What Do You Do with an Idea? by Kobi Yamada is a powerful picture book.    Read it, and you may learn (or remember) something about yourself.  To my husband, it was a book about riding motorcycles.  To me, it was about being brave enough to finish writing the novel I tucked away after someone didn’t like it.

The illustrations of “the idea” look much like a glowing egg wearing a crown.  So, “the idea” will emerge in each reader’s mind  as their own particular dream.

The echo in my heart this week has been:  “Do the thing God has called you to do!”  Writing children’s stories and poetry awakens in me something truly otherworldly, something beautiful , boundless, and light.  Writing gives me energy and makes me feel like I am who I’m supposed to be.  That is . . . when I’m not crying about real or imagined rejection. 🙂

What do you love to do?  What are you often scared to begin?  As my cousin-in-law, Ashley, says, “Sometimes we don’t want to do the thing we most want to do.”  What gives you a window of hope, a happy quickening of your breath?    Where do your natural talents lie?  Nudge your fearful, critical voice out of the way, and do that thing—because God made you to do it!

I often imagine writers in the days before they “made it.”  If Madeleine L’Engle had known A Wrinkle in Time was going to be published to great success, would the years between books have been so hard?  What if E.B. White could have lived his whole life knowing he would pen Charlotte’s Web?  How confident he could have been!  Yet, there was a time when he wasn’t a brilliant success, and he wrote anyway.

I have to write anyway.  You have to paint or practice or play or invent or start anyway!  E.B. White was always the creator of Charlotte’s Web.  God knew that, for He isn’t stuck in linear time as we are.  I think God must have given E.B. White a lot of clues along the way, because he kept writing.

Listen for God’s clues to you.  Read What Do You Do with an Idea?  Then, hold on to your unique, glowing egg.  See where it leads you.