April 2019
If you read last month’s newsletter, you may remember how I wrote about my oldest son. He was riding his bike and took a pretty hard fall. I was away from the house when it happened. When I got home, he was in a lot of pain. We decided to take him to the ER, worried he may have broken something.
I put our youngest to bed and waited anxiously, receiving updates from my wife every hour or so. They finally arrived back home at around midnight. After taking X-rays, doctors confirmed my son had a broken elbow. They wrapped it up in a splint and he was so uncomfortable, but we made a little bed on our couch and my wife slept next to him for a few days like she did with our youngest when he broke his collarbone in January.
My son was miserable all week. The splint was hot and uncomfortable. He was in pain. He’d broken his elbow, after all. The doctors said so. But he was most upset about not being able to play flag football after we’d practiced throwing the ball for months.
We went for a follow up a week later to see how long it would be until the break would heal. We figured six to eight weeks, probably. A different doctor came into the room holding the X-rays taken a week prior with a confused look on his face. “I don’t think your elbow is broken,” he said to them. “But we need to take more X-rays to make sure. So take it easy and come back next week.”
We did and they confirmed there was no break and he got his splint off. The doctors at the ER had just misread the X-ray. He started playing football and is doing great!
Of course we prayed for healing (and I know many of you did as well… thank you!). And I’m sure that had a lot, if not everything to do with his healing. But the experience and my son’s reaction stuck with me because I’ve seen echoes of it throughout my life.
When I was twelve, my band director told me I wouldn’t be a good trumpet player and should play the trombone. The truth was, as I found out years later after deciding to switch to the trumpet anyway, he just simply had too many trumpet players at the time.
When I was eighteen, the local radio station said I didn’t stand a chance being a DJ. Five years later, I was working on the air for them at their radio station.
Last year, I went to New York for ThrillerFest and pitched my Blake Jordan series to agents and was rejected by all of them. I thought I had a chance when a junior agent from Writers House asked me to send him the first three chapters of THE SENATOR. But in the end, the series just wasn’t for him. He was more interested in taking on new science fiction writers as clients, which I can understand.
But I don’t give up on my dreams that easily… and if I listened to everyone who ever told me No, I’d never have seen any dream I’ve ever had come true, would I?
I know our mindset won’t fix everything. If my son’s elbow really had been broken, no amount of positive thinking would have changed that fact. But it was interesting to see the change in my son from thinking he’d be in a sling for up to two months to playing football two weeks later.
The thing is, people with authority will try to tell you who you are and often tell you what you’re not. Sometimes it’s a truth we can’t do anything about (a broken bone is a broken bone, after all). But sometimes it’s nothing more than just one person’s opinion.
Our job is to decide what we’re going to believe and if we’re going to let what others think of us define us. And if we have any say in it, deciding what we can do about it.
A quick update on Blake Jordan #6: I just wrote chapter 30 of 60, so I’m halfway done with the first draft and I’m planning on making more progress in May. I’m aiming to finish the first draft by the summer, then work on finishing the second draft so you can enjoy the story a few months after that. I’ll update you more in next month’s newsletter.