It helps me introspect and acts as a mirror to hold up to myself
Writing is back-breaking, but it is therapeutic for me. Bent over the keyboard for hours, in trance-like agitation, extracting the next thought or word frozen in the lunar crater Hermite, eyes ping-ponging, scanning content across multiple open windows on the PC, fingers beating away at the keyboard, besting Thurzó Zoltán, the Romanian concert pianist who set a world record for most piano strikes in half a minute, hitting the piano key 500 times in 30 seconds.
Activities deserving of a health warning like on a nicotine pack. But the word must be proclaimed. This is the last reflection on the series ‘Human condition resolved by the renewal of mind through the Word of God’. I need the renewal of my own mind to write further.
I write on what I hear, observe, and experience. If it is happening, then it is real. We live troubled lives. Not a day passes that we are not ‘between a rock and a hard place’. The only way out is to have been born with rocket boosters native to our spine to generate escape velocity from our orbit of problems. The other is to trust God.
Especially if the situation is frightful, painful, belittling, feeling cornered, and mentally distressing and physically nauseating. I write about these situations. I am not a life coach or a soothsayer. Trusting God is like having rocket boosters. He will bail us out.
Most future events are unpredictable. “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? “(Mt 6:25-26)
From the beginning of time, starting with Adam and Eve, human existence is characterised by humans unwittingly or intentionally inviting trouble on themselves. Eve ate of the tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden; the fruit God had forbidden. She was generous. People with communicable diseases tend to be. She gave it to Adam. So ashamed were they of the conduct that they hid behind fig leaves; teenagers hiding a pimple behind a skin-coloured tape.
We deliberately choose to infringe the Laws of God or of the land. Breaking a traffic light. Why? No cops around. St. Augustine stole pears from his neighbour’s garden for the heck of it. He admitted in his book ‘Confessions’; he was not fond of pears; he desired to commit a crime and get away with it. He wanted to be ungodly. Ended up becoming a saint of the Catholic Church. Not all may have the grace of God for such transformation. Don’t risk it if Hell is not your thing.
The ‘trouble’ we bring on ourselves can be as minor as someone not extending a courtesy we feel entitled to. On a Richter Scale of Magnitude, it should be classified as one. But the person registers it as five. They were visibly shaken by such discourtesy. Because they are shaken, they need to stir the pot. James Bond liked his martini shaken, not stirred. He only had a license to kill, not to make a scene. But the one ‘grievously’ affronted will have none of James Bond British suavity; the matter will find redemption only when the whole world knows about the person’s concocted maladjusted upbringing.
The need for détente is an ongoing agenda on the program called life. Holding back from offence is a necessary strategy. But the cloud or contrails (”condensation trails”) of the contentious interaction still hang in the air. You can choose not to look, but it is there.
Emotions are like cumulus clouds. They usually indicate fair weather, especially when they are small and scattered. However, if they grow taller and darker, they may develop into storms.
A cut on the finger can be Betadine’d and Band-Aided. But a cut on the mind and the heart needs surgery. Surgery by the ultimate surgeon. The Creator Himself. We must trust Him.
My writing is evangelical, and no apologies for that, since the Bible is my source of strength and shield. The human condition is the patient. The crafting is the challenge. For a novice, that’s a tough one to crack without feedback. To get expert feedback, you need to have written expertly. A Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. You know headway is being made when the stats reveal opens, reads, and shares. Shares suggest the reader found it meaningful. If you have been cancelled, you know writing is not your thing.
Feedback is critical to a writer. It is his lifeblood. Especially if he has written a bestseller. The readership may span precisely two people. But you know you stirred something in them when a reader asks your daughter whether she went with her mother to attend to a midnight caller seized with chest pain. Covered in ‘Let Your Yes Be Yes and No Be No’, posted on Sept 27, 2026, on M-Stack. The interrogator’s second question: Who was the midnight caller?
I hadn’t intended to write a thriller, but it turned out to be one. A whodunit. My daughter looked blank. The interrogator imagined my daughter wanted to keep it a secret. It was indeed a secret to my daughter. She does not read what I write.
I can write with candour about my family, secure in the fact that they don’t read it. Good judgment on their part, born of familiarity. My daughter had not read the reflection. But she was the star player in the story. With the celebrity-hood showered on her, her 15 seconds of fame, she spilt the beans on the well-protected identity of the midnight caller.
Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honour except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” (Mk 6:4)
A plug for me as a writer, but wasted. My family is not going to read it. Therapeutic for me, though. That’s all that counts. That’s why I go through this back-breaking indulgence called writing.
- Mathew Anthony
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