73 | The Hardest Word in a Kingdom Writer's Vocabulary

There's a word most Christian authors say they believe in. They underline it in their Bibles. They nod at it in sermons. And then they go home and hold on to their author lives with both hands.

Surrender.

In this Good Friday episode, I'm taking you to the garden of Gethsemane — to the night before everything fell apart — and to the five words Jesus prayed that changed everything. Not just for the world, but for what it means to be a Kingdom writer trying to be faithful with something they can't fully control.

Because surrender at a writing desk doesn't look like giving up. It doesn't look like passivity. And it's not a one-time event. Today we talk about what it actually looks like — practically, honestly, daily — to say "not my will, but yours" over your author life.

"Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." — Luke 22:42

👉 Listen now to uncover the secret to becoming an anointed scribe!

Transcript

If you're listening to this episode, the Day it goes live, then today is Good Friday.

And I want to use this opportunity to talk about the hardest word in the Christian author's vocabulary.

Not marketing,

not consistency,

not even faith surrender.

Because Jesus said it in a garden the night before everything fell apart.

Not my will, but yours. And I've been thinking about what it actually means to say that at a writing desk, as a Christ following writer on a mission for Jesus,

as a writer writing with a kingdom purpose.

Not in theory,

not as a nice idea, but as a daily, practical, sometimes painful act of letting go.

If you've been holding on tightly to your author life,

to the results,

the timeline, the version of success you've been working toward,

this episode is for you, my friend.

Grab your favourite beverage, sit back and take a listen.

This is the Anointed Scribe Podcast.

I'm Urcelia Teixeira, ex real estate agent turned award winning Christian fiction author.

When I wrote my first novel on a bucket list whim, I had no idea it would spark a spiritual journey that would redefine my calling. But you know what friend?

Self publishing wasn't easy. I got caught in the hustle, chasing rankings and sales while desperately trying to stay rooted in Christ.

Now, by God's grace, I'm building my author business his way. And now he's called me to help you do the same.

Welcome to the Anointed Scribe Podcast where faith meets business for Christian writers. Let's write, publish and grow our author business God's way. Are you ready? Well then, let's get started.

Hey, it's your author friend, Urcelia. And welcome to the Anointed Scribe Podcast.

If you're joining me for the first time today, of all the days to find this podcast, you picked a really special one.

So welcome to the Anointed Scribe tribe, friend.

I'm so glad you are here today and to my regulars, it's awesome to have you back. As always,

friends, I hope wherever you are today you have a little space to breathe and reflect on what this holy day is all about. And my prayer for you is that the message of the cross brings you comfort and peace throughout this weekend.

Before I get into today's episode though, I want to actually just mention that I pre recorded today's episode and honestly,

I went back and forth about whether to release it today at all.

Good Friday is one of the most sad sacred days in the Christian calendar and the last thing I want is for a podcast episode about the author business to pull your attention away from what Jesus did on the cross.

But then I felt this nudge and I couldn't shake it. Because if there was ever a weekend where the sacrifice of the cross and what God is calling us to do as Christian writers could be fused together into something meaningful,

then it would be this one.

So here we go.

I hope today's conversation honours both for you.

No strategies today, no marketing, no work.

We're just going to have a conversation about one word that I think most of us say we understand and then spend the rest of our author lives conveniently avoiding it.

And that word is surrender.

I want to take you to a garden.

It's the night before the crucifixion.

Jesus has just shared what would be his last meal with his disciples.

He knows what's coming and he goes to Gethsemane, this quiet olive grove just outside of Jerusalem,

and he falls on his face before God.

And what he prays in that moment is one of the most raw,

honest things in all of scripture.

Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me.

Take this cup from me,

I want you to sit with those words for a second.

Because this is Jesus,

fully God, fully man.

And he is asking for a different outcome.

He's not pretending the cup doesn't exist.

He's not performing spiritual composure for the disciples watching nearby.

He's on the ground on his hands and knees,

experiencing extreme agony, sweating drops of blood, according to Luke 22:44.

And he is asking God if there is another way. Way that wasn't Jesus being weak.

That was the most honest prayer ever prayed.

And then Jesus says the second half in verse 42,

yet not my will, but yours be done.

Not my will, but yours.

Five words. And they changed everything.

Not just for the world, but. But I think for what it means to live as a called person,

as someone who says yes to God and is still figuring out what that costs as kingdom writers who can't always control the results. Right,

but here's the thing. Most of us know this verse and we say we believe in surrender. We nodded it in sermons,

we sing it during worship, we underline it in our Bibles,

and then we slip in behind the desk come Monday morning and hold onto our author lives with both hands.

So before we talk about what surrender looks like in practice,

I want to clear something up first, because I think we've been taught a version of surrender that isn't quite right.

And it's been making this word and this act of faith feel so much heavier than it needs to.

Surrender is not giving Up.

Jesus didn't give up in Gethsemane. He didn't walk away from the assignment.

He didn't decide the calling was too hard and went home.

He surrendered the outcome,

the how, the when, the what. This is going to cost me to God.

And then he got up and he walked toward it.

See, surrender is not passive. It's not sitting back and doing nothing and calling it. Trust.

Jesus prayed. And then what did he do? He moved.

Nehemiah survived the rubble and then what did he do? He built. He built the wall.

Surrender is not the absence of action.

It's the reordering of who's in charge of the results.

And here's another thing. Surrender is not. It's not a one time event.

I used to think it was. I thought you surrendered your author life to God once,

maybe at a conference, maybe on your knees, in your office,

maybe at church on Sundays, and then it was done, right?

