Psalms 81:10 NASB “I, the LORD, am your God, Who brought you up from the land of Egypt; Open your mouth wide and I will fill it.
My favorite genre of books is writing advice and encouragement: some can fit all genres, others more specific. Most of my writing books are poetry related, with a few personal essays and fewer still flash fiction.
Most have one thing in common though – they are secular. I have read a few of this subgenre for Christian creatives. The Creative Call: An Artist’s Response by Janice Elsheimer and Art + Faith by Makoto Fujimura are good choices. The secular books are good for practical ideas and suggestions, but they advise calling on “the Muse” for idea inspiration. Would that be the nine muses of Greek mythology or automatic writing?
As much as I have read books to get ideas flowing, nothing beats typing posts on my laptop or writing poems on paper until ideas flow. (Writing prompts, just no). Some I can attribute to my own thoughts, but some clearly come from the Holy Spirit. My one and only Muse.
We are living in a time of metaphorical Egyptian bondage. It is time to open our mouths, or fingers, and let the Lord fill us, so we can praise Him with the written word during and after deliverance comes, when we are called. And be lights when deliverance comes.
A Stroll by the Seine, Paris by Henri Victor Lesur
Public Domain
You have been cooped up in your writing room, hopefully for hours, in a state of flow. Or maybe not, maybe you have stared at the screen or paper not knowing what to scribble. Or maybe you need some inspiration, some window shopping for ideas. Take a stroll with me down memory lane on the French word flâneur.
A flâneur, or a “man-about-town” according to Merriam-Webster, was coined in 1854, during the reign of Napoleon III’s rebuilding of Paris. Eric Maisel, in A Writer’s Paris, writes it is a “French invention of strolling as an art form.”
Many of my haiku ideas were conceived strolling the beach in my neighborhood. Pegging the changing colors of the Pacific from day to day, like a kindergartner changing the weather chart, clears my head and rolls any stress off my back. Strolling sets my mind mulling over what I have written or read, and/or opens my eyes to the details around me.
Writing is an interior exercise, but strolling becomes an external exercise. We see our natural history roll right before our feet. Just as the ocean changes daily, observing your environment intimately will enlighten our routine stroll. It grounds us in the reality of our physical bodies and physical, concrete world—perhaps giving us ideas for metaphorical writing. For the introverts, and most of us writers are introverts, it is a way of blending in without interacting too much with others, so we can think and plan and observe sans cell phones.
Now you are ready to write those ideas down to start the process of flow. The wind of the Holy Spirit flowing through your mind with ideas to flow onto the screen or paper. He can supply the ideas, and we supply the unique expression of those ideas. We co-create.
It is through him that we are able to live, to do what we do, and to be who we are. As your own poets have said, ‘We all come from him.’ Acts 17:28 ERV
For the first time that I can remember this past Christmas, I genuinely thought of the baby in the manger. I was one of the parents that never promoted Santa Claus. My mother did, and I remember how hurt I felt when I realized he was not real. (My mom was a warrior – she was a high school counselor whose students called Battle Axe. It was from her that I learned the art of non-violent spiritual warfare techniques.) But still, I gave Him the short shift every Christmas by not pondering why He came here for us.
On New Year’s Eve, I write resolutions and prayers for the coming year. But before I do, I tear open and read the sealed envelope from a year ago. Twenty twenty one’s resolutions were, well, … quite depressing. However, this year I had something brewing to write: podcasting.
Several years earlier with my son, I listened to the 2011 World Series live on the radio. It was spectacular to engage my visual imagination as I heard the crack of David Freese’s bat deliver a miracle for the St. Louis Cardinals.
I have had a surprising passing interest in podcasting for several years. I am a visual and not an aural learner. I borrowed Podcasting for Dummies from the local library and dug in. As well as Poetry for Dummies, this book gave me a clearly-written foundation to build on with further research.
Podcasting Made Simple mentioned that unlike blog posts and videos, podcasts could be listened to on the go. Also, podcasting could be recorded in solitude, which appeals to me.
The baby in the manger was born, was crucified, and rose again to give us life and our lives more abundantly. He and my purpose are now my abundantly. With the warfare over our nation and my first empty-nester Christmas, I truly thought about the baby in the manger. And I truly saw Him in a deeper than before raison d’être this Christmas.
It is a fearsome thing to be dealt with by the heart of the Lord.
One recent weekend (I reserve weekends for guilt-free R&R), the Lord swung a punch to my psyche.
I profess no practical knowledge of the publishing industry. All I know is what I have read in books, online posts, and magazines. I do have experiential knowledge with blogging — my first weblog (an older, shortened term for web log) in the 90s was called My Hearthstone. My prodigal blog title returns home.
When I was writing my weblog – back before social media became popular – I was just proud that I was writing posts using HTML 3.2. I shared my views, one referring to Elton John song lyrics, another on Y2K. Technorati, a precursor to likes and follower counts, displayed popularity results for the world of weblogs.
Enter Twitter in 2006, the year I bought Twitter for Dummies and drove in.
Twitter, and a few others, paved the way for the interstate highway system of social media, bypassing American’s Main Street of weblogs. All the action entered the highway of social media, and our blogs became homing places. Our websites, our hearths, had been bypassed by social media companies that circumlocuted our blog posts with algorithms and AI. Wisdom congealed into building platforms first then writing books afterward.
A few weeks ago, the Lord, acting as a traffic cop, stopped me with the dastardly deed of AI and algorithms. In my human wisdom, I had gone looking for other writers to follow instead of working on my writing projects. I was looking for conversations, as limited as they are on social media, with other writers for some semblance of a give-and-take encouraging environment.
