Five-Minute Friday: Writer

Today’s Five-Minute Friday comes to you from a roomy bungalow situated on a breezy Costa Rican beach.

I know, I know, everyone hates me now. Last week Paris, and now this? It’s another gift-trip, and we’ve had to pinch ourselves. In between loving every minute of it.

So the writing prompt, this week, is WRITER. And I know that because I had to take a timeout this afternoon. To write.

My 3-year-old napped, and my husband and big kids took an ATV tour (with monkeys and snakes). I stole away from a handful of pools with their frozen drinks, from hangout time with friends and the kids’ nonstop laughter, from catching them sneak extra drinks at the swim-up bar and from the sunshine I’ve been desperate to meet up with again after a long, hard winter. (Northerners, I mean no disrespect. Your winter won, hands down.)

I couldn’t wait for this pocket of time, because there’s this thing I cannot shake. It won’t let me go. I have to write. I am a writer.

I look for time day after day, and don’t always find it. Because I am not only a writer. I schedule time, and it doesn’t always work out the way I plan. Sometimes, I end up writing with wrestlers grunting a few feet away or a preschooler on my lap or a little princess brushing my hair, or in between frosting bread with peanut butter and jelly, because the merry-go-round rarely stops and I can’t always find a quiet space with time attached.

But I still write, because somehow I must make sense of things and this is how I figure out what life is teaching me or where my heart is in a given moment.

My husband shakes his head and says, “Really? You really want to do that when no one is making you?” The way I shake my head about his mornings of leaving this bungalow at 5 am to spend hours in the cold, pruning water where the sharks live paddling around on a board, looking for another ride on a wave. Five AM! Did I mention that?

But yes. For both of us, the answer is yes.

Even though writing’s the thing to do these days and I don’t like doing what everyone else is doing. Even though I hate the idea of platform-building. I wanted to write at age 6, and for 30 years after. So I write.

I still don’t know what I am meant to do as a writer. I want to love God and bring Him glory, through my writing. I want to love people. I want to grow deeper faith and live it in the routine of my daily life. I want to grasp His grace, more and more. I want to help someone, anyone, with anything I can offer. You know, just a few small aspirations. 🙂

But I know, as certain as I know my name, as easy as I wear my other titles. I know because this is what I actually do, because I have always done it to some extent, because when I don’t do it, I can feel it, and it feels exactly wrong.

Because day after day, I write.

I am a Writer.

STOP.

*Find out more about Five-Minute Fridays here.