Be Forewarned

I haven't blogged in a long time. Like a long time. I haven't flexed my writing muscle at all in a really long time. I'm not sure what happened. Usually when I write, it goes something like this: experience something profound/hard/amazing/funny/real. Think a lot about it. The thinking begins to write itself into something in my head. It writes and writes and writes itself in my thoughts until it's an itch that must be scratched and I scribble the words out onto the screen and feel a great, blessed relief.

Lately, there just hasn't seemed to be the time for the last few steps of this process. The experiences are coming so fast and furious and I'm thinking about so many things, that nothing ever seems to have time to stew long enough to become insistent. But make no mistake, there's a lot of stuff rumbling around in this brain. And it's starting to get kind of crowded in there. And Lord knows, my brain doesn't need any excuses to be any more of a mess than it already is.

Plus, I am a writer at heart. I love to write. It's part of me the same way screaming at football games on the television and sniffing deep to inhale the scent of rain and dirt are. I have missed this part of me.

I have figured that part of what is contributing to my malaise lately is the constant flow of sound bytes I am putting out there and taking in in the world of social media. So I have made a commitment to pull back from those places a bit and take the time to do some real processing and writing. Something I think is long overdue.

And I'm just putting this out there as a warning, I just devoured Jen Hatmaker's book 7 in a day and have moved on to God Doesn't Sleep. I've got Radical re-queued in the line-up. I'm feeling the beauty of the life I live, a deep zeal for the poor, and the tension of never being able to do enough. I'm thinking about growing up as a grown up and the way suffering shapes us. I'm reading lots of human trafficking statistics.

In short, as life permits, I'm going to try to unscramble some deep thoughts in this spot in the near future. If you like cute pictures and sweet stories about missionary kids, you might only be mildly entertained. But if you're interested in how this journey is shaping and changing and growing me, if you're willing to touch on some hard spots with me, to look at some ugly stuff and grope for mercy along side me, well, let us see what God does.