The kid with no practical purpose

I was the weird kid. The nerd. If I wasn’t stuck in a book reading stories or glued to a television set watching stories, I was daydreaming stories, stories, stories. I lived inside my head.

But I had no practical purpose.

I never hit the baseball past the pitcher’s mound until I was in sixth grade.

When we played football, the other kids left me wide open because when the quarterback dared to whip a pass at me, I ducked.

Anytime someone raised a hood on a car, the other boys clustered around for good, long looks inside. “Sounds like the carburetor,” one of them said. I didn’t know what a carburetor was. I still don’t.

On our farm, I loved when it was my turn to drive the tractor into the field to rake hay. Over the growl of the engine, I heard all kinds of action, adventure, superhero detective stories playing out in my head. That daydreaming might have had something to do with how squiggly the rows of raked hay end up.

Dad didn’t know what to do with me. Once, he sent me to get his crescent wrench. I dashed to the shop, pulled a tool from the box, ran right into the house and waved it at Mom. “Is this a crescent wrench?”

I wanted to be the right kind of boy, but I couldn’t. All I cared to do was devour books, watch adventure shows, and make up stories in my head.

I was a failure.

Or so I thought. What I didn’t figure out until later was that I had been in training for the most fantastic, stimulating, awesome career I could ever hope to have—an author.

When I read novels, the music of the words played delicious songs in my mind. I heard rhythms and melody. I felt the tempo and crescendos. When I watched TV, my heart beat with the lifeblood of the stories. The action of comic books fueled the adventures that banged and skittered across my mind.

Through all of those books, all those stories, without knowing it, I had soaked up techniques on storytelling, structure, pacing, action words, and other mechanics and nuances that would be part of my writer’s toolbox.

I thought I had no practical purpose. But I found out that telling stories is exactly why God put me here.

In 1 Corinthians 12:14-20, the Bible compares the group of God’s people to a human body with its eyes, ears, toes, guts, and a whole lot of strange and funny-looking pieces inside and out: “God has placed each one of the parts in one body just as He wanted. If they were all the same part, where would the body be?”

I might be weird, but I fit God’s plan perfectly. If God gave you the dream to write, don’t be afraid to follow it. It’s where you belong in the body of Christ.