Today I am working on the final edit before I see my brain child (more like my heart child) in print. I waited in patience for several seasons before I walked away from a traditional publisher, and am now becoming my own Indie name. I don't know what the future holds for this tiny imprint I am about to start. It's not up to me.
What I do know, realize, remember as I go back through Out of Egypt, His Children Come is that I must first minister to myself.
I know.
That sounds selfish. But hear my thoughts.
I have read this story from beginning to end a hundred times or more. I wrote it, lost it in a computer crash, rewrote it, and lost it again when my daughter caused my computer (despite a good virus protection program) to have the mother of all viruses. I was then forced to decide I would never give up on this trilogy.
That's it's name, and as I rewrote it and edited the living snot out of it, I cried each time I worked within it's pages. It brought me to extremely emotional sessions of weeping. And that's kind of the point of writing. If it doesn't make you want to keep going, neither will it cause the reader to do the same. If you can't even feel the Spirit of God as you type the words of a Christian book, then perhaps it's time to fast and pray.
A Christian author's first and most important job is not to make money or become famous. If they reach that point then hallelujah, but their job is not a job at all. It is a calling. The author whose calling is of God is to teach, preach (sort of), give word from God, get people saved and delivered, and revive and heal the brokenness within the reader. No, we are not to fix it all and be psychologists. Yes, we are to minister to the weakest areas within them.
My prayer has always been that people get saved and/or delivered from the stuff they struggle with through reading the words I have been given to speak. I don't want to write for me. I wrestled with God about even putting my photograph on the back of the book. Of course He won. I will go to see one of my favorite photographers sometime in the next few weeks. And maybe my photo will just be to put her work on the back of a book. Who knows. I only want to obey.
So as I sit here and type and pray fiercely because I don't even have the money to pay a professional editor to make my work zing, my hope rests in the Lord. May every word I type, every semicolon and indented paragraph, resonate His glory and tell His story. In Jesus' name. There is no other reason to do that which I do. Grammar crown or no, onward this child shall go.
Amen.