I am only one, but I am one. I can’t do everything, but I can do something. The something I ought to do, I can do. And by the grace of God, I will.
Edward Everett Hale
The story of Relentless Grace emerged differently than I imagined. I suspect a lot of creative endeavors are like that—you prepare and plan and develop your skills, but you also have to make sure that your own ideas and schemes don’t get in the way. The final product is often something with its own spirit that existed before you arrived.
Michelangelo claimed that his job as sculptor was simply to expose the form that already existed within an ordinary-appearing chuck of rock:
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it … I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
While I certainly don’t intend to compare my book to a timeless masterpiece, that’s the feeling I experienced in writing. I wasn’t creating a story as much as I was revealing one. And that means that the story doesn’t belong to me. I was simply given the gift of disclosing it to those who need to hear it.
It’s a priceless gift, a gift of grace I certainly don’t deserve. Thirty-five years teaching math to kids isn’t the typical preparation for writing a book, and yet here I am. I guess the Bible shows that God frequently chooses unlikely messengers, and I’m surely in that category.
I don’t mean to portray some sort of hocus-pocus, spooky-sounding vision, as though God spoke to me and told me to write this book and then provided the words. It’s much more ordinary than that, much more mundane and difficult, but no less powerful.
I think that’s why I’m so reluctant about commercially marketing the book. The story needs to get in the right hands, and that can’t happen unless people know it’s there. I want to share it; I don’t want to sell it like one of those guys in a TV infomercial. Great way to make money, lousy way to disclose a story entrusted to you by its rightful owner.
I’m impatient; I want it now, or at least by the middle of next week. I want to trust that the same God who guided me through four years of writing, editing, and publishing will provide the path that’ll get the story to those who might benefit from it.
It’s a life lesson that applies far beyond one insignificant book. Retrospect shows that His objectives and timetable are frequently different that mine. I might need to wait until at least the middle of next month!
Have you ever planned and fussed about something, only to see it happen in a different manner, on a different schedule, and much better, than you could ever have imagined?
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