One of my goals for 2024 was to send an email journal every month. It’s now June (how?!) and I’m finally getting this first one done. So there’s that. But I have been writing, squeezing the craft into the margins of my days, jotting down thoughts on my iPad in between homeschool lessons, scribbling notes in my kraft notebook in parking lots, getting up before the kids to try to put it all together coherently. And instead of shoving the work into a neat compartment in my brimming schedule (which would be ideal), I’m learning to see how productive waiting truly is. And whether my writing ever sees the light of day, it stretches a continuous thread of worship through all that my hands are set to. I’m a writer even when I’m not writing.
Waiting Is Not Easy
When I graduated from college over a decade ago, I was eager to bestow my enlightened thoughts upon the waiting world, sure that the strangers of the Internet were ready and hoping for the writing genius of 22 year-old Alexis. What a mess I could have made with my puffed-up over confidence. Honestly, it’s a grace that the writing did not start flowing in the ways that I wanted.
I needed to wait for God to settle me, to humble me (even if painfully), to help direct my words in a life-giving way rather than the washout word flood I was especially prone to spew. But waiting is not easy—to borrow the title from one of my children’s favorite books. Patience is not a virtue that comes easily to me. Restlessness is the constant cramp in my side.
The awareness that I need to write is always pulling like an undercurrent, the stories and topics moving around the structures of my soul. Yet every attempt I made to slide into the whisper of the undertow, to let myself drift out to sea and get lost in the writing, was thwarted. I say “thwarted,” but I should say “rescued.”
Formed in the Waiting
Safely ashore, properly humbled, I settled into the waiting. I allowed myself to be formed in it. My writing is better for the different seasons of waiting for this one thing while my heart has been devoted to better things. My writing is more human because of the people in my life every day.
And while I’m certainly well-weathered from my fair share of storms, my soul has been cared for in ways that I didn’t know I needed. Thanks to community and counseling, I have healed from childhood trauma that caused confusion in my writing.
Thanks to patient church leaders and the counsel of the Holy Spirit, I have been gently humbled in how I view and write about the Christian church—which could have easily been fruitless, unhelpful writing ten years ago.
Thanks to my husband and beautiful children, I see the honor in caregiving and homeschooling and am proud of my vocation as a homemaker.
Thanks to the hard work of leading and doing ministry in my church, I understand that whatever gifts I have, or think I have, are first for my local church and the people I am physically with. Because of all of this, I see every bit of work I do away from my keyboard and kraft journal as endlessly important.
Flesh and Blood
I’ve never wanted to swim away from my people or my commitments. We were made for community. What joy would I have if I am swept out to sea and my community is left on the shores? What truth would there be in my writing if it’s not caked in the mud that we trudge through together? If I cannot truly see the flesh and blood around me, then any of the writing I do will just be bones. No breathe will pass through it to settle with the reader.
And if the writing gives no life, then to me it is not worth the words.
I now see my calling as a writer as something far beyond going for an aimless swim, submitting to the waves, tossing about with the waves. While I originally thought my intentions were good, the beauty in my craft was scattered by restlessness, weighed down by confusion, iced over from trauma. That’s not what I want to impart to my readers—to you, dear one.
What I want for you is the refreshment of a sunset walk on the beach after a dinner with dear friends. What I want for you is to marvel at the creation above and below the seas without sinking, without crashing against jagged cliffs. What I want for you is to be able to look up from the inevitable rough waters of this life and see a beacon of light cutting through the darkness.
Towards Hope and Grace
On writing to you every single month. What a grand intention that is and I hope it can happen, but the life around me has to be my priority. I can’t write without it. I’ve finally learned to not make any promises with frequency of writing and posting anywhere. So I’m not gonna do that.
I’m under no delusion that I have “arrived” and that all the writing will flow like water gushing from a desert rock. This is not my full-time vocation. It’s not even a part-time one. It’s still a fight to get the words breathed onto the page. By God’s grace, there is clarity in the work and some semblance of humility that was lacking before (let it grow, please).
But I do promise to write to serve you, to write towards hope, to share the light I have found and keep finding. I promise to tell true stories and to introduce you to characters born from the reality of a well-weathered human experience. I promise to write about the intrusions of God’s grace in my life with the prayer that you’re invited to see the intrusions of grace in your own life.
“Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.” – Flannery O’Connor*
I’m excited to read all you feel lead to say!
Beautiful! Love all the nautical themes!