What a Book Coach & Editor and Spiritual Director learned about Resistance and how that might help your calling as a Writer

 

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” – St. Catherine of Siena

 

The Gift of Words and the Call to Listen

I delight in words. As a writer, I love how they dance and twirl, how words evoke laughter and accompany tears. As a lover of Jesus, I delight in all things contemplative. I linger longer at the heart of Love to hear Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. His longing for me surprises me. It’s been one of the joys of learning to live with listening prayerfulness, and it’s changed how I move through this world.

 

I desire to listen to God more than I listen to myself. I listen to hear His heart for my heart. I listen to hear His heart for another. This is part of my joy and calling as a spiritual director, writer, and Book Coach & Editor. I listen for the hearts of the writers I work with, and my spiritual directees’ hearts. I listen to my retreatants as I offer the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. I lean into the Trinity as I grow as a Book Coach & Editor and a spiritual director who walks with a contemplative heart.

 

When Two Callings Become One

There was a time when I wanted to be only one thing: a contemplative spiritual director. I savored the expansiveness that happened when a directee journeyed to interior places of their soul and story and discovered invitations from God. What a wonder. Yet, in my interior life with God, He invited me to be both a spiritual director and a Book Coach & Editor. I like things simple. One thing seems easier than two. I wasn’t sure what it would be like to be stretched or rearranged into the unknown. Expanding to the place of offering to authors and writers felt clunky and a bit scary. Fear caught my attention. I wondered what the fear was about as I pondered how to step into two callings with different focuses, though similar values.

Steven Pressfield said, “Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore, the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance.”

Resistance that produces fear may lead to a new mindset and path forward. After a recent hip replacement, I experienced something similar. Feeling unsure about what was happening revealed that resistance lurked in the shadows. Part of my hip replacement convalescence involved physical therapy. There’s comfort in the work done in the presence of a physical therapist. He set the agenda. I showed up. His training told him what my hip replacement could bear, so I trusted his wisdom and judgment. Little by little, the physical therapist permitted more activity. He wanted me to begin to trust my body and my choices.

After a few months, I grew too comfortable doing the same exercises over and over. I resisted trying new things. Fear crept in. How could I trust that this new hip would hold me? What would really occur if I walked further and further each week? Though I had permission, I resisted stepping into strength training or longer walks in the neighborhood.

Resistance knew my name and shut down my desire to step out further. Out of fear of what might happen, I stayed stuck. One morning, though, when the sweltering heat was tamped down by a “cold front,”—meaning we were in the 70s with low humidity, not in the 90s with 2976% humidity— I decided to resist the resistance and walk half a mile.

What’s the worst that could happen? I might need to sit down and take a rest. I might need to call my neighbor to come pick me up. That first walk battling resistance shattered the fear. Since that date, I haven’t missed a single day of at least thirty minutes of movement. Sometimes I walk a few miles. I lift weights, dance to country music, or ride my indoor recumbent bike. Using small sticky notes, I track each day’s activity, where I am resisting resistance. Freed from fear, I stepped into the joy of exercise again. Breaking through resistance invigorated me to push past the comfortable into the possible.

In Pressfield’s book The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, he gave credence to my fear. As I thought of how to formally declare myself as a Book Coach & Editor, it helped to consider why leaving my comfort zone might be important. A comfort zone is comfortable, isn’t it? But, we all know that God doesn’t call us to stay comfortable, don’t we? He invites us to resist the too-easy by choosing to step into something that requires us to get brave and bold and battle resistance as we partner with Him.

These places of resistance have more in store.

God called me to step into Love’s action.

 

Contemplation in action requested more of me.

 

 

Contemplation That Leads to Courageous Action… and Your Calling

Thinking on seemingly disparate differences between quiet contemplation and bustling action led me back to St. Catherine of Siena. She wasn’t a familiar name until I visited Siena decades ago. When my daughter studied in Florence, Italy, I discovered St. Catherine. You know how it goes, don’t you? Being a good mother, and missing my darling daughter and never having been to Italy, I cashed in all my frequent flyer points to fly over and check on her. Of course, we explored a bit of Italy during my short stay.

 

One gold-lit afternoon as we meandered medieval lanes in Siena, we came across references to St. Catherine. Born in the 1300s to a somewhat prosperous merchant family, she chose a spiritual commitment to Christ over a social commitment to marriage and affluence, having experienced holy encounters with Christ.

