© 2026 Urcelia Teixeira. All rights reserved. This episode and its accompanying materials may not be reproduced, republished, transcribed, or adapted without written permission.
You know, God called you to write your books, yet you can't stop wondering if maybe that season is over,
if maybe you were only meant to do it for a short while, and if perhaps it's time to move on.
There's no dramatic story behind it, no fight with God this morning.
Your tiredness has been around for a while. Your book sales aren't improving.
So all that's left is this one nagging question.
Does God still want me to write?
If that's the question you're living with today, friend, let me encourage you by saying it's not a faithless question. In fact,
it might be one of your most sincere prayers you've prayed in a while.
And I'm going to offer you a biblical perspective on where you are right now. And it's my hope that by the end of this episode, you'll be one step closer to knowing that answer.
This is the Anointed Scribe Podcast.
If you're a self published Christian author who's ready for real growth in your relationship with God and in your author business, this is your home for growing your faith and building a profitable author business.
Go God's way. I'm Urcelia Teixeira, best selling and indie Christian author and I'd love to walk this journey with you. Come on in friend. It's good to have you here.
Hey, it's your author friend, Urcelia, and thanks for joining me today.
I'm so excited you're here, friend. And if that title is the reason you clicked today, then I already know a little about the season you're in.
Which also means it wasn't a coincidence, but a God incident as I like to call it.
If you're new to the show, welcome friend. I hope you'll follow or subscribe because this is the only podcast for Christian writers and authors where we learn to keep Christ at the centre as we build and grow a successful author business along the way.
Before we get into today's topic, just one quick reminder that you have a little over two weeks left to still get in on my Revive to Thrive Way™ program and take advantage of that 50% discount.
The price goes up on September 1st.
If it's been on your heart, this is your window. Two weeks. $100 off and the price goes up. I'll leave the details and the link in the show description for you.
Okay, so let's get straight into today's episode and the question on the table.
How do you know if God wants you to keep writing?
So let's just Take a step back and look at what's below the surface of this question. It's a little bit of a loaded question,
because there's actually two things going on here that can look and feel the same from the outside,
but really couldn't be more different underneath.
And to do that, we need to look at why we are asking this question to begin with. What is it birthed from? Where is it originating from?
The first reason you're wanting to quit is out of frustration.
Perhaps you just refreshed your KDP dashboard and your sales report came in low again.
And it's frustrating you because you've spent the last three months sending out new newsletters and social posts that have barely made a difference.
Or maybe you've tried to find validation or motivation in the handful of reviews you have, only to be stung by a few not so friendly comments.
And now you want to close your laptop and walk away from it all because no one's liking your book, no matter how many writing classes you take.
And that too leaves you frustrated, right?
But here's the thing about frustration.
If you give it a few days,
that urge to quit often passes because you might have had clarity in that moment, but actually it was your emotions prompting you to make a decision.
You're letting your heart guide what I consider to be a massive decision.
And we know Scripture warns us that our hearts will deceive us, right?
The second thing that's prompting you to ask if God still wants you to write is a sincere question about the season you are currently in.
Now, this one is a little bit calmer, even if it's a little bit sad.
You are not slamming the door or closing the book on it. You're actually standing in front of it and asking God a very heartfelt, sincere, and honest and raw oftentimes question of whether this is still where he wants you to be, if this is what he still wants you to do.
Now that's a fair thing to ask. It's a faithful thing to ask.
And God is definitely not offended by it. But here's where a lot of us get tangled up in all of this.
Somewhere along the way, you picked up a belief that once God leads you into something, it has to stay the same way for the rest of your life.
That if he called you to write, then writing must always look the way it looked the day he called you to write.
The same output, the same pace, the same genre you began with all the way through until the day you die.
But Solomon tells us that there is a time for everything.
And a season for every activity under the heavens.
That's in Ecclesiastes 3:1, if you want to go look it up.
A season for every activity. That word season is doing a lot of work here in this passage. A season. Season is real,
and a season isn't permanent.
Spring does the work of spring, and then it hands it off over to summer. A farmer plants in one season and harvests in another and lets the field rest in a third season.
And none of that makes him unfaithful to his land, right? It makes him someone who works with the land the way it was made to be worked.
Your calling as a writer can be permanent, while inside this calling, it moves around between seasons.
Those are two different things, and treating them as one thing is what keeps so many Christian writers gritting their teeth through a season.
God may have already been trying to close or to turn to the next one.
