sustain:if:able kiwi

A prayer for writers (for me)

Having returned from holiday over this weekend, my main task for the next 12 weeks is to write. (I have some research to do, but that takes second place behind my hope of completing a book – on sustainability in emerging and fresh expressions.) I face the 12 weeks with mixed feelings. It’s been 7 years since my first book and that breeds a certain sense of anxiety. I feel quite unsure if I can capture what I want to say. Will I be clear enough? Sustained enough? Academically able enough?

Writing is such an individual experience. It feels so egotistical, this individual pursuit to be heard. Why might my words be worthy of being read? Why, in a world of so many books, should I pollute with yet more information?

There are a whole lot of academic pressures at work – to publish, to get the right press, to be recognised. Again, a complex set of emotions and motives to sift.

So this morning I found some phrases from Philippians 1:9 helpful.

“And this is my prayer:”
“love” – and so to write out of love for God, church, people and world
“knowledge” – and so to write respectful of the tradition, of those who’ve gone before and my contemporary colleagues in scholarship, all the while conscious of the intuitions and feelings that are learnings within myself
“depth of insight” – to write something that might, through God’s mercy, shine some light on the yet simply complex and complexly simple task of being a disciple in this contemporary world.

And so, to writing I will go …