The late writer Flannery O'Connor kept a devotional journal when she was in her twenties and a student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. It has recently been published under the title A Prayer Journal. O'Connor was a fervent Catholic and her journal is filled with interesting reflections on spirituality, as well as writing, which she saw as a way to express her spirituality and hopefully lead others to God. She laments early on that "I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside." Throughout the journal we witness an earnest young woman struggling heroically to be more pious, and striving to get out of God's way, i.e., how to get rid of the ego and let God fill up the space. Her simultaneous struggle to destroy the ego while seeking literary fame is sometimes the focus of her reflections, as when she says "Don't let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story, just like the typewriter was mine." God desires to work through all of us, through our words and our deeds, if we can only get our egos out of His way.
