Lindsey Gendke

Dear Readers:

What gets in the way of you chasing your dreams? Crummy life circumstances? Fear of failure, perhaps? Or maybe failed past attempts? (Feel free to let me know in a comment!)

For me, it used to be all of the above, plus one:

I worried that following my dream was a sin.

You know how I wrote about treating tough subjects (both topics and people) appropriately in writing? Well, that’s because I used to not. See, I have this passive aggressive bone that metastasizes sometimes (see my previous post), and for a lot of years that’s mostly what happened in my writing.

Long story short, a few years ago, I was convicted that my motives for writing were all wrong. And I was confused. I didn’t know what to do. So I just quit.

But the writing dream wouldn’t go away.

My “writer’s bug,” as I called it in my MFA application essay, followed me everywhere—from college to career and back to college again, where I finally threw up my hands last spring and cried, “Lord, what am I supposed to do?” This was the same question I put to a campus counselor whom I sought out of sheer career desperation.

Then, after all my agonizing over the possible sinfulness of my writing, would you believe that counselor looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Why do you think you keep having this desire to write? Who do you think put it there?”

Whoa. Bull’s eye. Since that session in April, I’ve had to ask the same question about that providential counselor whose name I can’t even remember.

So God wanted me to write. But how? I still felt I needed permission somehow. For that matter, I needed some new material! If I was a “new creature,” a born-again Christian, but my writing record was stained with blood, ink, and tears (with a passive aggression that not a few times became active) what was I supposed to write about?

In my next post, using part of my MFA application essay, I’ll tell you about the answer/affirmation I got from God last summer.

Although the writing project He dropped in my lap is not the same one I am documenting on this blog, it is what has led me back to my writing roots—definitively, decisively, and defiantly.

It is also the same project I am struggling to finish up this week and, by extension, is keeping this blog painfully short and colloquial. And so, with that cliff-hanger (or choppy ending?), come back on Thursday for the rest of the story—or to read why I’m finally embracing my dreams.