Yesterday I wrote of the role patience plays in creative writing, and how creative writing builds that virtue. Further reflection has me realizing how much I am yearning to be able to leave my day job behind and concentrate professionally on my fiction.

Like all writers, I am a creative type. A dreamer. Head in the clouds (though I do in very real ways have my feet on the ground as well). So my day job in corporate America is hardly thrilling. I feel like an utter corporate drone a lot of the time, and I’d love the freedom to pursue my fiction full-time.

Perhaps that day will come. I strongly suspect it never will. And that’s ok. Deep down, I’m really at peace about that, largely because I have learned over the last few years that my life is not about me, as I mentioned here. It’s all up to God and his plan.

In the meantime, I’m trying to practice gratitude more. And regarding my present situation, there’s a lot to be grateful for.

• My day job is in the healthcare industry helping really sick patients get the care they need. That matters, even if I don’t get to see the results given the nature of my specific position. God is using that job to work through me and IN me. It’s humbles me a lot. It teaches me to find my identity in HIM, not how I make a living.
• I’m enjoying revisiting my trilogy and planning how to advance beyond it, what to write next.
• How God is speaking to me personally through my characters and the bits of me that are in them is just wild. I love it. It’s amazing. HE’s amazing.
• I do have decent time to devote to my fiction, despite it not being a full-time endeavor.
• It’s really crazy to have the comparison, now, of putting my dreams for my fiction in God’s hands, with all the peace I have in that, as opposed to before my conversion experience in 2014.

Yes, I’d prefer to write full time. I’d love that freedom. But freedom, at heart, is what I have found in Jesus Christ. Freedom is not the ability to do everything we want. As Pope John Paul II said, freedom is “having the right to do what we ought.”

So I will continue taking one day at a time, step by step. It’s not a bad way to go about things! In fact, it’s the only way we can. As my protagonist’s mother used to tell her:

“One step at a time, one choice to be made, that choice to be honest and just. When you feel overwhelmed or feel slighted and small, that’s the time this is really a must.”