A Party Today

Heidi Dru Kortman's blog

My friends here at the retirement complex reserved the formal dining room, and gave me a party. The desklamp will be very much appreciated, and I'll find a place of honor for the flower embellished poems they framed.

I may eventually buy Mark Buchanan's The Rest of God, but for now, I'll consider several small sections of the exerpt.

"Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." Ps. 90:12.

"...only those who number their days aright gain a wise heart. Only they become God's sages: those calm unhurried people who live in each moment fully, savoring simple things, celebrating small epiphanies, unafraid of life's inevitable surprises and reverses, adaptive to change, yet not chasing after it."

I want this, and I see that there will be no avoiding reverses and changes. As I said a couple of days ago, I don't usually institute changes, but wait until they collide with me. That might be okay, if at the moment of collision I were not in the habit of internal panic. Externally, I go into what I call 'crisis mode' and tackle the situation with the gifts and talents God loans me. Though my actions make sense and ameliorate the circumstances, there are other parts of me that object, and fuss and fret. It's embarrassing to know how long it has taken in my life for me to even recognize the pattern, much less to admit how sinful and how distrustful of God I am.

Mr. Buchanan has written his book while many congregations speak of being purpose-driven. He requests caution. "Drivenness may awaken purpose or be a catalyst for purpose, but it rarely fulfills it: more often it jettisons it." He goes on to state, "Truly purposeful people have an ironic secret. They manage time less, and pay attention more....They're fully awake."

This sounds much like advice frequently given to would be authors of fiction: "Pay attention to people." It appears that by God's providence, I'm the sort who needs a complete change of location to prompt me to be attentive. That's embarrassing too.

"What matters, Jesus concluded, isn't being rich in stuff: It's being rich toward God. He explained the essence of such richness elsewhere: It's having eyes to see, ears to hear. It's to notice, to pay attention to the time of God's visitation....To live on purpose means to go and do likewise. Purposefulness requires that we pay attention, and paying attention means, almost by definition, that we make room for surprise. We become hospitable to interruption. To sustain that, we need theological touchstones for it--a conviction that God is Lord of our days and years, and that his purposes and his presence often come disguised as detours, messes, defeats."

I am not yet hospitable to interruption, though I do confess that He holds my days and years. I think he sits and shakes his head in dismay at the detours, messes and defeats I've collected in my life, as his righteous response to the few things I do do, because I'm more inclined to label those failures my fault, than I am to propose that messes and defeats outline his purposes for me.

"Think a moment of all the events and encounters that have shaped you most deeply and lastingly. How many did you see coming? How many did you engineer, manufacture, chase down? And how many were interruptions?" (More Later)

Serious Contemplation

Heidi Dru Kortman's blog
No acceptance letter in my mailbox today, but I did get an issue of Christianity Today. One of the articles will take serious contemplation. "Schedule, Interrupted: Discovering God's time-management technique", is an excerpt from Mark Buchanan's The Rest of God: Restoring your soul by restoring the Sabbath.

Schedule, Interrupted grabbed my attention, because in about two weeks, my life will enter another period of change. Generally, I don't institute changes--I wait, and they collide with me. For the last eighteen months, I've lived in a retirement apartment complex. During the last six of those months I've had a lovely studio-sized flat, with complete privacy, and as much quiet as I choose.

I've been working on an edit of the manuscript of my first novel, and on completing coursework from the Christian Writer's Guild. The work is progressing, though not with as much dispatch as many writers fantasize it would. I'm not quite disciplined enough to deny each task its tendency to expand to fill all available time.

That will need to change, probably more by the grace of God and act of will than by cooperation, because by the fourteenth of February, I will move out of my much-appreciated flat, and into the same house that currently shelters my brother, his wife, my father, my nine nieces and nephews, and their maternal grandparents.

I've never lived with that many children and teens around the clock, before, and the last moniker I want to adopt is "The Crabby Aunt". My personal time preferences would never willingly shift to rising at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning to begin my daily writing time. I may institute a simple signal with the younger ones: If Aunt Heidi's door is closed, she's at work. If it's open, you may come in, because Aunt Heidi needs ideas. Many writing mothers advocate something similar.

Another option will be to schedule myself to write while the children are being homeschooled. Time will prove whether I've matured enough to stick with my promise to work on two items per week. I only know that I must approach this impending change with the same deliberate choice of a flexible, thankful attitude that I applied to moving into this retirement complex.

To do less would be to disrespect the Providence of God, and would deny me anything like the positive growth I've had in the last year and a half. As my CWG mentor is fond of typing, Onward!

Antidote for rejection blues

Heidi Dru Kortman's blog
Yesterday, a rejection notice, today, the antidote for depression--I've made some changes to the rejected tale, and printed it out, in preparation to submit it elsewhere. If for every act of refusal, I counter with another try, something ought to happen. Even with SASEs and postage rates, the price per mailing isn't that much to pay for a sense of anticipation.

I don't think I'll use the scattershot method of submission, but I promised myself that this year I'd work on two items per week with intentions to submit them. If I can keep the effort up for six months, I just may surprise myself. According to the write-ups, my target publication for this story has a record of replying in three to six months. Now, I'm going to check my mailbox. One of these days, I'm sure to find an acceptance letter.

This was something I hadn't planned on doing

I came in to comment on another author's blog, and discovered I needed to set one of my own up first. I should have guessed. Now that I've done it, I suppose anyone who might stop in will want to know a few things.

I'm 48, an aspiring author in the collecting rejection notice stage, and an aunt to nine children. I'm also working to cope with understanding the publishing business and its predilection for making aspiring novelists prove themselves by writing and selling non-fiction first.