I Should Be Writing Something

From a young age I loved reading and the opportunity to string words together myself onto a piece of paper. While I thought of it as fun, I never thought of it as a calling on my life. I grew up knowing who Jesus was very well, raised in church and spending regular time in Sunday school. But as I have written in a previous blog post, I experienced a lot of unkindness growing up in school. A lot of cruel words and actions were directed at me, and by the time I started changing into a young lady, my self worth was in the negative and I was depressed to the point of regularly contemplating my own death. My parents knew a guy from my dad's work who was a pastor and a professional counselor. They took me to see him and my life was saved because He got me to understand from my heart the depth of God's love for me, and that my value did not depend on what others thought. When I went to a vacation Bible school that summer, I realized I couldn't remember a time in my life that I prayed to say that I accepted Jesus as my personal savior, and I went forward at the alter and did just that. From that time forward, all I knew was that I wanted to help other people the way I was helped through the knowledge of God and how great is His love for us. I dreamed of mission trips around the world to proclaim the Gospel among the nations. I dreamed of getting myself a college degree that would allow me to change a life the way my counselor changed mine. I always had empathy for others. Surely God would use my compassion to save someone else. I enrolled into my first basic psychology class without a shadow of a doubt what my degree would be in that first semester of college. And I hated it. HATED. I hated it and the mumbo jumbo I thought my professor was teaching so badly that I dropped the class, and picked up something general instead until I could decide what on earth I was going to do with myself now. Now what would I do to change the world?

I recall very clearly one dearly loved professor that taught me during my first two years of college. He taught English and writing classes, and the classes brought back to me the joy I had experienced all through my education every time I had a chance to write anything, whether it was a book report, a poem, a biography or a short story. I got easy As on those assignments, and this professor encouraged me every time he handed me back a graded paper, telling me that it was so good and how he had enjoyed reading it. I thought back to other people I had admired over the years telling me they thought I was skilled in my writing. And it finally struck me that writing was possibly what I was meant to do. I changed my major to journalism, because at that time I believed the media had the ability to bring about positive change in the world and serve as a protection of sorts for our society. I could change the world a little bit at a time through the written word. I wanted to move to some suburb of some city and write feature stories about things that mattered for a magazine. But life rarely ever goes the way we envision it will. Just as with the original dreams of world travel and psychology degrees, I learned that God had planted different purposes within me, and that He would use the circumstances of my life to encourage people in different ways than I ever could have thought up. The man I wanted to marry and I decided that it was best to stay close to our family, who all lived right here in small town, USA. So instead of a widely circulated magazine, my job was at a local newspaper. While I hated the "hard news" stuff, because my heart hurt where someone was killed in an accident or their home had caught fire, I did love writing features about the treasures found in local communities and positive things people had done. I loved bringing light to needs that got charities and missionaries to receive checks in the mail. I felt like sometimes, having that bi-line in the paper with my strung together words was making a difference.

But when my husband and I finally had our first child, we discovered in his first year of life that parenthood wasn't going to look the way we thought it would either. We were still trying to nail down his diagnosis when I knew I had to leave my job and be his mom, therapist and teacher full time.

 Little did we know when we decided to stay here that Lucas would come along with the needs he had and every service he could possibly need would be right here in this county. We have been surprisingly well provided for when it comes to his therapy and education. I think God knew we were planted where we needed to be. But as the days were filled with all his necessary activities, my writing about much of anything came to a stop. I did get to attend local autism events and write about them on a freelance basis for a while, but then all my acquaintances at that local paper moved on to other things, autism conferences at a local college were no longer offered, and I had nothing I could write about for publication any more. When my son started kindergarten, I tried starting a blog. I wrote on it pretty regularly and then gave it up when it didn't get much of a following. I didn't see the value in putting the effort in for so few people to read it. Fast forward a few more years to dealing with my mother's illness and having a second baby, and having a minute to write more than a social media post was pretty much impossible.

Before that though, I had seen the joy of having my name in a book, and even on the cover of another. Someone I know was asking for submissions for an a book that shared stories of living with depression and perhaps overcoming it. I was so happy to share my story of how all those years ago, God rescued me, and how over the years, whenever depression came back for me, He was my way out. He always helped me have what I needed to beat it.
After that, a dear friend of mine was writing a book about the state of the church in America and asked me to help him. I was super excited and also terrified when he told me to run with a little of it largely on my own. Because there is always that inner chatter about not being good enough. But I did finish. The book was edited and published and distributed, and I have to say, receiving any royalties, small as they may have been in the scope of books published, was very cool.

This friend of mine, who knows me better than most people as he has been my spiritual mentor and like another dad to me, he often has a question for me on the occasions we got together in person.
Have you done any writing lately? And with the complete understanding that he thought I should be using my gift, I usually sheepishly said no.
When I listen to anything for personal development and hear people talking about the importance of creativity and asking me to consider the purpose I may have by thinking of what I want to create, I always feel convicted that what I want to create most is inspiration for others through written words. So again, I blog a little. For a really small crowd most of the time, anywhere from 20 to 800 max views on my posts. But I read something by a girl named Rachel Hollis recently and she said how writing was her must do also, and she said that she learned that she needed to write for herself, not for others. Write for yourself! Another podcaster and author I listen to, Emily Freeman, said the exact same thing on an episode of The Next Right Thing. She added to the sentiment that we who write or create anything need to do it for an audience of One. God. Wow, I felt the moving of the Holy Spirit trying to communicate to me that He gave me a gift and I have declined to find the time or the motivation to use it. I have had it in my heart that I need to write a book about health and all that I have learned in recent years on how to best care for our health. Some of the things I have learned were so shocking to me, and I know that the majority of people are unaware that they have the power to prevent or reverse so many of the commonly suffered with conditions that occur at such high levels in our country. But the negative inner chatter rises up every time I consider the possibility of writing my own book. I don't know how to publish it....nobody will want to....I am a nobody so nobody will pick up a book written by me....nobody cares what I have to say.....on and on and on. But for the first time ever I feel confident in telling that inner voice to shut up. I have heard the message God wanted me to receive, and I am 100 percent sure that if I have reversed an autoimmune disease through life style change alone, if it's true that maybe my mom did not have to develop dementia or even ALS, and if other people I love didn't have to stop doing all the things they once enjoyed in life because of failing health, it would be wrong for me not to tell people that. I was given a gift by God, I got the education to know how to use it, I have learned how to interview the experts on a topic and I used to do it for a living. Just because life turned out differently than expected and I am busy being a mom is no excuse not to use what I have and share my message. So this is me, promising to myself and whomever decides to skim through this, that I will spend a few minutes of every morning writing something. Because now I really see it clearly, I should be writing something.