A friend of mine told me about the Blog "Holy Experience" (thanks Janey!) - http://aholyexperience.com/ so I went for a visit...and spent over an hour there. Ann Voskamp is a homeschooling mom of 6, a homesteader, a Jesus lover and very gifted (and published) writer. She falls somewhere between poetry and art in the way she writes - it's beautiful. (I also highly recommend an older post of hers called "How we Homeschool".)
I asked her permission to publish her most recent post to my Blog b/c it spoke to my heart so much on why this "blog thing" has captured me so (especially with all my "confessing" as of late). I think you'll enjoy reading this. But get a hot cup of tea and put on your slippers...peace is in her writings and I think you'll truly be blessed and calmed. And if you have speakers...enjoy that too...
Of blogging, secrets, porn and truth
We're coming home in the dark last night from a little country fall fair. And in the thick black on the other side of the window, I find words for things never seen in the glare of day. Only vaguely, uncomfortably felt.
~ That this scratching the curve of a heart, out here in an online space, often breaks mine.
~That I don't know how to walk the tensions of blogging, this public forum...
(How many posts in a row can you put out there about what a mess you are, this home is? Is that fair to your family?
How many posts can focus on the beauty He's raising from your ashes, the things He's drawing you into, without coming across as sacchrine?)
~That blogging (writing?) is a form of nudity and I'm endlessly plagued by this: am I unintentionally guilty of participating in stay-at-home mommy porn? faith porn? life porn?
I'm not interested in contributing to some false propoganda about life.
(Mothering is tenderly beautiful ... and the most anguishing thing I've ever done. God is granite real ... and sometimes I can't find Him. This life is exquisitely stunning ... and a gory mess.
Depending on where you stand, where the shadows fall, how you see, it looks startlingly different.
What is real? What is honest? What is Truth?)
By the time we park this van with all these sleeping kids in the garage, and the garage door draws close on the stage of stars, and we trip over the dozing golden lab sprawled out in the dark by the back door, and kids stumble to their beds, those discovered words and questions are settling down. Settling down into me. But I don't have answers.
I lay in the dark and pray. Flick on the light and try to find more words. And the book on the nightstand falls open to this:
:::
"Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity... that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally.
If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually....
In these pages I tell secrets...because that is one way of keeping track and because I believe that it is not only more honest but also vastly more interesting than to pretend that I have no such secrets to tell. I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it is to be human." ~Beuchner, Telling Secrets
I close the book and turn out the light. I lay there. True, that.
And I feel Him close, touch-His-face close, answering these questions that gnaw.
This morning, still in the dark, I find this entry in the archives. I've been here before, wrestling this down:
:::
“In these pages I tell secrets about…myself because I believe that it is not only more honest but vastly more interesting than to pretend that I have no such secrets to tell. I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets.” ~Frederick Beuchner
I yell on Sunday mornings, about things of grand import, like socks left on floors and back mats all wrinkled. And then I leave for Worship Service.
I sigh when dry cereal is scattered across the floor and, as I sweep up the mess, I lecture with great profundity about carelessness… to a seven-year-old.
I whisper prayers in the deep black of night, “Father, would you graciously bestow one more baby?” And He shakes the core of me with striking truth: “Love the ones you have.”
I know it: I don’t want the demands of love. I chafe for easy. I am broken and incapable of more. And I cling to this: “Our sins are stronger than we are, but you will blot them out.” ~Ps. 65:3
:::
In a span of dark, He's led and I've stumbled into some of the answers, or part of them, for this day.
If I lose track of the stories, I'll lose track of part of me. Lose track of His voice in this life. Telling our stories, keepings traces of His graces, even in a venue such as this, may indeed be important, sacred work, because in these stories, God meets us. We listen to our life and hear God.
And maybe other who listen, hear Him too?
Perhaps in sharing our stories, spiritual disciplines of reflecting and telling the truth, even in this public space, others too just groping along might find more of their way?
What is real and honest and truth is as simple and as complicated as laying bare a heart and words before His eyes and letting the Spirit lead.
Maybe it as simple as stripping it back and saying yes, I have secrets, ugly ones, and I do not pretend otherwise.
True, others may read the stories as photoshopped "faith-porn." But maybe it's a matter of how one sees. And that maybe the nakedness of writing isn't about porn and propoganda, but a return to Eden.
And maybe, just maybe, telling the secrets of the dark bring us out into the Light.
Instead of picking and choosing which pictures to post here...since I'm SO behind on this...I thought I'd just upload them all to one place and give you all access to them. ;o) SEE LINK BELOW...
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