Tag Archives: writing

Clarity and Hope

17 Jan

I’ve been wanting to blog for the past couple of days but I’ve been [shocker] busy at work and [bigger shocker] busy outside of work this week. So here I am on a nice little Saturday, taking time to read the Bible, pray, and blog.

[Side note/Update: My resolutions for this year are going well. I did create a little reward system for meeting my goals each week and so far, I’ve been doing really well. The hardest thing has been to exercise 6 days a week (my body isn’t used to it) but other than that, I have been consistent in getting in the Word and praying daily as well as memorizing one verse a week. We won’t talk about eating… 🙂 I’m not expecting complete consistency there.]

Saturdays are my favorite day of the week. That’s why I would love to be a writer by vocation: every day could be a Saturday (except Sunday because I’d still have to go to church in the morning). But I love being able to get up early (today I got up at 7:30…I’ve been trying to get up relatively close to when I get up for work so that I don’t mess up my sleep cycle on the weekends) and eat breakfast, read the Bible, pray…just be very relaxed. It reminds me a lot of college. Every day was like this…I loved it back then too.

Anywho…can you tell I’m more upbeat today than I have been in some of my recent posts? (I was being a total Debbie Downer…but I was also being honest.) The reason for my mood/outlook change is that God has been faithful in giving me insight into the past few months.

I was living in my failures and sinfulness. Even though I “knew” I was forgiven, I was still carrying them around as my personal burden. Especially in my marriage. I saw my sin affecting Travis and I was terrified that I was going to ruin our marriage, drive him away–that’d we’d wake up one day in 15 years and realize we no longer knew each other at all…and that we’d be able to trace it back to something I did or said that set the ball in motion.

I was also hating myself. For sinning again and again. For (from my perspective) never learning or advancing. For being a coward and a hypocrite.

But this past week, I remembered that there are many stories in the Bible that depict God using sin or using people in spite of their sin to accomplish His purposes. That means I can’t thwart God’s will or purposes by my sin. That means He can make our marriage thrive even despite my constant threats to kill it. I was making my sin and failures all about me…when nothing is all about me. It’s all about Him. And HE is so much BIGGER than my sin. Who am I to think that my failures will deter Him from His will?

I also realized that I have been holding myself back from God. I felt like a failure and a pathetic sinner who would never learn. When reminded of God’s love,  a tiny voice inside me said, “Yeah but, I’m still doing X and struggling with Y. God’s love is great but first I want to stop doing all these things that I hate.” Silly girl, it’s God’s love that enables you stop doing all those things you hate.

BarlowGirl’s song “I Need You to Love Me” sums up my realizations well:

Why? Why are you still here with me?
Didn’t you see what I’ve done?
In my shame I want to run,
And hide myself.
Yeah, but it’s here I see the truth,
I don’t deserve you.

But I need you to love me,
And I, I won’t keep my heart from you this time.
And I’ll stop this pretending that I can,
Somehow deserve what I already have
I need you to love me

I, I have wasted so much time
Pushing you away from me.
I just never saw how you
Could cherish me.
Cause you’re a God who has all things,
And still you want me.

Your love makes me forget what I have been.
Your love makes me see who I really am.
Your love makes me forget what I have been.

My favorite line of that song is “Cause you’re a God who has all things, and still you want me.” Me, a sinner. Me, a girl trapped in self-pity. Me, an unremarkable person. You want me. You want me. You want me. How powerful each of those 3 little words is.

I have also been reading “God Has a Dream for Your Life” by Sheila Walsh. It’s a good book. Very easy reading. There are 2 passages that stand out to me regarding the whole questioning-life-and-purpose thing I’ve been going through for the past 6 months or so.

On discovering who I am and what God’s will for me is:

“So what are we to make of this God-given promise that if we delight ourselves in him, he will give us the desires of our heart? I love what C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity: ‘Your real self will not come as long as we are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.’

“My own journey has taken me away from trying so hard to find the will of God for my life. It has taken me to the place of brokenness and letting go of everything I thought I needed. I found peace and purpose as I lay exhausted at the feet of the Lion of Judah. It took me many years to understand that God wanted my heart, not my schedule.”

God wants my heart, not my fine-tuned plans for aiding His kingdom. He wants me to be who I really am in Christ, not try to be someone I’m not.

On my desire to write but feeling it’s prideful to want to do so:

“Don’t turn your light down just because it seems to burn brighter than the one who stands beside you. Let it shine and hold it high. The liberating truth is that none of this is about you anyway–it is all about God. If God has given you a voice to sing, then sing out for him. If God has given you the gift of mercy, then pour out that mercy in Jesus’ name whether anyone gets it or not. If God has given you a heart to serve, then serve with your whole heart even if no one stops to say thank you. If God has given you the ability to teach, then teach with vision and passion.

