by Roseanna White | Mar 7, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
In our home school reading yesterday, we were reading the continued tale of the life of a Prussian missionary to England, George Müller. In the part of the story we got to, he had just gotten married to the sister of a British missionary, and together they had made a decision to abolish pew rents in their church–which meant their living went from guaranteed to based on the goodwill of their tiny congregation.
One night, all the food in the house was gone. But George and Mary set the table anyway. They sat down at the dinner hour. They held hands, and they prayed. Not asking God for food–but rather, thanking Him for all he had provided. Thanking Him.
Minutes after their prayer had ended, someone showed up at their door with a whole ham.
That story traveled with me throughout the day. When it comes to this life of ours, it’s so easy to focus on what we lack. The things we don’t have. The empty places. Sometimes, that’s all we can see. It surrounds us. It defines us.
Lack can be such a solid thing. Think about it: what’s the absence of light? Darkness. What’s the absence of heat? Cold.
Things that are literally nothing in themselves, yet their counterparts are so crucial to us that we feel their absence as a physical thing. And the same applies to things like wealth, food, clothing, cars, houses…all those other things. It applies too to family, friends, churches, school, education.
Things we, as human beings, crave. Need. And when we don’t have them, we feel it.
But George Müller taught me something today. He taught me that I shouldn’t just pray for the empty places to be filled. I should praise Him for having them. I should praise the Lord my God for taking away what I don’t need. I should praise Him for giving me life enough to want. I should praise him for being bigger than a lack, for being the eternal Being that is never absent.
And I should pray knowing that all those empty places…they’re just potential, waiting for Him. They’re just Him sweeping clean so He can give me what I really need. Because how could He, if I’d filled with junk the places He wanted to fill with promise? If the Müllers had scavenged for moldy bread, why would God have sent a feast?
What plates are we filling today with garbage, just to have something, when we should be waiting for Him to provide the right thing?
Lack will never be easy. It’s not meant to be. Not many people in this world ever seek it. But it finds us, in one form or another, always. There is always something more we want. Some hole we see in our lives. Some empty place.
But let’s try doing it like the Müllers did. Let’s set the table anyway. Let’s sit down together, join hands, and praise Him. Praise Him not just for what He will provide, but for the empty places just waiting for Him.
by Roseanna White | Feb 28, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
Well, it is nearly time for the event I’ve been counting down to since last June–a writing retreat with my best friend/critique partner! We’re renting a cabin, settling down with our laptops, and taking three whole days (and two partial ones) to do nothing but WRITE! Heaven!!
That’s tomorrow. Today I need to get everything ready, LOL. Kinda short on time!
|
Peek of just a corner of the
cover for the free novella! |
Which, of course, is when a new project comes along. =) A fun one, but one that can’t be put off. I’m working with Harvest House on a free novella that takes place between
Ring of Secrets and
Whispers from the Shadows. We’re all very excited about it, and it needs to be turned in (cover, edits, etc) by tomorrow–and included in it we need a title for a
second free story that was just brought up yesterday. So I’m scrambling to come up with a plot so that I can title it, LOL.
Any ideas? Anyone? 😉 I know the setting is 1835 and who the characters are, a basic plot. Title still eluding me…
So I’d better spend my few free minutes working on that. I know you’ll understand. 😉
But don’t forget to check out the
Colonial Quill, where I took my spy-name game yesterday! And also up today is a post I put together for
Go Teen Writers asking some of the CBA’s top editors how they got into their jobs and what they love/hate about it. It’s a fun one!
by Roseanna White | Feb 21, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
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!
by Roseanna White | Feb 14, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
I know, a predictable topic for Valentine’s Day. 😉 But you gotta love the classics, right?
I’m amazingly blessed when it comes to love. I found my true love in high school, got married at 18, and haven’t regretted a minute of it. In this day and age, I know that’s rare. We live in a kind of strange society where it’s accepted that teenagers are going to be sexually active, but not that they’re capable of making long-term decisions on romance. A world where they’re told to pick a career focus at age 13, but then that college students change majors on average 5 times (or something like that).
But I was never typical–I say that in all honestly, LOL. I knew from primary school onward that I wanted to be a writer. And I knew in high school that if I were smart, I’d marry someone who was happy to support me in that goal until the dough came rolling in. 😉 At that age, I had my list of what the Perfect Guy would be. He would be older than me. He would be taller than me. He would have shorter hair than me. Those were my criteria.
Then I met David. And, well…he was taller. =) Ten months younger, he had a ponytail while at that age I had a bob, but oh the dimples. The green eyes. And most of all, the soul that mine understood so perfectly. He too was atypical. More focused on life-after-high-school than most. Another rare teen who not only understood consequences but contemplated them. A guy who immediately put his total support behind my writing dream…and made it his dream too, deciding then and there that maybe he’d like to get into publishing someday.
Be still my heart!
We went to college together, from our West Virginia town to St. John’s in
Annapolis. Yes, at first my parents worried that I wanted to go there just because he was leaving high school a year early to do so. But I explained that we both wanted it because it was an awesome school, and the fact that we both thought so was, you know, kinda one of those things we had in common that made us such a great couple to begin with… And after visiting the college, my parents knew it was the place for me as surely as I did.
Still, ours wasn’t the typical teenage romance. We were engaged our last year of high school. Not exactly a popular decision among teens today, but we knew what we wanted. During our first year of college, we started planning a beach wedding for that next summer. Good decision, gotta say. 😉
We got married after Freshman year. Found a ridiculously expensive postage stamp of an apartment. Finished college together, David went out and got a job with his family’s company. We decided to start a family, and afterward to move back home. And now, eleven years after those beachfront I-dos, I can say with the perspective of age that, yep, we knew what we were doing. We knew what we wanted.
Because we knew who we were.
In a lot of ways, David and I are so very different. Where I’m temperate, he’s passionate. Where I’m quiet, he’s talkative. Where I’m reserved, he’s demonstrative. Which is perfect. We balance each other out in those respects. He knows how to draw me out, and I know how to listen. And we have the same sarcastic sense of humor. The same dreams. And of course, two of the most adorable kids on the planet. 😉
Some couples have “their song,” usually something they danced to once. We have our song too–from the fabulous kids’ show Phineas and Ferb. =) Yep, we found our Evil Love. (Told you we share a sarcastic sense of humor, LOL.)
by Roseanna White | Feb 7, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
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The Little Potato Peeler
by Albert Anker, 1886 |
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.
by Roseanna White | Jan 31, 2013 | Thoughtful Thursdays, Uncategorized
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.
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| A Lego building at NASA’s KSC |
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.”
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| A Lego model of Trafalgar Square, London |
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.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. Having successfully launched two homeschool grads, she now spends her time writing fiction, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years, as well as a fantasy series and contemporary mysteries and romances. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.