'A' is for Albatross? by Sharon Heagy

                                                        photo by Alain Rider (Unsplash)
    

     Albatross is not my ‘A’ word for the month but I think it is kind of a cool word to say and quite an interesting bird to read about. Which is to say, when I began writing this blog post and decided to entitle it ‘A is for Albatross’, I was led down a path of discovery all about albatrosses. One of the interesting tidbits I learned was that the albatross will sometimes abandon its nest, especially if it is a first-time nester. This doesn’t bode well for the population as they only lay and hatch one egg at a time. This brings me to my actual ‘A’ word which is abandon.

    Abandon can have many negative associations. It can evoke a sense of sadness when we are watching nature shows and animals abandon their nests or young. Stories of parents or caregivers abandoning children, the ill or the elderly can crush our hearts and leave us wondering how we can help. It can refer to someone who embraces an illicit lifestyle such as drugs, theft or love affairs which they pursue with abandon. With no restraint or inhibitions. Reckless. But when it comes to writing, and especially for the Christian author, abandon takes on a different bent.

    Yes, there are times we need to abandon a piece we are writing because it just will not work no matter how hard we try to mould it into something worthwhile. We will need to discard it, ditch it, rip off the band-aid and throw it away, and then, more importantly, begin again.

    Facing the blank page once more. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. What am I going to do now? My first move needs to be to abandon my work in a different way than the examples above. I need to yield and give it over to the One from whom my gift was given. My first posture needs to be one of prayer and praise. Yet I must move beyond that to doing the work that accompanies faith.  

    This leads to the next exciting part, the writing. The process. And in that process I need to learn to write with complete lack of inhibition or restraint, entire and utter surrender, with complete abandon. The ink flowing from the Holy Spirit through my head and heart and onto the page. Words gushing out like they are coming from a holy fountain pen. This does not come naturally in my fleshly state but those times can come with practice.

In his book, ‘Your God is Too Safe’, Mark Buchanan talks about practicing the presence of God:

     “That’s why we need to practice the presence of God: Not just to acknowledge in some     philosophical way that God is present, but to rehearse, to repeat, to work and rework our knowledge that even though we don’t see Him and sometimes don’t feel Him, He is there. He is here. When we practice the presence of God, we train ourselves to desire His presence-to resist our temptation to flee Him. We also train ourselves to experience His presence-to resist our temptation to think that He flees us. In other words, the practice of the presence of God helps us to live between the temptations of Jonah bound for Tarshish and John bound in prison. Jonah is the prophet who wants to abandon God. John is the prophet who feels abandoned by God.”

May each one of us practice His presence in 2023 and learn to write with abandon to the glory of God.