For years, I braced myself for the hard seasons in my author life.
I knew exactly how to get through the slow sales months and how to survive a book launch where nobody buys.
So the thing that actually caught me off guard wasn't a hard day at all. It was a good one. It was when my books finally started to sell,
and it was when a reader wrote to me to tell me that something I'd written had changed them somehow,
and I thought I'd feel established or comfortable when that happened. I really did.
But instead there was this voice in the back of my mind going, okay, but is this a fluke? Is this just a once off thing?
Don't get too comfortable, because who knows how long it's going to last?
So instead of just enjoying the good thing God had done,
I was already braced for it to slip away.
And maybe you know that feeling too, friend. Maybe a good day in your writing life has left you more unsettled than at peace,
and you couldn't quite work out why.
Well, there's a reason for that, and Scripture is really straightforward about it.
Because, as I've come to find out myself,
a good season can test your heart just as much as a hard one can.
So today I want to sit with you as we ask ourselves,
what do we actually do when something good finally happens in our writing?
How do we take it in without gripping it too tight? And how do we keep God at the center of it all,
even when the sales are finally coming in?
And by the end of our time together today, you'll know how to hold the good things God brings you without losing your footing.
And I've got a great tool for you that'll help you see what he might be growing in you in this very special season.
I look forward to digging into this with you today, friend. You might want to grab a notebook for this one.
This is the Anointed Scribe Podcast.
If you've been building your author business feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and unsure of your next steps, the Revive to Thriveway was made for you.
Three shifts that replaced the overwhelm with peace, the confusion with purpose, and the hustle with overflow. And they're ready to do the same for you. Check it out at anointedscribe.com forward/revivetothrive link is in the show notes.
Hey, it's your author friend, Urcelia, and you are listening to the Anointed Scribe Podcast,
the show that helps Christian writers grow their author business and their relationship with God.
Thanks for choosing to hang out with me today. However, you Found Today's Episode I'm so glad you're here today, friend. I. I think it's going to meet you right where you are if you're in that place now where things are finally starting to go well for you.
But even if you are still not there, my hope is that this will be a bit of a heads up for you. Because the good days will come so you best know what you are in for, right?
Let's get stuck in I want to start with something I've noticed in myself in the past.
When you've been struggling for a while, you've gotten so used to getting ready for the hard parts of this journey, right? We break ourselves for the one star review. We steal ourselves for the book launch that falls flat.
We tell ourselves ahead of time not to check that sales dashboard too often because we already know what it looks like and what it can do to us.
But almost nobody prepares you for those good days, right?
Nobody sits you down when you're starting out and tells you what to do when all your hard work finally pays off. And it works when the book takes off,
when the five star reviews start coming in, or your newsletter list miraculously doubles in a month,
or a reader messages you to say your story carried her through the worst year of her life.
So when the good days arrive, we don't quite know what to do with them.
Some of us do what I did and we start bracing ourselves for it to disappear.
Some of us swing the other way and start taking the credit for it,
adding it up, deciding it was our own strategy or our own hard work that finally paid off.
And either way, the good thing God gave us ends up pulling our eyes off Him.
Which is honestly the last thing you'd expect a blessing to do, right?
And that's the part I really want you to hear today, because it caught me by surprise when I first understood it.
See, a good season tests your heart every bit as much as a hard one does.
We know the hard times test us. We've all heard that a hundred times.
But we don't talk much about how a wind can test you too.
Proverbs says it about as plainly as it can be. The crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold.
But people are tested by the praise they receive.
Now that's a surprising thing to say, isn't it? I mean, we assume the hardship is what tests us.
But Proverbs points us to the opposite end of things.
It says we are tested by the praise we get, by the applause, by the recognition by the very thing we've been hoping would finally come.
Because failure tends to send us running to God right when the sales dry up and the doubts pile in.
Most of us end up on our knees pretty quickly.
But success can do the opposite.
Success can make you feel like you've got this now, like you finally cracked it, like maybe you don't need to lean on God quite as hard as you did back when you were so desperate.
And that kind of drifting almost never happens in the hard season.
It happens on those good days.
So what do we do instead?
Well, I want to walk through three places in scripture with you today, because when we put them together, they give us a way to receive a good thing with a out losing ourselves in it.
And the first One is Psalm 92. And I love the way this psalm opens because it's basically a call to worship. It says this,
it is good to praise the Lord and make music to your name, to proclaim your love in the morning and your faithfulness at night.
Morning and night. The psalmist here is telling us to bookend our whole day to with worship. He's saying before the day even begins and after it ends, I'm turning my eyes back to God.
