A word to you who may, by God’s grace & sovereign will, become career writers. Vocational writers. I’m talking about those who’ll write numerous books and articles that stretch over 3 to perhaps as long as 5 decades. One of the most important things you’ll be faced with doing is
looking back over your own work & accepting your limitations. You couldn’t know what you didn’t know. If you’re in your 30s & you’ve written something fabulous & think you’ll get years down the road & look back on decades of writing without wincing, I have bad news for you. God’s
too good, too faithful, to let you grow old—drawing ever nearer to the day you’ll see his face—thinking you’re hot. It’s not going to happen. And you’re also going to still be quoted for saying things you either wish you wouldn’t have said or would have said differently. You’ll
try to clear some of it up the best you can. But most of the ones who criticize it will never see the corrections or will simply ignore them. You might revise here and there but, honestly, You can’t just spend the rest of your writing life rewriting what you wrote back then.
More often you have to do something far harder: accept your incompleteness. Accept that you weren’t born grown. Accept that you wrote what you knew to write. Said things how you knew to say things. Was your motive to glorify God and to help people? Were you doing your best? Then
receive the gift of humility. It will be crucial in your work to come. And receive something else that, for me, became a most life-giving revelation:

God likes watching things grow.

God likes watching his children grow.

I’m glad I got to teach my daughters to walk. I don’t
wish they’d run a 5k home from the hospital. Spiritual maturity, if it happens at all, happens over a lifetime. Perfectionism is the boneyard of books we’ll never read.

Take heart, people of the pen. If you’d known it all to begin with, you’d have written it all to begin with.

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More from @BethMooreLPM

29 Mar
Meditating on these fascinating verses out of 1 Peter 1 this AM. What I’d give to sit around a table today and discuss this segment for a couple of hours with others who find them equally compelling, especially this Holy Week. I memorized them in the NET so I’ll quote from it:
“Concerning this salvation, the prophets who predicted the grace that would come to you searched and investigated carefully. They probed into what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating when he testified beforehand about the sufferings appointed for Christ
and his subsequent glory. They were shown that they were serving not themselves but you, in regard to the things now announced to you through those who proclaimed the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—things angels long to catch a glimpse of.” 1 Peter 1:10-12
Read 4 tweets
23 Mar
Presently in the book of Jeremiah in my daily reading. Have you ever heard anything more beautiful than these 2 lines of poetry in Ch 15?

“Your words were found and I ate them. Your words became a delight to me and the joy of my heart, for I bear your name, Lord God of Armies.”
I knew someone who felt this way. Bible study was not only a spiritual discipline to him. It was the delight of his life. Though I could not quite define what distinguished him, I knew that I wanted it and began to pray for it with all my heart. And the Lord granted it.
A guy who worked with him told me that, earlier the very day my mentor went home to be with Jesus, he’d gone on and on to him about several verses in Ephesians.

I‘ll tell the story as long as I live because I believe with everything in me God would do this for any believer.
Read 10 tweets
21 Mar
I’m sitting on my front porch reading a book, watching the sun go down through the trees, and there is a small plane flying in circles over my house. What is this kind of insanity???
What is wrong with people????
This is Keith, come to deal with it. Lol. No, that’s not a weapon. It’s the TV remote.
Read 4 tweets
21 Mar
To know Jesus.
To know him yourself.
Not 2nd hand through teacher, writer or preacher. These have a crucial place but their job is to help you know him yourself. To do life with him. Walk with him. Follow him. Talk with him. To be loved by him. To come to love him. To trust him.
To learn to listen to him. To hear him in Scripture. To be led by him. To serve him. To find divine consolation in pain & loss by learning to fellowship in his sufferings. To take his courage, These form a bond no one can easily walk away from. There’s no replacing Jesus.
I don’t grasp for the life of me how anyone could know Jesus, I mean really know Jesus, and walk away from him. He is like no one else. His love is better than life. His faithfulness surer than daybreak. His mercies are unending. His grace, abounding. His scars, healing.
Read 4 tweets
18 Mar
I write to you this morning as the sun slices brightly through the white oaks, pines and sycamores behind our home. Tears fill my eyes often these days and as often over awe and gladness as sadness. The gifts to be had here—stubborn beauties among thorns—-grow sacred with age.
A week ago I left our home in the woods to go see my eldest daughter & her family. I left a new herb garden brown & wilted that had sprouted back my hope. I left brand new baby fruit trees drooping, leafless. Drove past more fallen limbs than I could count. Winter’d come killing.
Of nature’s 4 daughters, Winter is the meanest but I am certain, at least in my own mind, that Spring is the most defiant. Maybe we don’t notice because she’s a bit passive aggressive. I don’t know if I told you but Lavender turns an eerie gray, like a human corpse, when it dies.
Read 8 tweets
8 Mar
Hebrews 6 this morning. A word caught my eye in yesterday‘s reading (ch 5) that I almost wrote on but the Spring sunshine wooed me to the woods. It popped up again in Ch 6 today so I’m going with it. The word is “lazy.” Disclaimer before I even begin: exhaustion is not laziness.
I can’t think of anything that has exhausted me more thoroughly than this pandemic. Isolation is exhausting. Hypervigilance is exhausting. For those who fell ill, sickness is exhausting. Fear & grief are demoralizingly exhausting. So please don’t get that confused here. But let’s
reflect on what Heb 5&6 are saying about laziness. Heb 6 is straight forward & so needed by weary servants. Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord: “For God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you demonstrated for his name by serving the saints...Now we desire
Read 12 tweets

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