Making Room for Writing

Well, here it is--the weekend, Saturday night. I admit it: I was feeling a bit down awhile ago because Joey was called into emergency surgery this evening, and Addie and I spent the majority of the night fighting over bedtime. (Yes, my eight month old picked a fight with me--and nearly won--over bedtime.) As I washed dishes and picked up the house, she was screaming, my back was aching, my head started to spin at the thought of the laundry list of things I had to get done in the next few weeks (real or imagined), and I began to feel guilty that I hadn't spent time writing in awhile, which turned into feeling like I was a big failure at life. (You know how the swirl happens.)

Addie eventually settled down, and not long after I managed to get the dishes dried and put away, it occurred to me that I had a quiet house all to myself, something which doesn't happen very often since we're living with my parents and my brother at the moment. I found myself confronted with, well, myself. Just me, no one else. Alone. I crave alone time, but I don't get much of it these days. It dawned on me that I could do whatever I wanted to tonight. I could even sit down and spend some time writing if I wanted to. But then suddenly I thought of a million reasons why I shouldn't write, the main one being the question, "What would I write about anyway?". I gave those reasons too much weight tonight, but the good news is that I overcame them. (You're reading the proof.)


This isn't the first time I've had to force myself to write. It probably won't be the last, either. It's not because I don't like writing, because I do. I love writing.  In fact, I often feel like it's one of the few places I feel the most comfortable in my own skin. Even so, making the time and space to write is a discipline because it feels frivolous to me sometimes, like I am whiling away the hours when there are a million other things I "should" be doing, and since writing is something I love doing, it must be unessential. 

But I know the truth: the truth is that it's not frivolous. It's not a waste of time. It's important, and I need to do it--even if it's only for myself. The problem is, I'm still figuring out what to write, exactly, which is why I often have to force myself to write. Believe it or not, a good majority of the posts I have collected here are the fruit of forcing myself to sit down and do the thing I love. More often than not, I don't plan what to write before I sit down to write it.

And yet, somehow when I set aside time to escape from the swirl of the world around me that never seems to stop otherwise, when I intentionally choose to give attention to the things that have been quietly clamoring for my attention, words begin to flow out of me, words that I wasn't aware of before, and that creates peace deep in my spirit because I know I am doing the thing that makes me come alive.

You would think that it would be easy to make the time for such a thing, right? The problem is, I've bought into the lie, the one that tells me that I have nothing to say, and even if I did, it wouldn't really matter. It's the same lie that makes me second guess myself, the one that tells me I'm unoriginal, ill-equipped, uninteresting.
  
I admit that I have let that lie cripple me. I wrote about it not so long ago, didn't I? The identity crisis I experienced was borne straight out of that. But I've come to realize that the lie was keeping me from being my true self, which is such a waste of a gift. Not using the gift that God gave me is just as good as handing it right back to Him and saying, "No, thanks," isn't it? It makes me think of instances when I have given a gift, one that I thought for sure the recipient would love to receive, only to find that they didn't love it, because if they did, they would have used it. Sure, they said plenty of "thank you's" and "I love it's" to make me feel like I gave a good gift, but isn't it so much more meaningful when the person to whom you give a gift puts it to visible use? When you give a friend a piece of jewelry, doesn't it make you happy to see her wearing it? Or when you give your brother a CD, don't you like it when you hear him listening to it?

In the same way, I want my life--writing or otherwise--to be an expression of gratitude to the One who gave me the gift, and I want to make Him smile when he sees me basking in the joy that comes from using it.

So, I guess that if I have to force myself to write once in awhile, so be it. It's better than not using my gift at all.

I'm back and (perhaps) better than ever.

Well, I’m back.

And to my frustration, none of the things I thought I’d be saying today are coming out at the moment. I have been sitting here tinkering with the keys on this keyboard for the past several minutes, and I have ended up deleting much of what I’ve written because this morning, nothing seems to really communicate the things I want to say.

So, instead of over-analyzing this setback and beating myself up over it, I’m letting it go and letting my hands loose. Sometimes when I let them do the work, they just go, clicking away so fast that I lose track of them, and before I know it, there are things on the page I hadn’t planned to put there.

In the end, those are the moments I relish, the moments when something comes out of me that I did not know was there, and when confronted with a blinking cursor the next time around, I remind myself that it is not a writer’s curse. A blinking cursor doesn’t mean the words have run out; it is a signal that something is in progress. It is a signal that when the next thought is formed, it will be ready to act. A blinking cursor is not a curse. It is a patient friend.

I have realized over the past few weeks (in large part to those of you who were so kind to encourage me) that the words I write are important because they are mine. Shocking, isn’t it? One would think I’m a little nutty if I am only now figuring that out. But I can’t help it—it was revealing to me. These words represent thoughts all my own, thoughts that are unique and meaningful because they represent something real—they represent me, my thoughts, my life, my interests, my choices, my perspective.

But in a world obsessed with self, I sort of panicked that if I continued to write about my own little world that I would seem self-involved to the outside observer. In a celebrity-obsessed world where ordinary folks are vying for a moment in the spotlight, I find myself questioning how much of what I see of them is real. Even on blogs, I am left wondering how much of it is for show and how much of it is real. I don’t want to leave anyone wondering if what I post here is real or not. I don’t want to create a façade, or make my life seem more perfect than it actually is. I don’t want to seem like I think I am more important than I actually am, and yet, I found myself long for significance. How do you marry those two thoughts? Not wanting to seem self-important and wanting to be significant at the same time?

In the end, I realized this: what I say matters, not because I am something important on my own, but because Jesus made me something special, and he has called me to do exactly the thing I fear most: bring Him glory by being who He created me to be.

Here is my pledge: I won’t pretend here. What you read, what you see—it will all be a real taste of who I am as I learn to live out the gifts He’s given me.

So here I am, an open book. Feel free to read.