This is an old post, from back in 2009 when I was writing my first book. This weekend, I was reading back through some old posts and I found this one. I needed it. What an amazing reminder of how God speaks. I love so, so much when He shows Himself to me. And He does show Himself, all of the time, if we’re paying attention.
-JB
I ran away to Panera to write today, because sometimes a change of scene helps, ya know? Only… I still feel like I’m just throwing letters at the page and hoping they become words which become sentences which become something better than I think they are right now. Boy, oh boy… revising this novel is going to be fun.
During the lunch rush, a lady and her husband sat down at the table beside me, prayed over their meal, and started to eat. All of a sudden, she looked at me and said, “Are you writing a book?”
How did she know that? Panera has wi-fi and all I had done for the bulk of her first few minutes there was stare at the screen, type a couple of sentences, then stare at the screen. Maybe there’s a universal blank look that all writers share? Hmm… Something to ponder the next time I can’t think of a good scene to write.
Anyway, I told her yes, and she went back to her meal. Then she looked at me again a few minutes later and asked where I was at in the process. Note: she did not ask if I was published. She asked where I was at.
I won’t recount the whole conversation, but it went like that, her occasionally asking me questions, us discussing writers we’d read, with lapses of comfortable silence for her to eat and me to write.
It was when she stood up to go that she touched me. She said, “What’s your first name?” So I told her. And then she said, “I’d like to pray for you. Would you like me to pray for you?”
This stranger, this amazing stranger, wants to pray for me. Wow. I mean. Wow. How humbling. How like our amazing God to show up and provide encouragement just when we need it the most.
Here is the kicker, the part where God went that one extra step that’s sort of like the signature on His postcards to me… She told me her name… and her last name is the same as a dear family friend of ours who passed on a few years ago. He was an amazing, godly man who stepped in for me at one of the lowest points of my life and helped put me back on track, who was among the first to congratulate me when I got engaged to my husband, who kept up with me and prayed for me even when I didn’t know he was doing it.
How like God is that? Pretty awesome, I’d say…
–JB
Loved reading this.