Category Archives: reading

the point of the story: how journaling is a healing work

Posted on by August 14, 2023

I looked for a pen but there were none on my desk – none, except for the light blue one which is too pale for journaling, and the .005 drawing pen I have a crush on and am afraid to use up. But Vin keeps a bunch of pens in a mug on the shelf in our room, so I went there and found the motherlode of blue pens: That’s mine, and that one’s mine, and oh yes, that one’s mine, too. How did all of these get here?

the point of the story: how journaling is a healing work

When I finished pilfering it, the mug was still full of green pens – his favorite – and some black ones, but he knows I won’t touch black pens unless the end of the world has arrived, or blue pens no longer exist…which might be the same thing.

Someday my great-great-great grandkids will go through all my journals, and they’ll find a ridiculous number of entries including complaints about bad pens, missing pens, or favorite pens running out of ink. Some of those entries start like this:

A quick minute with an unfavored pen, waiting for Reagan to finish up on the potty at bedtime. (In terrible, thick black ink.)

Well, this pen might not work. (Ink fading on the upward strokes.)

Some quick thoughts with an ugly pen – my kingdom for some blue ink – before falling asleep. (There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of men for how I feel about black gel pens.)

Aaand we have a wonderful blue-inked pen! I found it hidden in the buffet drawer.

Other journal entries have remarks like these in the middle:

Wow. That was atrocious handwriting. Partly the pen’s fault – the good ball point is over at my desk. (Black ink should never be used on a particularly emotional day.)

And some entries end like this:

See? Handwriting. I really should find a better pen.

I think I despise this pen for journaling.

Aaand I hate this pen.

Journaling for me is like mental housework – twice this month I only got a short paragraph in before some interruption hit, and then it was almost two weeks before I even touched the journal again. Once I did, I dove in to grasp at all the emotional and spiritual clutter that had accumulated over those weeks to see what would emerge. Like neglecting laundry for weeks at a time, when I finally dug through the piles and straightened things up, I found treasures I thought were lost a long time ago.

Journaling is good for both normal tidying and also the occasional necessary deep cleaning. Writing is a healing work.

I thought that when we started writing full time I’d have more time to journal, but that hasn’t been the case because most days, all my writing time is done at the computer. But other times I end the week with journaling and get to start the next week with journaling, too, and it’s in times like those when I realize the weekend in between sometimes feels no longer than the thin line separating the two entries.

But there’s so much good to be had from sitting down with a good pen and lined pages, to force ourselves to slow our thinking long enough for our fingers to catch up with. It gives us the time we need to draw deeper things out of ourselves that we can’t always access while just typing – or worse, texting.

If those great-great-great grandkids ever go through my journals, they’ll also find that my published books left a lot of things out. Not every behavior was mentioned in Upside Down, and not everything God told me during that period was divulged in Oh My Soul.

And in the book I’m working on now, not every conflict, attack, and catastrophe that occurred during our adoption process and the first few years afterward is detailed out. Partly because it’s not meant to be some dramatic exposé. But mostly it’s to protect the guilty, and the innocent, and the misunderstood…and sometimes those are the same people, but not always.

I wrote a while back about the struggle to tell our story when it overlaps with the stories of others. And now, several months later, I can see that the process of filtering our story has distinct layers. First, pull all the material that might work, then go back through all of that and run it through a finer sieve. Whatever’s left after all the sifting is, so far, what gets to stay. Taking the time to work through that process generates an intuitive sense of what fits and what doesn’t.

The significant stuff that’s left out isn’t eliminated because it had no impact on the story. It’s left out because it’s not the point of the story. And sometimes (often) the things that were meant for harm don’t deserve all the attention the enemy wants them to have.

I couldn’t see it then when we were in the middle of it, but now I can look at the progress with a bigger, broader perspective and see the good that came (and is still coming) from awful circumstances, from walking through a season of darkness and brokenness. And part of the good that comes from it is the maturity and equanimity to see that those harmful issues, circumstances, and people were never the focus of our story, no matter how much they overshadowed it.

