Adding it all up

For the last time this year, I’m writing. It’s been quite a journey, and when I add it all up, it’s staggering.

365 entries, containing

106,019 words, made up of

563,029 characters, on

465 pages, that would take

7 hours and 22 minutes to read.

I’m not sure what I thought would happen as I wrote throughout the year? I knew there would be days when I would want to, and days when I wouldn’t want to. I knew there would be some posts that felt like some of my best writing, and other posts that, well, wouldn’t.

I wondered if more people would read what I was writing, and there were days when I would see the stats and wonder why I was doing all this work for such seemingly little return.

That’s when God would remind me what this was always about. Forget all the words and characters and visits and pages. When it’s all stripped away, the only thing that mattered was obedience.

Simple obedience.

The kind of simple obedience that produces supernatural outcomes.

I was reminded of this as The B99 watched a movie called “tick, tick… Boom!” with our son, Parker, the other night. It was the story of Jonathan Larson, the creator of “Rent,” a show that ran for 12 years on Broadway and grossed over $280 million.

But the movie wasn’t about that show. It was about a show he’d worked on for 8 years called SUPERBIA, and the struggles he faced as an unknown performing artist in trying to get it funded and produced. Without giving away any more than you could find on Wikipedia, suffice it to say that the show he’d poured 8 years of his life into was received with great applause, but never picked up.

As he’s speaking with his agent after hearing the devastating news, he asked her what he should do next.

“Start working on the next one,” she replied.

His next one was the show that “tick, tick… Boom!” Is based on, which was followed closely by “Rent.” It’s fair to say that he had to invest 8 years of his life in an apparent failure to get out what was hidden so deeply within him.

Where does all this lead? Only God knows. I’ve been obedient to do this year what I sensed Him leading me to do, and now, I’ll be obedient to whatever comes next.

The writing will continue because I know that there are more words in me that have yet to find their way to a page. And while I may not post what I write every day like I did this year, I am confident in this: simple obedience produces supernatural outcomes, and that one truth makes me lean forward into a new year with expectation.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Photo by Reuben Juarez on Unsplash

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