The Difference Between Hustle and Abiding: What Writers Need Most

From Edie: Heidi McGill helps writers discover the difference between hustle and abiding, and learn why writers need God's presence more than productivity to overcome burnout, find peace, and write with purpose.

The Difference Between Hustle and Abiding: What Writers Need Most

by Heidi McGill @HeidiGrayMcGill

What a Diagnosis, a Rage, and a Surprising Peace Taught Me About Showing Up for God

I was furious with God.

The retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis came with a timeline I did not ask for and a future I could not control. I had young daughters. A full life ahead of me. And now the slow certainty that I would lose my sight, degree by degree, until it was gone.

Anger did not keep me from habit, though. Every day I opened my Bible, spent a cursory amount of time in the Word, thanked God for my blessings, petitioned Him on behalf of others, and closed with the request I knew He would not grant. I wanted my sight back.

Day in and day out, I hustled through my time with God. I showed up. I checked the boxes. I said the right things in the right order. But I was not abiding. I was performing, and somewhere underneath the performance, the anger still burned.

Then one morning I could not pray.

I had just finished reading a passage and did not know what it said. The words had moved through my eyes and stopped somewhere before they reached my heart. And something inside me snapped.

What came out of my mouth next would have earned a thorough mouth washing had I said it to my mother. I railed at God. Snot flew. Spit flew. My voice rose, and my composure shattered. I told Him how unfair it all was, in terms that left nothing unsaid. I wanted to see my daughters grow up and get married. I wanted to watch my grandchildren. I wanted to stand next to my husband and see the colors of a sunset.

When I exhausted myself, a peace like no other settled over the room.

I cannot say I heard God's voice. But He spoke to my heart as if He had.

Heidi, you don't need your eyes to see those things. You'll know the quality of your sons-in-law by how they treat your daughters. Your influence on your grandsons will be the same, and perhaps more, than if you still had your sight. And those sunsets, you don't need to see the colors to experience the moment with your husband.

That was the moment I understood the difference between hustle and abiding.

What Hustle Actually Looks Like

Hustle in the spiritual life does not look like rebellion. It looks like obedience on the outside with nothing left on the inside. It is the cursory Bible reading, the petitions offered by rote, the quiet times that are neither quiet nor intimate. It is doing everything for God while doing very little with Him.

For writers, hustle wears convincing disguises. Deadlines, launch teams, platform expectations, marketing plans, and growth strategies are all legitimate parts of this calling. But when they crowd out communion with the One who gave the calling in the first place, productivity becomes a substitute for presence. We mine Scripture for content instead of seeking God for connection. We produce without abiding, and we run dry.

Burnout in a writer's life is not always dramatic. Sometimes it arrives as an inability to pray. Sometimes it looks like reading a passage and retaining nothing. Sometimes it is the low-grade guilt of knowing something is off but not being able to name it.

What Abiding Actually Looks Like

Jesus modeled something different. He withdrew from the crowds. He protected time with the Father before the demands of the day arrived. He said no to things in order to say yes to rest and obedience. He never rushed.

Abiding is not a productivity strategy. It is not a morning routine or a color-coded planner. It is the decision to come to God without an agenda, to sit in His presence long enough for something other than your own voice to rise.

For writers, it might look like starting a writing session with prayer that is not about the manuscript. Protecting one day from output and letting it become input. Asking God what He wants to say before deciding what you want to write.

Abiding produces words that mean something. Hustle just produces words.

The Peace That Follows an Honest Prayer

The prayer that changed everything for me was not my most composed or careful. It was the one where I stopped performing and started telling the truth. God was not offended. He was waiting.

He did not restore my sight. He restored my perspective. And what He said about my daughters, my grandsons, and the sunsets I would experience without seeing the colors has proven true in ways I could not have imagined that morning.

You do not have to have a diagnosis to understand the difference between hustle and abiding. You just have to notice whether you are showing up for God or showing up for the checklist. The checklist will never answer back. God will. Sometimes you just have to get honest enough to hear Him.

TWEETABLE

The Difference Between Hustle and Abiding: What Writers Need Most from @HeidiGrayMcGill on @EdieMelson (Click to Tweet)

Heidi Gray McGill is a Selah Award finalist and five-time NEST Award-winning author of Christian historical and contemporary fiction. Her Discerning God's Best series has earned over 3,500 five-star reviews on Amazon, where readers describe her work as "faith-filled fiction with flawed but lovable characters." She began her writing journey in March 2020, after retirement, proving that God's calling has no expiration date.

A sought-after encourager in the writing community, Heidi speaks and writes on the craft of storytelling, writing with biblical conviction, and reaching readers across generational and cultural divides. She is both independently and traditionally published, and she writes despite progressive vision loss, which has only sharpened her perspective on what it means to walk by faith and not by sight.

Connect with Heidi and receive a free prequel to her bestselling series at HeidiGrayMcGill.com.

Christian Fiction. Relatable Characters. Life-changing Stories. Fusing Faith and Fiction™