This post was written two years before my book sold. Some gifts take longer than others to open, but they’re all the more precious because of it.

My time reading and studying Revelations has been, well, revealing. Not so much in the way of hearing apocalyptic hoof-beats, swatting at hoards of locusts or steeling myself for another trumpet blast.

It’s the magician ( this is an analogy; I do not think God is a magician or David Copperfield, for that matter) swishing the drape off the cage and there’s a pacing lion instead of a lovely assistant kind of way.

The first line I read this morning was, “When He opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” (Rev.8:1, NKJV) I just find John’s prophetic specificity as to “about half an hour” intriguing. My notes say it was to indicate a “brief, but significant break” between two events.

Are there clocks in heaven? This gives me an entirely new perspective on the half-hour I get for lunch at school. If God thinks it’s sufficient for resting between disasters, then perhaps, so should I.

I did, though, have this picture of Spielberg God perched in His director’s chair issuing “Quiet on the set” orders and looking over his scrolls for the pending judgments.

The pacing lion (wake up, back to the analogy) in my cage this morning was pride. In my eagerness, anxiety, teensy-tiny bit of obsessive compulsion to publish, I lost sight of for whom and what and why I set out to write in the first place. Instead of singing, “It Had to be You,” I’d replaced it with “It Had to Be Me.”

If I’m going to see writing as my gift, then I’d better remember how “gift” is defined. And, yes, being the word nerd that I am, I looked it up. “Something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation, ” and, most interesting, “often implies special favor by God or nature.”

My prayer was, and God put me in time-out today to remind me “is,” to use my writing to reveal His goodness. To show that ordinary, jumbled, tumbled people who constantly lose their keys and get cranky in traffic and walk away when they should walk toward, can be delighted by and delight in God. To show that we can go to the bottomless pit (Rev 9:1) and return to survive, be blessed by and bless others.

Now, for that thirty minute break.