And then a couple of verses on he tells us why.
He says,
for you make me glad by your deeds, Lord, I sing for joy at what your hands have done.
Did you catch that?
The gladness is coming from what God has done.
The joy is a response to what God has done.
So what does that mean for us on a good day? It means that when something good finally happens in your writing life,
your very first move gets to be worship.
Because most of us, the second a book starts selling, we go straight to the numbers, right? We start reverse engineering the whole thing. What did I do right? How do I make this happen again?
How do I keep it going?
And listen, there's a place for looking at what work there really, really is.
But the psalmist worships the one who handed him the win before he ever stops to study it.
So thank him first, and then you can go and dissect it later.
The second place is Psalm 44. 3.
And this one speaks straight to that nagging voice I told you about at the start of this conversation,
the one that's whispering, is this a fluke? Can I even take any credit for it?
In this psalm, the psalmist is looking back at how God's people won their battles and took the promised land. And here's what he says.
It was not by their sword that they won the land,
nor did their arm bring them victory. It was your right hand, your arm, and the light of your face,
for you loved them.
It wasn't their own sword or their own arm that won the battles. It was God's hand in it. Now sit with what that does to the Fluke question.
If the good thing in your author business came from your own cleverness,
then sure, maybe you should be a little nervous because you might not be able to pull it off again.
But if it came from God's hand,
you don't have to frantically protect it or reproduce it in your own strength, because the same hand that brought it to you is still with you.
And it settles the pride question at the very same time.
Because if it was his hand and not your sword, then it was never really yours to boast about in the first place.
Both fear and pride get answered by the same truth. It was God and God alone.
And the third place in the Bible that tells us how to react when your author business takes off is Deuteronomy, chapter 8.
And this is a verse that has been sitting with me all week because it came on the back of this podcast, hitting the number one spot on the Million Dollar Podcast's 30 Best Podcast for Christian Writers list.
I was so chuffed I was elated with it. So thank you very much also, by the way, for making it happen.
But this immediately made me think.
This verse says this. Remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth. It is he who gives you the ability to produce success.
He gives you the ability, the very capacity to do the thing that you do that's going to sell your books or get you on a blog post or a podcast interview or get you that best seller badge.
And guess what? That thing came from him too.
The gift of putting words together in a way that moves a reader.
The mind that can hold a whole story in your head,
your discipline to actually sit down and finish a book,
the time given to you in grace,
the fact that you're even alive this very moment. All of it traces back to God.
So even the skill behind your success was his to give in the first place.
But I want you to see the warning wrapped all the way around this verse in Deuteronomy. Also, because the whole chapter is a caution.
Moses is telling the people what's going to happen once they finally reach the promised land. The good land. Those good days,
he says, when you have eaten and you are satisfied, when you've built the fine houses to live in and your herds and your silver and your gold have all multiplied.
He says. Be careful that your heart doesn't grow proud and you forget the Lord your God.
And notice when that warning lands. It doesn't come from the wilderness or from the hungry seasons or the desperate years.
It comes for the promised land, for those good days, for when those good days happen.
For the season when things are finally going to go well.
Because that is exactly when we are most likely to forget who brought us there in the first place.
So let me bring all of this down to the ground because this is the Anointed Scribe podcast and I always want to send you off with something you can actually do this week that moves you forward in your author life, but also moves you into a deeper relationship with God.
When a good thing happens in your author life, there are two ditches waiting on either side of the road.
On the one side is fear that is this a fluke voice that won't let you enjoy the gift.
And on the other side is pride. The taking of the credit, the slow forgetting of who actually opened the door for you in the first place.
And the way you stay out of both ditches is the same. You keep turning your eyes back to God.
So let me give you a few simple ways to do that.
The first one is worship before you analyze your success.
The next time you get good news, a jump in sales, a review that makes you tear up, a reader email that undoes you stop before you screenshot it or run the numbers or turn it into a Facebook post.
Just say thank you out loud if you can.
Let your very first response be in worship and let it be turned to God the way Psalm 92 tells us to.
The second is to name God's hand in it. Say it out loud both to him and to someone you trust.
This was God. And I don't mean to say it in a false humility way where you are not allowed to feel any joy in your own work. I mean in the honest way of someone who knows exactly where the gift came from.
Saying it out loud now keeps you from deciding months down the line that you did it all on your own. Because a few months on you, you'll find that the gratitude fades and you start telling yourself it was your smart launch plan or your hard work or your ad knowledge that made it finally happen.
