Summer is about over and I've decided that while I do need to continue guarding my time and my work so that I don't fall into the bad patterns that led me to burnout, I miss doing the Encouraging Words episodes! So I'm going to do at least one a month. Here are my encouraging thoughts for September. :-)

I was reading my Bible this morning and read from Ecclesiastes, a book of wisdom in the Old Testament. It says that God has set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from the beginning to the end.

It got me all excited because I've been thinking about the next stories I want to write, and how the best stories start in media res, in the middle of the action. The reader doesn't know when the book begins what has happened earlier in this character's life, and he doesn't know how the entire life will end up. But there is this portion that we will tell the reader about that starts here and ends there, and we try to make it as interesting and/or exciting as we can.

I love the idea that God is doing the same thing with us! I'm in the middle of my story. I am trying to have a good character arc, growing as I go, and I don't know exactly how the full story will end. But just like we know which writers tend to write sad endings, which tend to write happy endings, which make sure that evil is defeated by the last page, I can rest assured that God is the kind of author I like, too. I don't know how my story will end exactly, but I know it will be a satisfying, happy ending!