Early in my ministry, I discovered that writing was a
great diversion for me. I had written
papers, sermon manuscripts, and letters (remember those?) since I was a
teen-ager, but I first came to see writing as a creative outlet when editor Bill
Junker invited me to write an article for The Student magazine. This began a long-time partnership with
National Student Ministries that included a number of articles, several
training resources, and one Bible study guide.
My interest in writing found an outlet through articles
and papers written both for The Campus Minister Journal and for some meetings
of State Directors of Student Work (now collegiate ministry). Along the way, I
also began writing a column for Reflections, the monthly publication of the
Student Ministry Department of the Tennessee Baptist Convention, that I called The
Barnabas File. I carried the title over
to my column in the Tennessee Cooperative Baptist Fellowship newsletter and in
June 2006, Barnabas File became the title of my occasional blog.
Writing gives me the opportunity to play with ideas,
words, and structure, always in an attempt to get a message across to a reader. The online blog has proven to be a great way to
put things out there and get some response.
I have also been affirmed by the fact that ethicsdaily.com, Central
Baptist Theological Seminary, and Associated Baptist Press are gracious enough
to pick up some of my blog posts, and I am still surprised when I see someone
at a meeting and they comment on something that I have written.
Writing is a creative process, but it is also work! I just finished writing up a rather lengthy
report for Central Seminary. A lot of
what I covered was “inside baseball” material that would be of little or no
interest to someone outside of the theological faculty, but I made an effort to
make it readable and interesting. This
required about forty hours of writing (not including research). The writing was sometimes an hour or two at a
time, but I invested a couple of six hour days when I got into the final
stretch.
Someone once said that the key component of success was
just showing up. For a writer, the road to success is putting some words on the
page (or the computer screen). The initial
effort may not look like much, but it is a beginning that one can return to and
polish, delete, or rearrange. In order
to be a writer, you have to write! Whether
you are a novelist, a biographer, a reporter, a columnist, or a blogger, you
have to start by putting your thoughts down.
What happens after that is often in someone else’s hands, but it does
not lessen the joy of writing.
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