 

Upon entering an order of laywomen, Catherine of Genoa spent three years in solitary contemplation. Such silence and prayerfulness set a foundation of strength and stability for her heart. I love this idea of silence and prayerfulness. It sets my heart yearning for more of God, as I imagine it did for St. Catherine. I’m like a sponge when it comes to quiet. I want to soak it all in. Yet, after all those years of solitary contemplation, God called Catherine forth to a new direction.

 

From her life of contemplation, He invited her also into a life of action. For St. Catherine, the blend of contemplation and action was not opposed to one another but was rather complementary. With the foundation of her lovely singleness of heart, she could be of service to others. In her life of action, she encouraged, mediated, taught, comforted, and served others. Contemplation grounded her. Then she accepted God’s invitation to serve Him by serving others in new ways, including her gift of writing letters and a book. She entered a life of action.

 

I watched St. Catherine and found myself challenged: would I only sit in the quiet, pleasurable place of contemplation that so delights my heart? Would I be willing to move forward into a life that blends the power of silence and the power of service? I’m nothing like St. Catherine, but her blend of two disparate things intrigued me. Could I blend a life full of spiritual direction and prayerfulness with a way of serving writers by stepping into being a Book Coach & Editor? I had been helping friends and relatives for years with books and their writing lives. Why was I so resistant to calling myself a Book Coach & Editor? It’s what I do with joy, and it’s part of my gifting. I am at home in two places of offering companionship. It’s still clunky at times. I’m always a spiritual director. I’m always a Book Coach & Editor. Sometimes I am both of those roles at the same time. Sometimes, who I am in one calling leaps up and twirls around in the other calling.

 

Thirteen years ago, with an acquaintance, I crafted a nonfiction book focused on the physical body and its impact on our spiritual formation in our life with Christ. As a writer, delight came alive. Like Eric Liddell’s famous line in Chariots of Fire, I felt, and still feel, God’s pleasure when I run in His giftings for my heart. I love God. I love words. Combining the two has been both a joy and a meandering, a navigation of blending words and The Word. Now, as a Book Coach & Editor who is a Christ-centered Spiritual Director, I help writers create books with their creative faith-based message, their way of serving the world.

 

 

Your Turn: What Might God Be Calling You to?

What about you? What gifts of writing has God bestowed on you and entrusted to your care? What brings you delight as you play with words?  What are you discerning as to how to use this gift of words? How are you being invited to write nonfiction, fiction, poetry, memoir, devotionals, or a children’s book? How might your words become a place of ministering to those who are hurting, hungry for more of God, in need of hope? What will you offer to those hankering to settle into the goodness of a story well-told? Your places of pain and joy brought you deeper into union with God. Now, using the talents entrusted to you, you can turn and offer hope to those who need to see light in the dusky places.

 

Where have you been reticent to step into the delight and challenge of writing? Where are you stuck with a writing desire but a lack of what to do next? Where is resistance causing fear to rise up? Thinking about writing won’t write the story, won’t create the poem. What difference would it make to have someone come alongside you, someone who understands resistance, who invests in you and your calling to be a writer, and who understands what it’s like to walk in the Kingdom of God, alongside Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? What if you had someone to encourage you who also provided a place of accountability? What if you had someone who guided and listened, who prayed for you as you played with words?

 

St. Catherine spurred me on as she prayed, “I have naught to give save what Thou hast given me.”

All we each have been given comes from the hands of God. What shall we do with these good gifts?

St. Catherine said, “Nothing great is ever achieved without much enduring.” She challenged people to stand with courage and speak the truth. When we want to be in the background, she emphasized the way forward is not to be silenced by fear. St. Catherine set the bar high. “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”

 

You are ready to risk. You are ready to leave your comfort zone. You are ready to write a book and enter the marathon of work and the marvel of completion. God is the one who entrusted these gifts to you. I am here to accompany you as you risk leaving your comfort zone to create your words into heart art. What might happen if, together, the writer and the Book Coach & Editor venture onward?

 

How will you set the world on fire by being who God meant you to be? Where has God called you to use your love of words to serve the world? What’s stopping you now? Let’s link arms and find out what’s in store as you write while I encourage you, as we move towards God, the good gift giver.