Writing time is still at a premium while I’m in the Time Crunch, but I actually produced something this week. I should have written about this yesterday, during my normal time slot for this blog, but had no energy for it, and so just made a quick post to my Facebook author page.

Back on October 1, our pastor sent out an e-mail to a number of people, asking them to write devotionals for our Advent season. He has a specific program laid out, with scripture on different days of Advent, some posts by him, some scripture studies, and then three posts a week by others in the church, each to a specific topic. At the end of the e-mail he wrote, “By the way, if your name is not David Todd, this may be your chance to be a published author for the first time.”

Ha! I thought about it, and decided I probably wouldn’t do it, though I’d have liked to try, and so didn’t reply to his e-mail. Devotionals are a different critter than anything I’ve written. I’ve thought about them, and “wrote” a couple in my mind. When I read the Bible subjects for a devotional on the passage just read frequently pass through my mind.

But devotionals, as normally written, are much different than what I’m used to writing: fiction and informational non-fiction. They need to be short, refer to scripture, and bring in a personal observation or illustration. It’s that latter requirement that turned me off from writing them.

On Oct 8 the pastor e-mailed again, repeating his request, saying he had a few more slots to fill. This time I wrote him back and said I would love to but I wasn’t sure I could write a devotional and that the Time Crunch worked against me. He wrote back to say no problem, why don’t you just take this one, mentioning a specific one that hadn’t been taken. It’s the Christmas Eve one. Nothing like pressure.

I said okay, and learned that the deadline was Oct 20, Monday this week. Saturday I finally sat down, reviewed the scripture, thought about how to tie reconciliation to Christmas, and started writing in manuscript. Pastor asked that they be 400 to 700 words. By the end of an hour or so, I estimated I had 400 words, including quoted scripture. And I had more to write. Whether what I had just produced was any good or not I didn’t know, but I was on my way.

Monday, Deadline Day, in my pre-work hour and on the noon hour, I worked on it some more, and had it pretty much finished except for editing. I snuck in a couple of read-throughs during the afternoon, tweaked it, back-checked it against the scripture, and decided it was the best I could do, coming in at 706 words. I e-mailed it to the pastor. That evening he wrote back saying, “Perfect, David! This will be a great addition to our devotional guide.” I hope he’s not into hyperbole.

So, I have now written a devotional. It’s the only writing I’ve produced in over a month, except for blog posts. I have only blogs posts planned for another month at least. Will more devotionals be in my future? Stay tuned.