“If my heart is generally in a place of wanting to glorify God and to serve His children to the best of my ability, it seems that whatever He gives me enthusiasm about is worth exploring, and then, again, letting Him do with it what only He can do…”
The following was posted by Stephanie Lee in our Mindset Mastery group, and it makes a powerful point about our potential and God’s role in helping us realize it.
With her permission I’m sharing it here. She writes:
Thanks so much for the encouraging and inspiring Webinar for Aspiring Authors, Leslie! You gave me some really helpful food for thought.
And, as my brain does, I have taken that food for thought and created a veritable buffet of mismatched dishes to sample. 😂 (Some are probably not for human consumption, others are hopeful but undercooked, some are in other peoples’ dishes, all are under seasoned…but there might be a dish or two that has real potential.)
Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly successful Twilight Series didn’t set out to write the series. From what I understand, writing books wasn’t even something she aspired to do really. One night, she literally dreamed chapter 13 of the first book in the series. It caught her attention enough to write it down. Then her mind started wondering about the story before and after so she kept adding to it.
Not many years later, her books were turned into movies that entertained millions of people and surely situated her family in a very comfortable financial situation. She has been both admired and ridiculed by people who create their own meaning around her stories and I can’t help but think that she has the ability and freedom to savor the successes she’s been blessed with without one iota of a care about what people think.
I’ve read all her books and as much as I was entertained by the Twilight series (though I’m decidedly NOT drawn to genres that include vampires or werewolves), I actually really enjoyed her other two, stand-alone novels much more. If someone were to ask me if her Twilight series had a positive impact on me, changed my life, or inspired me in anyway, it might seem odd to know that my answer would be a big yes.
Not because of the stories but because of the way in which those stories came to be and the incredible opportunities that [I assume] she has had and abundance that her family has been blessed with because she followed a little curious trail. It seriously inspires me so much.
Four years old is the youngest I remember being when I would wake in the night to the sound of my mom’s typewriter clicking away. When she got an electric typewriter, I was a bit sad that it was so quiet. I remember staring at the street light coming through my pink gingham curtains, listening to her type down the hall, and knowing that I would write books when I was grown up. It was a knowing sort of feeling and it has never not been there.
As the years have passed, I’ve become more and more doubtful about having anything important enough to write about and I certainly haven’t had any defined enough ideas of WHAT to write to *just do it* and then turn over to God to do with what He will.
I want to be motivated by divine intent. I want to be led by the Spirit. I want God to use me for His highest purposes. And…
…what if “having an impact and blessing people’s lives” isn’t exactly what He needs me to have as the end goal of writing my book? What if that’s an amazing and hoped for side benefit? What if His desire for me is that I live free and fully expressed and that any abundance that comes through that specific path actually allows my LIFE to be the impact and the blessing (even more than a book could be)?
I’m hoping this is making sense. The content of Stephenie Meyer’s books didn’t impact or bless me (unlike Leslie’s books). The fact that she wrote them, carved space out of her life to follow the breadcrumbs to their completion, and then was blessed with those books being made into movies is what has impacted me. It’s the proof of potential that has impacted and inspired me the most.
This morning I had a sort of lightning bolt thought:
What if I let myself dream about my book as a major motion picture? How would my enthusiasm for showing up at the page over and over to do the work change? It’s a strange and sort of backwards thought to write a book with the dream of a major motion picture. I mean, WHO AM I TO…?
BUT!…it felt exciting and, oddly, I noticed as I surveyed the buffet of possibilities, there were lots of dishes that suddenly looked a heckuva lot more appetizing than others. It feels more important to me to honor that feeling of excitement than to try to want to impact and bless people if that feels obligatory. If my heart is generally in a place of wanting to glorify God and to serve His children to the best of my ability, it seems that whatever He gives me enthusiasm about is worth exploring and then, again, letting Him do with it what only He can do with it.
It’s actually not about the major motion picture dream and the enthusiasm it invokes. It’s not about pretending that I have much of a chance of that even being a possibility.
It’s about moving with the enthusiasm in a way that quiets all the questioning about what to write about that will impact and bless people.
Food for thought, indeed, Stephanie! Thank you for sharing.
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