ABOUT
WRITER'S
BLOCK
ABOUT THE STUDY
You are typing away on your computer for what feels like hours now. Your mind wonders through these ideas and you begin to get lost within the words on the screen. You have a vision. You know exactly which direction you want to take it. You are typing so rapidly and the backspace key becomes almost unnecessary. Sentences become paragraphs, and paragraphs become pages. The thoughts are just flowing through your hands as each finger presses a key. You are finishing up a thought, ready to begin the next when suddenly your mind draws a blank. Your fingers that were constantly moving, come to a stop. The cursor blinks at you. You stare at it aimlessly, anxious to move it away again. Your brain flat lined. The thoughts are not coming to you anymore. What was raining into your mind is now drying up and in need of hydration. The dreaded cursor continues to blink, and your hands back away from the keyboard; writer’s block. You knew it was bound to happen, you have prepared yourself for it’s appearance, but you never thought past its grand entrance. “How can I make it go away?”. That question becomes all you can think about. Frustrated, you wildly press your fingers into some keys and create a jibberish mess in front of you. That is what your brain feels like. You’re lost in an act of creativity, where it feels like there is no way back.
Writer’s block: how can you get rid of it?
The lives we live are stories being written by God. Every detail is carefully crafted and thought out. The Lord sits at His computer and types away a novel dedicated to each and every one of us. His fingers quickly move about His keyboard. His sentences become paragraphs, His paragraphs become pages, into a novel with a title of your name and the words “Written by God” engraved underneath. Each thought comes together. Piece by piece He gives life to your story. But, the difference between God’s writing and our writing is that He never gets writer’s block. He knows your plan and your path and He types until it is finished. No slamming at the keys, no flat lining, no blinking cursor, just a wonderfully written work from start to finish. I imagine He has a book case, stretched along the wall behind his work space. That’s where He places his works. When His writing is finished, He turns around and finds a special place for your story. Now, all He has to do was wait for you to pick up the book.
​
But you don’t pick up the book. It sits. It collects dust from all of the times you chose not to take it. And it’s not because you forget to, no. It is because you thought you could write your own story, better than the one already sitting on a shelf for you. You, instead sit at your computer, type away with your own thoughts and plans for yourself. You use the thesaurus to spice it up a little, too. You decide you were too good for proof reading, and spell check is not needed. You don’t hit ‘save as’ either because odds are things will work out just as planned. You write and write with no limits at all. Your mind keeps going and your fingers frantically hit the keys, filling the pages with YOUR plan. You get all the way down to your last few paragraphs and then the dreaded cursor appears. Writer’s block? How? This time, though, it’s not because your brain flat lined. You didn’t run out of ideas or thoughts, you ran out of God. Writer’s block: you blocked out the Creator. You left His book sitting on a shelf and never bothered to open it up.
Writer’s block: blocking out the One who has already written your story.
Writer’s block? Yes. Writer’s block. We all tend to hit this point in our lives. The time in our lives where we believe our vision is better than His. The time when we decide to guide our own feet rather than letting Christ walk us through. We drive a wedge between us and the Lord’s truth. It is like we are in a war zone. We put up a blockade, except God is not on the other side firing shots at you. He’s waving the white flag. He is saying trust me, I have a purpose and a plan for your life. “Plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” (Jeremiah 29:11). Why do we run in the other direction of that? He promises that He has a plan for us, a plan that is divine and perfectly written and yet we chose to run the other direction.
Writer’s block: not giving control to the One who gave us life.
We know God has a plan for our life, but we can’t see it clearly, which naturally scares us a little bit. As humans, we are planners. We have to know the beginning, middle and the end otherwise we won’t go through with it. We have to see things all the way through to the end. Almost like everything has to be transparent. We are trapped under a thick sheet of glass. We can see straight through to the top. No cracks, no smudges, nothing hindering our vision of the other side. The vision is clear and the top is reachable. Therefore, we can make it out. The other side is known, the outcome is making it out without a scrape or a bruise. There is not any necessary planning needed either. The escape route is obvious. Nothing is going to get in your way. God’s plan for our lives, though, looks completely different in our eyes. To us, the glass we are trying to get through is ten times thicker than the glass YOU invisioned for yourself to get around. It’s jagged, and broken. Pieces of glass stick out every corner. You cannot see the middle or the end, just the beginning, and you are not even sure you want to begin anyway. The other side is unknown. Why would you go through all of the uneven glass just to head to an unknown space? That’s where building our blockade begins.
​
God introduces something to us with a scary beginning, an unclear middle and an unknown outcome. Instead of going forward with trust, we walk away. We refuse to give the novel He is writing for us a chance, and we turn to write our own. One that is less risky with an easier goal to obtain. We limit God, and limit ourselves. What we refuse to believe is that God makes what seems impossible (getting through the jagged glass) possible. The bible says we are to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understandings. In all of our ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3: 5-6) We are to not follow our own idea on things, because when we do, the glass that looked to be perfectly clear and flawless, breaks. The glass fogs up and before we know it we can’t see a way forward anymore, let alone back.
​
We are stuck. And in that moment, after the blockade we built is finished, we realize that it is completely covering us. It is pitch black. We begin to wish we never built it in the first place, or that we could knock it down. We begin to long for God and His guidance, so we frantically try to kick the wall down, but the wall is too tall and strong for us to knock down alone. We kick, we push, we slam ourselves into the wall and nothing budges. Our only option is to fall to our knees, and as our knees hit the ground, the ground shakes for a moment. A stone falls from above, and you look up. There is a hole, allowing a sliver of light shining through. Hope. God is there, He is with you in your weakest moment, where you felt like giving up, He is there, and He is ready to help you knock down that wall.
Writer’s block: building a blockade in front of God that ends up being built around you.
We all do it. Each and every one of us blocks the Creator out of our plans. We take matters into our own hands, and make the matters worse. Why, though? Why would we ignore a perfectly published book? One with OUR name on? One written by OUR Creator? The answer is simple actually. We don’t pick up the book because we pick up other things. We pick up the enemy. We pick up, lies, hurt, abandonment, idols, depression, and temptation. The devil fights with us over the book, our book. It’s like you are playing tug of war, only you have one hand on the book and Satan has two. He pulls it away and places it back on the shelf. He puts a blindfold over our eyes to prevent us from ever reading, or reaching the truth within those pages. Instead he convinces us “our way is a better way”, so we write our own way, without God. We don’t let Him into our life stories, instead we block him out.
Writer’s block: “Writers” blocking out the Creator.
I am a “writer” blocking out the true author. I have lived a life with writer’s block. I have, time and time again, chosen my way over His way. I have hit the blinking cursor with no way of removing it. I blocked Christ out and let the world in. I didn’t pick up my novel. In fact, I let it get pretty dusty. It took a lot to bring myself to pick up a dust pan and dust off the book. It took a faith- defining moment, a choice between continuing to type, or deleting what I had written and opening what God has provided for me. Luckily, I chose to delete my own novel. I closed down word, and backed away from my keyboard. I blew away the collected dust, grabbed my novel from the shelf, and I haven’t let go since. I have chosen to let Him be the ONLY author of my life. No more writer’s block. Granted, the cursor still shows up, but he can move any cursor that comes my way. Afterall, He never runs into writer’s block.
​
Ask yourself this: am I blocking out the writer? Really take a step back and think about this one. Are you currently trying to write your own story without consulting with the Author first? Maybe you started down the path He paved for you, but life got distracting? Or, maybe the cursors of life showed up and you just can’t seem to remove them? It doesn’t matter what caused it, or when it began, but what matters is making the decision to let the Writer back in.