Saturday Afternoons, Red Gloves and Tears

 

Still reading Unafraid, and was only able to finish Gideon’s Gift and Maggie’s Miracle from the Red Gloves collection, but these are stories that would change a readers life, if you only open your heart and head to it.

I was morose that whole week, wondering what I wanted from life and wondering why I feel so unfulfilled, and a little resentful about my lot in life.

That short, quick, unexpected Saturday afternoon talk with Nong Gil was certainly an eye-opener.

I wanted to write. I just don’t know why I can’t anymore.

I like teaching. I am just not sure why I feel so restless with what I am doing.

Reading, after God and family, is my one (well, three actually), Great Love. So, why do I keep flipping from book to book, cover to cover, author after another author, without really reading anything?

What could be so wrong?

I guess, I have learned to separate the heart from the brain that what the brain can comprehend, the heart can’t express and what the heart can feel, the brain cannot realize. Not really unusual. I may look like one whole big person but deep inside, I really am just one huge compartment with a lot of little compartments subdividing the rest of my life.

And that afternoon, I understand why I have to get hurt while reading a book and that it’s okay to cry (just not where my mother and siblings could see me). And that by so doing, I am letting my heart and brain connect with each other again.

I can’t write while I am not whole. I can’t be myself without the freedom of using what He has given me all along. I don’t know what I am capable of yet because I have always been too afraid to try.Still am though.

But this week, I found my way back into the arms of my most favorite activity, with all of me, this time. And while lying on a hammock, I absorbed one great story with both my head and my heart, taking in a series of stories involving a Red Glove and Christmas time.

After crying a river (Karen Kingsbury, seriously, knows how to make a person cry), and after engaging the whole of me in the exercise, I felt better afterward. This has always been the ultimate reading experience for me – taking in all my senses, delighting the intellect and stimulating the heart – and feeling good afterward.

Romance novels have dulled my heart after many years of gobbling them (they are just like the junk food of books). But, the kind of fiction that Francine Rivers and Karen Kingsbury create makes me feel and think and appreciate life. They make me feel more alive and closer to Him. They make me feel a part of Him, His creation. They make me think of Him and they make me cry because He makes me cry often. (And only He can do that – and reading too, and yeah, my mother as well).

And maybe, someday, I would be able to write something like what Rivers and Kingsbury have written and maybe, that would make me feel ever more alive, and fulfilled and much closer to Him too.

I Want to Write

 

Right now, I feel something literally screaming my name – the front cover of a book, several books, books meant to be written.

I have always wanted to become a writer, a novelist…

I chose to become an English teacher because I thought I would be able to become a writer and be practical at the same time. I thought I could do it.

When I became a teacher 7 year ago, I thought I only needed a laptop. When I had my laptop five or six years ago, I thought I needed time. I decided to become a Mobile Teacher because I thought I would be able to have the “time” to become a writer. And I never really did – finish anything that is.

I finished several unpublished poems that fell short of whatever literary criteria the world has. I was able to plot several young adult fiction that never came into fruition. I managed to blog about things that matter and don’t matter to me… I was able to finish a script which they intend to publish as material for our sessions, and with colleagues, we were able to finalize a modified big book and a brochure on responsible parenting.

Now, the call is so loud and so deafening that I could not think. I could not return to our fellowship with SFC because everything is so unclear to me right now. I want to write. I want to write. I want to write. I can feel this thudding in my blood. When the crowd goes away for the day, and I find the time to be alone, the same mantra begins to play in my heart.

But, I can no longer write romance novels I have effortlessly plotted when I was in High School. They seem too froufrou, like a mockery of the life I have seen so far. I can no longer write poems forthey seem to deep and too artificial a venue to express the slice of existence I have tasted in the past three years. I cannot seem to write short stories. I never knew how, anyway.

I want to write. I crave it with all of me. But why is it that the words refuse to flow, the plot refuses to shape itself, the inspiration fails to come?

I want to write. So why can’t I?