Category Archives: words

A Writing Meme From Dorcas Smucker

Posted in life, My Book, words by

Let’s be clear about this: I don’t do chain stuff or forwards. For various reasons. Two recipes or 50 questions about yourself to forward to 51 of your friends or email poems that have 152 emoticons in them that you MUST  forward unless you want to be attacked by a billy goat? I don’t do it. Life is too short. But Dorcas tagged me in a meme, which is (or can be) a different thing, and I answered her questions because they were about things I care about, and I had time to answer them.

(A meme is an idea or theme that spreads like a virus in the blogging world, and this one is about writing and I’m breaking the bendable rules by not preparing a list of more questions or bloggers.)

1. How long have you been blogging, and how often do you post?

I started the blog in ’08 when my book came out. Before that, I had a xanga site, which was more social to me than serious writing. There is no rhyme or reason as to how I often I post. I refuse to write just so that I get more hits on my site, or because it’s been awhile since I last posted. I only write when I feel there’s something inside that needs to get out. This is my 201st post here.

2. Have you had anything published, and if so, what and when?

Some devotional/inspirational articles in CLP’s “Companions” some years ago. I published my own book, written especially for single women, in ’08.

3. Who is the author who best speaks your language and who you would most like to be like, in style and message?

Philip Yancey speaks my language because of his honesty. I admire the way he explains his conclusions with words that are carefully chosen but still carry a cadence, a kind of rhythm.  I admire CS Lewis for the way he connects the spiritual and the tangible world. I’m relishing Les Miserables  but would NOT want to mimic Victor Hugo’s style.

4. What do you see as the unique message God has given you to share with the world ?

It has something to do with exposing beauty and truth. Also, I want to be a voice for those who have none, and an ear for those who those who have found none. In other words, be a facilitator, which may not necessarily mean writing.

5. Who or what has made you believe in yourself as a writer?

A teacher at school (Rosalind McGrath Byler) and a Calvary Bible school teacher (Ervin Hershberger).

6. Who or what has done the opposite?

Men who refused to market my book, were opposed to it because it didn’t fit their theology and disapproved of my using quotes from writers in other denominations.

7. Besides blogging, what types of writing have you done?

Journaling. Letters. Dabbled in verse and music composition but wasn’t willing to stick to it. In my head, I’ve written travel articles about my local area in Ireland.

8. Where would you like to be, writing-wise, in five years?

Working on my 2nd book.

9. What would need to happen to move you from here to there?

A lot of things that God and I keep discussing.

10. Any advice for beginning bloggers/writers?

Don’t write if you can help it. But if you can’t help but write, do! Read all the time, always have several books on the go, and don’t read rubbish.

11. Just for fun: what’s a skill you have that almost no one knows about? (example: I know how to develop black and white film in a darkroom.)

I can read and write words upside-down, across the table from my English students.

Commas, Maybe?

Posted in life, words by

The silence from this corner is not because I’m bored, or depressed, or too busy. Things tumble  about in my head, but they don’t need to see daylight yet.

This is a period where

It feels like

everything I

say

or write

must not end

with a

.

but with a

,

or

?

The words I have declared now feel

less sure.

The sacred and beautiful things

are still all of that,

but I feel I can say nothing,

write nothing,

except to end it with a

question or disclaimer or comma.

A few things I know.

They are great, glad statements that arch over the questions. These things I know and they have no question marks.

I think everything else is sand.

Shifting.

Ending in a comma because each new thing adds to the

sequence.

Each orbit of the sun reveals a new

aspect to acknowledge.

Each bit of truth adds

understanding

so that I can

never

be wholly sure of what I’ve seen.

I can’t see myself completely ,

never mind someone else

or my surroundings.

It means living with an open hand,

not clenching anything in my fist,

not refusing new things.

Being sure only of my God

in whose hand I am,

and only His words are

final.

Deepest Fears Spill Out

Posted in life, words by

For a long time, I’ve promoted the act/discipline/therapy of journaling. Life journals, and particularly thanks journals. Because I maintain that getting something out, something that’s churning inside you, isn’t as big or scary or impossible when it’s  outside of you and you can look at it and see it for what it is.

This was confirmed recently when talking with a friend who had gone through a debilitating mental breakdown. In the process of healing, which included the strong support of her family, and a Christian counsellor, she said with a little grimace, “And I had to write alot.”  It was obvious that the therapy helped, and she admitted it even though it hadn’t been fun at the time.

