After two year of blogging, I’m still considered a baby in a world of wise adults when it comes to navigating this ever changing landscape of sharing what’s hot off the daily presses of living. I’ve learned much and made oodles of mistakes. There are some posts I revisit and wish I could take back. They’re like looking at your younger-self wearing big hair and shoulder pads. You can’t believe you actually said that.
I’m tempted to delete those younger posts, but I don’t because I consider the process a bit sacred. We don’t arrive at success by conquering something the first time. It requires leaning into steadfast, faithful work, even when you don’t feel like it. I often find solace in the 60 rejection letters by literary agents to Katherine Stockett who wrote The Help, which later sold over 100 million copies in 42 languages.
Why didn’t she give up, I often ask myself. And then I keep writing.
Life, all of it, takes practice. Failing and getting back up, starting over and asking for forgiveness; pressing on and pushing past the voices of critics. This is where the fullness of life resides, in the small, ordinary mundane stuff like cleaning up spilled milk and wiping crumbs off your kitchen table.
In the early days of blogging, I revisited my stats about eighteen times a minute. I longed for a sign of validation and eventually got it. But it never seemed like quite enough. The immediate access to feedback in blogging can turn affirmation into a sneaky addiction, an insatiable appetite. Pretty soon, we’re writing not because God inspired it, but because it dictates self-worth.
For me, checking stats is like an endless hole of longing for certainty. No number can fill that up. That innate place inside of us that longs to know that what we offer to the world is meaningful, it can shift and transform into an idol when you least expect it.
Our lives are meaningful because He IS meaning. He created meaning from nothing. The world was dark, void, an infinite sea of blackness until he created by speaking words into existence. He named things for understanding, not so we could figure it all out. (Genesis 1)
I tend to do that in blogging. I want to figure things out. I want to know where my traffic comes from, what resonates with someone’s heart; I want to know how I can format my words so you’ll read them and then come back. I want to know the optimum time to share stories through social networking (did you know you can access that?) like knowing the exact moment you sit on your couch with your computer on your lap.
I want to know too much. And that insatiable search for unreachable outcomes leads to insanity.
Nothing in this life is certain, except Jesus and His love for us.
“We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of ‘faith’! How strange that the very word ‘faith’ has come to mean its exact opposite.” ~Richard Rohr
He decides who will read my words, what resonates, how a story will be shared, and who sees fit to publish it.
Blogging has taught me that God isn’t as interested in our certainty as he is with trust, our ability to surrender our nets and follow Him when he asks us. Like those fishermen he interrupted by hijacking their empty boat, shall we let go of the need to know how things will turn out, and trust him to navigate? He determines outcomes and our future is in HIS grasp.
I’m certain of that.
Join us in the comments and for further discussion at Redemptions Beauty Book Club on The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown as we let go of certainty and comparison this week to cultivate intuition, faith, and creativity. This is day 15 of 31 Days of Letting Go in the Deep End. Find out more here and join us for daily posts delivered to your inbox by adding your email address to Subscribe in the sidebar. It only takes a few seconds and it’s painless, I promise.