Despite my best Pollyanic efforts to remain positive about winter, a gloomy chill engulfed me last week. Our cold, snowy, icy, and foggy winter, which came early and shows every sign of planning to stay late, is the obvious culprit. But to be honest, I can’t wholly blame this glum funk on external circumstances.
Part of my Gloomy Gus mood is self-inflicted. In the dark of this cold winter, I’ve been chaffing against the quiet, ordinary tasks God has given me to complete. Day after day, He calls me to be faithful in the non-flashy, by myself stuff – writing blog columns and book proposals, collecting tax documents, answering emails, preparing for speaking engagements, and organizing things for church. Big days in January were the ones when I took Mom to the library to check out books by authors with careers much more successful than my own.
Which points to the crux of the matter. Much of this winter’s discontent is due to flat book sales. For weeks, I watched Different Dream’s Amazon rank sink lower and lower. Nobody emailed to order signed copies. The ones in the local book store were gathering dust. And all three January speaking engagements were postponed because of weather, eliminating any hope of book sales from that quarter.
Through it all, God whispered over and over, “Trust me. Just wait and trust me,” which I did, only because there’s nothing to do in the middle of January except wait for things to improve. The trusting part was harder. But once I realized the other option was to trust myself, which experience has taught me is risky at best, I let the book sales thing go and left it all in his hands.
What happened next? A few books sold on Amazon, the book store called and asked for two copies for their store and a stack to take to some conferences over the next few weeks. A woman wrote a review for her special needs newsletter, and a Detroit radio station asked for an interview. None of which will catapult sales into the stratosphere, but all of which remind me of truth in the winter of my discontent: God is at work in even the small things. He calls me to faithfulness in more small, non-flashy tasks on this winter day.
I look outside and see a frost-covered tree branch shaped like Gonzo’s nose. The thought of the Don Juan of Muppets and his flock of hens makes me smile. The gloom lifts a little, and I tackle the small things once more.
