“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed, my hands flying to my cheeks. “Ellen means light?”

She looked confused (and who can blame her?). Yes, she said, her name means light.

“That is so cool!” I practically jumped up and down.

She was a very gracious woman. She simply said thank you and then continued the conversation without commenting on what a weirdo I am.

The reason I was so excited about Ellen meaning light is that my novel’s main character has a secret name, given her by her grandmother, because the grandmother sees that this girl will be full of light. The secret name?

Ellewyck. Which looks a whole lot like Ellen.

Only I didn’t know when I named Ellewyck that her name was related to one that meant light. The novel takes place in 3rd century Wales, so when I was trying to create this girl’s name, I looked up the Welsh word for light. It’s llewych, which looks in English like the sound you make when snarfing snot into your throat. Not exactly what I was going for. Of course, in Welsh it’s pronounced something like thloo-wick, but that’s still not a very attractive sound. Besides, what American reader would know that’s how to pronounce it? So I fiddled with it until I came up with a word that sounded sort of similar, but looked like it could be a girl’s name.

And now I find out that this name really does mean light. Go figure.

I wanted to close this post with some words from Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water, something to the effect of our work being smarter than we are, but I couldn’t find that quote. What I found instead was this, which feels like a big hug from God, an affirmation of my writing: “When the words mean even more than the writer knew they meant, then the writer has been listening. And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.”

Bring on the adventure! And should this book ever come into print, I will take a copy to Ellen and explain why I was such a weirdo that Sunday she met me.

But as I worked, I was held in the hand of God, my work inspired by the Spirit of God breathing life into the words that sometimes poured generously across the page and sometimes had to be wrenched and wrestled there.

Let me be specific. My book is an introduction to the church year. Each chapter corresponds to one of the eight major seasons or days of the Christian calendar. The two chapters I was most dreading were Epiphany and Pentecost because these are not seasons but rather single days, and I wondered how I would ever find enough to say about them to fill a chapter.

The Epiphany chapter, particularly, gave me fits. I wrote and found nothing usable, so I wrote again with the same result. It took me 12 of my 16 hours to even find a gem I could use to provide direction for the chapter. But once I did, the writing flowed, and in just a few days I was able to finish the whole chapter, piecing in material I’d written—and written off—in those frustrating days of what seemed like wasted writing time.

Months later, when I got my editor’s comments back, guess which chapter he wanted me to significantly revise? Yep, Epiphany. He particularly wanted me to change the opening story and suggested moving one of two anecdotes from within the chapter to its beginning. Again this chapter gave me fits. I went through eight drafts, using various iterations of my editor’s suggestions before one line—one line!—from the chapter morphed into a story, and that story fit the themes of the chapter far better than I could have ever dreamed.

As I look back, I see dozens of instances like this one, where I felt like I was getting nowhere, banging my head against a wall of words, none of which were yielding to let me through to the road I knew was on the other side. But all that head-banging was not wasted, however painful it was at the time.

I think often of Jesus’ words to his disciples after they feed the 5000: “Gather up the fragments, that nothing may be lost” (John 6:12). Indeed, nothing was. Nothing is. Amazing, that.