This behavior was outside the AI algorithms that Instagram had decided for me. I was locked out of my account immediately for suspicious activity and asked for a cell phone number to receive an SMS message containing a code to reenter. Which I don’t have.
Now mind you, I had 11 followers, mainly family and a few others who were interacting with me through my posts and comments. But they meant something to me. I had read and underlined a book about blogging on Instagram using captions. I shed a few tears.
He had been dealing with me for months to write first and demote social media platforms to a second-place priority. Telling me that my local isolation is a blessing in disguise so that I can concentrate on my writing. As Eudora Welty wrote in One Writer’s Beginnings, “My temperament and my instinct had told me alike that the author, who writes at his own emergency, remains and needs to remain at his private remove. I wished to be, not effaced, but invisible….”
Another lesson I believe the Lord wanted me to learn was to write steadily on a schedule and as Isak Dinesen said, “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”
But beyond the pain of losing what I was trying to build on a small level (for many followers would swamp me) was the pain of knowing I was not writing the way the Lord meant for me to write – a long Psalms 119 type poem and venturing to write longer, thoughtful blog posts. And I abandoned the joy of writing itself.
Writing is my God-ordained baptism. A dying to self in front of a blank page. I never would have thought the desire of my heart would be used this way.
I had a vision a few months ago: I was sitting down writing and had so much paper that it was floating all around me, no supply issues here. I know that meant my drought days of writer’s block would be over, but I can’t help but wonder if the vision did double duty and showed me how different the coming days would be regarding how we published our works. I don’t believe the paper in the vision meant an old-school return to book-only publishing, but I do think it might have signified a change.
On a national level, I see around the corner which we are turning now, as do many others, a total upheaval of our society. Social media and publishing companies are not exempt. Even though my Instagram account was taken out prematurely, I know it was a matter of time before censoring companies are taken down, regulated, or for all practical purposes boycotted.
I don’t want to see the Internet go down. I know that is primarily the only way my works are going to be read by those that God sends my way. And I know I am not alone in this. I want to see it cleansed.
It doesn’t have to be all or nothing – variety is the spice of our literary lives. I chose Substack because of the melding of the social media aspect with the newsletter format (and because they don’t censor). My blog before h. renell’s Hearth was with WordPress because of the ability to have a community of followers. And my aforementioned Instagram account.
Many years ago I read Thomas Merton’s book Seven Storey Mountain. The Lord prompted me to revisit it. In the epilogue “Meditatio Pauperis In Solitudine.” Merton records the Lord’s message to him regarding his popular published poetry and his conflicting desire for solitude.
I will give you what you desire. I will lead you into solitude. I will lead you by the way you can not possibly understand, because I want it to be the quickest way…But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in my Mercy which has created you for this end…And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth.
Thomas Merton
Building a literary life with God, me, and the eyes that God sends my way has become the joyful practice of my weekdays, done in His way. Writers usually don’t see most of the hearts that they touch. For the work is ours and the reach and glory are His.
When the lockdowns started, and Oregon residents were given a choice to wear masks or not to wear masks, I chose to not wear masks. I was in the minority, but every business (except one customer who gave me the evil eye and got a look of disdain back, needless to say, she did not look at me again) I entered, the employees greeted me with a smile with their eyes as before the lockdowns. Shortly, and I mean days after the evil-eyed customer, the governor decided that not enough people were following her advice and made them mandatory.
I stocked up as much as I could without resorting to hoarding, though one employee disagreed and said to another, “I told you she would be in again.”
But after a few weeks, it dawned on me that this was going to last far longer than I had anticipated.
The Lord works in mysterious ways, the Christian cliché goes. I had watched a movie: the storyline was touching, beautiful, clean, and not to be forgotten (except for the title, which escapes me). Later, an idea hit me – the main character had to have a job at night because he was allergic to the sun. He was a courier.
So I did my internet research. I also found other ways of purchasing what I needed. The Lord provided in ways that never gets old.
Fast Forward a Year and a Quarter Later
The masks are starting to come off. But not in the way I would have dreamed, though the Lord warned me 20 years ago of “Hitler’s Germany looking like candy compared to what is coming.” I never would have lived my life if I could have seen what was coming.
I never was afraid of the virus, after praying for the Lord to take the fear away. It was the people around me who did not research and caved to fear that I was afraid. I did not want to be on the receiving end of an irate masked person, or worse, the police. And I did not want to get the local businesses in trouble, for they were forced to become mask police.
But every chance I had to not wear a mask “legally,” I ran with it.
I went for a walk today in the rain. First one since the lockdown started. I used to walk with my portable radio & headphones along the beach. Then the devil interfered. Soaking wet, but feeling soul-satisfied, I took a hot shower and sat down to write this post.
By no means is this over. Devastating revelations are fixing to fly. Research. Start with recent events and don’t use mainstream media for answers. Mainstream media is a piece of the revelation puzzle.
This movie was an answer I did not know I needed at the time. The fact that it was so beautifully done and remained in my memory, is God’s work of art, whether the people involved in the film knew it or not.
Some details in this post will remain a mystery. But good writing co-creates with the reader and allows them to use their native intelligence. And some details just need to remain private, if that is even possible anymore. I personally don’ t believe it is, but I have to at least try.
Shout Outs & Thank Yous
The local police. They made protesters follow the law recently and protected us.
My town. They did not cave to cancel culture regarding community and private events.
My courier.
A few local businesses.
Friends and family. For being there.
And mostly, the Lord, who gave me creative ways and the fortitude to deal.
