Relinquishing the Pen

Thanks, my dear friends, for reading along with my story-from-yore this week. It's been a busy week in my head and heart, and I've just needed some time to catch up again. Thanks for hanging with me while I share from the past, and I hope that no matter where you are in your story, you're finding something God can use to get through to you about your situation!

This part is to follow up yesterday's story, when God asked me to give Him the pen to write my love story.

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I knew exactly what God meant.  A few years before, I’d read Ericand Leslie Ludy’s book When God Writes Your Love Story.  In my typical fashion, I’d curled up with the book, a pen, and an old bulletin to make a straight edge under the sentences that needed underlined.  I’d studied the book carefully and felt God’s first tug on my heart to follow Eric and Leslie’s bidding to hand over the pen of my love story to the capable hand of Almighty God. 

In response, I’d looked at the pen, considered the pen, toyed with the idea of handing over the pen, and ultimately kept the pen.  But on this day, as I whispered those words of trust to the Lord – I felt the tugging again.  Give Me the pen.

To show you just how God works all these things together in His time, I’ll sneak ahead to the next day…after my time in the prayer chapel…to show you where this moment and that prompting of the Spirit led me.  After Eric and Leslie wrote When God Writes Your Love Story, a book about how to let God be the author of romance, they also wrote their own love story in a book called When Dreams Come True.  I had owned the book for a couple of years, but I’d never read it.  But this exchange with God drew my interest to that book, and the next night, I picked it up.  And as I read, I wrote:

I read these words in When Dreams Come True tonight.  They gave me hope.  On the heels of last night…of all of yesterday, actually.  In this chapter, Eric talks about the personification of his wedding day:  “I only spent a day with him – though he had been waiting since before I was born to throw me this great fiesta.  God created Mr. Vale for one purpose.  It was his life’s work to decorate the stage for the most tender and precious of romances.  He didn’t just do his job well, he was the best I’ve ever seen.”  God, I want my wedding day to be such a celebration.  I want it to be a day of celebration for You as much as for me.  I want to feel as though You’ve waited all my life to throw me a wedding day.

He goes on:  “God has given you something today that all the money in the world couldn’t buy…Never forget what God has done for you.”  Lord, don’t let me forget this wilderness once I reach my Promised Land.

“We often stop believing in the Heaven at the end of the race, and so strangely dare only to believe in the hell in which we’re struggling through today.”  I know those days.  I do.  Aren’t these pages testimony to that?

“Let this story offer you hope.  Let it lift your chin and put a sparkle of vision back in your eyes and dreams of heaven back in your heart.  Let God remind you how big He really is as – on a day when rice filled my hair and joy filled my heart – He reminded me…True love is worth all the pain that patience and perseverance can inflict.”  Please, God.  Make it so.

And though I didn’t know those words from Eric’s heart were in my near future, similar prayers formed in my mind as I sat on the wooden pew in the tiny chapel.  God wanted the pen to my life and I’d withheld it thus far.  It had worked for Eric and Leslie to release their hold on their own lives.  God had done a good job of bringing them together and opening up a ministry for them.  Why would I not trust Him to do the same for me?  Clearly, nothing I had tried seemed to work. 

The request from God hung in the air:  Give Me the pen. 

Okay, God.  You write the story.

***

And from the other side, I have to say, He wrote a MAGNIFICENT story. One far better than I could have dreamed that day in that pew. So even though on THIS day...I'm not waiting for love, I'm still waiting for God to write other parts of our story, and I'm reminded again to hand HIM the pen and let HIM do the writing.