Why? What is it all about? Does my life have any meaning? Does anybody care?

Madeleine L’Engle asked these questions in her book, Walking on Water. She writes: “As a small child I was lonely not only because I was an only child in a big city but also because I was slightly lame, extremely introverted, and anything but popular at school. I did not measure up to the standards of my peers or teachers.” It was this dissatisfaction with herself that compelled her to search for answers. “I turned to writing as a way of groping towards wholeness,” she says. In her search for meaning, she also became an avid reader and often found her own likeness in the characters of fictional stories. Eventually, she began to find the answers to her questions in the Bible. She believed the stories about angels, she loved the fact that God communicated with His children by giving them dreams, and she saw that Jesus taught almost entirely by telling stories – simple stories dealing with the things of life familiar to the Jews of His time.

In her reading, she found that many famous people had inadequacies such as her own. “In a real sense not one of us is qualified,” she says, “but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do His work.” Perhaps it is because if we feel we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job by ourselves, but if we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger of confusing God’s work with our own.

In the Old Testament, we find the story of Moses who was past middle-age when God called him to lead His children out of Egypt. Moses was fearful, he spoke with a stutter, and he often could not control his temper. Nevertheless, God used him.

Many famous artists have had physical problems to overcome, such as deformities, lameness, and terrible loneliness. L’Engle writes: “Could Beethoven have written that glorious paean of praise in the Ninth Symphony if he had not had to endure the dark closing in of deafness? Could Milton have seen all that he sees in Paradise Lost if he had not been blind?” She adds: “Milton could have retreated into passive blindness and self-pity. Beethoven could have remained in the gloom of silence instead of forging the glorious sounds which he could never hear except in his artist’s imagination.”

God uses our deformities and our pain, and He can do amazing things with whatever we surrender to Him. However, pain is not always creative; if pain is received wrongly, it can lead to alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, and suicide. Because God has given us the gift of free will, we can choose to walk away from Him and be destroyed by our own pain and inadequacies, or we can surrender it all to Him and receive His creative grace and mercy.

“When we surrender to God, He is constantly creating in us, through us, with us,” writes Madeleine L’Engle, “and to co-create with God is our human calling,” We are coauthors with God in the writing of our own life story.

L’Engle wrote about the disciplines of spending time with God by reading His Word and listening to His still small voice. She read from the Psalms and from both the Old Testament and the New Testament daily. She believed that listening in prayer was extremely important to her creativity. She said: “God quietly tells us who we are and who He wants us to be. It is then that God can take our emptiness and fill it up with what He wants and drain away the business with which we inevitably get involved in the dailiness of human living.”