Not everyone can write easily or well, but in a journal, that doesn’t matter. You should still write. Even in single words punctuated by dashes and not complete sentences and paragraphs, if that makes it easier for you.

Not long ago, I was processing some issues by journalling. There were things roiling inside me, and I wasn’t able to verbalize them, let alone make sense of them, but suddenly, as I wrote,  my current deepest fears went spilling on onto the page, and then I thought “That’s it! That’s what’s bothering me.” I felt so relieved to have a name for it.

Sometimes the truth of the words doesn’t compute with me until I re-read them a week later. But often it happens as they tumble out. You hear yourself say it, it’s a form of self-talk, and it helps. A lot.

Try it!

And no, you didn’t really think I was going to tell the cyber world about my deepest fears, did you?

Joy Like Swords

Posted in books, life, recommendations, words by

I read these assorted words this week, on a theme I keep bumping into:

The Lord our God is One and in Him, all the fragments of life are woven into one piece. In Christ, we’re aren’t ever torn. In Him, all brokenness is made whole, all moments are made holy, all pieces are made one.   —Ann Voskamp

Why must we always insist that the destination is the most important measure of success? We put so many worry hours into our future only to discover that it keeps changing.

My years pursuing and practicing the job of sign language interpreting were not wasted. They brought with them necessary gifts for my life: the gift of listening for the purpose of understanding, the gift of learning how to do the work, the gift of becoming comfortable in my own skin.

That season prepared me for this one. But at the time, I was sure that season was all there would ever be. I was sure I would be a sign language interpreter for the rest of my life.

What you are doing now may not be what you’ll be doing this time next year. Those things you care so deeply for now may seem small a month from now. Might I boldly suggest that the season you are in carries hints of what you’ll be doing next? This season is a kind companion, escorting you to the next one. And then the next. We would be wise to sit back a bit and enjoy today’s adventure, whatever gifts and sufferings they may hold.

Neither the accolades nor the critiques are worth anything. Don’t force something as valuable and sacred as the definition of your life to fit onto the small, flat, earthly paper of a degree or a certificate. They will come and they will go and they are important. But they do not get the final say. For in HIM we live and move and have our being. —Emily Freeman

“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! Is everything sad going to become untrue?”

And the minstrel sang to them… until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.  — Tolkien, The Return of the King

 

 

Sing the Glories

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He came, John wrote, full of grace and truth.

Grace and truth. Truth and grace.

I mull the words, mixing them in a million ways, and always they stay only two words. Two words that dazzle me, words so big that I can’t get my head around them. It’s good I’m not trying to understand ten words.

I am desperate, panting, wanting to absorb what they mean and what they are.

Truth defies darkness, illumines, clarifies. To live with one lie–even half a lie–is too much darkness to endure. What is the truth about this situation? What can dispel the lie I believe here? Living in light is what we were created for, and it is beautiful.

But truth alone can kill, can cut to the bone, can devastate. Truth can be scary, and we unconsciously adopt ways to avoid it.

Grace moves into the cracks that truth opens. Grace soothes and softens. It never refutes truth, never distorts the light. It gives space and understanding and patience. It gives when it could rightfully demand. It forgives when it could justly expose.

Humans, in their finiteness, are prone to the either/or limitations of grace and truth. We try to be balanced, and try to come out with a good average. But Christ, in His fullness and perfection, came FULL of both grace and truth.

The wonder of it catches my breath and makes me hungry for the same fullness, the same richness. I know how my fallible heart harps on truth without the balm of grace, but the next minute slathers grace in the shade, disregarding the full truth.

I see that real change in the world and in me happens at the place where grace is poured onto truth.

The bishop told Jean Valjean who’d stolen the silver:  “You promised to become an honest  man. You no longer belong to evil but to good. With this silver I ransomed your soul, and now I give you back to God.” The truth was that he no longer belonged to evil. Accepting the grace poured onto that made Jean Valjean a changed man .  Javert, though, tried to live his life without breaking a single rule but truth by itself it had no power for lasting change in himself or anyone in his world.

(If you’ve never read Les Miserables go quickly and get a copy to read over Christmas break.)

He who is full of Truth and Grace is my life model, and I love Him, however feebly and childishly. His truth takes away the shadows of untruths, and His grace softens the hard edges of this fallen, tired, broken world.

He rules the world with truth and grace, and makes the nations sing!

Connect the Dots isn’t a Game!

