Thread by @BethMooreLPM

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.