Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. Your eyes were never meant to see this essay.

I originally planned to write on Doubt. In college I was well-acquainted with that cancer of faith, and lately, I've felt compelled to share a tale of grappling with God. But after penning articles on homelessness and death in the past two months, I couldn't bring myself to open a vein.

Then I decided on the cheerful subject of Joy. But perhaps because of the melancholic artistic temperament, I felt strangely lacking in personal experience to leaven a boring Scriptural exposition. The article would have been a tedious string of "Thou-Shalts" to achieve what I've struggled to find myself.

So I was left staring at a blank screen with a cursor flashing in mockery and a deadline striking fear in my heart. Truthfully, there are days when I fear and loathe writing. There are moments I wish God had planted a more practical (and profitable) gift like Accounting somewhere in my psyche.

Lately, I've been wishing that a lot.

These past months, I've experienced a low-level anxiety about the craft that devours my heathen, untrusting soul. Each deadline is an opportunity for failure — I'll never write anything as good as my scribbles of the past. Each week the recession continues, I have one more chance to lose a client who can't afford me anymore. Each time I write down a personal experience, I worry I'll someday run out of my store of angst and be left without material for my trade.

After all, writers have a dubious distinction as the only people in America who earn a living by dumping our guts on a plate. With the possible exception of reality show contestants.

***

For many writers, plying our craft comes at the bottom of the to-do list. We can think of a hundred things more pressing; a thousand mundane chores more appealing than facing the vacant page. Dishes and cleaning that have long laid untouched suddenly take on a great urgency. Phone calls are returned and e-mails drafted — anything to avoid the task at hand.

The work will never look as good on paper as it does in my head. Internal imagination lends a poignancy to thoughts that bare words can never achieve. And writing at all assumes I have some "internal imagination" about where the story's going. Sometimes, I haven't a clue. I stare at the page; pace the apartment; take a nap. Writer's block has arrived.

Then I come back to the computer much, much later — far later than intended. I choke some feeble, uninspired thoughts onto the page and get disgusted with their emptiness, finally giving up and checking to see if anyone's posted on my Facebook wall in the past 18 minutes.

When the deadline looms tomorrow, I'll have to put something on the page — exhausting myself with a huge number of words in one day, feeling like I can't possibly tackle anything else for a week and hoping against hope the words mean something to readers because I no longer have time to let my passion cool and look at them in cold blood a few days hence.

But even knowing the consequences, I still can't bring myself to write before the deadline. Not yet ... no, not quite yet. I'll wait until inspiration strikes.

***

Writing suffers in my priorities because I'm a list-maker. I excel at forgetting details, so I compensate by living in tune with Microsoft Outlook. But consequently, I can find more satisfaction checking off 20 tasks, however mundane, than in writing a thousand torturous words that seem to wring all my soul's energy and may be deleted tomorrow when the start of a new day reveals them to be vapid. In any case, they hardly put a dent in my 5,000-word feature story.

I get tired of laying down words encoded as bits and bytes, forming nothing more than wispy dreams. Yesterday, I needed so badly to do something substantial that I went out and chipped away the ice on our sidewalk. When I was done, I had something in the real world, the physical three-dimensional realm, to show for it. That sidewalk was clear! It was so much more satisfying than struggling for the right adjective.

The fun parts of being a writer are getting the initial ideas and watching your stuff appear in print for all to see. The stuff in between feels too much like work.

Of course, there are happy days — days when the words flow readily and I can't imagine doing anything else. I finish something that's just right, that expresses exactly what I'm trying to say and whether it flowed easily or painfully with a wrung-out spirit, it still turned out the way I was dreaming. I send it off to the editor and believe it might touch someone's heart. I'm at least confident I earned my paycheck.

But some weeks, those days are few. In Wild at Heart, John Eldredge suggests that it's at the root of our most significant gifts; the place where God could use us most greatly; that Satan is keenest to strike with fear and inadequacy.

I believe him whenever I'm writing an article.

***

Truthfully, I always approach my computer with mixed motives. I'm torn between using a gift God put inside me; praying something I write will help the hungry find grace ... versus hoping I'll get six e-mails and two phone calls telling me what a great writer I am. In such a public ministry, I wonder if I'll have rewards left for heaven. Jesus said when the accolades arrive on earth, I've already been compensated.

Yet God also commands that we look for results when we serve, to make certain we're watering dry souls. Aren't people who write to say they benefited from my paltry paragraphs the "fruit" I'm told to seek?

Really, If I'm going to take the credit for the success stories — the reader who says my story helped turn her life around — I also have to take a hit for the failures. On the Boundless blog not long ago, a reader commented that one of my articles seemed to offer easy solutions, a quick turnaround for a lifelong struggle. That wasn't what I meant at all, and it certainly wasn't the real-life experience I was describing. But the words I agonizingly set on the page misled her to think I was another Super-Spiritual Guru offering breezy platitudes that don't work in real life.

In some sense I failed that reader. But God knows I tried. I tried desperately.

Some readers expect me to have answers for the Valleys of Shadow they're passing through. Tragically, I don't. When those e-mails arrive, they remind me of the time in high school when my youth pastor suggested I go into ministry. I replied, "But don't you have to be super-spiritual for that?"

He couldn't help laughing. Now, I'm the one sitting in the youth pastor's place, and it isn't very funny.

