My flesh defines my success by how many people follow me, who likes my blog page, how many people share my work and whether I can earn a living by doing it.
By all of those definitions I am a nobody. Definitely not a writer, speaker or teacher.
I get so caught up in all of that. I assume that if this is truly what God wants me to be doing that he will somehow grant me success, as defined above. The thing is, He never has. I've been writing for over 12 years and I don't have a huge following. I've never written a book and no publishers are knocking on my door to ask me to. I don't have any speaking appointments and I only teach on the rare occasion when my own kids are my captive audience.
Somehow, I think that all of this writing has really just been to teach me that there is value in my gift, regardless of how other people accept or reject it. God has given me a gift and it's okay if he's the only one that approves of it.
I listened to a podcast tonight and the speaker shared that they had stopped reading their own book reviews because they had learned that sharing their writing wasn't really about who liked it, who understood it and who didn't.
I've been contemplating how I can accomplish my own version of that.
I've joined websites and read articles about how to grow my platform. And every one of them has said that what I am about to tell you is my new norm, is wrong. That I should be doing this whole list of things to grow my blog. But I'm not going to do that.
No boosting Facebook posts. No checking my stats to see how many people have visited my website. I am just going to share when and what I feel led to share. If God is the only one who reads it, so be it.
I am going to express my gift of creativity to and for the one who gave it.
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