Did I say something about rest in my last post? "Now I can rest?" [Insert long riff of hysterical laughter here] That was almost exactly three weeks ago. The day after posting the last entry, I did rest. And also prepared to travel to Oregon on the next day (Thursday) for the Oregon Bible Conference in Salem, Oregon.Thursday we were up early and off to Portland by air, then Salem by land. Lots of rainy weather, a trip to the beach, a feast of fellowshipping and talking with royal family, and some amazing, life changing doctrinal teaching about the Christian Stand when it comes to relationships. I got answers and validation for things I'd been uncertainly applying over the last few years... More on that later.
After five days of all kinds of stimulating, encouraging and substantive conversations about the Christian life and application of doctrine, as well as getting to spend about three hours a day concentrating on the teaching of God's word, we returned home. Tuesday, Mar 31, I was wasted. A shell. All my words used up. I did get the laundry done. And started juicing and zesting lemons to freeze before they all go bad.
Thursday, April 2, I was beginning to get back to normal. That evening, at 7pm, the galleys of The Enclave were delivered to my door. The book turned out to be about 500 pages long, and they gave me 10 days to go through it. Which is why there have been no blog posts since March 24. Everything since the trip has been consumed in working through the galleys.
Galleys are like page proofs of what the book will look like in final form, only on separate 8 1/2 x 11 pages. It's my last chance to make any changes, and in this case was my first chance to actually read through the entire book from start to finish and see what was there. I'm pretty pleased with it.
I opened this post with a picture of the entire stack. Here's what one of the pages looks like:
This one has some of my corrections on it, and shows the little post-it tabs I use to mark places that need extra thinking.In order to get them back by the deadline they gave me, I'd have to pack the whole thing up tomorrow morning and send it off. Alas...
Does this sound at all familiar? Here I am again, not done, not able to make the deadline. In this case, I pretty much have to get it there by Thursday, so I may upgrade the return postage envelope from second day air to overnight or something. Actually I have the whole thing done except for a series of flashbacks that I've scattered throughout the story. There are some inconsistencies and contradictions in them that I need to deal with, and some of those pesky questions that drive me bats that must be answered.
But after all this time, I figure I will be a pretty big idiot if I haven't learned to just trust the Lord to do what He's going to do in His timing. It would be awfully nice though if things could clarify tomorrow and I could get this thing out of my house before Wednesday! Especially since I am soooo very close to being completely finished.
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