Inspiration

“Try and fail, but don't fail to try.”

Stephen Kaggwa

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Last night I was feeling bad and I wrote and I felt better.  Now I’m feeling good and I’m going to write and feel better again.  The trick is consistency, no matter what I’m feeling.  I know when I’m feeling bad, the last thing I want to do is write.  But it’s the first thing I need to do.  After writing last night, I felt my psychic energy renew, like a patched hole in a boat.  In creating a blog, I created life for myself.  It felt miraculous.  It almost always does.  The other beauty of consistency is that it doesn’t take skill, talent or even inspiration.  Consistency is its own requirement.    Skill, talent and inspiration come with consistency. 

I think this is why I’m so adamant about writing these blogs.  It long ago surpassed the goals of having a huge audience or making money for me as writer, though I still very much want those things.    No, I write because I need to.  As I’ve said before, there are very few things I’d rather be doing than this.  So here I sit, in good times and bad, creating something. 

The hard part is waiting for the Muse to give me something, but even that doesn’t matter.  I just Keep Going.  She will be here when she’s ready.   In the meantime, I keep working.  For a moment just now, I stopped writing.   I wasn’t sure what to say.  I certainly don’t have anything new or original, but that’s okay.  I just need to keep my fingers moving.

But what if?  What if I keep my fingers moving and I still don’t get anything?  Then I keep writing until I do.  If I have written for a good amount of time and nothing happens, then I will stop and come back later.  The point of this is not t write a blog, but to write.  Yes, I want to get a blog written, but more importantly, I want to write even if the inspiration doesn’t come.

I had an experience in which I’d lost my inspiration.  I used to work with Jr. High students at a church.  Every week I’d deliver a short inspirational talk.  Then one day I ran out of things to say.  It felt like the Holy Spirit had left me.  I felt drained and frightened.  I felt perhaps that I was supposed to go in a different direction with my life.  I did.  Now, I’m not so sure I made the right decision.  I’m not saying I made the wrong one either.  I don’t know.  Perhaps either way I would have gained valuable life experience. 

What wound up happening is that eventually I stopped doing youth group work (and never really did it again).  I changed churches and met a whole new group of people.  I made new friends and I missed the old ones.  Some amazing things happened as my whole life turned upside down.  Eventually I also changed jobs and an entirely new life opened up for me. 

What if I had stayed?  Then perhaps I would have been stuck for a while.  Or I might have found my inspiration return.  Perhaps I would have gone on to a different type of ministry.  There’s no point in wondering.  All I could do was what I could do.  For the record, I think my season there ended and it was time for a new season.  And I found inspiration in new ways. 

I continue to find inspiration in new ways. 

Perhaps a day may come when I won’t write any longer.  I doubt that.  But if it happens, it will simply mean that I’m meant to express my Purpose differently.    For now though I have to Get Started and Keep Going.  I have to keep writing, not from obligation or fear, but from a place of developing and continuing health and wholeness.  And mostly, because this is what I want to do…inspiration or not.