By Sarah Van Diest, @SarahVanDiest
My words rest on the page as if sleeping.
They are worn out from their journeys and struggles. The stories they would tell if they weren’t so tired are of an epic nature, I am sure. Where they have traveled, what they have seen and endured, how they have suffered and triumphed, and what miseries and hopes they have carried! They are weary, and for good reason. “The road has been long” is an underdeveloped expression of their experience.
New life is breathed into them only with exposure to fresh eyes. Until that transformative moment where they are enlivened once again, they remain still and lifeless, though full of the potential energy which an encounter could excite.
They wait for you.
Encapsulated and insulated in their hulls is the heart that beats in me and the mind that whirrs, and imbedded further still in that heart and in that mind is our Father’s Spirit eager to connect us all together. Those sleeping words, lying dormant on the page, are the bottle in the ocean and our Father’s Spirit is the message rolled up inside. I do not say this to claim I speak for the Father, but to say the overflow of the heart spills into our words.
Our words are a gift from the Father who first spoke creation into existence. He lives in our words when our hearts “…have been crucified with Christ; (and) it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and delivered Himself up for me” Gal. 2:20. Words live in us and in the Word we have life. Beautiful and graceful, ethereal in nature, yet more solid than the foundations of the earth, words are our essence and very existence.
I write them for you. They wait for you.
But here I turn and twist to see another view of the words on my page. If I look closely, with stillness in my breast, if clarity and calm define as my eyes fall upon the resting words, I see the life within them rising, and their weariness dropping off, untethering them from the page. The Spirit that lives in me infuses them with life and I love them once again. My eyes have become fresh and so I see their newness myself.
How kind the Father is. My words do not just wait for you, but wait for me as well. They hold within them the Spirit that lives to bring life; to bring comfort; to bring joy and peace. I say again, how kind the Father is.
Now I turn the eyes of my heart to you, dear reader. Your words. Your heart. Your mind. The Father lives there. The Father loves there. With all I have within me, I urge you to write, to speak, to use your words to bring life. As you keep them to yourself, hiding them in your fears as we all do at times, they push against the walls of your heart, longing to find their next landing place. They landed first in you, but there are other hearts they need to find as well. They came to bring comfort and hope, and that’s what their purpose is. Share them. Please. Our world needs life-giving words.
That’s how we first came about:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” John 1:1-5.
Our words may seem tired. They may lie lifeless on the page, but as the Spirit works, they quicken and live. The darkness cannot comprehend it. The darkness cannot overtake the life the Spirit brings.
So, be not hindered. Say it, email it, pray it, and by all means, if you are a writer…write!
Educated as a teacher, Sarah taught school for nearly 20 years. As a young woman, she lived in China amid the rice paddies and water buffalo near Changsha, and then later taught English in Costa Rica for four years and raised her two sons.
Sarah is married for the second time, the mother of 2 boys and the step-mother to 3 more. She and her husband, David, work together in their agency The Van Diest Literary Agency. Her full name is Sarah Ruth Gerke Van Diest. She’s 5’5” and cuts her hair when stress overtakes her.
She is a freelance editor (including a New York Times and USA Today bestseller), blogger (The Write Conversation) and writer for hire. Her first book releases with NavPress in 2018.
http://christianliteraryagency.com/
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