Author: C. L. Harmon

My mother once told me a story about a successful man from whom God took the use of his legs. I don’t remember all of the particulars but the gist of it was that the man had made choices in his life that led him to financial success. Apparently, God had other plans for him. Modern medicine could not find the cause of the man’s inability to walk and so the man writhed in bed from mental anguish as all he had worked for slipped away. He was helpless and in despair as nothing improved his situation. Depression set in and grew as weeks turned into months and the man became suicidal. Although not a religious woman, his wife called a priest to speak with her husband and talk him out of such thoughts.

While in the man’s bedroom, the priest noticed a very unusual carving on the dresser. He inquired as to its origin and the man said that he had carved it as a boy. He explained how he had loved to carve as a child, but his father had forced him to put away such childish hobbies as they were not a method in which to make a living. He had not carved any since. The priest, in awe of such a creation, persuaded the man to begin carving again as therapy. Miraculously the more he carved the more use of his legs he regained.

There are two ways one can interpret what happened to this man. One is that it was coincidental and the man would have regained the use of his legs anyway. Or, there is the one in which God took away the use of the man’s legs for not doing what He wanted this man to do. Since I don’t believe in coincidences, I shall focus on the second scenario where God took away the use of his legs.

I believe that we need to revisit a part of my last blog when I write about doing what God wants us to do, according to His plan for us. Perhaps the Biblical phrase “Thy Will Be Done” comes to mind here. God does not create a universe and not retain at least, a certain amount of control over it. The problem it seems is that others, especially those who love us, often do not understand the amount of control these desires which God gives us impacts our lives. Just as the man who lost the use of his legs, his father believed that working with carving was not what was best for his son. He was wrong.

Although the father’s intentions were good, they were not God’s intentions for the man. I believe that creative people struggle with this more than any other type of people. I think it’s a fair statement that most creative people struggle financially, often for long periods of time, while attempting to use their talent to make a living. It’s a very difficult road to take and one that is often very long before reaching the destination we desire. What we must all understand though is that we didn’t choose to be this way any more than a person chooses to have cancer or limited intelligence. It was given to us before we were born for a purpose that is not disclosed to us.

We are beholden to a desire we did not ask for. And yes we do have a choice to not pursue that desire as did the man who lost the use of his legs. It is doubtful to me that God goes to such drastic measures with all of His children who do not follow the desires given to them. But I do believe that He keeps a sense of happiness from them, a sense of fulfillment even. It is that happiness which we seek above all else. And so we are only content when we are pursuing those desires.

Walls that are constructed and broken bridges are not to keep us from those following our hearts and from reaching our desires; they are instructions informing us that we must turn and follow another direction to reach what we seek.  What others may see as failures or mistakes we have made, God knows to be directional logistics. We should always listen to others as God provides direction in many ways, but we should never follow the words of those who do not understand that God sets a course for us based in faith and not in logic.

That pursuit is our journey. The failures, the triumphs, the losses and the gains are all part of what our desire is to teach us. Remember always that it is not others who must understand what we are doing. What God desires for us is not a riddle for others to solve, it is a puzzle that we alone must assemble in order to discover the meaning of who we are meant to be.

It is to be locked inside a cellar. There are noises on the other side of the door; voices and sounds of which most have familiarity. Sometimes there is laughter and other times only quiet. The silence though is most of what rings in this angular and hollow room. It is as an old friend who never parts from my side. It is the noises and the voices from outside this room that are guests at my door, never knocking.

I stretch my imagination to match up voices with faces that I have not seen, adding new features each time the voice utters a word or laughs or cries in the house which I do not see from my closed and locked room. It is to be kept company by what I imagine to be on the other side of the door. It is the hope I think that can only be known to those who understand that isolation has a place in every soul. It is a way of life in this cellar.

Footsteps from above and below on the opposite side of the door are directions on a map that allows for a layout in my mind of what the world beyond this locked door must be like. Each footstep is a marker in my mind as I hear them tapping the floor beyond the corners, on stairs, and down corridors. Some are soft as though made by tiny feet, while others thuddish and louder as though made by giants. There are faint images from the crack at the bottom of the door, but they are only shadows pierced by the light beyond them when others stand outside the door.

There is artificial light in this depth, but it is void of sunlight. There is little warmth from it. It is to be tempted with what is true and then tested with what is false inside this cellar of stone and repetitive echoes.  On certain days from windows outside this room, the truth does shine in as slivers from the gaps around the jambs. As minute as are the rays, I can still feel the warmth from them inside. It is far from me, but still, I know it holds no artificial properties. It is foreign and yet longing.

There is only outside and inside from this perspective. A door made of steel, wood or even cloth that separates one from another, one world from another. There are those who walk the rooms with both artificial light and sun and those who stand at locked doors imagining what that must be like. There are those who see a world that is with these bright lights. And there are those, who with candles in their minds, only imagine it with a flicker. This is what it is to know to a crowd can be a haunted place. This is what it is to feel a sharp wound from a dull knife. This is what it is to know depression.

For me, writing has always been a two-fold objective. The first has been to help people. The second has been to make a good living writing. Over the course of my career, I feel I have attempted to do both to the best of my abilities. As time has passed and realities such as paying bills, life’s many responsibilities, concerns like retirement income, health cost, etc. has become ever more important causing the second objective to take on a much more important role.

For many, many years, I never lost sight of my first objective. Through the financial lean times, I reminded myself that being able to write at all and helping others with that talent would be enough…and eventually bring the second objective to fruition. In many ways, it has when money would trickle in with a check here and there for an article when I needed the extra money to make ends meet. But it never reached the heights which I had hoped.

And of course, there have been the jobs at newspapers as well. But in Oklahoma, these are not high salaried jobs like they might be in a large city such as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. Like most of us who want something that seems to never come, we want it more as time passes without it. So what happens at this point? What do we do about it when the realization sets in that what we thought would materialize by now hasn’t?

We keep on trying to make money! That’s what I have done. So I must come clean here. This blog, like writing itself, has been a two-fold objective…the same two-fold objective in fact. The idea of this blog was to attract people to my writing in the hopes that they would discover the many works I have written over my career and to eventually create a revenue stream from those works. The other objective was, of course, to help writers who feel as frustrated and lost as I sometimes do.

However, as time has passed without the results I desired, my focus began to move toward pushing the financial aspects more vigorously. In other words, the helping people objective is still present but only in the back seat. This confession, if you will, has come from the revelation that I wrote about in my last blog. From that, I learned that the most important action I can perform is to write, regardless if anyone reads it or not.

I write often about faith and trusting in God, but I don’t always practice what I preach. Like most who live life, according to a faith, I sometimes fail when the pressures of life begin to force me down and keep me there. But no matter how hard I am forced down, I still have a choice to help others even knowing that there may be no financial upside in doing so. This I believe is the best lesson I can convey in anything I write.

Maybe God will bring money or maybe He won’t when it comes to writing. But we all have the choice to write something that helps others.  In future blogs, you will see a deviation away from the writing aspect of this blog and see it becoming more geared toward life. It is time to put helping others back in the driver’s seat. I hope you will continue to read as we head into a new direction of exploration and expansion.