things I resonate with

I've been reading Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle and it seems tonight that every couple pages I want to scream, "yes!  yes!" because I resonate with it.

This, this is sort of how I feel with the career thing:

     "There's [a] New Yorker cartoon that shows a woman opening the door of her house to a friend.  We look through the door, and in the back of the house a man is writing at a typewriter, with a large manuscript piled on the desk beside him.  The friend asks, "Has your husband found a job yet?  Or is he still writing."
     "A successful businesswoman had the temerity to ask me about my royalties, just at the time when my books were at last making reasonable earnings.  When told, she was duly impressed, and remarked, "And to think, most people would have had to work so hard for that."  I choked over my tea not wanting to laugh in her face.
     "A young friend of mine was asked what she did, and when she replied that she was a poet, the inquirer responded, amused, "Oh, I didn't mean your hobby." 

(Walking on Water, pg. 109 in her chapter on Names and Labels.)

 When asked who I am, I am an artist.  It is not a hobby, it is a way of living.  What do I do?  I make stuff, and to help make ends meet I work at a recreation center.  I know in my previous blog entry I mentioned my dissatisfaction with this, but the main dissatisfaction is in feeling that what I do is not a mainstream choice - I don't have a normal career like teaching, or nursing, or administration, or something in the sciences - I don't bring in very much money in what I do - and that somehow because of that I have failed.  But I shouldn't care how I am viewed in the eyes of the world.  I know it isn't the choice that brings in a lot of money, but it is a conscious choice.  I want to work part time because I need the space to create and to live and be and figure out this life thing that God has given me.  How can I live it and to the full?  I believe God provides, he always has and always will.  I have these moments of doubt when I am living outside of belief or maybe momentarily forget God's promises.  He created me to create.  I don't care about having a lot of money, I care about having enough.  God grants this, and more.  Not in the ways I expect, but in the ways I need, in the ways that fill my heart and soul to overflowing.