It sounds a bit like Lucky Charms cereal, but I’m in no way referring to food. Follow the links . . . it can be taken many different ways, but for the purposes of this blog I am referring to our sermon from yesterday.

So, after several weeks of rotating horrible sickness amongst ourselves, we finally managed to return to church (much to the kids’ disappointment).

Upon walking into the doors we were met with tables set-out, and they were strewn with books boasting the title “Dream Big, Think Small”.

“Oh boy, here we go,” I thought to myself, tinged with a bit of jealousy over how often our Pastor manages to publish a book (about once a year). It seemed like the mantra for my whole weekend was “follow your dream”. Not that my weekend was awesome, oh no, it was many shades of depressing.

So, for the next few weeks, our Pastor will be preaching, ahem, from his OWN book. If you are interested in watching yesterday’s sermon, you can visit www.adabible.org .

Yesterday’s sermon was on following the links in your life to reach a set goal. Referring back to a passage in Proverbs about how the ants toil all summer to save up for the winter, Pastor Jeff explained that goals that seem impossible are best accomplished by small steps, one day at a time. You add day after day, after day — link after link, after link until you have a chain. “Don’t break the chain”.

The sermon helped me feel justified — Erik had been complaining the other morning that I was STILL waking up at 5am to go out into the dog kennel to write. “Why? What are you DOING out there, I thought you were finished!”

I’m not breaking the chain, that’s what I’m doing. Because if I’m ever going to HOPE to get something published, I have to keep putting in the time. I have to keep writing blog posts to improve my chain of thoughts, I have to keep editing my books, I have to keep searching out agents.

IF I SLEEP IN, it breaks the chain. I’m less motivated to get up the next morning. Granted, maple syrup season is hard to get up at 5am since I’m usually up until midnight . . . but I think last year I DID . . . I just took afternoon naps!

The other reason I’m up so early, as evidenced Saturday morning when my son ALSO woke-up early, is “quiet time”. This is the ONLY time I get in the day to just SIT and relax with my thoughts. I’m NOT thinking about the 50 things I need to do, or feeling too sleepy, OR BEING HARASSED BY FAMILY.

Since I still worked a bit on writing/website stuff yesterday, I had to sit inside at the table while my (almost) 4 yr old whined on the sofa. Getting the day off to a bad start sets the mood for the day. If I can’t clear my brain out the first 2 hours of waking-up, I’m going to be grumpy.

Going-on to the bad news . . . .

Pastor Jeff said (according to some sort of study), it usually takes 3-5 years to see that goal completed. 3-5 years of chain-making.

Not that I want to hear that, but it did make sense. Many first-time authors I talked to said it took 5+ years of working on a book to see it published. But I’m pushing all time-related factors out of my head, and just focusing on getting things to where they need to be, and finding the right agent for them. If I thought this would take me 2 more years, I’d probably have a nervous breakdown.