My computer is going blind. Which is to say, its video card is failing. It’s annoying on a good day–it won’t play video, crashes any time flash comes up–and kinda terrifying on a bad day when the screen just blinks out and then doesn’t recover quite as it should.

I still think of this thing as “my new laptop.” But really it’s four years old, which is about the life expectancy of a computer these days (let’s not get into why…). And as I sit here and contemplate getting a new one, I remember a conversation I had with my best friend five years ago. She was getting a new desktop computer, and while she was happy, she was also sorry to let her old one go. Because, she said, she thought that would be the computer she was using when she got published.

I’d never paused to think about the machines that might be tied to certain periods in my life, but it came back to me yesterday while I stared at my crazy-big-looking, wonky screen. And thought to think back on what I’d been through with this one.

I had a laptop in college, but it went kaput shortly after Rowyn was born, so just about five years ago. I wanted to get another right away, but finances didn’t permit. So I used an ancient, wheezing desktop for my projects then. That’s where I wrote a contemporary romance I pitched to Summerside, another contemporary romance that I thought would be a fun followup to it with another house. Yeah…both of those are just sitting in my Completed MSS folder now.

Then I finally got the laptop I wanted in the summer of 2009. Right before the ACFW conference. I picked based on battery life, and man was I impressed! I didn’t have to plug the thing in at all while I was away. Then I came home and got down to work on another historical, also destined to sit on the my harddrive for a while. Then, then I wrote Jewel of Persia on this lovely little Acer. I carried it around with me, writing in every room of the house, often making a desk of the end table in my living room. From there, I went to Love Finds You in Annapolis, Maryland. Which lead to Ring of Secrets.

Yeah–this is the computer I used to write these books that got me published. This is the computer that will be forever tied to my big break, to those thrill-inducing emails. The computer that has seen born and has saved for me the first books of mine to really get into readers’ hands.

Sniff, sniff. I love this little laptop!

So while this isn’t exactly a post that waxes philosophical on things of faith, it seemed appropriate to take a minute to be thankful for this gift. It’s just a computer. Just a collection of parts that can fail and get sick and find any number of ways to infuriate us daily. But it’s also a little machine that has made my life easier. That has seen me through a lot of manuscripts, a lot of dreams, a lot of disappointments. I’ve cried with it and laughed with it and learned how to work around its quirks. And I’m going to miss it when it’s gone.

~*~

I’m a guest again today on the Borrowed Book, where I’m talking about a day in my life–don’t miss your chance to enter to win a signed copy of Ring of Secrets (one just for the commenters there) and also get more entries into my Box of Secrets giveaway!

I want to be like a potato. Aside from the fact that they don’t have hourglass figures, that is. 😉 But every time I reach for one in dinner prep, it hits me anew.

I want to be able to sprout no matter where I am. No matter how unsuitable the “where” is to sprouting. That right there would be enough. If we could put out roots like a potato, then just think how secure we’d be in our lives, wherever we are. Whatever we’re doing.

I want to be long-lasting. No week-away expiration date. I want to be able to still go strong after weeks and months left sitting. Because sometimes there are periods of inaction in life. Of rest. If I were as long-lasting as a potato, those wouldn’t bother me a bit.

I want to be hearty. I want my work to stick to your bones, yes. But more, I want to know that I’m made of sterner stuff than fluff and nonsense. That I’ve got some starch to me. Maybe that gets potatoes a bad rap in this age of dieting, and maybe it gets people bad raps too sometimes. But that’s the stuff that energy is made of.

I want to be a chameleon, handy for any number of oh-so-different goals. Is there anything you can’t do with a potato? Slice them, fry them, boil them, bake them, mash them, make them a base for a soup…for a candy…for a bread. If I could just be half so useful in half so many ways…

I want to be full of good things. Starch aside, potatoes have nothing but goodness. Anything bad has to be put into them. Lord, make me so pure!

I want to be a staple. Cultures rise and fall around potatoes. I don’t profess that kind of hubris, LOL, but I want to be the kind of wife my husband builds his life around. The kind of mom that provides a life of stability and love for my kiddos. The kind of friend that can be depended on for anything. The kind of writer, the kind of editor, the kind of mentor that people come back to over and over.

I want to be a potato. Not that kind that sits on a couch and does nothing, but the kind that can do it all. The kind that’s just fine with waiting and doing nothing when it’s called for. The kind that can then be picked up and put to any number of uses. 

Lord, make me a potato. Sometimes I’m not so sure I have what it takes to be one of those lumpy brown legumes. But I pray I do. Help me to live up to their example. Help me to be a potato too.

For Christmas, my little guy got some Legos. He’s got great fine motor coordination and will sit there and happily build some fun things. But last week, he just couldn’t get the pieces to stick together like he wanted. And from happy builder he turned into wailing child.

I, in my infinite wisdom, (ahem) said something along the lines of, “Rowyn baby, I know you worked hard, and I understand that it’s frustrating, but you don’t have to cry over it. It’s only blocks.”

My logic did little to help him, gotta say. But it sure resonated with me.

What do you think we look from heaven, toiling away at our lives? Building our castles, our kingdoms, our empires? All our grand plans, all our hard work, all our building and growing and planning? To us, it’s everything. It’s our world. It’s our focus.

