The Stuff Inside

Seventeen years ago today, I was in a hospital bed holding my newborn baby girl. Drunk on hormones and lack of sleep, I held her in my arms and fell hard. Smitten, irrevocably besotted with this tiny person that would turn my world inside out. I cried when I had to cut her nails for the first time. Seriously? How could anyone trust me to do that right? Yet somehow we both survived without too much bloodshed. I bathed her without drowning her, I rocked her to sleep without breaking her and now seventeen years down the line, she is a beautiful young lady with the ability to turn my world the right way up on those days when it's too top-heavy for me.

I didn't always think I could do this mothering thing, but somehow we muddled through.

Eleven years ago, I started stringing words together. I sold some of them to magazines, but then Jesus pushed my button and I thought about writing a book. A whole book. All eighty thousand words of book. Seriously? Who could trust me to do that right? Yet eleven years later, I'm finishing up my third. Sure, sleep got short-changed, tears were cried and there may have been some bloodshed, but we muddled through.

When Jesus tells you to do something you're not entirely sure you can, it's best not to argue. Take a look at what He's planted in you. Dreams and hopes, desires... the things that make you come alive. You can be sure He didn't plant them there for nothing.

Breathe deep and step off the edge.
Watch the floodgates open.
See His Life and Love pour out of you.

Has Jesus been pushing your buttons? Tell us more...

Dianne J. Wilson is a South African author, who squeezes out words a few hundred at a time in between doing admin for a dance studio and mothering her three girls.

Her first novel, Shackles, is available as a free ebook.

Her second, Finding Mia, releases from Harbourlight on the 19th of June 2015.

Her third, Affinity, is a batch of flapjacks away from being  ready to go out to beta readers.

Feels Like Midnight

Running and I are not friends. There are reasons for this. Good reasons. For now, let’s just say I am anatomically incompatible with the sport. My hubby, however, loves running. So much so, that he will sacrifice sleep to be out pounding the tar. Some days he gets up so early, the birds and worms are all still tucked under their duvets, snoring.

It was one of those mornings about a week ago that I was up with him. The race he'd signed up for started on the road to Stutterheim and ended 42km’s away on the other side of town. I suggested that he run back to fetch his car afterwards but strangely he wasn’t too keen on that idea. (Odd, hey?)  

As we drove to the start, a profound realisation hit me. The clock told me that it was 5am, but if I looked out the window, it might as well have been midnight. The streetlights, the moon... the odd car driving around. It looked, felt and sounded exactly like midnight. Even my bed-missing body agreed. Yet within half an hour, everything changed. The sky drifted from pitch to dappled pastels, bird-noise filled in the silence and the temperature climbed a few degrees. 

I could almost hear Jesus clear his throat... 

When we live hoping for our dreams to be realized... waiting for the publishing contract to land in our inbox, the email from a reader who found transforming Truth in the folds of our words... it often feels like midnight. The darkness hangs thick around us - rejection letters, working a regular job each day when all we want to do is write. Some days one simply cannot see how things could ever change. I remember feeling like fool for hoping for something so far out of reach. 

Here's the thing: 

Today could be your 5am. You could be one email away from your book contract. One sentence away from changing someone's eternal destiny. One word away from throwing a line of hope to someone with nothing left to hold onto.

So don't give up just because it looks like you'll never come out of the dark. 

Don't stop because it feels as if He has forgotten you.

Everything He promised, He will do.

He is faithful and perfect in his faithfulness.  

Dianne J. Wilson is a freelance writer and novelist from East London, South Africa. She is mom to three girls and wife to Scott, who, being the only male other than the St Bernard, is horribly outnumbered and has learnt to dodge flying hormones.

Her first 'official' novel, Finding Mia, releases from Pelican / Harbourlight in June 2015.

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The Frog in my Handbag aka Writing for Eternal Impact

It all started when the zip on my handbag broke. I left it in the lounge overnight, and was in traffic the next day when I discovered the stowaway. There's nothing quite like reaching for lipgloss and pulling out a frog. There may, or may not have been a bit of screaming involved. It took every scrap of self-control to keep driving until it was safe to pull over and evict my new friend. Ugh. On that same day, I nearly lost my purse because I couldn't zip my bag closed.

What does this have to do with writing, I hear you ask? Apart from the fact that all good prose involves frogs, one of the chief things that I pester Jesus for, is for Him to write Eternity through me.

I love to leave my reader chuckling, satisfied and keen to read more of my writing. I also want to have stirred a hunger for Eternity inside of them, a curiosity about this God who loves them.

One simple way of achieving this is to lace our writing with, what I call - Holy Spirit bombs. These are the revelations, the spiritual lessons that God gives you through living normal life that are profoundly simple, yet carry His anointing to shift the heart and spirit of your reader.

Jesus spoke to me about my bag and I wove it into my novel Finding Mia. When ones carries a load that you're not meant to (say, a cheating husband who leaves you), over time something breaks which allows things into your life that you would never normally allow in (being wooed by a smooth-talking kidnapper who is acutallly after your children). It also allows things to be stolen from you (common sense, in this case!) But when your life is hidden in Christ, He doesn't replace the zip on your life, He becomes the zip through which certain things are allowed and other things are simply not.

So as you go through your day and the odd bizarre thing happens to you, ask Jesus what it's all about. You can rest assured that most of what you go through is never meant for you personally at all, but is there to become grist for your mill and food for your reader.

Seen through His eyes, even a frog in a handbag becomes meaningful!