I spent my childhood in my own world of daydreams.  While some children have imaginary friends when I was a child I created whole planets far away and untouched by war, want and all the things I knew weren’t right in this world.  This perfect place was my refuge from the mundanity of school work and I would doodle pieces of this world inside my head creating stories and imagining rescue.  There were times in elementary school where I was actually disappointed when these grand designs didn’t come to life so that I could be swept away in front of my stunned classmates.

My dreamy ideals eventually began to fade into an interest in more practical designs.  I had spatial intelligence, in that I could easily imagine things in three-dimensional form and convert the thought with pencil to paper.  As I got older I became interested in computer-aided design, I learned quickly how to convert the ideas in my brain to keystrokes and with my fingers I would build things on the screen.  It was very satisfying to hold a finished work printed on paper to show friends or family.  I had assumed at that point that my future would be engineering, design was natural to me, but life and God had other plans.

For various reasons my vision to be a mechanical engineer never was realized and with that came a sense of something missing and potential unrealized in my life.  It troubled me not being who I was ‘supposed’ to be, it was a little humiliating too to watch friends and classmates sprint past me to their own goals.  And, it was this need to fill a thirst to build, design or create that eventually pricked my interest in writing as an outlet.  A writer is an engineer with words; an author is defined as an originator or the one who gave existence to something and I wanted to use words to create snap shots of the ideas flying around my head.

Since then I have had mixed success sculpting words into interpretable sequences.  Writing to be understandable to another mind is sort of like trying to write code for a smart phone except you don’t know if you are dealing with an iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows phone or even if it is a smart phone at all.  Writing depends on both the author and interpreter to ‘be on the same’ page.  If the writer misses a line of code in trying to explain or if the writer and reader interpret the code of symbols we call language differently then the picture in the mind of the receiver created in words will be distorted and sometimes lost on them completely.

Needless to say, the challenge of communication of ideas with words is both frustrating at times and fulfilling for me.  When I sense a connection with another person through my written creations it is a wonderful feeling of accomplishment and especially when it encourages or inspires them to create new things in their own life.  In writing my ideas can live inside of other people, when I write the designs of my own mind are transferred to one or multiple others, thus a piece of me now lives in them and now has potential to grow to something more than I myself could ever have imagined.  Writing makes both the world of the reader and the writer bigger; the reader taking a part of the writer with them and the writer living in the mind of the reader.

To me that ability to build ideas makes the frustration of potential failures to communicate and the time spent drawing my thoughts out in paragraphs well-worth the effort.  I love to turn abstractions in my mind into appreciable designs, using words like my paint and dictionaries like a palette full of shades of color.  Writing is an art form, words give an author the power to create universes never seen before and the ability to live in the minds of those who are able to translate their work.  I write because I still like to create.  I write because I enjoy engineering solutions to problems and using words as a means to draw the designs put in my head.

Ideas change your reality so think of good designs and then build them with the means you have been given to express them.  Engineering is a field with endless possibilities, so build the good designs in your own mind and create the world you know should be.  So, bring heaven to earth one pen stroke, one act of kindness, one carried burden, one painted picture and one small step at a time.  Together, brick by brick we can build the world God intends.  If you pray “on earth as it is in heaven” with sincerity, then believe in it and make that design live through you; bring glory to God with the creative designer’s mind you have been given.

My writing is ultimately an act of worship to the Master Designer and Author of the universe; it is a means to love my fellow creation, to fellowship with them and to mirror my own Creator to them.  I write to love Master by loving the creation by expressing designs with the work of my mind, words and hands.  I create a new world with the ideas of my own mind, I am a child of my Father.  I, like God, am an engineer at heart.