Why Your Wild + Precious Story Matters---And 5 Giveaways!
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. (AND—I offer 5 books to give away. See end of post.)
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? Many don’t. I’d love to send out 5 signed books this week.
And, I’d love to send out one of the companion DVD’s (filmed with Ann Voskamp and I on my family’s island in Alaska).
HOW to do this?
**Would you share this post with friends, especially those know need to wrestle God and write into their lives?
**Include your email
***Let me know you’ve done that in the comments.
I’ll put your name in a beanie—-and I’ll draw out 5 names in the next few days. YAY!!
One more thing? (Ach! Sorry so much!!)
I want to invite you all to be part of my free online LIVE class for the next 9 weeks: “WHY Your Story Matters—And HOW to Tell It.” There are 600 of us from ALL over the world gathered already, and we have room for 400 more. It’s a BLAST. And God is already working in our lives because of it. (LIVE, Tuesdays, 2 pm CT)
(Do you know, this isn’t about me getting rich and famous from this book? That’s not going to happen. It’s about me getting to serve you, getting to shepherd the words and the love He’s given to set others free. )
