I Wonder...

I wonder, sometimes, whether my powers as a writer are more or less directly connected to my awareness of God. Repeatedly I have noticed this cycle, that when my heart is weary, fretful, and far from God (as I am realizing it has been these past two or three months), and caught up in its own misery, then my writing too begins to be repetitive, flat, stale, or otherwise lackluster.

But when God draws me back to Himself, it is as though someone unsealed the fountain of artistry. I draw fresh water, rainbow water, stained-glass colors and crystal brightness, and splash it around and am glad. New ways of writing crowd into my brain. I am aware again of texture, devices, rhetoric, as if being aware of God and in love with Him sharpens and brightens and deepens everything.

It is either very strange or not strange at all, and I can't decide which.