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My English student is a graphic designer and once showed me how she uses that Apple gizmo to make these amazing professional advertisements. This is the lady who’s my age,  studied artistic dance in university, and is a most creative student in the way she describes a word she wants to use but doesn’t know.   She loves all things Apple. From her,  I first heard about Steve Jobs, and afterwards, promptly found his famous Stanford commencement address, and liked it. Liked it very much, really.

I especially liked how he showed how demotions and perceived failures can actually turn out to be good. They can even benefit you sometimes. Such as when he was fired from Apple which pushed him to start Pixar Animation Studios.

Last week I was meandering down the street, licking my last ice cream cone of the season, celebrating the sunshine and my free afternoon. I wheeled around when I heard my name shouted behind me–something that pretty much never happens here–, and it was my graphic designer student! I’d not seen her since early summer, since she had a baby last month, and I’d been missing her, and I shouted her name and hugged her delightedly.

We walked across the street to her parked car to admire her baby and touch his cheeks, and talk about how her life has changed since his birth. Standing in the sun, licking a cone, talking with a student/friend, I somehow felt incredibly rich.

The next day, Steve Jobs died. Not that the two events are connected, but for me, these two people are connected in my mind: Steve Jobs and my student.

In that Stanford speech, Mr. Jobs talked about how one choice affects a million things later.  Maybe that’s why one of the most useful prayers for anyone is for wisdom for them to make good choices.  And maybe that’s part of the fun we’ll have when we’re old and can see how the dots in our stories connect to make something meaningful and beautiful. God did say it would all fit into a good pattern, didn’t He?

I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.       –Steve Jobs

 

Pied Beauty

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Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-89

I Wish…

Posted in life, words by

…full gas tanks would stay full.

…children would be smiled at and have their hair tousled as much as they deserve.

…learning Polish would be easier.

… roads wouldn’t have pot-holes.

…I’d own a private ocean cove.

…cells wouldn’t mutate to form  tumors.

…there would be answers for every question.

…Business English wouldn’t be about business.

…we could see the real battle we’re in and that it’s bigger than any person.

…I could understand poetry.

…autumn wouldn’t mean the end of summer.

…women would live knowing they are beautiful without striving.

…I could remember how short life’s imperfections are compared to eternity’s perfection.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

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As king fishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

A Curious Blogger

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The old grey donkey, Eeyore stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?” and sometimes he didn’t quite know what he was thinking about.  — A. A. Milne

I’m most decidedly not an Eeyore, but blogging can carry its own kind of angst. I’ve learned to be pretty ok with what I put out here. I basically know what I can’t do, what doesn’t feel authentic, what isn’t ‘me.’ While I like to see the hit counter go up, that’s not what motivates me, because I’m not out to rope in new readers just for the sake of more eyes reading this. I don’t have the mod gushy, glossy lingo that lots of bloggers do, and I don’t care. It feels good not to have to prove anything. I don’t post pictures even though all the good bloggers do, because in this visual era, I like the challenge of trying to make words work for me.

There’s a lot of things I could write, but choose not to, because while I don’t have much (!) to hide, I value modesty, discretion, and mystery. I can keep secrets. I take joy in living a wonderful moment and savoring it in real time with real people without compulsively sharing it with the world.

I think it’s true that the blogging world has a gazillion narcissists (that’s a funny word to spell) and I don’t think that I blog just to talk to myself about myself, but neither am I looking for lots of dialogue and Q&A. I don’t ask readers for feedback, because I figure they’ll let me know if they care enough to say something. Although I really do love comments, even negative ones. Maybe someday I’ll want more interaction, but not now–even though my book needs publicity–because I don’t have the energy  to be an MC on a virtual stage.

But in describing my blog and its goals, it’s not fair or accurate to define it by what it’s NOT, and for a long time I didn’t know how to  verbalize what this blog IS. Finally, yesterday, I think I found it. It was when I was reading Mere Orthodoxy which referred me to Trevin Wax’s post about curiosity in a blogger that the penny dropped, and I said “Hey, that’s me! That’s why I blog–because I’m curious.”

I’ve seen some things, and heard a lot of stories, but I like to think that I’m not jaded, and that I still can be easily surprised, and that I won’t lose a sense of wonder about whatever’s around me. I want to keep asking why, and wherefore, and whither to.

I’m a pilgrim on a narrow road, with nothing to prove about myself, but now and then the exhort-er in me wants to say “Hey–look what I found! I wonder why–” to  other pilgrims. And I think that’s why I blog.