| Sunny Side Up
with Kathleen Gibson September 10, 2008 Why worry when you can pray? The road is long and lovely to the place where I spend most of my days. Sometimes fawns peek out from swaying grass at its sides. Always I watch for their parents, leaping on spring-loaded hind legs to cross the highway ahead. I�ve spent the last dozen or so years writing full-time from my home office, commuting down the hall on my own size nines to a converted bedroom across from the Preacher�s and my room. Now I drive an hour or so to reach my office. On the way, the land too rises, from paper-flat to gently rolling swells swirling with color. Spring peeper green, sea blue, sunray yellow, coffee brown. Sometimes, especially on these end-of-summer mornings, ducks and geese rise too, in vast flocks that dot the sky as though sprinkled from a galactic pepper shaker. And sometimes I spend the entire trip telling God he couldn�t have planned a better surprise. After the Preacher�s encounter with the mosquito and his release from both job and rehab center, it became clear that one of us would sooner or later be required to generate some regular money. It also became increasingly clear that the �one of us� likely wouldn�t be him. My last dozen years of freelance writing and speaking, though full-time, has never brought in wages sufficient to live on. Often over those years, I (and many others, I know) wondered if I was wasting my time word-spinning all alone in that tiny parsonage bedroom-turned-office. Playing Scrabble for peanuts, I�ve called it. Often I was tempted to quit. After I finish putting our book together, we decided, I�d look for work. There�s work everywhere these days, honorable work. God, we prayed, show us the next step. A phone call interrupted me mid-afternoon one May day as I sat finishing the book. �Hello, Kathleen?� The man identified himself as the publisher of a magazine I was barely familiar with. He followed that with this ��.Were looking for a new editor over here. We wondered if you�d consider the job.� That�s the long and short of it. (Well�the short of it, really. I listed multiple reasons why I wasn�t capable, he listed several reasons why I was�). In the end we agreed to meet to talk, and the end of that is this: I took the job, and I�m loving it. But I have moments, many of them, of sheer terror. I�m used to the other end of the magazine business, you see, the end that reads them and writes for them, not the end that puts them together. But every day, God provides what I need to negotiate the steep learning curve, and always the road is colorful. All that is why my commute is longer these days. It�s also why I seldom worry anymore. God has proved himself over and over as our shelter, our healer, our provider, our enabler, our strength and hope. After all, why worry, when you can pray? Why not start today? �2008, Kathleen Gibson |
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