Miracle

When Jared and I completed writing the final chapter, I was almost afraid to voice the question.

“Is it done?” I asked.

Three and a half years ago, I moved up to Utah and began co-authoring a business fable with my brother. It was supposed to be done in 6-9 months. Being a person who finds great delight in checking things off my “to do” list, the constant evolution and re-writing of this book has been pretty rough on me. I’ve thought it was done a dozen of times, only to have my hopes dashed over and over agin.

Now the ball was in my court. My task was to make all the final adjustments and prepare a print-ready version that he could take with him on his January retreat.

“No problem,” I thought. “A few little tweaks here and there and we’re good to go.”

Two weeks later I’d only gotten through 4 of the 18 chapters. Those “little tweaks” were tying me in writing knots. I only had one more week left and knew that finishing was impossible—and that put me in a very bad mood.

That Sunday I was bombarded with messages about how God is a god of miracles who can help us do impossible things—Nephi and the ship, Joseph and the church and on and on. I was listening to a BYU Hawaii devotional that night (random) and the speaker suddenly begins telling this story about how he had an impossible amount of work to get done in a limited time-frame but when he’d exercised his faith and the Lord opened a way to make the impossible possible.

Obviously someone was trying to tell me something.

I wrote up my plan of attack, told everyone I'd be working from home, cancelled everything I had going on for the week and began to pray. Starting Monday, after exercising in the morning, I settled into my big chair with my computer on my lap and wrote. I wrote all day and into the night (generally finishing at around 10 pm)for six days straight.

This really was an exercise of faith because even at my very best, I’ve only been able to write for about 5 hours at a time (after that the quality of work decreases rapidly). But somehow my brain was suddenly able to do marathon sessions without shutting down. I went through each page over and over again and smoothed and fixed and adjusted and kept going. On Saturday at 4 pm, I arrived back at my office to print out a hard copy and go through it one last time. At 11 pm, I arrived at Kinkos to bind the manuscript. At midnight exactly, I drove out of the Kinkos parking lot went and dropped off the books in Jared’s mailbox.

I’m not announcing that it’s completely done (I’ve learned my lesson) but I am awed and grateful that the Lord loved me enough to perform this miracle. I’m not a Nephi or a Joseph Smith, but he did this for me anyway and that is an amazing thing.