I can’t cook. I can’t paint. I can’t sculpt. I can barely decorate my house. But when I write I feel a sense of purpose that keeps me up later than my contact lenses can usually stand.
My mom was 42 when she died. She was always going to write a book. And today I imagine what it would be like to have her words with me still. She was a lover of stories and my overcrowded, dog-eared, paper pages and hardback covers, stuffed three deep book shelf testifies to the many I inherited from her. Stories from the wide world over but none of them hers.
She would sit long hours with a bottle of coke, bag of chips and a computer screen writing words for work and for church and the letters home that she loved. But none of them found their way into a story that was hers alone. My hands are hungry for those pages. And as I try to find my way into a grown up understanding of the mother who left me while I was still a child, I scour through old letters to follow the trail of her words into the heart of who she was, beyond the role of mother.
Words are a road map for those who come behind.
To write is to give. To be flat out, all out generous with your story. To wrap up your words, your life, your failings, your most miserable moments and your wild and wonderful discoveries and give them to somebody else. To share them with someone, to encourage someone, to re-gift what have been the hardest parts of your story in ways that make other people feel they are not alone.
To write is to pour out your life as a love offering for people you may never meet, because when you do so you feel God’s pleasure in your fingertips.
And maybe you were made for this time and these keyboard letters to leave a legacy. Maybe you were made to connect a family. Maybe you were made to tell the story of someone who can’t. Maybe what you whisper over your kids at night or dream in the dark hours, or doodle in your head while waiting in the car pool line is essential to somebody else.
Maybe when you write it down you will discover not only your own pleasure, but the pleasure of the God who gives you the words, the prompting and the message.
Run with it, my friend. Forget the doubts and the reasons why you think you can’t. Don’t look back – run with abandon like you used to when you were just six and discovering the joy of your own strength.
Run like you used to when you believed you could fly.
Feel the wild wind of freedom as you pour yourself out onto the page and press on and into the God who created this gift in you.
Because what you write is a gift to me.
A gift to all who discover and read and find they have a friend, a challenge, a comfort in you.
{Me crazy leaping photo credit: Dawn Camp}
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Heartbreakingly beautiful. WE needed your story here today.
I needed these words of encouragement to keep writing. Thank you.
Lisa-Jo what you’ve written here really resonates with me because my Mom and my Grandma (My Mom’s mother) both journaled regularly. My grandma journaled out of her weakness and my Mom journaled to leave a legacy to me and my brother.
I feel privileged to have had the legacy of a Grandma who was a librarian most of her working career. Also, I feel really privileged to have known who my Mom is because of her journals, and I know someday I will inherit both my Grandma’s story and my Mom’s no matter how scary and beautiful they are.
I pray that the Lord will help you know more of your Mom’s story even though you only have fragments remaining. Thanks for posting this! Blessings.
I can’t help but wonder about your first book. :
And, you need to know that your words here are incredibly encouraging to me. More than you could know right now. He knows I needed them.
Lord God, I pray you lead my friend Lisa-Jo closer to your heart through her own writing. Bless her trust in you. Amen.
I cried when I read this in the early hour this morning. I cried because just last Friday, I sat at the keyboard and cried as I remembered and wrote. I thought I was past the hurt. But in the writing I realized I am still 11 and still hurt somewhere deep inside. But, just as you say, I wrote it as a gift to someone else so they will know they are not alone. It is important to write your story. Because someone else needs to know that we are all in this beautiful life together. Never alone. Thank you Lisa-Jo. For being brave and the very best kind of lover of words and souls.
your mama has left her legacy in your heart … as you right from that most authentic place, you honor her life …
I love reading every word you write. And that is one awesome leap! {Love it!|
I felt overwhelmingly defeated last night and almost vowed to slam my laptop lid shut and never look back. And then God reminded me that the Israelites were never meant to be desert wanderers forever. And now this morning, I read this. Shaking the dust of defeat off my feet and moving forward. Thank you.
Your encouragement is just what I need, Thank you for the push and for the message to ‘get up and do it’. God bless you.
Wonderful! Thanks so much for the encouragement to keep writing.
Here’s day 8: http://musingsandmeanderings-mlp.blogspot.com/2012/10/day-8-of-31.html
Thank you for this post. As I was reading it, I could feel the truth of the words, which seem they were written just for me, deep inside of me. I just started a blog 2 months ago, just because I’ve always felt the need to write, but have always been afraid. Then this past Friday, I linked up with my 3rd Five Minute Friday on Welcome. It was very personal and I was afraid to publish it. But I did because I felt like it was what God wanted me to write (since he changed my mind at the last second about what to write!). It was scary, but it was perfect for that very moment.
Thank you for the encouragment and bless you!
LJ (I can call you that, right?) :),
Yes, a thousand times yes. I adored this so much it made me cry.
You can SO happily call me that :)
I am “your mother”. I am nearly 60 years old. I’d sit with my coffee and books, making entries into blank journals, writing letters, and so on. If I were completely honest, I’d say I was constructing my life as I went along, full of doubts and a low self esteem, born of perfectionism and comparison. In those days, being a woman was losing its well-defined role in American society. “Liberation” was in the air. I could not participate in that movement and feel any kind of authenticity. Those of us who had yearned to be wives and mothers our entire lives felt short changed, confused, and were being told to break out of all that and FLY. Some of us did not want to, or did not know how. I WISH I HAD WRITTEN ABOUT IT.