But that's not how it works. Surrender is daily,

sometimes hourly.

Every decision,

every task. It's a posture you return to again and again.

Not a box you tick off once and forget about.

I want to tell you what surrender looked like in my own author life. Not the pretty version,

the real one.

For a long time, I thought I had surrendered my writing to God. I prayed over my books, I asked for his guidance.

I dedicated my work to Him. And I meant all of it. Every word.

But what I hadn't surrendered was the results.

I was holding on, white knuckled to a specific vision of what success was supposed to look like.

A certain number of readers, a certain level of recognition,

a certain income. And I had internally decided, without ever saying it out loud,

that if those things didn't happen,

something had gone wrong. Something had to be wrong, right?

That God had either not come through for me or I had somehow missed the mark.

And so every low book sales month felt like it was proof of me failing.

Every book launch that didn't perform and yield the results I expected felt super personal.

Every author who passed by me felt like a sign that I didn't have what it takes and that I didn't belong.

But see, secretly, I was still holding on tightly to a specific version of what success was supposed to look like.

What I was doing looked like me saying, not my will, Lord, but yours. But underneath,

underneath the praying,

underneath the right language and going through the right motions,

I was still trying to be in control of the results,

of the outcomes. I hadn't actually let go. I just wrapped my control in spiritual language and called it Surrender.

But the moment I actually surrendered, and I mean the moment I opened my hands and said, God, the results are yours, the timeline is yours. Even the level of impact is yours.

Something shifted in that moment.

Not in my sales number, not immediately, but in me.

The weight lifted, the pressure lifted. Not all at once,

but enough that I could breathe again,

enough that I could sit down to write without needing the book to perform in a specific way to justify my calling.

That's what surrender does. It gives you your author life back because you stop needing it to be something specific in order to feel okay.

So what does this look like, practically, for us as Christian writers? Because I don't want this to stay in the abstract.

I want you to walk away from today's episode with something real,

something that resonates, something for you to think about and pray about.

Surrender starts with putting God first. The second you wake up spending time with him,

just you and God.

Surrender at a writing desk looks like opening your laptop without first checking your sales numbers to decide how you feel about that day.

It looks like finishing a chapter and feeling something close to peace about it.

Not because you know it will perform,

but because you wrote it faithfully and you're trusting God with what happens next.

Surrender means sending a newsletter to a small list and meaning every word of it, not performing for numbers you wish were bigger, but genuinely speaking to the people who are actually doing there.

Surrender looks like watching other authors have breakthrough launches and being able to celebrate them properly without the sting, without the jealousy, without the envy, because you've stopped measuring their success against your progress.

Surrender looks like sitting with peace in a slow season, without clutching at straws and running in circles to figure out how to fix it.

And sometimes surrender looks like writing a book that God asked you to write,

even when every market signal tells you it won't sell and you're at peace with it, too, because you've decided that obedience is the real assignment and that the results are up to God.

Friend. Here's what I've come to believe.

Every called author has a Gethsemane moment.

A moment where what God is asking costs something real.

Where the cup in front of you is not what you would have chosen.

Where you have to decide consciously, honestly, whether you're going to hold on to your version or let it go.

Maybe your Gethsemane moment is releasing a book into a highly competitive market and trusting God with a reach.

Maybe it's walking away from a genre or a direction you've invested years in because you sense God redirecting you.

And as what happened in my case, the cost of that pivot is enormous. Maybe that's surrendered to you.

Maybe it's staying faithful to a small platform for longer than what feels reasonable,

writing for the 50 readers you have that are already there instead of performing for thousands you wish were on your subscribers list.

Maybe it's letting go of the timeline entirely,

the one where you'd be further along by now, the one where a certain thing would have happened by a certain age, Right?

Releasing the schedule you'd written for your author life and trusting that God's version, even if it looks nothing like yours, is better.

Whatever the cup is,

whatever you've been holding onto that you haven't quite been able to release,

I want to invite you today, on this Good Friday to say the prayer,

not my will,

yours,

not my timeline,

yours,

not my definition of success,

yours.

And then get up and keep writing.

Because that's what Jesus did. He prayed the hardest prayer. And then he got up and carried that cross and walked toward the assignment with his eyes firmly fixed on God the Father.

Friend Good Friday reminds us that what looks like the end is seldom truly the end.

What looked like defeat on a Friday became the foundation of everything on a Sunday.

And I think that's true in your writing life too. That the seasons that feel like you're going nowhere,

the slow book launches, the no writing days,

the months where it seems your KDP numbers aren't growing,

they are not the end of your story.

They are often the place where the most important thing is happening.

The thing that can't be rushed or manufactured or forced into existence.

The place where God is calling you to hand over the pen,

to take his hand and trust that he's got it handled.

So today, on Good Friday, wherever you are, take a moment,

put down the laptop,

step away from the to do list and just be with him.

He knows what he's doing with your books.

He knew before you wrote the first paragraph.

Trust that friend. If today's episode stirred something in you, if you found yourself thinking, yes, this is exactly where I am, I want you to know you don't have to keep circling the same mountain.

There comes a point where working harder and more information aren't the answer.

What's needed is a step by step,

spirit led journey that takes you from knowing what do to wrong to actually fixing it from the inside out. From the foundations up.

The revive to thrive way is that journey. It's not another strategy. It's not another checklist. It's you.

God and the work that actually moves things forward at your own pace, in your own time.

If you sense this might be your next step, head to anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive .