God Told Me to Stop Writing
One of the many lies I believed.
I used to spend mornings writing stories, articles, or tinkering with a novel I’d started in college.
When I started homeschooling my kids, I got up even earlier.
My alarm went off while it was still dark so I could read the Bible on our battered couch that had lost its legs in the last move. It was mid-September, warm in our stucco navy house on the hill only two miles from Crystal Pier in San Diego’s Pacific Beach.
As the sky grew pink, my three-year-old daughter climbed into my lap and nuzzled her sweet-smelling hair under my chin. Then her two-year-old sister shuffled in, eyes puffy with sleep, her worn white blanket bunched into her arms. I made room for them as my nine-year-old son joined us and I snuggled him in, too. My husband was away doing workups on a hulking grey ship to prep for another six-month deployment to the Middle East.
When the kids became restless, I stretched, padded down the hall, and slipped on shorts and a tank top. I pulled the girls’ curls back into ponytails, washed faces, brushed teeth, put the two-year-old in a fresh diaper. I scrambled eggs, poured Cheerios and whole milk into bowls, and wiped a damp towel across our big, wobbly table. The kids climbed into their seats.
Other homeschooling families at our church full of tattooed, tanned surfers, claimed that starting each day with Bible stories was the best way to teach our kids to always consult God first.
Before that, writing had broken open my senses. It had nourished my brain and body. Flipping to a clean, white spiral notebook page or opening a new document on our massive desktop computer, sent an expectant shiver up the back of my neck.
Creating beauty with words was something I was wired to do.
Then, during my husband’s last deployment, my surfer pastor had brought up spiritual gifts. I’d only just begun to study my Bible like I’d studied literature in college. But I wasn’t familiar with spiritual gifts. When we took turns naming our gifts, the others mentioned leadership, encouragement, hospitality, and teaching.
I told them my spiritual gift was writing.
The group fell silent.
The pastor laughed. Not a cruel laugh. He sounded surprised. He explained that writing wasn’t one of the spiritual gifts in the Bible. My face went crimson with embarrassment.
The pastor’s wife pushed her long, strawberry blond hair back over a shoulder and told me prayer was the best way to know our spiritual gifts. She said through a sunglasses tan that she got up every morning to pray before she did anything else. It set the tone for her day. It calmed her. Made her a better person.
I wanted that.
My mother had told me when I was young that I was rude, spoiled, and had an ugly disposition. She said it was a wonder I had friends. The nice things she often said were drowned out by her insults and seemingly constant rage.
I wanted to know my spiritual gifts, to feel calm, and to feel like a good person.
So, before my gaggle of children awakened, I didn’t just pray, I wrote my prayers to the God I couldn’t see. I poured out my angst. Begged him to fix my faults. But when my children woke up, I felt hollow and empty. When would I have time to write stories and research articles?
I chastised myself. Praying would make me good. Someone worthy of love.
One, morning I wrote a long, multi-page prayer asking God what he thought of my stories and articles. He didn’t answer outright—anyone who claims otherwise is lying or delusional. But after several months of morning prayer and evening Bible study, I was primed to hear the answer the harsh God I’d grown up with would give me.
He said my writing was self-centered and frivolous. He said I still had an ugly disposition. He said I needed to pray harder and pray more.
In that moment, a light inside me snuffed out. I believed, that day, that I needed to spend my free time learning how to serve God and teach it to my children, like the Bible says a Christian woman should. I closed my spiral notebook with all its notes and started stories, and slid it into a drawer. I promised God that any future writing would be in the form of prayers or teaching my kids to believe.
Whose voice had I actually heard that long-ago morning? My traumatized, unhealed inner critic? My mother? It hardly matters. In my dissociation, I believed it was God. And I spent the next twenty-two years giving myself to the church, barely writing, except in the form of prayers, clawing my way toward the elusive idea that religious belief would give my life meaning.
When I woke up and saw what I had lost in the name of a fantasy, I had much to grieve.
I still grieve those lost years. I want a do-over.
I’m writing now like my life depends on it.
Maybe it does.
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Thank you for reading…
Keep your chin up and eyes open.
xoxo
“The pastor laughed. Not a cruel laugh. He sounded surprised. He explained that writing wasn’t one of the spiritual gifts in the Bible.” I felt a pain in my chest reading this. Thank God you kept writing.
Oh, Paulla. I think we may have had the same mother. I can feel every bit of pain here. The pastor may not have been intentionally cruel, but the message he delivered was: there is no “you” outside of who I say you are. What he told you was an abomination. I feel so terribly sad that this happened.
But let me tell you that your light was not snuffed out. You took care of it. Protected it. You survived. That light can never be extinguished. I’m so glad we’re here, together, in this lovely Substack community.🙏❤️