On Writing Right & Doing Nothing

Spent Thursday tracking down information on some long-ago fire chiefs.

Elusive rascals.

The thing is, I feel I should include mini-biographies of all former fire chiefs in my history of firefighting in Jacksonville, or none of them

Accurate information on these important people in city government is hard to come by. In fact, one yellowed turn-of-the-Century newspaper clipping tells more about the fire chief’s mule than it tells about him.

Notice to all Important People: any historian can write a book about your organization, church, industry or company with no mention of you in its pages. A tombstone leaves little room for recording our feats. In fact, I imagine that in the far future some scholar’s doctorial thesis on Influential Jacksonville Writers And Literary Giants could be written without even mentioning my name. Startling, isn’t it?

Anyhow, I’m going for a few lines about each fire chief and searching for old photos of each guy.

My friend Barbara White called about a problem with proof pages in the forth of her Along The Way books; I’d duplicated a column/chapter. Removing it would throw the pagination all out of whack, so I went into the master file, deleted the repetition and replaced it with photos and text to fill in the blank space. That tactic saved the pagination so the final copy will have the same as the printer’s proofs.

Barbara plans to come over Monday. God willing, we’ll make the final corrections and publish the four-volume series on-line through Bluefish Books Monday evening. It’s been a tedious and difficult process but well worth doing.

Here is a sample column from Barbara’s fourth book, Rejoicing Along The Way:

Waiting For Directions

Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing anything — even something "good."

A visiting minister, leading a teaching mission here recently, asked a series of questions that opened up the whole new area for consideration to me.

Why, he asked, when a promotion comes along — and it involves a move to another city, away from the roots you are putting down, from the body you are becoming part of — do you always take it?

Why is it always called God blessing you with prosperity?

Might it not be Satan trying to bring you down instead?

Even "good" things are not good unless God is the one directing them.

When Satan tempted Jesus after His 40 days in the wilderness, he suggested that He turn stone into bread.

Now that is not a bad thing — making bread.

The hungry world needs bread.

And later Jesus would do just that, make bread and feed the hungry.

But He did it when God told Him to, not when Satan did.

Man shall not live by bread alone, Jesus said, quoting Scripture, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

Think about that.

No matter how good something seems to us, unless God tells us to, we are not to do it. That's the way Jesus did it.

Doing nothing is hard.

We are so conditioned to doing something, anything.

We try to do good works.

We may know good works are not the basis of our salvation, but we think of them as our response to God's gift of salvation through grace by faith.

And they are, aren't they?

I mean, we're supposed to be feeding the poor, aren't we?

Yes, but first we are to surrender our wills to Him. Then, we are to wait upon the Lord, literally I think.

Learning to hear Him when He speaks follows surrender.

His Spirit speaks to us through circumstances, opening some doors, closing others; through other Christians when they confirm our conviction; through the Scriptures, when we are steeped in them, not when we dip occasionally into them; and through prayer, continual prayer that brings inner peace about the action.

So there may be times when we are to do nothing, but be His.

Then when He speaks, we are to respond.