Ticket to Write

I’m back in Nashville after an interesting yet exhausting week in Denver, where I attended a gathering of the full T-Mobile USA leadership team. It’s an incredible organization, and the investment made by executive leadership to share its vision for the coming year was as impressive as anything I’ve experienced in the past. I enjoyed meeting colleagues from all over the country, and was humbled to realize what a small fish in a giant sea I truly have become with this new job opportunity.

The long flights also gave me the chance to take a fresh look at my manuscript Chased by the Wind and some renewed steps forward in pursuing publication of this spiritual memoir of youth. I also broke new ground on my follow-up memoir, in which I am examining my spiritual and vocational development from college through the present time. I’ll probably conclude this second project with my ordination this May. After all, doesn’t a spiritual journey end with ordination? I mean, what’s left after that? Just kidding, but there’s some painful truth there also…

I have a new determination to write every day, somewhere, somehow. I can thank Liz Gilbert and Donald Miller for that; reading their memoirs the past two weeks gave me renewed hunger for my own love of crafting words.

Maybe it’s not so much crafting words as providing the vehicle of words as transportation for the ideas, feelings and observations that are bursting from inside of me and demanding a ride to the outside. Truth—which is what a writer must express—doesn’t like to be left stranded without a ride. So I’m up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday following a week of very little sleep, because I must keep the transportation company in business.