Why Your Wild & Precious Story Matters (and 2 more Giveaways)
I’m so excited to be over on Ann’s farm porch today! We got to spend a week together on my Alaskan Island. Come and see the stunning photos taken on Harvester Island sunset (about 11 pm)
Friends, here we are, most of us still sheltered-down, hunkered up, stir-crazy crazy, sick and ready to be well, ready to be social, moving, working, churching. Ready to hug and shake hands and invite friends to dinner. But——-not yet. We wait still. And while we wait, we cut our hair.
While you wait, I want you to know something. You’re living a wild life right now, do you know? NO matter how stay-at-home it is right now. And you HAVE lived a wild life not matter how tame you measure it. People need to know about this life of yours. YOU need to know about this life of yours, because I guarantee it, you do not even know how rich, how wide, how deep, how profound your life’s journey has been.
This is why I write. Because I know nothing. And I want to know something about Life and the particular one I am living. Maybe you do too?
Last year I sat in a circle of writers from remote villages in Alaska. Darlene had never written a story from her life before, and neither had she read her words aloud to anyone. She wrote about her adult alcoholic children, how she kept trying to help them, take care of them. Her strength wore out day by day. One day, she fainted. The doctor told her she was dangerously anemic and malnourished. She could have died, he told her. She must rest and take care of herself. Darlene read her story to us slowly, her face calm but hands trembling. She ended simply with the sentence, “I, too, am important.” She read this sentence with pressed lips, then looked up at the four of us with resolve. She needed to proclaim those words to us, and we needed to witness them. That truth she was finally able to speak and to share may save her life.
What happens when we begin to write our story?
We discover, we are not alone:
“No matter what country we live in, no matter our neighborhood, our politics, our religion, our age . .. we risk passing like strange ships in the long night. unless we braid word around word from our own passage, then toss it out toward the hands on the other deck. Don’t we all sail the same mercurial waters? Aren’t we longing to stop for a while, to not be alone on the high seas?
There’s so much we could lose!
“Every day we are different. The memories of what was and what we’ve been, and the discovery of who we are now, could all be lost. But we have this chance now to stop. We’re stopping to find the difficult and beautiful truths of our lives.”
Everything that has come to us is meant, finally, for good. We cannot turn away from that.
“Every time we lock up a person, an event, a decade even in the Closet of Forgetting and Denial, we’re missing out on what God wants to do with us and with that experience. . . When we can name our ghosts, they haunt us less.”
Does it really ALL matter?
In God’s economy, not a moment is wasted. Not the fall of a chickadee from your tree or the wandering of a rebellious sheep or the loss of a strand of your hair goes unnoticed by God. And since the One who is Running All Things including galaxies takes care to notice lost sheep, dying sparrows, and falling hair, we should notice as well. . . . Write your story because God attends to every moment of your life, and you should too.
What will happen if you dare to write?
If we pursue our stories, honestly and truly, they will send us on a pilgrimage that takes us, like Abraham, from one land to another, from a country of unknowing, through wastelands where the promise of a promised land appears invisible and impossible—but day by day, this journey moves us closer to clarity, to truth, to the very City of God, if we allow it. I don’t want to lose out on any of that. I don’t want you to either.
As you wrestle and write your story, I wish you leaps of joy, but also I wish you that crooked little sideways limp when a piece of writing is done and has done its work on you.
Let’s go into the world limping together.
Many of you have my new book already I think? (Or here) Did you know that Ann Voskamp, my wise and beautiful friend, joined me on my Alaskan island for this 8-session companion DVD here that goes with it? (Filmed by the extraordinary folks at RightNow Media).
I gave away 5 books a couple of weeks ago. This week I’d like to offer two sets of a book and a DVD together. To keep it simple, I’ll just ask you to
*let me know that you shared this post on your social media (FB, Instagram, twitter)
*And leave your email in the comments below so I can contact you for your address!!
(Here’s a glimpse of the DVD: Your Story for His Glory)
