Does it matter if I write?

What difference does it make? I urgently need to know. More urgently, I need to know what difference it will make for me to write.

I guess I was born with a passion for words and writing. And if a person is born with an innate drive to do a thing (besides sin!) then I guess it's from God. So far I've only toyed with words...I used to dream up characters and tell myself stories about them (too lazy to write whole stories) and filled up notebooks with doodles and "plans" and paragraphs destined to abandonment. The stories just didn't come out right. The characters were two-dimensional, and words that sparkled so brightly inside were just drab rags on paper. Plus, none of my stories really had a plot. Dismal, but true.

Later I wrote poems, because they just fell out on their own without all that work and were mercifully acceptable without a plot :) I just had to use words, I had to get my thoughts OUT. And I've journaled and journaled (going on 27 I think.) It's a nice outlet, sometimes to the point of addiction :) Somehow, I just keep wondering...what does this have to do with God, with life, with people, with reality? With God's kingdom?

Deep down, I'm craving art, dying to convey something beautiful, significant, and valuble. Painting...Poetry...Music...Lace and Full Moons and Waltzes, played on a piano. Most of all people. Feelings. Why we do what we do and need what we need. How God somehow loves us, and what He did about it. It's a craving for beauty, actually. Beauty God created. Beauty He made me to "recreate," somehow. Whenever I hear the piano played, something wells up in me that wants to spread my fingers along those keys and send out a beautiful song. When I see shadows falling on trees in the woods, or picture something in my head I wish I could look at with physical eyes, I long to put my fingers to the brush...or at least a pen. I've tried, but to no use. I could practice, and learn...but the moment is always gone before I pursue the skill. But when words dance across my mind, and ideas conglomerate and float around like giant bubbles in a lava lamp, and I start pacing the floor and twisting my hair and generally becoming absent from the world for a moment...well, sometimes, just sometimes, I sharpen a pencil, dig out a journal, and write. And something is satisfied. The bursting and swelling inside is abated for a time.

This has happened less often lately. A spring is running low inside. Not dry completely, but low. When the subject of writing comes to mind, I stare at it blankly, confused, sometimes tempted to beat my head on the mental brick wall. I was meant to thread words together, somehow. I was meant to make them beautiful, to communicate beauty and God. I was meant to communicate a story to someone who knows it already, but couldn't put it into words themselves. But I have no plot, no characters, no setting, no history. All I have are these elusive words, phrases, and abstract ideas, trembling mirages that disappear as soon as I reach out to touch them.

Back in the spring, as I wondered how I'd pass the time this summer, I was explaining my flexible plans one day to someone who promptly replied: "You could write a book!" It was kind of a joking suggestion, but it stuck with me because that's precisely what I'd like to do now that I'm free of the demands of highschool. Write. Not a book, really, but something...a story.

If I knew that I could write with purpose, I would be able to write with passion. I'm tired of writing for myself. Scribbling up journals may be a great personal hobby, and a cheap alternative to therapy, maybe :) If the only benefit goes to me, though, what is the real worth of it? I want to write with a nobler vision, but I have no idea how anything I write might that help anyone. Especially poetry. What use is a poem? I mean, it's obviously an issue to consider because a good portion of the population thinks poetry is sentimental and useless anyway. For the rest of us who are somehow captivated by it...why is it worth our attention? Why do we somehow hold poetry up on a pedestal as a thing to be respected. Is it simply because the ancients wrote it that we think it's special? Are we just crazy? When I get to heaven, will it matter if I have written anything? Judging by the urgent tugging inside me, I have to say yes. But I have no idea why.