Those hard things were just ingredients, or seasoning, that flavored that time of our lives. Their effect was like bay leaves in soup – they influence flavor, but they’re indigestible. We’re not meant to internalize them. So we take them out so no one chokes on them or ingests too much of their influence.

And as I work through this project, that is one of the other ways that writing is healing me.

If these books…represent the new memoir at its best, it’s because they were written with love. They elevate the pain of the past with forgiveness, arriving at a larger truth about families in various stages of brokenness. There’s no self-pity, no whining, no hunger for revenge…We are not victims, they want us to know. We come from a tribe of fallible people, prisoners of our own destructiveness, and we have endured to tell the story without judgment and to get on with our lives.

– William Zinsser, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir

We’re only meant to be an open book to God. Even our spouses can’t be expected to handle it all – and if you want to argue this out with me, first tell me how opening fire with all your unfiltered thoughts and criticisms is working out for you.

the point of our story: how journaling is a healing work

This stack is my current required reading for writing memoir, as opposed to the most recent crappy memoir I read – which I won’t call out here, but you can easily find it if you poke around my Goodreads page. And actually, one of these is a wild card, though it’s a highly recommended one. (I have known such wild cards to be terrible, but not often. See above reference to crappy memoir.)

The truth is that memoir writing, like every other kind of writing, comes in both good and bad varieties. That’s the only standard that matters. Whether the authors of certain notorious recent memoirs ought to have revealed as much as they did, breaking powerful taboos and social covenants, isn’t finally the issue. The issue is: Is it a good book or a bad book?

– William Zinsser, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir

But these other three should be safe – you can’t go wrong with E.B. White and William Zinsser; you’re almost never sorry for reading them. They are writers for writers, who make you want to write.

These are the kind of books you shouldn’t read on your day off because you catch yourself putting notes into your phone for Monday, and those notes turn into sentences and the sentences turn into paragraphs, and a few minutes later you’re like, Oh, screw it. You grab your pen and notebook and start working in earnest.

And if you read Vin’s recent post, you know how dangerous that is. Those weekends, you know, are sometimes as thin as the line between two journal entries, and time for rest and Sabbath is important. So I might be at risk of having my books confiscated for the weekend.

Which, come to think of it…might be how I lost all those blue pens, too.

in the fog: what we do when we can’t see where we’re going

Posted on by December 20, 2023

Kavanagh napping. Finn playing sweetly, but he’s loud enough to trigger neighborhood car alarms. Vin and I bossing him. Baby waking up after a refreshing 90-second power nap. Repeat until dinnertime.

And this, at least, has not changed in eighteen years of parenting – only then, it was two different kids who are both now in high school, and we are now old…er. Older. Oldish? Whatever. You get it.

in the fog: what we do when we can't see where we're going

It is a night for an easy dinner after a day of not getting nearly enough done and cringing from loud noises. Leftover pasta, leftover salad; sauté some broccoli to go over the top and give myself something to be proud of. Because somedays feel like nothing to be proud of.

Not enough time for everyone and everything. Heaviness in the chest. A sense of swelling behind the eyes that hints at tears, but no thank you, we don’t want that, we don’t have time for that. In this season, ain’t nobody got time for that.

I know what it is. It feels a little like PMS but it isn’t – it’s spiritual attack threatening to spiral into depression, the barrage of lies that shout failure from the rooftops in every area. Loud noises on the outside spike against the loud thoughts inside. The body hurts, the mind and spirit hurt.

And I can be a slow learner, but now I know the drill when it hits: Do the small things, the necessary things that fight the lies and the feelings and the oversensitive body processes.

Drink a glass of water. Take a dose of vitamin D. Rebuke the lie.

And find something easy to clean.

People sometimes seem surprised at how (relatively) clean our house is in spite of seven kids living here, and usually the credit goes to regular chores and a highly efficient husband. But every once in a while it’s something else entirely.

Every once in a while, the house is clean because the mama almost lost her ever-loving mind but narrowly escaped by taking it out on the kitchen.

Because order on the outside helps bring order to the inside.

And wiping down counters is easy, so much easier than the stressful intangibles that have no end. Clean counters help bring sanity and white space.