“Whatever God has placed in you, use it.”

I’m planning on starting my weekly writing retreats (to Panera, Starbuck’s, or a cute local coffee shop if I find one) this week on Tuesday. I have a lot of books on writing to read, old journals to review, and a long way to go. But it’s my dream and I’m going to pursue until God slams the door in my face. At least I’ll know that I have been faithful in using the gifts God has given me.

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Powerful beyond measure

12 Jan

Let me just say how much I love the Bible, especially when I am going through hard times. There are times when I read a verse and it resonates so closely to my own recent experiences that I am literally left breathless. And I know that my “stumbling across” that verse was no mere accident or coincidence…it was God speaking to me.

As you can see from my last post, I have been having some “issues.” Really questioning my life: what it means to me, what it means to others, what it means to God. Little by little, I have felt the inkling that I am called to write. I absolutely love writing. When I was growing up, I was always writing stories. I wrote one about a porcupine, I started a few novels. I remember going to a football game at the Metrodome when I was 9 or 10 (my oldest brother was in high school).  When we left, I pulled my notebook back out and continued writing.

I also devoured books the minute I brought them home from the library. I loved reading. I still love reading. I am awed by authors like C.S. Lewis and Jane Austen who can create characters and stories that are so fascinating yet so realistic.

I want to be a writer. I really do. But I feel like saying so–as well as saying that I believe God has given me a talent for writing–seems too boastful, too self-absorbed. “Who am I to write? What makes my thoughts or words better than anyone else’s? What makes me think I am a good writer? Who am I to have such high aspirations, such big dreams?” are the thoughts that keep me from pursuing this dream of mine.

But today, Romans 12: 6 caught my eye and left me breathless. Paul writes, “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given us, let us use them…” Let us use them. Let us not leave them on a shelf collecting dust because we’re too falsely humble to use them for the mutual encouragement of the body of Christ. Let us not neglect the developing of them and the pursuit of them because we don’t deem ourselves worthy of such an honor. Let us use them.

We had an intern this past summer at D2S named Emma. She was a great girl and a wonderful help. One day, she gave me (and the other people in my department) a piece of cardstock, decorated with a striped border, with a poem on it written by Marianne Williamson. The poem called to a deep yearning in my heart and I have read it numerous times since that day. I think that it echoes Paul’s sentiments in Romans well and it is a brilliant response to my fears and doubts about writing.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We are meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It’s not just in us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

I am beginning to see just how very true Marianne’s words are.

May they be true in your life as well.

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Dreaming

6 Dec

I got an email yesterday from one of my best friends in Minnesota. She wrote about how she was scared to date anyone because she had gotten her heart broken in the fall by a boy. She had spent a lot of time with him and thought he liked her but turned out, he didn’t. (When will boys understand that spending a lot of time with one girl who is “just a friend” is a no-no?!?!?)

Her email reminded me a lot of what I had to work through while dating Travis: learning to trust again.

After reading that email from my friend, I felt a renewed desire to write my memoir. I have suppressed this desire since I graduated from college. For my senior thesis, I wrote a prospectus, which is a fancy name for book proposal. I submitted it to about 5 specialized publishing houses. All came back saying “Sorry, no dice.” I put it on the back burner while I went to another Beach Project, got a real job, got engaged and then married, and then moved to Colorado.

But the dream has not disappeared. There is nothing I’d like to do more than be an author. To have books published. To tell other young women my story and share what God has taught me through the hardships I’ve gone through. They are not extraordinary hardships; they’re common ones. And that’s why I think my story would be so relevant and useful to other women.

I’ve hesitated to proactively go after this dream for a number of reasons. 

1. Every time I tell someone about wanting to write my memoir, I feel like so narcisstic. I ask myself, “Why is my story worth telling over someone else’s?” 

2. I’m scared that my dream won’t come true. I’ll put all this energy into writing and developing my manuscript, only to have it sit on a shelf somewhere, unread. I also wonder if this dream is just a selfish ambition or if it could really be in God’s will for me.

3. I’m working full-time and use that as an excuse to not devote time to writing. ‘I would have to quit work and only write for it to work,’ I think. But then what if #2 happens?

As I was doing my hair today, I was again wondering about what I should be doing with my life. Mentoring? Teaching? Volunteering? And I finally put 2 + 2 together: Writing is my passion. And writing is my gift. I should be using it.

1 Peter 4:11 says: “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace…in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.”

I should be using my gift of writing to serve the body of Christ and to glorify God. So I am daring to dream big and start writing, in faith that God will use it for His glory and purposes, whatever that looks like. Travis is starting grad school in January (God willing) so my plan is to write while he is going to class and doing homework. I will submit my manuscript and if no one agrees to publish it, I will look in to self-publishing. I am going to go for it…we’ll see what happens.

