Writing and Life

This year has not been a great year of writing for me.  Even though writing is a creative outlet and something that often gives me energy, the fact is that it's also a lot of work and requires a lot of energy at the outset.

But this has not been a year in which I've had a lot of energy at the outset.

The demands of homeschooling wring out most of my allotted energy for the day, and the constant noise and interruptions that occur around our house throughout the rest of the day drain whatever energy may be left.

For the record, the noise and interruptions are not just from our own boys.  Our community has been blessed with many children and they do what children do: create noise!  Trying to silence everything around me so I can pull from the reserves of my creative energy has been a most difficult task this year.

And it's simply been a busy year.  Lots of visitors to host, lots of events to plan or participate in, lots of traveling for meetings, appointments, conferences, and weddings and funerals.  And for me personally, lots of hours logged on Zoom meetings for our field leadership team.  The number of available hours to sit and write have been few.

Besides the literal lack of hours in a day to write, I've felt a lack of emotional energy towards that end.  A lot of my emotional energy has been put toward a long season of trying to be an anchor while others around us have gone through seasons of stress and/or transition.  There's been a lot of transition within our community this year.  Constant comings and goings are a norm around here, but there've been some unexpected comings and goings on top of it all which have added another layer of grief and stress.  After nearly seven years of learning how to say goodbyes and hellos like it's our job, it's still hard, and harder still when it happens suddenly.  Despite how hard it is, these situations require people who are in a season of stability to step up and hold down the fort, to keep an eye on the community and plan the events and farewells, to be "the mom of the compound" and check on the kids whose parents are gone, to be "the keeper of the keys" to the houses that are empty and need cleaning and oversight and management of househelpers, and to host official hospital visitors that no one else is available to do.

Our family has been stable.  We haven't had any major life transitions or literal transitions to navigate (except helping each other process how the transitions of others impact ourselves), so we've tried to offer a sense of stability and normalcy for those around us.  We've made ourselves available to be the people others can come to, to be a listening ear or a logistics coordinator, to be an anchor.

It's been good for us to fill this role.  I feel (I hope) that we've carried it well for this season.  But it's demanded a lot of energy and has forced other endeavors to take a backseat, like my writing.

Although my personal writing projects have taken a hit this year, as well as regular blogging, the one thing I've been able to consistently maintain are my newsletters sent every few months.  That has been the most important way to maintain some level of connection with people interested in our missions journey.

And despite my overall discouragement at the output (or lack thereof) of writing, I've been recently encouraged because one of my projects this year was to print off every blog post and newsletter I've written since beginning this missions journey and put them in a binder so they could read like one big story.  To date, I've written 76 posts on our missions blog (including this one), 7 posts on the blog A Life Overseas, and have created 31 newsletters (and am about to send #32).  These numbers are significant to me because writing is how I process.  It's how I remember, reflect, and sometimes reorient myself in order to learn and grow and move forward.

I'm encouraged because, overall, that binder (which is actually two big binders at this point) is a kind of physical proof that I've done a lot of processing since I started writing missions-related material over eight years ago.  I've done a lot of reflecting, a lot of soul-searching, a lot of growing.  And I hope a lot of encouraging as other people have read my writing and been able to reflect as well.

It's humbling to know that other people read my writing even though it's just my unprofessional musings, and even more humbling when someone reaches out and tells me they were blessed by it.

My hope is that as we enter into a new season of more stability in our community, there will be a bit more time and space and energy for me to focus on writing.  There are no guarantees because if there's one thing that's true of this life, it's that there is always something else to demand your attention and relegate the non-essentials to the bottom of the priority list.  But writing is an essential for me.  At least, it's supposed to be.  I'm hoping it can feel that way again, like a core part of myself that serves a good purpose.

Because the ultimate purpose of writing, for me, is to process life.  I desire to live life and to process it so I can live it more deeply and graciously moving forward.