So let me help you pull a few things apart here, because I think they've gotten glued together in your mind, and the gluing is part of what's wearing you down.
Writing is one thing.
How often you publish is another.
Your business model is another thing again.
So are your genre, your platform, and the pace you keep.
All of these things have been sitting in one bucket in your head with a single label on it that reads my calling.
So when the pace becomes too much or the genre stops fitting,
or the platform drains you dry, it feels like your whole calling is falling apart.
Except it isn't.
You can be tired of publishing six books a year without being tired of writing.
You can be done with a genre without being done with a book.
You can need to change your business model or step back from a platform that's costing you more than it gives back to you and still be every bit as quick called to write as you were the day you started.
Your calling is the deep thing.
The rest are containers you've been carrying your calling in. And containers are allowed to change.
In fact, they should change if you want to be transformed into who God needs you to be.
This is why you can be called to write. And God can still be changing how much you write,
what you write, or who you're writing for.
Maybe the reader he sent to you to reach five years ago isn't the reader he's pointing you toward today.
Maybe the stack of books he had you produce in one season was for that season, and this next one is slower, deeper, and aimed at fewer people on purpose.
None of that means that you misheard him at the start.
It means he's still speaking,
still molding you, still growing you, still shaping your story long after you wrote that first chapter.
Hey, real quick. Are you wondering what needs your attention most in your writing life or author business right now?
Take the Free Growth Quiz™ for a quick personalized insight into what God might be growing in your current season.
It only takes around two minutes and you'll walk away with greater clarity or on what to focus on next.
Visit anointedscribe.com/quiz or use the link in the show Notes so how do you tell the difference between a seasoned God changing and a bad week full of frustration and pain and hurt and maybe even anger that will pass?
You pay attention over time to a handful of things, not one of them on its own, in isolation,
but looking at them holistically,
seeing the full picture they paint together.
So let's dig into a couple of these things.
Conviction is the first thing Underneath all your tiredness,
there's still a sense that this is what you are meant to do. That's conviction.
A pull that shows up even on the days you don't feel like showing up.
Or. Or has that feeling that conviction faded in a way that even a break or a vacation can't fix?
The next thing to look at is capacity. And it's a very fair thing to weigh up here because you have to make sure that the season of your life that you're in right now can actually carry your writing schedule and your author business.
Are you perhaps in a writing season where you have a newborn or young children at home?
Do you have an aging parent to care for or a full time job you can't yet leave?
None of these mean that you are less called. You're just in a season with less room to write, the way the industry perhaps demands.
And here's the thing.
God knows how much room you have to write.
He knows what responsibilities you have. It's all in his plan.
The people God has put in your care come before your author platform.
It's the heavenly order he calls us to have daily.
God first,
family second,
work last.
If your writing keeps costing you your family or your health,
that isn't something you should neglect to seek him in.
The next thing to look at when you are asking yourself if God wants you to stop writing, is your spiritual health?
Is your writing life drawing you closer to God?
Or has it become the thing that crowds him out,
a calling that keeps pulling you away from the one who gave it to you in the first place,
is worth having a long and honest conversation with him over.
The next thing you should do is you should take a look at how often you are being directed to ask if God still wants you to write.
It's misdirection if you are feeling like giving up when you've had one dramatic feeling of frustration on one occasion.
But that same gentle nudge showing up again and again over weeks and months in your prayers,
in the Word, and in the people you know that deserves more time in prayer until you know beyond a shadow of a doubt what God is directing you toward. Instead dead.
And that brings me to the last one, which is wise counsel.
People who love God, know you well, and aren't impressed or discouraged by your sales numbers can see what you can't see from inside your own head. Let them speak into this with you.
This isn't a decision you can make on your own.
Seek them out. A church community group,
friends, siblings.
Pray with them and take note of their advice.
Now let me give you two warnings, because in a tender season like this one,
it's very easy to misread things. And both of these mistakes are common.
The first one is don't read every difficulty as a closed door.
Hard isn't the same as wrong.
Some of the most God ordained work you'll ever do will also be the hardest. And if you treat every obstacle and stumbling block as God telling you to stop,
you'll walk away from things he wanted you to push through,
things he wanted to grow in you.
A slow sales quarter isn't a closed door.
Neither is a painful book launch or a stretch of discouragement that runs longer than you had hoped.
Sometimes difficulty is the resistance that shows up right before the thing God's growing in you takes root on its own. Hardship isn't a reliable signal.
