Making A Commitment

It’s easy to fall in love. Most of us have taken the plunge into love at some point in our lives. In fact we may have broken up and fallen in love on many occasions.

But there comes a time when we decide that we’re not playing around with love anymore and that we need to make a serious commitment.

We take those slow steps down the aisle, exchange shy smiles and golden rings. And we declare before God and witnesses to have and to hold each other from this day forward and forevermore.

Marriage. We enter it with such high hopes and dreams. The future stretches before us and we’re positive that nothing can stop us from having the greatest marriage ever, from beating the odds, from being different from everyone else.

In the last post, we shared how we fell in love with our writing. Most of us have indeed developed a love affair with our writing. Eventually we have to ask ourselves how serious we want to get. How far do we take our writing? How much commitment do we want to give to it?

Some of us may be at a point where we love writing but we're not ready to get married to it. Perhaps we’re too busy with other life responsibilities to be able to devote enough time to writing seriously. We're content to dabble, to write when we have time or energy. And we're looking forward to the day, sometime in the future when we can finally say "I do" and give it a full-hearted commitment.

There may be others of us who are getting more serious. We've been dating our writing for a long time. We're ready to take our writing career to the next level. We know we need to make a greater commitment to it if we want to succeed.

But then there are some of us who don't really know what we want. Maybe we lack vision or goals. Maybe we lack the discipline to commit. Or perhaps the idea of getting serious about writing gives us cold feet.

Personally, I struggle with how much commitment to give writing at this point in my life. Do I continue to view it as a part time endeavor that I squeeze around the other priorities of my life? Or should I start to consider it a full time career? This is a tough question for me, since my Mom-job is already full time.

My writing commitment has increased gradually over the past couple of years, so the transition has been relatively smooth for myself and my family. If there comes a point when I need to give even greater amounts of time and commitment, I pray for the wisdom to balance both my jobs.

Where are you at? Dating or marriage or somewhere in between? Do you ever struggle with how much commitment to give to your writing?

What happens when the honeymoon is over? Join in on Friday for more discussion!