I don't know if I should call this creepy, amazing, or simply proof that God is working behind the scenes in my writing, but I just came across one of the most amazing little vignettes this morning.  During the building of the story (I'm not going to tell you what it was, so as not to spoil the book) for Lion and the Fire, I found myself struggling to fight my way through several scenes, and to move the storyline forward.

At one point I even gave up on the story, feeling almost certain that God was not behind it as I'd hoped.  But then something amazing happened this morning as I was once again tackling the story.  I was doing it more as a last ditch effort to salvage a story I thought was doomed.  To my complete surprise, I discovered that it was not only doing great, but was actually in better shape than I first thought.

Actually, after taking several days away from it to do other things, I've found that I was actually doing better than I thought, and am now excited to get back to work on the story.  But that's not the most impressive part.  Earlier I had mentioned that I wasn't sure if God was working behind the scenes to help my writing; a fact I felt wasn't true for this particular story, meaning that it didn't have his blessing, and thus would fail.

It turns out I was wrong.

As I started into my edit this morning I ran across a line in my story that utterly floored me when I read it.  That one line had actually predicted something that would occur in my story later on which had not been part of my original plan.  Basically I had written it as a little side thought for the main characters; something for them to chew on as a "but what if it's not true" question.

More or less I wanted them to think of one completely off the wall possibility, one that was almost completely unlikely to happen, and then do what was more practical instead.  Well, the idea that I considered "more practical" ended up getting canned, and the one that was completely off the wall became what happened.  But it wasn't intentional on my part.  That's just the direction the story developed.  It was never my intention to go that direction originally.

Yet it did.  Despite all my efforts, it did, and God predicted that it would.

While some may consign what happened to influence of the subconscious or any of a dozen other things, I have this incredible feeling that God demonstrated to me this morning that not only is he supporting me as I write this story, but that his hand is laying gently on the pen as the story unfolds, and the message he wants to relay through this developing novel is slowly being laid down one word at a time.

Isn't God awesome like that?