But to God? I can imagine him watching us with a fond smile, just like I like watch Rowyn snap colored blocks together. I can imagine him sitting up a little straighter from time to time, opening his mouth to point out a better way to do something–but we, stubborn children that we are, shake our heads and say, “No. I want to do it myself.” I can imagine him sighing when that way doesn’t work and our little world we’ve built comes tumbling down.

And oh, that hurts us. How we cry and rant and rage and sometimes even rail at Him for not making it all better, conveniently forgetting that we refused his guidance because our vision was just so perfect.

That, I think, is when God gathers us into his arms and whispers in our ears, “You don’t have to cry over this, baby. I know you worked hard. I know it’s frustrating when things don’t turn out like they should. But they’re only blocks.”

Still, we can’t quite accept that, can we? Those blocks, those tools, are all we have to work with. And we so wanted to build that thing we imagined…

And so God pats our back and says, “I know. And I want you to build it too. Let’s do it together, okay? Let me help you fix this problem right here…”

That might require undoing some of the other work we’ve done to get at the flaw. And we might cry a little more when we see that. But then he’ll fill the hole, line up the pegs, shift it all away from treacherous ground, and hand it back over.

And sometimes, we might greet his aid with a new tantrum and toss it all aside. But most of the time, I hope, we learn from him. We see where we went wrong. And we smile up into our Father’s eyes and say, “Thanks, Abba.”

Because even if it’s only blocks, he still cares. He still claps when we create a masterpiece, he still feels our pain with us when it doesn’t turn out right. He still helps us perfect it, and then pats us on the back in paternal pride. Toiling at it is still something he wants us to do. 

But let’s remember what it is we’re working with. And whose advice we should take while we’re building away. He’s got a better vantage point up there than we do here at eye-level. And a whole lot more experience with fitting those blocks together.

For some reason that I can’t quite explain, 4-year-old Rowyn has decided that Heaven = Outer Space. There is no hesitation in his mind. When he talks about going to Outer Space, it’s to drop in on God and say, “Hello.” Preferably in a rocket. That, he says, is where he will go when he dies to live again forever.

Who am I, mere mortal that I am, to try to straighten it all out for him? LOL. The book of Daniel tells us about angels on a physical journey from Heaven to Earth, waylaid by demons so that they arrived seemingly “late” to answer the prayers of the faithful. For all I know, those demons were hiding behind an asteroid orbiting Jupiter. *shrugs*

The Milky Way over the West Virginia hills

But it came up in my little brain in response to some wonderful conversations and books I was reading yesterday. The conversations joked about how the particular group involved is made of black sheep, it seems. Or at least, would be dubbed so by a prominent few. We like reality in our fiction. We believe that redemption is greatest when the sin was staggering–after all, who will love the forgiver more, he who is forgiven much or little? We believe in thinking, in living our life in this world even if we’re not of it, in refusing the neatly bottled answers that are often tossed around in Christian circles.

And yes, that leads some of us to rant and rail on occasion. Why, we ask, do our brothers and sisters in the Church judge us for following Him into the wilderness? Isn’t that where He went? Where He ordered us to go??

Then, in something I was reading by my good friend and WhiteFire author Christine Lindsay, she quotes C. S. Lewis, and it resonated:

“It
would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too
weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex
and ambition when infinite Joy is offered us, like an ignorant child
who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot
imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are
far too easily pleased.”

You know what that hammered home to me? That we’re so very small. Sometimes, that makes us petty. Sometimes, that makes us close ourselves into a cozy little box. Sometimes it makes us judge–and I’m not talking just about the ones in the box judging those outside, I’m talking about the opposite too. We all want to be accepted for who we are–and when someone else is different, we feel that as judgment. Don’t we?

But what Lewis pinpointed so beautifully there is that God is bigger than that. God is a God of the biggest dreams, the grandest ideas. He’s a thinking man’s God and an infantile-minded man’s God. The God of the broken and of the fixer. He’s a God who says, “You want the world? Foolish mortal–I’m offering you heaven.”

Or as Rowyn would say, Outer Space. 😉 And that’s true too, isn’t it? He’s the God of the universe, of the infinite.

But how often do we forget that, as Pascal expounded on in a Pensee, the infinite goes both directions? The infinitely great, and the infinitely small. So often, we pick one direction and focus on that, because that’s where our interests lie.

I love–absolutely love–that I serve a God with no limits. A God who can touch hearts through the sweetest stories as well as through the grittiest. A God who doesn’t say we must change before we can enter His house, but who invites us in as we are and says, “I’ve been waiting for you. I have a job for you to do, and those quirks of yours will make you a perfect fit.”

I don’t know about you, but I serve one amazing, all-out, no-holds-barred God. He meets me in the grime, and He promises me the galaxies. He tells me that there’s nothing I can dream that’s too big…but that sometimes He wants to give me something even bigger than the corporeal, than the physical. He’s a God who says, “Go ahead. Reason. Ask questions. Explore the what-ifs. I’ll be there too.”

So for today, in all gratefulness, I say, “My God, who art in Outer Space, I set your name aside as holy. Establish your kingdom, and do your will, O Lord. Not just up in the stars…but right down here in the muck.”