Another Imperfect Beginning

Hi, friends! I hope you’re doing well and are either settling back into your new-school-year routines or are enjoying what’s left of your summer. Here in my corner of the world we’re finishing up our first full week of the school year. (Read: we’re all exhausted, routines are being established – for better or worse, and as my daughter said in the car yesterday about a math assignment she was given, “Things are getting REAL.”)

With her back at school, I’ve been trying to get my head above water and re-establish my own school year routines. Over the summer things always kind of fall apart; having a little mini-me shadow isn’t always the most conducive to getting actual writing done. The soil of my little blog space here always sits a bit fallow over those months. While I miss writing and always feel a little bit like I lose myself when I can’t write, the time away is good for reassessing where I am with this writing journey. I do a lot of thinking and praying for renewed direction, looking at what works for me, and thinking about what it is that I want to bring to you guys on a regular basis.

I also do a lot of pursuing some of my other passions, which tends to feed my writing when I do get back to it. I recently watched an incredibly powerful documentary on Netflix that has sparked something inside me and might well be the catalyst for some fairly big things to come in this space. The documentary was “Half The Sky,” which confronts painfully real issues of oppression against women around the world and introduces innovative solutions through education, healthcare, and general empowerment. (You can read more about the Half The Sky movement here.) It’s incredibly heartbreaking to watch the stories of real women and girls in the world today, but it’s remarkably inspiring to see what is being done about it all. There are so many seemingly hopeless situations for girls around the world, but we serve a God of hope who is never done with anyone’s story…who never sees any situation or any person or any problem as a dead end.

As I watched the stories of real girls unfold in front of me, I was moved to tears more than once. I thought of my own life…my daughter…and all of the things I have encountered in my own story that were just bumps in the road for me, because of where I live….but that would have been catastrophic had I been born in some other part of the world.

It’s not right.

Frederick Buechner said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” With that in mind, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my interests…the things that make my heart beat faster in my chest and that make me feel like I’ve tapped into something real within myself…and I’m really feeling driven to make this blog space something more than it has been. For years I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that God wants me to do here. For years I’ve been asking Him to reveal more of His calling for my life. For years I’ve felt that I could be doing more for Him through my words, but I’ve never known exactly what to do or how to do it. As a result, I haven’t done much of anything.

I like to do things well. I want to have a plan before I start, rather than figuring things out as I go. But blogging – and life, really – doesn’t work that way. And I’m realizing more and more that if I wait to have a perfect game plan before I ever do anything, I’ll probably end up doing a whole lot of nothing. As hard as it is for this perfectionist to say, it’s sometimes better to start imperfectly than to never start at all.

So given all of that, I’m going to try some new things in this space over the coming months. I’ll keep doing what I have been doing, because connecting women’s hearts with the heart of God remains central to my calling. There is more God wants me to do, though, and even if I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like or how to do it, I’m willing to get started.

I’m so glad you’re on this journey with me, and I hope you’ll be inspired to find your place within God’s story as you follow along.

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