As 2021 comes to a close, I regret not writing more. Last year, I coped with the pandemic by writing prayers. This year, I’ve really struggled to keep myself blogging. In writing about his own mentor, one of my favorite Christian writers wrote a sentence that resonated with me: I can hardly write if someone shares the same room with me. I also need solitude to write and I need a lot of time to compose my thoughts. If my husband walks into the room and starts talking to me, I can’t write. I become too self-conscious.
It helps to know I am not alone in needing to be alone.
C.S. Lewis has been a constant companion, a shadow mentor who sits beside me urging me to improve my writing style, my thinking, my vision, and also my life….
“[He] affirmed my calling as a writer who works out my faith in print. We live sequestered lives, those of us who make a living by herding words. I can hardly write if someone shares the same room with me. And the results of my work are both slippery and vicarious: when I write I am not actively caring for the poor, ministering to the suffering, feeding the hungry, or even conversing about spiritual matters. Lewis proved to me that this most isolated act can still make a difference.
“As one who was changed—literally, dramatically, permanently—by an Oxford don who often felt more at home with books than people, I trust that God may use my own feeble efforts to connect with readers out there somewhere, most of whom I will never meet.”
Philip Yancey, What Good is God? In Search of a Faith That Matters
Fortunately, I don’t make a living herding words. It’s much easier for me to herd numbers. But like Philip Yancey, I work out my faith by writing. My faith has been strengthened by writing about it. And like my mentor, Philip Yancey, I trust that God can use my feeble efforts to connect with readers I will never meet.
Thank you to everyone who reads Innermost Being!
Innermost Being 