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My judgment of movies = bad

26 Feb

I always get on Travis’ case about never letting me choose the girly movie that I want to see. He absolutely refuses to go near a movie that even remotely looks like a chick flick (although I am going to make him watch Pride and Prejudice with me once we get it from Netflix).

So I enjoy the freedom to watch whatever movie I want when Travis is gone. But I’ve noticed that my choice of movies isn’t so great. Maybe I’ve just had a run of bad luck (or most likely it is just that Netflix doesn’t have many good movies to watch instantly on the computer) but the past 2 movies I’ve seen have been horrible.

Granted, the first bad movie I watched was Perfect from the 80s starring none other than Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta. It’s about a Rolling Stones reporter (Travolta) who falls in love with an aerobics instructor (Curtis) while writing an expose on the health club industry–or shall I say “the singles bar of the 80s.” I just about threw up during the aerobics class scenes. There is more pelvic thrusting in that movie than I have seen in my entire life. Yuck.

I just finished the second bad movie–Suburban Girl with Alec Baldwin and Sarah Michelle Gellar. I thought it looked like a cute movie, other viewers rated it well. But the story has no real plot. The whole relationship between Baldwin and Gellar is immoral and juvenile. She’s a young associate editor for a publisher and he’s an editor-in-chief for a huge publishing house. She wants to learn about life; he wants to teach about life. He is a closet alcoholic who incidentally slept with her boss. She’s a weak little girl who wants nothing less than to prove to her dad and the world that she can take care of herself. Blah blah blah blah. The whole movie is boring. Like my Venezuelan profesor de cine used to say, “Fue un flop.”

So maybe Travis’ taste in movies–and the fact that I rarely get my way when it comes to the girly movies–is a good thing. I would be wasting a lot of time otherwise watching crap on the ‘puter. Time that I could be spending writing crap on the computer.

Speaking of writing, I can find no motivation to write more of my memoir. I worked on it this past Saturday but that time was spent retyping what I had already written (and lost, thanks to my hard drive crashing) and rereading what I had written in my journals back in 2004. I know that it’s probably just a case of writer’s block but when I only have a limited amount of time in the first place (because of that darn full-time job), sitting down to force myself to put words on a page (that I don’t intend to immediately post on the web for public viewing) just seems like too much to ask.

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Grammatical Twilight Zone

14 Feb

This past Sunday, the pastor at my church gave his message about the need for giving and receiving loving correction in the believer’s life. Over and over again, he emphasized how much people “need rescued.” When he first said that, I was like “Did he really just say that? He must’ve made a mistake…” Then he said it again. I wrote it in the margin of my notebook and showed it to Travis. Then he said it AGAIN. I glanced at Travis and laughed a little. What was this guy saying? I had never heard anyone say that before. I wanted to say, “Uh, I believe it should be “People need rescue…?”

As much as I love our new church out here, Travis and I have some issues with the pastor. His teaching is doctrinally sound and theologically correct for the most part. He just doesn’t have the greatest delivery, so to speak. Maybe it just clashes with my personality. And Travis’. It probably doesn’t help that we came from John Piper’s church in Minneapolis, who is probably one of the best preachers alive right now. I miss going to that church…

Anyway, so imagine my surprise yesterday when I was in a meeting with my boss and the same stupid phrase came up. We were looking over the handouts I had created for a speaker’s presentation at an upcoming convention. One of the points in his notes said, “People need rescue.” So far, so good. Then my boss said, “Isn’t this supposed to be ‘people need rescued?'” I told her I didn’t know–up to that point, I had only heard the phrase once and I had assumed it was because my pastor was a little “off.” But the fact that my boss had brought it up as well…that really rocked my world.

So this morning I was working on the handouts again, tweaking them a little before converting them to PDFs. I googled the phrase “need rescued” and found a lot of different sites–granted they’re on the internet where any moron can publish anything (like this blog!)–that use this phrase. I feel like I’m walking around in a daze now. This beats the time that my younger brother proved to me that “negate” was a word when I swore it wasn’t (that happened a lot unfortunately).

Since when did this universe start saying “People need rescued!?!?!!” Can’t we just say “People need to be rescued.” or “People need rescuing.” Anything but “need rescued.” I can’t take it.

This experience reminds me of the scene in Never Been Kissed when Drew Barrymore’s younger character gets invited to the prom by Billy. She says, “I don’t know what to say. I’m actually speechless. That never happens to me because words are my life!!” I am speechless as well, but more out of horror and shock, rather than excitement and anticipation.

What is this world coming to?

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