I cannot clean everything. Just like I cannot do everything. But I can clean this counter in front of me, and see the difference.

In so many areas, we can believe and hope and trust that what we do matters, but we cannot see it yet and the enemy takes advantage of that.

So doing something that we can see is important. It becomes prayer and prophecy; we see movement and change and impact. A clean counter can represent so much more as we pray.

The edge of the sink is covered in coffee grounds and water droplets. One wipe, and it’s clean. Perfect. Rinse the sponge. Done.

There’s a clear before-and-after here, unlike most of the other work with words, and situations, and people. And my own attitude.

For many of us it’s a season of refining, pressing further than we thought we could go, pushing through pain, taking maturity to the next level. And it hurts, like a muscle being strengthened.

We are refining character and relationships, habits, skills, and communication, for a great plan ahead that we cannot see, praying for rain but not yet seeing the cloud the size of a hand.

He sees what we cannot see – and sometimes, often, He lets us see these things for each other.

A close friend of ours had a surprise party last week. She was blindfolded; she didn’t know where she was going, or when she would arrive. But we knew, and we couldn’t wait for her to get there.

…As Christians, we will always live in tension between what we understand and what remains a mystery….We cannot afford to live only in what we understand because then we don’t grow or progress anymore; we just travel the same familiar roads we have traveled all of our Christian life. It is important that we expose ourselves to impossibilities that force us to have questions that we cannot answer.

– Bill Johnson, The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind

In the deep searching, trusting God when it feels like you have no choice but to trust Him (and is that really trust at all?) we’re pressed into voicing those gut-honest questions – the ones He’s not afraid of, but that we’re usually afraid to ask.

These questions lay us open, vulnerable to legalistic blind spots in our past, and the enemy hisses things like, If you really trusted God, you wouldn’t feel that way/need to ask that question/feel so uncertain. We think that Really Good Christians are supposed to find some kind of bliss in the pressure of not knowing, but that’s only because the enemy is liar.

Fire tests the purity of silver and gold, but the LORD tests the heart.

– Proverbs 17:3, NLT

God knows these seasons are not easy. He’s not mad at us for feeling the fire and asking the hard questions.

He’s not mad at us when we ask repeatedly for the cloud the size of a hand.

He’s right there with the truth – He knows the destination, and these questions are the sweet spot, the brave willingness to stare fears in the face and name them aloud, willing to surrender those fears to Him.

Here’s the root of it: If it really is that bad and our fears come to pass, will we still trust Him? Will we still talk to Him?

Of course we will. There is no one left. He is the only one who knows how to take us where we’re supposed to be going. Regardless of what the weather or the circumstances look like, He is rubbing His hands in anticipation, leaning forward, telling us, Just wait, you’re going to love this. I can’t wait to show you where you’re going.

Those who fear You shall see me and rejoice, because I have hoped in Your word.

– Psalm 119:74

And these curveballs, these situations of unknowing, and what-in-the-world-are-You-doing, prove that surrender is beautiful, and powerful, and victorious, and He knows what we want better than we do. He’s not afraid to give it to us, even when we’re afraid to ask for it or take it.

The unknowing and waiting are a lot like writing. Here too, we usually do not know where we are going:

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way.

….You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you: Ah yes, then this; and yes, praise be, then this.

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Bread crumbs from lunch cover the island. Scoop them into my hand, throw them off the deck for the birds, or maybe the mice, but with four cats I’m not worried. Easy, done. Moving on.

It’s hard to see outside of ourselves from the chaos and stress – it presses in, closing in on us just like the fog around the windows, obscuring mountains, neighbors, and the river of traffic going up and down the highway.

We ask for a cloud the size of a hand, and in perfect time He sends the fog rolling in, pressing us into questions and answers and growth we could not or would not have pursued otherwise. And sometimes in our own density, we don’t recognize that that, too, is an answer.

