No Rights Reserved – Bonnie Rose Hudson

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By Bonnie Rose Hudson

As writers, we get our ideas from everywhere—the supermarket, a conversation with a friend, from a headline we read. As writers who believe in Christ, we know that all our good ideas ultimately come from God. Have you ever had an idea that got you so excited you couldn’t sleep at night? Every waking minute you work on it, develop it, and polish it. You jot down every facet of the idea as it comes to you. You pray and give the whole project over to God.

Then you start the process of writing the drafts, the endless drafts! You work hard; you do your best. At the end of the day (or week or month) you are pleased. Then you send it off to the next step. Maybe it’s a blog post you are eager to share with your readers. Maybe it’s an article for a newsletter. Maybe it’s a project that needs to go to an illustrator or a managing editor for the next step. So you sit back and wait. You know you’ve given your best work to God to use as He sees fit.

But then, it happens. The blog post you knew would touch your readers generates nothing but silence. The article is rejected. The project goes through so many changes at the hands of others that you hardly recognize it when it comes back to you. And you think to yourself, “That’s not how I pictured the project working out. That’s not where I thought my idea would end.”

Has it happened to you? It has to me.

One time when it did, God reminded me of what I had just said. I had mixed up my pronouns. I had said, “My idea.” But hadn’t I given it to Him? Way back when the idea was a seed and the dream had been born, hadn’t I thanked Him for giving me the idea and turned it all over to Him to do with as He pleased?

So why was I complaining now?

Please don’t misunderstand. Sometimes, when someone changes our dream and our project in a way that doesn’t please or honor God, we need to push back. Sometimes we need to take the project back and wait for the divinely appointed time it was meant for.

But sometimes we have to accept that God knows more than we do and surrender the ideas, the projects, and the dreams to Him. No rights reserved.

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Bonnie Rose Hudson works as the Executive Editor of SchoolhouseTeachers.com, the curriculum site of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine®. Her heart’s desire is for every child to feel the love of God and know how special they are to Him. She would love for you to stop by her author’s blog WriteBonnieRose.com for resources to help teach your children about missions and the persecuted Church, free history and writing printables, and to discover how you can write for the homeschool market.