Journey: Chasm

My toes hang over the edge every day.

Writing is both personal and painful for me. I wish it were not so. I wish I could write a story whose words don't seep with my soul. I wish I could construct a plot without feeling like my heart beats behind the sentences.

It's just a story, after all. Build the plot, discover the characters, plan it out from A to Z. Revise. Edit. Sell. Voila--you're a published author.

But not me, it seems. I must stand at my own edges and look down, down, just to put the words on the page, so that by the time I receive a revision letter the bruise on my soul no longer pulses with pain.

Batten down the hatches, says my agent, I have tough feedback for you.

Bless her heart. The tough feedback is nothing compared to watching ten painted toes hang over the edge of a chasm that, two years ago, I didn't even know existed. Revision suggestions are nothing compared to being marched to your edges every time you dare uncork the words, when God takes you to the precipice and says, "Look down."

So it was fitting that the first leg of my ACFW adventure involved the deepest of chasms and my most visceral fear: heights.

First, the airplane. I hate flying. When I say I'm afraid of it, I don't mean that fluttery feeling most folks get when they contemplate a disaster. I mean trembling fear that cannot be contained with prayer, thought control, or even medication. I mean elemental, urgent, barely-contained terror.

Normally that would be enough to rattle my week--a ride on an airplane. But the entire ACFW trip registered high on the intensity scale, like biting into bitter dark chocolate rather than eating handfuls of sweet M & Ms. The trip afforded no respite.

So naturally, a few hours after landing, my friend Anne and I drove up the Rocky Mountains.

And up.

And up.

And up.

And then...up.

It matters not that I trust Anne with my life, that she is an excellent driver, a Denver native, and a gift from God to me. I told myself all of that and more while I trembled in her passenger seat and she prayed I wouldn't have a heart attack or stroke from panic.

It didn't matter what I told myself. This was all about my chasms, the ones I face every day with keys under my fingers.

And now, fittingly, God marched me right to the edge of mountain cliffs. Literally.

I wish I could say I overcame; that Anne took my by the arm and walked me to the lookout, where I had an epiphany and the nerves vanished. It didn't happen that way. But I sat in the car and observed her joy in the mountains, and I survived my heart-pounding fear. Through the palpitations I was struck speechless by the majesty, power, strength, and unyielding stony faces of the mountains. "That mountain mocked me," said Anne while looking at a fourteen footer, "because I tried to climb it, and couldn't."

I stared at the same mountains, shaking and nearly crying with panic.

They mock me too, because I know I must approach them again. I must reach deeper than I want, reveal more than I care to, expose my chasms again and again, go deep, deep into my own canyons where the words roil over the rocks so painfully that the current changes who I am.

Why, God?

Why can't it be easy for me?

Why can't it be plot and story, words that swish in tranquil meadow streams? This is how it works for other writers, who write wonderful stories that don't make them bleed and seep and cry.

I want to do that too.

"No," He whispers. "Look down," He says.

I look. Breathtaking. Horrifying. Exhilarating. I stand at the chasm, unable to go over, unwilling to go back.

"Right here," God says, "Right here. Write."

A big sky above. A chasm below. My toes hang over the edge, and the words flow.