MishaI’m going through a season where I have little to no motivation for creating. I sense it’s a collective feeling for our culture. Heavy things weigh on our souls; a deep winter sits upon us. It’s this sort of experience in which creativity hibernates under a darkening blanket.
I’m not only talking about the Corona Virus. If anything, that’s only the cherry on top of the growing list of sorrow, uncertainty, and disappointment of this season. Students taking their own lives. Parents dying. Cherished relationships ending. Crippling student loan debt. Crazy politicians. Entire people groups being systematically slaughtered. Evil giants rising out of the sea. The proportions feel biblical. Why write a silly book when you hear the hoofbeats of apocalyptic horsemen?
That’s when I think it’s good to recognize winter. Winter is a season where life is renewed under a facade of death. Jesus told us all about it in John 12:24 (MSG). “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”
When you read J.R.R. Tolkien, you recognize his familiarity with world-wide chaos and despair. He could not have written that looming feeling of doom if he hadn’t first been intimate with it. It soaked into the weary bones of each of his characters — probably the same way it did to Tolkien in the trenches of WWI. But he also knew and experienced reckless love. He wrote about the fellowship and their brave work toward destroying the ring, even if it meant moving armies to distract Sauron from seeing the hobbits who carried it.
Right now, I find myself trying to draw upon and write the heaviness so I can also write the reckless love. Our call as creators of story is to draw people into victory, and without connecting to the looming darkness, victory falls flat.
“For everyone born of God overcomes the world.” John 5:4
Julia N. White
Gretchen Carlson
Great post. I can so relate to those feelings and I believe that we are able to use the bad we endure to share hope with others on the written page.
What a great post, Michelle. Desperately needed. Thank you so much for your honesty and the great reminder.
So true – bfore victory, there is a battle! As writers we point to our God and his hope!
You’re right. It is hard with everything that’s been going on, but it might be good to write stories around current events, creating our own endings and providing hope in the dark.