It happened over near the lightbulb aisle. In Wal-Mart, where I spend way too much time. I was looking for sheetrock anchors to hang a picture frame on the wall of my new writing space. A few aisles over from where I needed to be.

“Excuse me,” a woman said to me. I glanced up from my list. Was she talking to me?

“Yes?” I looked up at her. She was white-haired, in her 70s perhaps, dressed in comfortable shopping wear.

“Can you reach something for me?” she asked, pointing to an aisle.

“Sure,” I answered, following her. I wasn’t sure if she’d said “read something for me” or “reach something for me,” but I figured I could help her with either task.

When I got to the aisle, I saw another woman with her, about the same age, with a cast on her arm. She looked a little forlorn, and both women began pointing to the top shelf.

“We’d like a couple of those pots up there. It’s just too high for us,” she explained. We were in the garden section, and she pointed to a row of turquoise ceramic planters.

I’m not that tall, but tall enough to reach the shelf. I pulled down a pot.

“We need two,” she told me.

“OK.” I handed her another one. “Is this all?”

She smiled. “That’s all we need. Thank you so much.” She gave one to her friend with the cast on her arm.

As I turned to walk away, I saw both women smiling, holding their matching spring pots, most likely imagining the flowers they’d soon put in them.

And then I felt God’s voice in my spirit, a voice I haven’t heard in a while. He said to me, “You reached something they couldn’t reach. You gave them something they needed.”

I remembered reading a quote earlier in the day, from a speech written by author Max Lucado on writing. He reminded writers that our words are important. Our words can reach places we can’t go, to countries far away, or to the deep crevices of people’s hearts, where they need something.

Lucado says:

Readers invite the author to a private moment. They clear the calendar, find the corner, flip on the lamp, turn off the television, pour the tea, pull on the wrap, silence the dog, shoo the kids. They set the table, pull out the chair and invite you, “Come, talk to me for a moment.”

I’ve had a lot of doubts in the past couple of years about my calling to write. Some days I don’t even have a chance to turn on the computer because I’ve put my calling as a mom in front of my personal dreams. But a few months ago, at my husband’s insistence, I signed up for another correspondence writing course, and God has given me a wonderful mentor, a woman who has successfully published several children’s novels, including one that was made into a Disney movie. So she knows her genre.

She said I’ve had a “crisis of confidence,” and I need to get back in there and keep at it. But I torment myself. Every time I read the words of a great writer, I think, “I can’t do that. I can’t write like her, or him.”

I reread To Kill a Mockingbird last month, and I thought, “Why should I even bother to try? Harper Lee has already written the master work.” And then there’s Madeleine L’Engle who gave us her strokes of genius, along with Catherine Marshall, Katherine Paterson, Lois Lowrey, Linda Sue Park, and all the others I admire.

But I know I heard it. That still small voice. “Can you reach something for Me?”

When those ladies needed help reaching the pots, I was there to help them. I’m not the tallest person around, or the strongest, or even one who’s an expert on gardening. But I was close by. I was the one who could give them the simple help they needed.

Harper Lee wrote one book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and it still sells millions of copies because it’s amazing and everybody loves it. But my nine-year-old doesn’t want to read it right now. She’s reading Prince Caspian, working her way through Narnia. Before that, she finished up Lisa Yee’s hilarious Millicent Min: Girl Genius.

A friend of mine says her daughter, unfortunately, “judges a book by its cover. She only wants to read books that look new and fresh and have cool covers.”

Back to my calling, that still small voice. Is there something I could write that might reach the heart of a child today? A story that connects with one place in one reader’s heart? Perhaps even a story that’s new and fresh and packaged in a cool cover?

Max Lucado says:

Accept it. We need your writing. This generation needs the best books you can write and the clearest thinking you can render. Pick up the pens left by Paul, John, and Luke. They show us how to write.

OK. So I’ll try to push through this “crisis of confidence.” I’ll try to hang in there when my computer is giving me problems and I don’t know how to get it fixed. I’ll get back to blogging, even though I don’t know if I’m really connecting with anyone out there. I’ll just do it anyway, when God puts something on my heart that won’t go away.

As I plow through writing my first novel, I know I face a hard road ahead. There will be rejections and disappointments, and maybe miles of nothing. Maybe my words will never amount to anything marketable.

But I see this sort of the same way I saw dating, back in my early 20s. I went through some heartache trying to find “the one,” but I never gave up completely. Sure, I went through periods of time where I took a break from playing the dating game and accepted my calling as a single. But deep in my heart, I knew, just knew that I wanted to be somebody’s wife and even further down the road, somebody’s mom. Those longings never went away, despite years of waiting and a myriad of frustrations.

So I go back to that deep secret place in my heart where I’ve known all my life I want to write children’s books. I go back to the dinner conversation about five or six years ago, at a Christmas party, when a friend I rarely see asked if I was still planning to write a children’s book.

Who, me?

I go back to my college journals, where I asked God, “Where do you want to send me? What do you want me to do with my life? Will I ever become a writer?”

And now I ask him those same questions, at a different season. I’ve been married to “the one” for almost sixteen years. My children are all here now. The house is quiet for a while, when they’re in school. I have a place to write. My computer works most of the time. I have a mentor who’s pushing me, encouraging me.

I have a draft of a novel I’ve been working on since 2004.

Can you reach something for me? she asked.

I told her yes.

And I did.