I hoped that somehow this proximity to Jane’s life would help me understand my own.  I kept a detailed journal of my trip, and came home glowing, only to be devastated by a serious and mysterious illness.  For days—months—I could do nothing.  I plunged into depression.

As I reflected on my trip in the midst of the silence and pain, I realized that Jane taught me something about the value of an ordinary life—things I’m not sure I could understand before I was stripped of being able to do even the ordinary. She did not want to be famous. She wanted to love her family and her friends, to live her faith rather than talk about it, to do good work, and tell good stories.

She enjoyed making money with her writing, and even developed a little jealousy, like any good writer. She felt Walter Scott should have been content enough with his success in poetry, without venturing into fiction.  “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones,” she joked.  “It is not fair.—He has Fame & Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.” I don’t think she ever knew that he owned several well-worn copies of her books.

And while Jane was—is—big, she never believed that being big was  important.

And these are the things I want for myself, the things that became more important after my own dark night where I learned that there’s no end to the grace of God—where it was big enough for every single day that I got up and could do nothing. It didn’t matter if I could never write again, if I could never work again. God did not love me because of anything I could do; this still astonishes me. He simply loves me. Me, me, me. Sitting on the couch or sobbing or staring vegetatively at the TV.

All my life I’ve been taught to rely on the grace of God and yet in practice I’ve tried to earn His love, and my own significance, by running and doing. So it was a measure of grace to not be able to run any longer, to simply be forced to ... be.

And this is the paradox, because this life—this loving your family and friends and doing good work and telling good stories life—may feel small, but it is far from ordinary. 

It is the best life, the extraordinary life.  It was Jane’s, and I hope it will be mine.

Adapted from A Walk with Jane Austen.  Copyright © 2007 by Lori Smith.  Used by permission.  WaterBrook Press, Colorado Springs, CO.  All right reserved. 

Lori Smith is a full-time freelance writer whose first book, The Single Truth received widespread acclaim and was featured in a front page story in The New York Times. She has covered religion writing for Publishers Weekly since 2004, and her writing has been featured on Breakpoint.org and in Washingtonian magazine, Christian Single, and Discipleship Journal.  

Her second book, A Walk with Jane Austen (WaterBrook Press), will be available in Ocotber 2007.  Tracing the steps of her literary hero Jane Austen, Lori explores universal themes of love, heartache, community, independence, creativity, a woman’s place in the world, and the rarely primed subject of Jane’s faith—and Lori’s own.