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!