Each Monday, church staff writer Bill Thompson had to write a devotion that complemented the weekend message. On the following day each week, his devotion was sent to a huge email list.
On this particular Monday, his mind was at his best, focused on a message that was sure to encourage a lot of people. He marveled at how the words came together and said to himself, I would never be able to write this again. After a few hours, he sat back in his chair, breathing a sigh of relief. He was finished.
He clicked Save.
Somehow, his computer must have misunderstood Save for Scrap. When he went to email the document to the church as an attachment, the file wasn’t there. Never before had such a thing happened. Clicking the link in recently saved documents returned an error. The file was gone—dead and buried somewhere in cyberspace.
Bill wanted to cry, but there wasn’t time for that. The Tuesday deadline said he immediately had to start over and write something new. He couldn’t duplicate what he wrote before. There wasn’t any way. He would just have to make do—the best he could.
After finishing the new devotion in less time than before, he sat back in amazement. This one was different but not worse. It was better focused and more heart-gripping.
What did Bill learn from this once-in-a-lifetime experience?
No writing experience is ever lost. The document might be lost, but not the skills gained from the experience. The value of having done the work made it possible to write something even better.