So saying it out loud and recording it and putting it where you can see and hear it and read it again in that moment,
writing it in your journal, it anchors the truth so you can't drift from it later down the line.
The third thing is to hold your success with an open hand.
Your good author days are a gift and you are allowed to enjoy it. But you don't have to clutch it and you don't have to turn it into some new baseline that you are now terrified of dropping below.
If God gave it once,
God can give it again. In his timing and in his way,
you were never asked to guard your blessing.
You are simply asked to keep trusting the one who gave it to you.
And the fourth way to keep your eyes on God during your author success is to ask what that success is. For a good author season, A good sales season often carries provision inside of it.
A lot of the time it's God resourcing you for the very next thing he's asking you to do. We often think it's just to pay off the bills, or to stuff it in the savings account or to go on a holiday,
but it's not. It's often God resourcing you for the very next thing he's about to ask you.
So instead of only asking, how do I keep doing this?
Try asking, what does this free me up to do now?
Instead of just stuffing it in your pocket or going on a nice holiday,
rather say, lord, what is it that you want me to do with this money? What is it that you've got planned for me to do?
Maybe the extra sales mean you can finally afford a good editor for the next book.
Maybe that reader who wrote to you is a living picture of the exact person God is sending you to reach.
Maybe it's that you need to start tithing and is testing your heart in that too.
The blessing is going somewhere, friend, and you need to ask God where.
Now, if you're listening to all of this and you're thinking, ocelia, I would honestly love to have this problem because things are not exactly going well over here.
I want to talk to you for a moment, friend, because this is what I've come to believe.
God is always growing something in you right now, in every season,
the good ones and the hard ones both. God is always growing something.
In a slow month it can feel like he's gone quiet on you, that maybe he's abandoned you. But I'll tell you that so often he's down at the roots, underground,
strengthening what nobody can see yet,
including yourself.
He's getting you ready for the fruit that will come later. He promises it.
And in a good month it can feel like he's only just shown up when really he was there. The whole time. And now he's inviting you to keep leaning on him,
even when you feel like you don't have to anymore.
Either way, the question underneath is the same one what is God growing in me right now in this season that I'm actually in?
So to help you find that answer, I'd encourage you to take the free Growth quiz I created just for you.
It's a short,
prayerful set of questions. It'll take you about two minutes, and it's made to help you see the one thing God may be growing in your writing life right now. Now, it's rooted in Scripture, and it keeps your eyes on him rather than on chasing some number.
Whether you're in a good season or a hard one right now, it's a gentle place to start paying attention to what he's asking you to focus on right now.
And I can promise you what he's going to ask you to focus on right now is definitely something that's going to move you forward.
God is not in the business of making you fail. He's in the business of making you grow toward him and grow towards a successful future and an abundant life.
You'll find it over@anointedscribe.com quiz and I'll also drop the link for you in the show notes just in case you find yourself driving as you listen to this episode. So do come back to it later.
And there's one more place I want to invite you into today, especially off the back of today's episode,
because I've learned something about good news in my writing life.
It is really hard to celebrate it on your own when your book finally sells or a reader's message brings you to tears. The people around you don't always understand why it matters to you so much.
And that's a very, very lonely feeling to have a win that nobody in your world quite gets.
So I've made a place for exactly that. And it's our private Facebook group, our own little tribe of anointed scribes, aptly also called the Anointed Scribe Tribe.
And it's where I'm hoping to build a community of Christian writers and authors who understand this road, who understand the hard days and the good ones alike.
It's somewhere you can bring a win and have people rejoice with you the way Romans tells us to rejoice with those who rejoice. Right?
And it's also somewhere you can be honest on the flat days, too, and and have people pray you through them and encourage you through them.
If you've been carrying this whole writing life on your own, friend. Come and find your people. Come and join the tribe.
Just search Anointed Scribe Tribe over on Facebook. I'll leave a link for that in the show notes as well.
So wherever this episode finds you today, friend, whether you are in a season where the sales are climbing and the reviews are glowing, or a season where you are still waiting and still still wondering, I want to leave you with the same thing.
Every good thing in your writing life and author business comes from God's hand, and he is not about to stop being good to you.
So receive his gifts with real joy and keep your eyes on the giver.
Worship him in the morning and worship him at night.
Worship him in sadness and worship him in your gladness.
Let your joy be a response to what his hands have done and what his hands will still do.
Keep your ears tuned to his voice,
keep your eyes on his word, and may your pens stay faithful, your roots grow deep, and every word you write bear fruit for his glory.