Weigh it alongside everything else and don't let one hard chapter make your entire decision for you.
The next warning or the second warning cuts the other way, and it matters every bit as much as the first one.
Don't read plummeting income as divine instruction.
Here's what I mean. You've poured years into this.
Money.
Hours,
learning book covers, courses,
bookbub feature deals, your email list, your reputation, the name you've built.
So when the question of stopping or changing course comes up,
the cost of that entire investment does not mean that you have to keep going the same way you always have,
or else all of it will be wasted. That's not what it means.
Just because you've put a great deal into something that isn't working as you expected it would isn't necessarily God instructing you to keep doing it the way you've been doing it.
Your past investment is real, but it isn't the same thing as a command from Him.
The enemy is content to let you confuse the two, because a writer chained to their financial losses is a writer who can't hear a fresh word from God.
God doesn't keep you on the same road simply because you've already walked a long way down it.
So here's a question I want you to rather sit with this week and to take before God and be honest with him about, because it has a way of cutting through all of this noise.
If you took away the money, the reputation, and everything you've already invested in your author business,
what part of writing would you still feel responsible to steward?
Set the pressure of your numbers, your sales, your income, all of that aside for a moment,
set aside what people would think if you slowed down or changed direction or changed genre or even changed your pen name and set on the weight of everything you've sunk into this deal.
Underneath all of it. Is there still a part of writing you would feel accountable to God to keep tending?
Maybe it's a specific message or a particular reader he keeps putting in front of you.
Maybe it's the plain act of writing itself,
of putting words on the page that you know you would have to answer to him for if you stopped doing it.
Whatever is left when you strip away all of those things, things, the money and the reputation,
pay close attention to that. That leftover is often where your real calling has been, living the whole time,
underneath the business you built on top of it.
And this is where I want to give you permission for something, because I think you've been asking God only half the question.
Most of us, when we reach this crossroads,
ask God about the original calling. Did you call me or did I imagine the whole thing?
Was I right about the first yes I gave you all those years ago?
Those are good intentions. They aren't the only questions, though, and they're often not the most useful ones for the season you are standing in right now.
Your calling has to move. There's ebb and flows. There's seasons within.
Your calling has to move as God grows and moves and shapes you.
You're also allowed to ask God about your current assignment. In fact, I would highly recommend you do.
Don't just ask, what did you call me to back then?
But what are you asking of me now?
Those two can have different answers, and both answers can come from the same faithful God who hasn't changed his mind about you.
Listen to the promise God makes in James 1:5 about this kind of asking.
If any of you lacks wisdom,
you should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault and it will be given to you.
That promise is for you, that promise is for me.
That promise is for us as Christian writers, not a special few with a secret line to heaven.
Any Christian author who lacks wisdom and asks God for it and notice the way God says he gives it open handed without finding fault, he isn't going to sigh at you for asking whether your season is changing.
He isn't hiding the answer behind a wall you have to be clever enough to climb over.
He gives wisdom to anyone who comes and asks, and that includes you right where you are with the honest question you've been carrying all this time.
So ask God. Ask him about the now season,
not only about the then season.
So here's your practice for this week and it's one question traded for another.
Stop asking should I quit?
That question has only two exits and and both of them are loud with emotion.
Keep going or walk away. Those are the two exits. It backs you into a corner and makes you feel like you have to decide over the entire rest of your writing life and your kingdom purpose by next week.
Instead, ask this Lord, show me what faithfulness looks like in this season.
See, you're asking God what obedience looks like right now in the season you're in with the capacity you have.
Perhaps you'll hear him say keep writing and change nothing.
Maybe you'll hear keep writing but slower or in a different form or for someone new.
You may even hear God say that this particular thing has finished its season and what feels like an ending is him turning the page to a chapter you haven't read yet.
Every one of those can be faithfulness.
Your job this week isn't to make a decision,
it's to ask and then to listen.
I'll be praying you hear his voice this week and that whatever he says, you find peace in knowing you brought it to him instead of deciding it all by yourself.
If you need help knowing what God wants you to leave behind and you want to seek out his vision and his direction for your writing Life,
go to anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive he's there waiting for you.
Meet him there.
May your pen stay faithful, your roots grow deep and every word you write bear fruit for his glory.
© 2026 Urcelia Teixeira. All rights reserved. This episode and its accompanying materials may not be reproduced, republished, transcribed, or adapted without written permission.
