Ch 12: Organizing Chaos
The Great Teacher tends to step back and let me figure things out for myself.
No Rest for the Weary
The last big push of transcribing all my journals (except for the one I was writing in) took nearly four weeks, Monday-through-Friday, couple-hours-a-day typing. And correcting my typos.
It had taken me an entire year to finish Step 1.
[Editor's Note: This article is Chapter 12 in my serialized spiritual memoir Well Guided: My Life as a Student at the International Academy of God, in which I share some of the many ways God has had a hand in my life. Access previous chapters via the Table of Contents.]
The morning it was done, I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally I could look forward to a couple days of goofing off. I managed to watch a movie that evening and was planning to treat myself to several more the next day, and maybe squeeze in some Spider Solitaire.
It wasn't to be.
Without so much as a full-day break, I felt the Spirit prompting me to sit and listen once again. As always, I obeyed.
April 9, 2009: It is not for me to say what you should write in this book you are writing, although I will guide your thoughts as I have been all along…
And now I say be fruitful and multiply your talents for indeed still more will be given you as you reach out and respond to my message and your current gifts in this way…
Use ALL the knowledge I have given you so far. Every sermon has at least a nugget to add. Every book gives some insight…
All materials have been given to you for this use, and I want you to use them all. Study them out, review what I have said, and do not fail me in this, your current mission…
20 Years of Content
So the Great Teacher was telling me to gather everything I had written over the past twenty years… that book I had started dictating in the mid-90s, every sermon, every testimony. Even outlines and notes buried in cryptically named file folders and notebooks. Stuff I had written but never used for anything.
Was that it? No. God told me to consider all the non-fiction and religious books I had read over the last twenty years. I'm a fairly prolific reader, so that was a nice-sized stack. I had read many of those books due to the Spirit's prompting. Like the Quran, which God put in front of me in a Goodwill store.
I started to identify the many colors of the puzzle image as I dumped the pieces into one huge, jumbled pile. I also began to appreciate the value of the simple note card. I made 4x6 cards for everything, including dates, topics and key messages. That collection came to a nice, juicy, color-coded 3-inch stack of cards, numbering in the hundreds.
And, while looking through my notes, I found some articles on book writing; those got summarized, too. Then it was time to sort.
60 Inches of Mahogany
Have you ever noticed in the movies how writers always seem to have a large blank wall where they pin or tape up all their notes, to look for patterns and structure? How I longed for such a wall!
Alas, there was nowhere in my 3-bedroom Southern ranch that suited. Every wall had art hanging on it, or heavy furniture wedged in front. And unlike my dad with the puzzle "table," I had family members to consider.
In fact, the whole idea of me writing a book, instead of looking for paid work, was a sore subject. (The plan had always been for at least one of us to get a job at the end of our break, after selling the store.) So, plastering more evidence of my questionable mental state in public view didn't seem like a prudent way to go.
Still, I needed a serious working surface.
So, I turned to the largest horizontal surface I could find that wasn't in daily use: the dining room table. Now, this was no ordinary table, mind you. This was an antique, solid mahogany, 60-inches-round (without the leaves) wonder, purchased at auction years ago. A table so large, all my tablecloths had to be custom made.
The plus, though, was this: with just one leaf in, I had a sizable amount of readily available real estate at a comfortable altitude above floor level.
It was across this vast surface that I spread my fat stack of note cards. They fit, barely.
Lizards Everywhere
Puzzle building is so much easier when the pieces are sorted by color as a first pass. But the larger the puzzle, the harder the sort. Does this piece go with mostly black and a little white? Or with mostly white and a little black?
Sorting that giant stack of index cards into common themes felt familiar—like the first sort on the 5,000-piece puzzle of the Sistine Chapel that my friend Betty had on her dining room table for six months.
See, the problem was, God hadn't deigned to tell me what the book was about. In fact, They specifically said wait for it. So, I was left trying to infer what They had in mind based on what had been revealed to me in the past.
As it happens, I'm a pretty decent organizer, so I was game to make sense of that paper flotilla of content. After all, it was a familiar challenge: a puzzle without the lid.
I made a couple of passes at organizing the chaos, but the "pictures" that emerged were still too abstract, more like one of Picasso's faces with all the features in odd places. What I had was a giant Shmuzzle™ Puzzle with identically shaped Escheresque lizards that fit together in an impossibly large number of ways.
In fact, the contents could go together in lots of ways, all of them reasonable. I tried organizing my topics along the lines of all the ways God is like an earthly parent. Then along the lines of “where much is given, much is expected.” And so on, for another three or four more tries. None of them felt right.
Discovering the Rosetta Stone
You don’t need me to tell you there's a lot to be said for a good night's sleep. It's amazing what the brain can figure out once the conscious mind-–the brain's self-appointed boss-–gets out of the way.
The next morning, I plopped down in my desk chair and suddenly found myself doing a virtual head-slap. What about those six pages of notes I had sleepily tucked away at 4 a.m. two months before? Weren't they a part of "everything I'd ever written?"
I hurried back to the bedroom, pulled the notes out of that old maple desk, and held them up to the light of day. Sure enough, there were those all-but-forgotten bullet points…then suddenly, bam. I felt like I had just discovered the Rosetta Stone. This was it, the outline for the book!
The Great Teacher hadn't let me down. It was I who hadn't followed the directions exactly. Now I realized that the outline revealed precisely what I needed next: the theme. The theme for the book was discovering your personal ministry.
It was as if God had flashed the box lid. That glimpse was all I needed to keep going.
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