What's Enough?

A few weeks ago a friend of mine messaged me on Facebook asking where someone could buy my books. The mother of a friend of hers discovered my work. Her friend wanted to surprise her mother with copies of my books. I’m still not exactly clear how this dear woman found out about my writing. I do have a few copies of my books left and shipped out signed copies of each book to her last week.

Pursuing a writing career, a career in any creative field honestly, isn’t easy. Nobody’s posting jobs for novelists (musicians, artists, etc) with benefits and bonuses. It can get discouraging to spend a year or more of your life crafting something only to have it rejected.

But God knows His timing.

He always shows up with some encouragement exactly when I need it most. You see when she contacted me about the books, I was revising the first few chapters of my latest novel and submitting it to my agent. It’s an exciting, but nerve wracking time.

My first two books aren’t my best work. My writing has grown and matured, and I’ve found a genre where my skills fit better. Yet these are the books God has used to touch lives. A friend of mine has told me many times how my work has affected her now grown child’s attitude toward life. Another friend said it helped turn her back to Christ.

And shouldn’t that be enough?

Last weekend at my daughter’s piano recital, one of the voice students sang “That would be enough” from Hamilton. It reminded me of the song “Never Enough” from The Greatest Showman. Isn’t that the tug of war in our lives? What is enough?

Isn’t it enough that God would use what I’ve written to affect two or three lives? Because what if He used those two or three to affect two or three each? And somewhere down the line of those multipliers affects fifty or hundred lives.

Wouldn’t that be enough?

At the same time, we’ll never reach enough souls with the gospel. We can’t. Not in our own power. We can’t be satisfied that we’ve shared Christ with three people in our lives and that’s enough, we can sit back and glide through the rest of our lives without worrying about who hears His message.

I would love for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to read my books, to be drawn into clean fiction, to read about Christian people who are living real lives and getting into real situations. But I don’t know if that’s in the plan.

So for now, I’ll be satisfied to speak to the people in my path. To seek out those who need to hear the message. And to allow God to fill the audience.

And if it’s two or three, then that would be enough.