Finally, Suzanne decided to quit talking about writing and actually do it. This would be the year she would finish her novel. A month later, she hadn’t made much progress. Not to be defeated, she encouraged herself and worked even harder. After another two months, she read what she had written and decided it wasn’t good enough and quit.
Suzanne considered the often-quoted truism: “Without a vision, the people per perish” (Proverbs 29:18). What had gone wrong? Why had her effort lacked staying power?
Just any vision isn’t good enough.
Because of vision, one look at the giants made ten men feel like grasshoppers. They knew they couldn’t enter the land God had promised Israel. Each year, millions of individuals and businesses will declare bankruptcy. Why? What was wrong with their vision?
What they needed is what we need: not our vision but God’s vision.
Suzanne needed God’s vision.
If Suzanne had kept putting her God-given talents to use, positive results would have followed. The only way she could fail was to quit. She made a new resolution: “Keep writing and rewriting with a relentless desire to improve, no matter how long it takes.”
To her great surprise, she wound up writing something different from what she had planned. The fact that she didn’t have a bestseller didn’t bother her, because people were being helped in an unexpected way, proving that she was following God’s plan, not her own.
We need to be careful with that “vision” part.
God will use our efforts in ways we can’t foresee. To keep writing, we need faith to believe the results, whether great or small by the world’s standards, will be great in God’s eyes.
Success is guaranteed only when we put our God-given talents to use. Then God will one day look at our writing and say, “Well done.”
