? Or was something else going on?

Okay, okay, I'm getting a little existential. My life didn't end, my marriage is wonderful, I didn't stop writing completely, and I can still put two words together. But I always do feel deeply, um, sorry, when I don't write. It's a funny way of thinking, of living, to think that something can mean that much to you and make such a difference when it's NOT there. Culturally we're taught that the tyranny of the urgent is well, urgent, and anything not attached to just getting through the day doesn't really matter.

I think this is what I'm haunted by, and passive-aggressively wrestling with. Trying to live in the present--do what needs to be done--but to take time for eternity, to write, to create, and just be, with no money or expedience necessarily attached.

It's why I'm sorry when I don't write. I feel sorry because I wonder if I was simply caving into expedience rather than eternity.

Writing, like this blog, is an act of faith. I see no immediate rewards or returns. It's anyone's wonder if it will ever really turn into anything. Rather, it's a exercise, a process, of living in God's economy where human striving and effort aren't what make the world go 'round; He does. So I try to worship Him with my art, my words, like little prayers, confessing myself to Him; confessing myself to a reader. It is a journey of bringing myself back, repentant in a thousand little ways that I've tried to live according to the world's expedience, and taking time, once again, for eternity.