There's a part of writing that involves wishful thinking — wishing I could be as spiritual as I sound on paper, wishing I could live all the advice I dispense with my keyboard, wishing there were simpler solutions to the big questions. I wish I had more confidence in the answers I force myself to believe when I'm struggling to bring closure to an essay. The very act of telling a story presupposes an ending, some sort of resolution to the conflict. But the issues I wrap up so neatly in 2,500 words seem less tidy when they come back to real life.

***

Lately I've been contemplating my own mortality, so I've written on the cheerful subject of death. It's easy to speak of Heaven and a Legacy from the comfort of my computer screen. It's possible to believe I'm making some lasting difference while I'm composing a story.

It's tougher to find meaning in mortality during the dark hours of the night as I lie on the couch with a mind full of questions. Why do I bother? I'm still going to die, and so will every person who reads my writings.

Through most of my 20s death was an abstraction, something that happened to other people. I'm only 31 now — if the statistics hold true for me, my life isn't even half over — but I've been facing the cold fact that someday hence, I'll be the one lying in my bed with an illness the doctor can't cure, praying someone is there to comfort my last moments, and then consigned to the dust with nothing but a small stone tablet in memorium.

The Undiscovered Country scares me. I believe in heaven, most of the time. But for someone who's never liked change, the ultimate transition is a frightening prospect. Will I suffer agony on my way out of temporal life? Will the place Jesus has prepared for me be as wonderful as everyone says?

My morbid maunderings have found their way into print — part of the humanness of the writer spilling into his product. I strive somehow to infuse my work with hope. But answers are easier to find inside literature than out in the bracing merciless air of life.

***

Whenever I count the years, I agree with the philosophers who assert that life is short. It's been five years since I led the singles ministry. Ten since I graduated from college; almost 15 since high school. That's more than the entire lifespan of my youthful drama students: They can't remember life before the internet.

In view of mortal brevity, some would-be mentors tell me I should pursue happiness. But happiness is invariably an uninvited guest: Like a cat, it never comes when called. So instead, I seek to live fully. Like the Dead Poets' Society, I want to suck all the marrow out of life.

Being completely human, completely alive — to think and experience deeply, delving beneath the surface to encounter new heights and depths of the soul — that is my goal. Surface living is safe, but it misses both the worst and best.

I went through a period a few months ago when I was so emotionally wrung out from an all-consuming directing project that I couldn't face intense emotions in my reading. So I buried myself in detective stories where the criminal was always brought to justice in 20 pages or less. Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown had all the answers: I wouldn't face anything that could possibly stir up pain.

Yet eventually, I felt empty and numb, because I wouldn't face anything that could possibly stir up joy, either.

I'm intensely affected by stories. In grade school, I hated watching movies because I entered so completely into the lives of the characters. Even in Disneyfied plot lines, I was terrified for the hero's safety. (I made Dad take me out of the theater during Return of the Jedi.) So my favorite films and books are the ones with scenes of domestic bliss, the family together around the fire or the small town where nothing too bad could ever happen.

Yet without the tension and conflict of the story, without pain or horror or revulsion or sadness, the cathartic joy of resolution is empty. The ending isn't the same if you flip to the last page early to make sure the hero survives.

I find more contentment and less pain in a life bereft of writing, in the times when I refuse to open wounds and probe my soul to sit down at the keyboard and compose. But there is also a kind of empty boredom, because I'm not creating or growing or finding the spent satisfaction of finishing that soul-wringing paragraph that says exactly what I meant — not with mind, but with heart and spirit.

So if life is short, I don't want to waste it seeking happiness; I want to experience everything it has to offer. I keep coming back to the sometimes-unpleasant fact that for me, fullness of life occurs only when I'm setting down word after stubborn word on the blank unforgiving page.

Or at least, that's what I think in my nobler moments.

***

One afternoon six years ago in the midst of a summer cratered by depression and insane working hours and a futile romance, I was sitting at my keyboard struggling to write. It was just journaling, there no deadline breathing down my neck. But an uncomfortable question was haunting my soul. I wept, I cried out to God, and there was no answer. I simply couldn't understand the point of life.

Why was it worth the pain? Why would I agonize to minister and write and romance when it would all end so soon — and leave heartache behind?

Even now, when I'm not in the throes of depression and thank God life is going pretty well, my thoughtful moments drag me back to the same question. And so borne on a longing for answers, I look back on the words I wrote in my journal on that bleak despairing August afternoon. In huge print, taking up one entire page, my journal reads:

I am loved. I love others in the image of God. And that is life and eternity.¹

In the midst of emptiness, I kept my soul from going over the cliff by believing relationships are the only thing that last beyond the final curtain. It's only by living in that reality, I tell myself, that writing and life become worth the air I breathe.

It seems far too simple; too commonplace. It makes writing an act of the will that sometimes exceeds my faith: To believe that in spite of my paltry skill and the sheer inadequacy of words and the uncertainty of leaning on a Spirit who blows where He will, someone might experience God-love, friend-love, community-love through my maunderings. It's hard to imagine that my words could combine with Spirit-Power to provoke love without end.

Yet it's that impossible hope that keeps me coming back to the keyboard. I pray that somehow these dead words will be animated with the breath of God and transform an eternal soul. Perhaps that is a foolish wish, but it's what I try to believe while I struggle to bring this essay to a hopeful conclusion.

Of course, things may look vastly different as I lay on the couch later in the bleakness of the night. The simplistic solution of love may not seem so satisfying anymore, because answers are always easier to find inside literature than out in the bracing merciless air of life.

So forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. In wrestling through this angst-ridden article, I have asked many questions without answers. But as my penance, this much I will do for you: I will refrain from manufacturing easy ones.

* * *

1. I've edited the words from my journal for clarity.