MY SECRET DREAM
"Prayer is not monologue, but dialogue; God's voice is its most essential part. Listening to God's voice is the secret of the assurance that He will listen to mine."
Dear girls,
It’s time I let you in on a secret I’ve kept close to my heart for a long while. As open as I try to be on these pages, there is a part of me that cringes at revealing too much.
What will you think? What if I fail?
But I have learned to trust your hearts.
You are gracious women who know about failure and yet have the courage to dream. You are women who risk, women who know their limits and choose to reach further.
So here’s my secret: I am writing a book. Or at least trying to write a book.
This has been my dream for so long I’d almost stopped trying to make it a reality. Until I got an email from a literary agent who told me his wife read my blog. Low and behold, he thought I might want to write a book. And more, he’d help me learn how.
That was well over a year ago. Since that time, Bill has become a friend to Phil and I, encouraging, pushing, patiently enduring my foot dragging perfectionism and overloaded schedule. With his help I’ve finally finished my proposal, all 50+ pages of it.
Next week he’s sending it out to real live editors. People who will flip through the pages I laboriously wrote and rewrote and agonized over. People who will make a choice to either throw it away or take it to the next step.
And I tell you because I just cannot wait alone. This does not feel like waiting for Christmas… more like that long, drawn out, stomach-clenching wait for the results from Final’s Week.
“Don’t take it personally”, my husband warns. But that, as every woman well knows, is not possible. For a woman, for me, everything is personal!
And I probably shouldn’t tell you because now you’ll ask… Have you heard yet? And I’ll pretend it doesn’t matter. Shrug my shoulders and act all cool and nonchalant. When inside I’ll be hoping every day that someone will want my story.
But you’re my girls, my friends, the ones who listen to my stories and tell me your own. The ones who give courage and take courage and delight together in the Father who cares.
My book is simply my story. In it I give all the details and events that led up to my diagnosis of deafness, then the miraculously beautiful rescue I didn’t deserve. In it, I try to let you see who I really am— how I felt, what I feared, why I fell, what brought me back. I’ve written details even my own daughters don’t know, dredging up memories I’d tried to push aside in order to capture the lessons learned the hard way.
My goal in writing this book is to help you and other’s like you. Because I have this crazy sense that you want intimacy with God as much as I did and do. And that you want to hear Him. That you don’t want to miss those messages He has for you everyday. That you want to know what He is saying and why. And that, like me, you have am insatiable appetite for more, something that no one but the Father can ever begin to satisfy.
So now you know. My secret’s out. I’ve dared to tell you about my dream even before it’s become a reality.
Will you pray? For me as I wait with heart in hand… for each of those editors are who will find a file in their email and decide… for Bill (my friend and agent) who will do his magic…
I promise to let you know because I love you, girls.
From my heart,
Diane