Now we have come full circle, and are finding all kinds of satisfaction in our CHOICE to become fit mothers and be respected and validated, my work would have been prophetic in its infancy.
I am so proud of my own daughters and their friends, especially those in Christ, who have selected to be MOMS, and in the best way they know…their OWN way!
I am writing now to leave a legacy to them and those who will come after.
Your posts are always so encouraging and make me smile :-). Thank you!
I love what you do with words. Though I’m not participating in the 31 days, I am following it. Thanks for sharing your inspiring thoughts.
Lisa-Jo I love this post! I am following your 31 days and loving the whole thing actually! Thanks for writing about writing! :) This part right here is one of the reasons I feel so strongly about the need for the (in)courager group I am co-leading.
“To write is to give. To be flat out, all out generous with your story. To wrap up your words, your life, your failings, your most miserable moments and your wild and wonderful discoveries and give them to somebody else. To share them with someone, to encourage someone, to re-gift what have been the hardest parts of your story in ways that make other people feel they are not alone.”
It’s so so true! It’s how I have begun to heal – because others gave me the gift of being totally open I do not feel alone and it helps me in turn be totally open with others. And then another person does not feel alone, and begins to heal…and so on.
Thank you for being open here in blog land. It has helped me open up and was specifically used to help me start blogging again – try a new style of writing (FMF) and be in the position to hear God nudging me to do something crazy and needed like leading an (in)courage community group! Praise God for His work in our lives to reach out and love each other and encourage one another!!
Ok…ouch!!! I am a 61 year old mom and grandma….I have said all my adult life that I want to write….occasionally I take a stab at it….but then let that voice inside me discourage me and life fill up that space……I have been reading your blog for over a year and am so blessed and yes envious that you have what it takes to do this writing…..you challenge me yet I do little about it…..I’ve been watching the “31 days… every day thinking I’m getting further away instead of closer to joining in this writing ….. your post has challenged me yet again because I do so want to leave something of me for my children and grandchildren……thank you for the challenge.
This pulled at the heart. I’m under a year to a very big birthday. When I turned 49 in July, I vowed to myself I’d have a first draft done by my 50th birthday. I better get writing. This post was a beautiful inspiration.
Lisa-Jo, Here it is 1:17pm and I haven’t gotten up from writing since the kids left at 9 *unless you count the 2 loads of laundry on the line. I have been working on an online class and I had to finish my assignment so that I could get to my blog.
My Mom died young too. Mama was 51 and that seems young since I am not 53. She taught typing, but did not journal. I think she had migraines, and she did not do a lot of creative stuff,but she had the gift of being “out to lunch”. She took people to lunch and listened. She also taught Good New Clubs from 1959 until her death in 1985. She was the first in our area to have a Release Time (school Bible program), when she died the ministry God put it on other people to start Release Time and I attended one that had 120 kids at it last Friday.
Our Mom’s were different, but their legacy remains.
It’s thoughts like this that keep me writing when I have forgotten why I have started!
I love how your passion rings through and your photo…. absolutely adore. Nothing like “Dawn Camp” says I, who writes as many pre-dawn poems as possible. I just had cancer surgery. Thankfully my Mom is still here, even though at one time she had colon cancer and now fights Parkinson’s. After my cancer surgery we are closer than ever and my long time dream of collaboration with her is coming true.
Simply Beautiful. You are an amazing story-teller and inspire me more than you know. Thank you for sharing your words…your heart.
Have I mentioned how much I’m loving this series???? I needed to read this tonight so, thank you!
P.S I DO believe that you CAN cook and do all those other things that you mentioned. I’m sure of it.
My friend says the reason she loves writing is that she feels she is giving back to the world and can contribute to something bigger. Love the leaping photo!
Thank you for your encouragement to keep writing. It’s so needed for not only myself but so many others.
One of my good friends used to blog, when she died I was so thankful for all the writing she left behind. That I can now still go back and re-read her words whenever I like. It was an amazing gift she left us. It spurred me on to be a more regular blogger.
All I can say is WOW!
We lost my dad a little over two years ago. He was the rock that our family stood on, and the glue that held us together. His accident was at such a pivotal point in our family’s lives. Two weeks before his daughter’s wedding, two months before his son’s first baby was born (his first grandchild), a year before our twin boys were born, 13 months before my brother’s divorce, and 15 months before his deployment to Afganastan. He lived for ministry, and had a special knack for reaching the unreached.
After his death, the night before my wedding actually, my mom found journals that he kept for each one of us. This was the most wonderful gift a father could leave. He wrote like he spoke, but wrote words he found difficult to speak.
Your story IS powerful. Makes me cry every now and then, but absolutely encouraging. Thank you for putting yourself out there for the world! If nothing else, I have been encouraged to journal for my family (maybe write for the world).
God Bless
Amazing post! I have thought of writing as a gift because it does have the power to impact and change lives. That is such a gift. However, I have never thought of writing as leaving a legacy. That change and impact in peoples’ lives can bring change and impact to those that follow. My prayer is that I will unashamedly be that offering poured out for the building up of others and the glory of God.
dear lisa-jo, thank you. a million times…thank you.