A Short Love Story (for Valentine’s Day)

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photo by Whitney Loibner, who shared our love letters on her blog recently.

A Short Love Story (for Valentine’s Day)

Recently I opened up a document I had put away for a while because I wanted to be able to look at it with fresh eyes.

And here is what my fresh eyes saw:

Rubbish.

It was all junk. A few good sentences were scattered in among the garbage but mostly it was truly awful.

The document was full of the pages of a book I have been working on for longer than I care to admit. You might remember that I wrote one thousand words a day in November for NaNoWriMo in an effort to make real headway on a project that was dragging out over way too long.

Now, I was returning to a third draft of a book that, while better than the first and second drafts, was still not a book I would even want to read myself. Much less purchase.

I was so discouraged. I sent the document off to a friend and wrote, “Be honest. Tell me to just throw it away and give up.”

Later that evening, over dinner, I was relating the incidents of the day to Taido, my husband. My love who does not mince words with me but is unfailingly honest. To a fault.

I was near tears when I told him that I could not bear to think that all the hours I had given to this project were a waste.

And here is what he said to me.

It is not a waste.

There may very well still be something buried there that will one day be a book, but I would love for you to feel the freedom to let go of it if you need to. If you stop working on that project today and no book ever comes of it, the time you gave to it is still not a waste.

You learned to write every day. To get words on pages. To tell stories.

If that is the only purpose that writing that book ever serves you, then it is still worth something.

Some days Taido Chino drives me out of my mind. He is not a sweet talker and he is just not going to say to me, “Honey, I do not know what you are talking about. This right here is a Best Selling Brilliant Book.”

He will not tell me the nice, but untrue thing. And there are days that I want to throw something at him because of how he is like this.

But then there are encounters like these where I know that I know that I know…

that there is a reason that God gave me this man.

True love is telling someone (and actually meaning it) that the energy they have given to something that may never see the light of day is not wasted.