I labored for hours, polishing my fiction proposal, and non-fiction query letters to take to the writer’s conference in Colorado Springs.  I constantly pushed away the pestering thoughts of self-doubt.  Why are you spending so much time on this?  You know it’ll never get past your own printer!  I continued to chop at the keyboard to the best of my ability until it was time to print everything off, stuff them into a black folder and throw it into my bag next to the hair dryer....

     All the way to Colorado I bit my fingernails over what I was bringing to show the editors in attendance.  Did I spell everything correctly?  I doubled spaced, right?  I numbered each page didn’t I?  I checked, and rechecked the publisher representatives I planned to see, getting their faces familiar in my mind, learning their names and saying a quick prayer, asking God that they have “an open mind.” 

     After hearing from the first keynote speaker that night, I sat on my hotel room bed and mapped out a detailed schedule of the day ahead of me.  If I know where I am going, I thought, and what I am supposed to be doing every minute of the day, then maybe no one will know how green I am. 

      No one would’ve suspected this was my first conference, my first time to meet with editors.  I covered the shaking of my hands with a firm grip on my notebook, and the apprehensive darting-of-the-eyes with an air of confidence I didn’t feel. 

     What I failed to think of were the other 250 aspiring writers standing in line with me, all of us waiting to write our name in a fifteen-minute meet-with-an-editor-slot. 

     What I failed to think of was what God wanted me to do. 

     I soon found out that my perfectly mapped-out plan needed a huge X marked through it.  I didn’t get to meet with some of the editors I wanted.  What will I do now? I asked, mentally throwing my arms up in defeat.  The plan is ruined, the whole weekend a waste! Those were my rather dramatic and faithless thoughts, until I stopped at the gentle tugging on my heart. 

     “Don’t you trust me?” a familiar voice asked me.  I sank in a chair, watching the chaos of writers darting from table to table, pens poised to stake their rightful time. 

     I sighed, remorseful, and asked the Lord to lead me in the direction He wanted me to go. 

     I signed up to meet with an editor of a home school magazine not charted in my plans.  But as I took a risk, with nothing but a business card and my story to give the editor, God proved to me His faithfulness. 

     As a result of that meeting I’m working on an article for the magazine, and through the writer’s conference weekend, God showed me that following His plan, instead of my own is what faith is all about. 

     It’s not the flat, petty word you may hear everyday, but real, risk-taking, putting-your-life-in-His-hands, kind of faith.  It’s the faith every Christian writer needs.  The kind that gives you a flicker of hope that what you’re writing on the laptop you’re still making payments on will somehow make it past your own printer and into the hands of the readers you’re constantly thinking about.  The faith that makes you know you don’t write for pleasure, because sometimes it’s just no fun, but you write because of a calling, because you can’t think of anything else God would have you do, to share the words He’s poured into your mind.  That’s the faith He desires us to live by. 

     “Don’t you trust me?” He asks.  “Don’t you know that in all things I work for the good of those who love me, who have answered the call I put on their lives?” 

     What peace there is in that!  What assurance!  How can we say no?