A Desire to Write

Hello, Dear Readers, if there are any of you left.

I last blogged in August of last year. I quit blogging for a variety of reasons.

I could no longer answer the question of why I blog.

When I first started blogging 7 years ago, I did so because I was the only Embryo Adoption blog that I could find. I felt alone in my journey and I felt that if I could help someone else feel less alone, then I had something worth saying.  I felt like it was a little ministry on my corner of the web where I could help people. Many years have come and gone since then, and there are many of you who say things so much better than I do, who have more to say, who have better hearts for ministry. When our story took a tragic turn with the seizure of our babies, I felt like I could no longer give the wholehearted endorsement of purposeful grief, of open adoption, and of ministry through pain that I thought these subjects so deeply deserved. Our pain was and is real, but it's not typical, and I don't want anyone to be frightened away by it, but I also can't smile through the pain like I used to, and I don't think that's a voice people should be listening to when they're navigating their way through their own pain.

Then I decided my blog would serve more as a chronicle of Matthew.  But as he gets older, this story becomes more his than mine, and I thought that maybe he might not want everything detailed so carefully for the world wide web to read. Unwelcome attention here made that decision even easier.

So then I began to wonder if I had a story of my own worth writing about. And I don't think I do. And I don't mean that in a self-deprecating way.  It's just a fact. My voice is not particularly witty, or clever, or insightful, and the housewife-gazette just didn't get me excited to write, nor did I think it was much fun for anyone else to read. I have much to say, but I'm not sure that I have much to add to any of the important conversations. I think about Mary, and how she "treasured up [things] in her heart" and I think that I have much to learn and I wonder what this looks like for me.

I thought about writing about parenting itself, but I don't have any particularly new ideas, nor any particularly new way to express them.

And yet I have a desire to write. All these months later, I still have ideas for things I want to post about. And I struggle with figuring out where the balance between self-expression and self-importance is. Words and ideas matter. And if they matter, I'm not sure how much I should be expressing of the ones that eternally don't matter.

And so much has changed in our lives. We're in a state of stress right now as we struggle through health issues with our son. We have been under quarantine for 3 weeks, he is on several medications that alter his disposition, and we are both feeling cabin fever and frustration. We lived from Thanksgiving until the end of January (10 weeks) in a hotel because our house suffered major rain damage and we're still suffering the financial impact of the upset and repairs. We suffered a very deep hurt in one of our closest communities and are still trying to figure out how to re-insert ourselves.

I used to be the most passionate person I knew. I find that I'm not passionate about much of anything these days. I'm too tired, too downtrodden, too-many-times told unwelcome. I feel like this last battle finally whipped it out of me. After years of defending it as the very core of my identity, (wrongfully so!), I'm not sure what stands in its place. Who am I when my only identity is Christ? What does that look like? Deep self-reflection and prayer has yielded little clues as to what the next step in this part of my sanctification is. But in the mean time, I feel rather unknown to myself. Which I think is silly, because I've always thought this "find yourself" thing is a load of bologna. And it is. So I wait as I beg the Lord to will my heart to act according to what I know is true.

Phew boy this sounds sad. It's not.  It's just the reason I don't write anymore.

Lest this sound depressing, I have much cause for joy too. About a month ago, we received a letter from the people we adopted Matthew from, apologizing for everything they have done to us. To be honest, we haven't had much time to even process it because of these other things that have been going on. It was so unexpected. But we are blessed.

Matthew is 3 years old and happy and usually healthy. He's smart, affectionate, sweet, sassy, and high on life. We are blessed.

Our business is growing and changing rapidly. We are blessed.

Easter is coming. We are blessed.

In the midst of all these thoughts, I want to write. So, what do you do with that?