@LynnHBlackburn

I want to tell you a story.

It involves football, but it’s not a football story, so stay with me.

It happened several years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. During a huge Clemson game, the punter Andy Teasdall, messed up.

This wasn’t a small mistake. This was huge.

It was the ACC Championship game and all he was supposed to do was punt the ball. Instead, he tried to run with it. A play that eventually led to the opposing team scoring a touchdown.

The Clemson head coach, Dabo Swinney, ripped into Teasdall. “All you had to do was punt the ball!” The video went viral on social media as this kid sat there and endured the scathing—and very public—rebuke from his coach.

The next time he took the field, someone in my living room made the comment that no one needed to worry about him trying any trick plays. No way they’d trust him with that for a long time.

Fast forward three weeks to New Years Eve.

The Orange Bowl.

The biggest game of the season.

As Teasdall took the field to punt the ball in the second quarter, no one—not the opposing team or the fans gathered in my living room—expected anything out of the ordinary.

So when Teasdall held onto the ball and then passed it 31 yards down the field, Clemson fans everywhere went crazy. A trick play that led to a touch down.

A crucial play placed in the hands of a player who had messed up in the last game.

If I hadn’t been surrounded by 20 screaming people, I probably would have cried.

Redemption has that effect on me.

Sure, Andy Teasdall will always have to deal with that mistake, but it will forever be overshadowed by the gloriously successful play that followed it in the next game. No longer defined by an error, his name will be etched into the memories of everyone who saw that game. And when they think of him, they will smile.

We all like a good redemption story when someone, somehow, takes a bad situation and makes it good. Sometimes we get to see the redemption almost immediately. Sometimes, it takes months, years, even decades.

I’ve thought a lot about Andy Teasdall…and about Coach Swinney giving him the chance to make that play.

Do you see the parallel to the writing life?

I do.

God has called me to do something. “All you have to do is write.”

And sometimes I do a lousy job of it. I’m not talking about the quality of the writing, although certainly that’s part of it. I’m talking about getting on the field—getting my hands on the keyboard and my rear in the chair. I get caught up in so many other things and fail to do the one thing I’ve been asked to do.

And while God isn’t likely to put my face on a jumbo screen and yell, “All you had to do was write!” before millions of people, in the quiet of my heart I hear Him asking me to get back in the game and leave the numbers on the scoreboard up to him.

It’s easy—far too easy—to look back over the failures of the past year and wonder if we should even bother trying again.

But if Andy Teasdall had quit after the ACC Championship game, he never would have had the chance to be the golden boy of the Orange Bowl.

In an interview after the game, he expressed his surprise that the coach had called the trick play for him so soon after his mistake. And when asked about the throw, this is what he had to say about it …“God’s plan and God’s path.”

Wow.

It is God’s plan and it is God’s path and God is not sidelining you because you didn’t meet whatever you think His expectations were for you last year.

Let’s get back on the field. We can’t undo the mistakes we’ve made, but going forward, we can do what we’re supposed to do. When we do, let’s not be surprised when God gives us the opportunity of a lifetime.

After all, He wrote the playbook on redemption and something tells me those stories always make Him smile.

Grace and peace,

Lynn H. Blackburn loves writing suspense because her childhood fantasy was to become a spy—but her grown-up reality is that she’s a huge chicken and would have been caught on her first mission. She prefers to live vicariously through her characters and loves putting them into all kinds of terrifying situations—while she’s sitting at home safe and sound in her pajamas!

The second book in her Dive Team Investigations series, In Too Deep, released in November. She is also the author of Beneath the Surface, Hidden Legacy and Covert Justice, which won the 2016 Carol Award for Short Novel and the 2016 Selah Award for Mystery and Suspense.

She lives in South Carolina with her true love and their three children. You can follow her real life happily ever after at www.LynnHBlackburn.com and on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.