________________________

This is an excerpt from Work That God Sees .

work in progress, part one: what happens when we fill the lake

Posted on by February 28, 2024

Reagan is next to me, reviewing letter sounds. And not just that, but she’s also reviewing other important things, like how to pronounce “the” like thuh, not duh – and she plods through all of them in order: Thuh…E…says…ehh. Thuh…F…says…fff, and so on. It may be the first time in my life I’ve ever wished the English alphabet had less than 26 letters.

work in progress, part 1: what happens when we fill the lake

People often ask how we homeschool all these kids (“all these kids,” they say, as though we’ve collected them like so many postage stamps) and I hate to disappoint them, but the answer is pretty boring:

We don’t, really.

At least, not anymore. We put in our time with the older ones when they were younger, and now they mostly homeschool themselves; we just check and discuss their assignments and read with them a little. Life is all learning, of course, but as far as school goes, they’re pretty independent now.

So school-wise we direct our efforts to working with the Littles, as far as they will cooperate, which is…ah, how do I put this…extremely variable. And if you know us, you know that the category of “Littles” has less to do with age and more to do with ability and maturity. Our big kids are 18, 15, almost 13, and 9; our Littles are 13, 13, 3, and 2 months. Our 18-year-old recently moved out, and our little Kavanagh is just learning to take the world in. He’s growing like a weed; he smiles and laughs. Which might all be the same thing.

Last month I made filling the lake a priority again, and it’s working. I’m remembering that this is why we chose to write from home full time: I feel alive again when that’s what I’m actually doing, as opposed to the administrative, publishing parts that consume certain phases of it.

When we like what we’re doing, we forget that we’re working.

I like the movement of standing up to reach over the back of my laptop to grab a favorite style guide from my stack of writing books on the back of my desk. And I like having a row of finished works next to them, and different notebooks and journals scattered all over the place.

I like that one of the works-in-progress is not just a digital file like the one I’m currently typing on, but it’s a stack of research materials, a notebook, and Oh My Soul and its companion journal. Eric Liddell said he felt God’s pleasure when he ran; I feel God’s pleasure when I am in full nerd-mode with a pencil behind my ear, going through familiar books, rifling through pages and marking up passages, and typing as the words flow easy, fast, and furious.

And I even kind of like it – in a perverse, self-flagellating way – when I am in front of the laptop with no words, frustrated with the wrong words, and aggravated as all get out trying to pull a piece together before a deadline when the clock is ticking down (like right now, she thought nervously), because I know the thrill of accomplishment and relief when it’s done.

I don’t love it so much that I forget that I’m working, but I know that it’s worthwhile because whatever I’m doing is working. Purpose comes easier when we see the headway we’re making.

Like when Reagan pushes through and makes it to Thuh Z says zzz – it’s progress, and she is gaining. In the effort and aggravation, we see achievement and increase, and it’s worth it. You know, sort of like childbirth: Ta da, look, we did it. We made this.

The other day one of my kids asked me for harder books, but she didn’t say it that way. She said she wanted “books that would take longer than a day to read” and I had the happy task of going through the library with her to find a new stack that would keep her occupied. She didn’t want The Hunger Games, she wanted the challenge: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Mother Mason, My Antonía.

And this is when I love homeschooling and forget that it, too, is work: Learning, like teaching or writing or any other job, ceases to be work when we get lost in it.

Along those lines, this month I got to dig into the first chapters of Bleak House with my writing student. I almost wrote “dive” into it, but no, one does not dive into anything of Dickens. You wade in cautiously, stir a foot around the water to check for sharp objects, and, finding none, keep going deeper and deeper until you’re surrounded by 43 characters swimming around and splashing you in the face and pulling you under, and you like it. At least, I do.

And I might as well confess up front that I’m already reading Pickwick Papers with Iree and Nicholas Nickleby (one of my favorites) with the family as a read aloud. So, no, I didn’t pick Bleak House, but I’ve read it before and was thrilled that my student chose it.

Each of us read from our own copies. I leaned over to see where she was at, and she was a full page ahead of me, because I had gotten lost in sentences like,

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

And I forgot I was supposed to be working.

So now I find myself in the middle of three, count ‘em, three Dickens novels, and perfectly happy about it. Vin thinks I might have issues. I think I might want to be a Dickens scholar when I grow up…and that, too, might be the same thing.

_______