I moved a bookshelf to a different room a couple of days ago, which involved of course looking at all the books (fun) and dusting the shelves behind where the books usually stand (less fun). I did find some stuff back there, though. There was twelve cents, which still puzzles me. How do coins accidentally fall behind a row of books? And I found a roll of papers – yellow half-sheets held together with a disintegrating rubber band.
I didn’t have to look to see what these were. I recognized those yellow sheets. They were from the little journal that I used to write my devotional reflections in after my morning Bible reading. In college. Over thirty years ago. And I saved them because . . . um . . . I might someday want to read the devotional thoughts of twenty-one year old me in order to . . . um . . . because . . .
I read one. From 16 December 1984. In that journal entry, I was fretting over the conflict between my love of literature and my calling to ministry.  I wrote, “Always my love for literature and writing has been the alternative for me – what I would do if God had not called me into missions.”  But something I had read that morning in Isaiah 50 had inspired me to wonder if perhaps I might somehow be able to combine my passion with my calling. Perhaps my love of words might enable me to be a better missionary.
I was so earnest. So clueless. So full of the importance of my calling. I had dreamed of being a writer my entire childhood, but in my mind that dream had simply had to be put aside after that week at Glorieta Baptist Conference Center when I responded to a call to go overseas as a missionary of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC was in the middle of “Bold Mission Thrust” at that time, a campaign to reach the world for Jesus by the year 2000. All by ourselves, as I recall. And we called this campaign Bold Mission Thrust. Really. I wasn’t the only one who was earnest in those days. And clueless.
I never became a missionary for the SBC. It turns out that by the time I finished seminary earnestness of calling was no longer enough. It had to be accompanied by a doctrinal conformity that I couldn’t offer. Evidently, you didn’t want to boldly thrust the wrong sort of missions on the world. So instead I wrote novels. And I tell stories. As a pastor, I sometimes think I hardly ever do anything else.
The Lord God has given methe tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. (Isaiah 50:4).
In 1984, I was worried there might not be a place for my literary passions in the religious calling I took so seriously. In 2016, here’s what I did with the sheaf of yellow papers from 1984. I leafed through them once quickly, trying to read as little as possible (what I did read was painful), then threw them out. The reason I leafed through them was because I remember that occasionally I used to write poems in my devotional journal. There weren’t any there, but there had been – that might have been worth keeping.