Where Have You Been

Sometimes you’re not meant to be a writer. It doesn’t mean that you’re not a writer, but that in a certain moment in time given all the crappy circumstances the writing just doesn’t fall out of you. Many people who write for a living have gotten it down to a science, when they feel like not writing they rely on structure and rules to get them to at least put some words on the page. That’s not me.

When I was studying Creative Writing at OCSA, they told us that to consider yourself a writer you have to be sending in your writing to get published. You weren’t truly a writer unless you were getting rejection letters. In this day and age many writers avoid the rejection letter by posting on blogs and praying or hoping that someone stumbles upon them. The onset of this new technology brings us back to the question of “what is a writer?” and I think through the last few months I’ve come to redefine my stance.

I said above that writing just falls out of you. See, Emily Dickinson didn’t have rejection letters, she hid her poems away for no one to read and yet we still look back and call her a poet. I agree that many people use this as a cop-out, to hide their writing away from the scrutiny of the public eye, but I think there’s more to being a writer than that. I think those who write do it with out thinking about it, with out fighting to keep it, they just sit down sometimes and they write. It just falls out of them.

At the core of “being a writer” is a question about identity. No one says “I’m a writer” with out first being asked the existential questions of “what do you do” or “who are you” or “tell me a little about yourself”. The core of these statements is a question of identity, a question that we struggle with throughout our entire lives. Who am I, really?

This question defines generations. It’s the essential question of the movie “Breakfast Club”, and a theme that runs through out pretty much every teen comedy. If I take of my glasses do I stop being a nerd and start being a cool kid? What if I put on a bit of make-up? What makes me who I am?

I am a writer. Whenever something terrible happens in my life my first thought isn’t “I should go bake a cake” because I am not a baker, I am actually quite bad at baking, but more so there is nothing in my being that says “I just really need to bake right now”. It’s not a part of who I am. Writing is; it falls out of me without any effort. It feels like breathing.

So, let’s go back to the first question, “Where have you been?” The thing about being a writer is that sometimes you have to concede that you are not a writer. Being a “writer” can’t supersede being Alex. Sometimes circumstances in your life require you to be other parts of who you are. For the past few months I was being a fiancé and I was being a minister. Those were parts of who I was, but just like being a writer, they weren’t the entirety. I spent those months allowing those two aspects of my life consume my identity. I forgot to be a friend or a brother, a son or an artist… or a Christian.

I let go of my identity and allowed myself to be defined by the things that I did. The entire time I was still a writer, but I was a writer who did not writer. Writing those words just now brings me this overwhelming sorrow. I was a writer who did not write. It was still so much of who I was and yet I defined myself not by who I was in my core but on what I did. I didn’t write, and so I told myself I am not a writer.

Let’s go back to that question of identity again. When we question our identity I would say 9/10 it’s because we have removed ourselves from the God who gave us our identity. I can’t speak for everyone and so I won’t try, but I will speak for myself in saying, when I defined myself as a fiancé and a minister I was not defining myself in Christ. Our identity in Christ is made up of all those little things, but it is unified in Him, it is made complete in Him.

When we think about the body of Christ we see ourselves as serving one function and defining ourselves by that, but I think that the body of Christ exists in a microcosm within each person as well. There are so many fragmented parts of who you are that can easily become mutual exclusive. If I’m a good fiancé I can’t be spending all of my time writing and not planning the wedding. If I’m a good minister then sometimes I need to be a church for 16 hours and not be spending time with my fiancé. One has to supersede the other. Except in Christ. When we find identity in Christ he unifies our identity into a whole.

What I always tell the youth kids is this- God is the creator. Imagine the person who programmed the iPhone (I know there were a ton of people working together, but still). They know all the tricks, they know how much effort it took to build everything and they appreciate every little curve. If you ever watch an iPhone commercial it’s amazing to see how they seem to share their love for this creation, going into the minute details that you really never appreciate. God is the creator. God made us and sees every aspect of our identity working together for the whole.

We are poor starving children. You know what a poor starving child would do with an iPhone? They would try to eat it or something. I’m not quite sure, because (thank God) I’m not actually a poor starving child. They sure as heck wouldn’t know how to use it. They might try to use it as a hammer, or as a mirror, or as a night-light. It can be used for any of those things, and yet it’s terrible at all of them. We end up trying to make use of our identities when in reality we have no idea how complex of a creation we truly are. In the process we end up seeing ourselves as one thing that supersedes the others instead of a whole thing that includes every fragment of who we are.

I’m a writer. A poet. A youth pastor. A songwriter. A cyclist. An artist. But most of all I am a Christian, not because pastoring or ministering supersedes everything else but because I find my identity in Christ, who unifies all of those little fragments.

So I was gone for a while. I was gone because I had gotten far away from who God wanted me to be and I thought, “if I can just be a good enough fiancé or minister then everything else will work out.” Writing continued to fall out of me. Little poems or songs here and there, but not blog posts. I apologize for being inconsistent but if you guys are willing to come here and read my words again then I am willing to post them.

I am a writer after all.

P.S. Next time I'll try to include some pictures, I love putting in pictures :-)