Sarah D. Shearer

Morning. The sky is a canvas of pinks and blues, its most beautiful hues saved for those who wake early, those who taste and see, those who can sleep no more. The invitation is always there. Wake early, Sarah. Put pen to paper. Let your morning be drenched in peace and beauty. Too often I pass up the invitation engraved in gold in the sky, but sometimes, I am present. Today, I am here. Full of wonder, full of questions. I love to write, love to spend time with Jesus before I do anything else, but so many times I opt to sleep, to miss it. My mom once told me, the right thing is easy to do. The right thing is also easy not to do. How true.

The other day I was going through my childhood room. Boxes and boxes of journals spanning 15 years. So many insignificant moments scrawled in gel pen in a sparkly notebook with the Eiffel Tower on the front. So many highs and lows, so many tragedies that are purely laughable now. But I have them all in my possession, and what a treasure they are. As I prepared to store the some-odd twenty journals in a big box, I found several crinkled sheets of notebook paper. Short stories I wrote, dating back to when I was nine and ten years old. Pages of pure imagination and really quite impressive prose for a child so young. I laughed out loud as I read about animals with feelings and emotions and senses of humor. I reminisced to when I would sit and write stories in my spare time. I have countless unfinished manuscripts penned in Lisa Frank notebooks, stories that flowed so very freely in an imagination which had no bounds. Even then, even then, I knew I was a writer. As soon as I could hold a pen, I knew what I was born to do.

I have danced around it, squelched it, avoided it, slept through alarms inviting me to it, for so long. I have a book I have almost finished but am terrified to try and publish. I dream of living in a great sprawling home with a room just to write in. Filled with windows and only a wide wooden desk in the middle, my stories would take flight there. I would really be a writer there. But would I, or would I tiptoe past its doors each morning citing some ridiculous excuse for why I could not do that which I was born to do?

I am reading a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer whose words I revere, and he too found countless ways to avoid doing what he loved the most. Why, oh why, is it such a fight to do what you love. shouldn’t it be easy, like breathing or singing or eating? Why does it take every measure of strength I have, like I am defeating Goliath or swimming the English Channel? I am committed.

I am awake.