The Empty Page

Every writer knows the silence before creation — that sacred hush between nothing and the Word. I’ve learned to see that silence not as a void, but as the same space God once spoke into. This piece is for every soul staring down the blank page, wondering if what they carry inside is enough.

The empty page seems a nemesis to writers —

that blankness mocking us as we contemplate

the manifold ways we could or would create,

stopping us before we begin or might have.

We lag in the internal ideological edits before the craft,

or perhaps fidget with a phrase or turn of tongue,

always asking, “What new thing can we create today?”

The barren sheet appears, at times, to mock us,

asking what creation could — or would — be born

in its literary cavity if we would but commit and give it form.

A poem never penned, a love letter never sent —

possibilities beyond number from origin to creation, if we engage

and enter that sacred space like the Father, re-enacting creation

through words, paint, dance, science, song, and symphony.

Yet we, my friends, are the ones who scribe riddles on walls,

or poetry folded over on napkins when youth raged and emotion was new;

on covers of notebooks, spilling forth from college-ruled lines.

We the writers write as our form of creation — giving of ourselves,

as He first gave to us, that we might desire to do what we were born to do.

As for me, it is to spill these devotional verses to the Father in an attempt to raise

an anthem of holy worship so pure it will carry notes of Heaven in praise upon the page.

Amen.

Dust,

to You,

for You,

from Him,

in me.