For those counting, we recently
completed our little blogging experiment. While we haven’t exactly been
faithful to our commitment of three blogs a week, we have tried, and I feel it
has been a success. Our purposes here were threefold. In a word, we wrote to
communicate, we wrote to understand and we wrote to learn.
“For
me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as
I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone.”[1] Writing is a conversation.
Truly, nobody writes what is meant to go unread. Even in the darkest hours of
life, when people chronicle their most intimate dreams and desires in a their
most secret journals, they do that by having a conversation with themselves.
There are three parties to “the most private
thought- the self that yields the thought, the self that acknowledges and in
some way responds to the thought, and the Lord. That is a remarkable thing to
consider.”1
We are thankful for where the Lord has brought us. We are glad we are where He
has placed us. We miss our dear friends, however, and as we write to you, we do
feel your presence, just as we feel it in a phone call or in reading a letter
from you. Our writing has helped us to feel the fellowship we miss with you,
and for that we are truly thankful.
I’m
afraid the last two reasons for the blog were quite selfish. Augustine is
reported to have said “I profess to be
one of those who, by profiting, write, and by writing profit.”[2] That
proved itself true for us.
We wrote
about many of the things we have been through here. The deadline which we
assigned ourselves helped us to discuss the things we’ve learned. The catharsis
of pen and paper did not merely comfort us, but helped us to process the means by which the Lord comforted
our troubles. The therapy was not in the pages we wrote, but in the act of
typing, writing or scratching our thoughts to paper, we could see more clearly
the way God Himself and His revelation of Himself helped us to understand our
experiences. In our joys and in our sorrows, writing was a way we meditated on
the faithfulness of God in Christ, who is our true source of unending delight.
There is
great joy for us in writing. In putting pen to paper (or hand to keyboard) I
find my thoughts to flow much more freely than they do when I speak, truly even
more freely than when I think. Writing is the way I can see the world, it is
the avenue by which I comprehend myself, and it is the tool I find most
comfortable to employ in communication with others. In writing and in opening
myself up for critique, (which, uncomfortable though it was, I was very
thankful for) I found myself able to convey my thoughts more completely, in a
more easily understandable way. I found my vocabulary becoming more careful,
and my thinking more precise. I feel that this has been profitable for me in
many ways, and pray that it will continue to be in years to come.
This
exercise has been very enjoyable, and we’re glad for those of you who patiently
endured and provided feedback as we attempted it. We will not be able to
maintain the quantity of writing that we have in the past two months, as much as
we have loved it. We do hope, however, that this trial will manifest itself in
a more consistent amount of writing for us. We have learned the importance of
our words, and look forward to using them further as we seek to serve our
Savior.
Did you write this for me, Nathan? haha. I'm glad you write.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm glad you let me read your love poems...haha.
Garrett